A 14-year-old Thai girl student fell onto a Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) track in Singapore on the morning of April 3. Nitcharee Peneakchanasak, also known as Nong Than, lost both her legs below the knees. One of her legs was severed by the train as it came into the station, and the other was so badly mangled that it had to be amputated by surgeo...

Please try to contemplate the following: No matter what, Buddha-nature is always present in all sentient beings. Therefore, there is nothing in any human being, you or anyone else, which is fundamentally wrong. This is not just some naïve belief. Think about the basic nature of mind. It is even more fundamental than happiness or sufferin...

Feeling guilty does not help. Regret does. Guilt creates the impression in the mind that one is forever and intrinsically unworthy, which is not true of anyone. It is more productive to regret negative things that you have done with the wish to not repeat the same mistakes, to do better in the future and, if possible, to repair the harm ...

Dark times can be a source of progress in our spiritual practice, since they allow us to see clearly the difference between what truly matters in life (inner peace, altruistic love and compassion for instance) and what is just the unavoidable upheavals of any life. Having confidence in an ethical or religious system that has at its core c...

Meditation, or more accurately mind training, helps to cultivate the inner resources that give us confidence to deal with the ups and downs of life. These inner resources include inner freedom that makes us less vulnerable to ever-changing outer conditions. Here, inner freedom means being free from the influence of automatic mental processes ...

Himalayan Hills late afternoon Stars at dawn above the Himalayas

We would be very happy to receive personal accounts, anecdotes, or stories concerning actions that clearly point to manifestations of genuine altruism. These could be examples that you witnessed or heard about, or facts that belong to our time or to a distant past: heroic acts or expressions of kinship and altruistic concern in daily life...

Rajgir is the place where the Buddha taught the Transcendent Perfection of Wisdom (Prajna paramita), at the Vulture Peak, sixteen years after his enlightenment, to an assembly of 5,000 monks, nuns and laity, as well as innumerable bodhisattvas. This teaching is known as the second turning of the Wheel of Dharma and if focus on understanding t...

After Kusinagar and Kesaria, our pilgrimage took us the great University of Nalanda, about 90 kms south east of Patna and a few kms away from Rajgir. Nalanda was one of the world's first universities and the largest Buddhist University in history. It was established during the reign of the Gupta emperor Kumaragupta. The complex was built ...

Kushinagar is the place where Buddha Shakyamuni entered ‟Mahaparinirvana”, the ‟great transcendence of suffering”. When he reached his eighty-first year, the Buddha gave teaching at the Vulture's Peak of Rajgir, and went north with his nephew to Nalanda and then Vaishali, a place where he often stayed and where he had given teachings on the u...