“Master, when you were young, did you also have sects?” (Context: The history of sectarian Buddhism.) According to the popular narrative, sectarian Buddhism started with a schism at the Second Buddhist Council due a disagreement over monastic rules. ...
There are now three major sects of Buddhism: Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana.[1] Here is a short historical account of how it came to be. Previous, we talked about how two of King Ashoka’s children, Mahinda and Sanghamitta, were sent to Sri Lanka as Buddhist...
We would like to wish all fathers a Happy Father’s Day! Buddha taught us to cherish and honor our parents. Possibly the most important thing the Buddha said about our parents is in AN 2.33. He said even if we were to carry them on our shoulders for 100...
In May 1998, in New York City, there was a historic dialog between two highly revered masters from two different sects of Buddhism. One was the Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, the other was the Chinese Zen Master Sheng Yen. They were sharing a...
Friends, Imagine a religion with a strict power hierarchy where orthodoxy is tightly regulated from the top. Now let’s do a thought experiment, and imagine a religion that takes an almost exact opposite approach towards orthodoxy. What would it look...
