Lion’s Roar

Soon after moonrise, Venus glistens awake to the southwest. An oil lamp is set aflame, a dim reading lamp is tugged to light. Prostrating on all fours, I touch my forehead to the cold oak floor. I stand, adjust a white chunni, or scarf, over my temples, and rest my palms together.

On another continent, within the hour, my grandmother’s body will be cremated...

On Monday I was honored to attend a gathering to mourn the passing and celebrate the life of a great American bodhisattva.

Robert Thurman died on June 16 at his home in Woodstock, New York at the age of 84. He was probably the pree...

“Ah! There is Rima, the bodhisattva!” Bob called out with unmistakable excitement as he spotted me standing among hundreds of people. We had gathered at Tibet House in New York to hear his lecture, where I was in the audience with my husband.

“Bodhisattva, huh?” my husband whispered with a mischievous smile, raising his eyebrows.

Of course, I am not a bodh...

This essay was written five days before the Madison, WI police killing of Corey Ruiz and a week before the Austin, TX police killing of unarmed Anthoneil Williams II.

I am a Black mother to a Black child in the U.S. The deaths of teenagers Nolan Xavier Wells and Daniel Erving remind me of the perilousness of growing up Black in the U.S.

Raising ou...

These days, Buddhism is a familiar presence in the American conversation about wellbeing, invoked in wellness culture, clinical research, and popular media as a path toward calmer minds and healthier bodies. But as a scholar who has long focused on “Buddhist medicine” in Asia, I wanted to hear how American Buddhists speak on the subject — in their own words and on their own t...