Every year in Myanmar, homes, streets and pagodas glow with candles and colored lights. This is the Thadingyut festival, one of the country’s most loved celebrations. It marks the end of the Buddhist rains retreat,…
Buddhist teaching has many lists, but a few ideas appear again and again. The three marks of existence are one of them. They describe three features that Buddhism says run through ordinary experience: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness…
The Buddha did not ask people to simply believe something. After he explained why life feels unsatisfying, he gave a practical method for living differently, and that method is the Noble Eightfold Path. Many people…
You got the promotion, the relationship, the apartment you wanted for years. For a week or two it felt like everything. Then, almost without noticing, it became the new normal, and some other unmet thing…
Buddha's teaching on right mindfulness gets flattened into "relaxation" more than almost any other teaching he gave, and the flattening loses the actual point. Most mindfulness apps sell calm, and there's nothing wrong with wanting…
Buddha's teaching on anatta is the one people misread fastest. It sounds extreme, but it claims something narrower than it first appears. It doesn't say you don't exist. It says the fixed, unchanging "self" you…
The Four Noble Truths explained in one sentence would still miss the point, so here's the longer version. Buddha gave these as his very first teaching after waking up under the Bodhi tree, and nearly…
Buddha teaching on mudita completes a set of four heart practices, and it's widely considered the hardest of the four to actually cultivate - harder than compassion, harder than loving-kindness, harder even than equanimity. The…
Buddha teaching on equanimity starts with a blunt observation about how most people actually live: constantly pulled back and forth by eight forces that never stop blowing. He named them specifically, and the list is…
Buddha teaching on compassion uses a different word entirely from the more familiar "loving-kindness" - and the distinction isn't just linguistic. Metta is the wish that beings be happy. Karuna, compassion specifically, is the wish…
