The Karmapa has been questioned by the Indian police after huge amounts of cash—the equivalent of $1.6m in some reports—in various currencies, including Chinese yuan, were seized from the monastery he occupies.
One of the two main political parties of the indigenous people in Bangladesh’s southeastern hill tracts prevented Christians from celebrating Christmas, sources said.
The United People’s Democratic Front (UPDF), which has demanded that Christian converts return to Buddhism, threatened tribal Christians of at least seven churches in Khagrachari district, some 300 kilometers (180 miles) southeast of the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka.
Scientists and religious practitioners can learn a lot from each other and should work together to find a productive balance between spirituality and secular research, the Dalai Lama said Sunday.
The exiled Tibetan spiritual leader’s comments came at a news conference kicking off his three-day visit to Emory University in Atlanta. During his visit, he plans to teach, lecture and receive an update on the development of the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative.
The Dalai Lama is a presidential distinguished professor at Emory — the only university appointment he has accepted.
The Dalai Lama said he has long been interested in scientific knowledge — particularly in the areas of cosmology, neurobiology, physics and psychology, which he says are mentioned in Buddhist texts.
Buddhist extremists held eight Chakma Christians for four days to force them to return to Buddhism.
The captives were all forced to wear Buddhist robes, shave their heads, bow down before a statue of Buddha and clean the temple; they were also threatened with beatings and even death if they tried to escape.
Archaeologists in Afghanistan, where Taliban Islamists are fighting the Western-backed government, have uncovered Buddhist-era remains in an area south of Kabul, an official said on Tuesday.
“There is a temple, stupas, beautiful rooms, big and small statues, two with the length of seven and nine meters, colorful frescos ornamented with gold and some coins,” said Mohammad Nader Rasouli, head of the Afghan Archaeological Department.
“Some of the relics date back to the fifth century (AD). We have come across signs that there are items maybe going back to the era before Christ or prehistory,” he said.
At the end of a cold Himalayan December in 1999, a 14-year old monk made a phenomenal escape from a monastery in Tibet where his every move was patrolled by the Chinese. Fleeing by car, on foot and by horseback, he crossed some of Nepal’s most forbidding terrain and found his way to India, where he settled at the feet of the Dalai Lama, seeking teaching.
Since then, he has been under virtual house arrest by the Indian government, circumscribed in his movements, and now banned from travel to the West, where he has a large following—and to the seat of his Tibetan sect in Sikkim, a once-independent Tibetan Buddhist kingdom that India undermined and incorporated in 1975. The reason for India’s denial of the monk’s freedom of movement seems plain. In a word: it’s China.
Young and strong, he already has a wide audience among Tibetans as a protégé of the Dalai Lama and could, however unwittingly, inspire Tibetan youth to revive their dreams of stronger resistance to the Chinese, a course the Dalai Lama has told them repeatedly would be suicidal. More important, the Karmapa is rapidly becoming a fresh new face for Tibetan Buddhism internationally.
For the time being, India, which preaches religious freedom and a special relationship with Buddhism, seems to be doing Beijing’s will at keeping the Karmapa out of global view.
Hundreds of Buddhist devotees gathered at a rural spot in Spartanburg County on Saturday for the dedication ceremony of a new pilgrimage site.
Members of the Cambodian community completed construction last week on a three-story Buddhist shrine, called a stupa. It’s located beside the Wat Sao Sokh San Temple at 841 Shiloh Church Road outside the city limits of Wellford, South Carolina.
It’s the first Cambodian Buddhist stupa in the United States. The dedication ceremony designates the Spartanburg County site as holy.
Nepal has increased the monthly stipend it gives its “living goddess” by a quarter, a top official said on Thursday, to help the schoolgirl revered by thousands of Hindus and Buddhists beat double-digit inflation.
The girl called Kumari is considered holy and is an attraction for the many tourists who visit the Himalayan nation every year, Reuters reports.
Critics of the centuries-old Kumari tradition say the girl is denied basic human rights as she cannot lead a normal life during the time she serves as the “goddess.”
A Cambodian court has questioned a defrocked monk accused of filming women who were bathing naked in sacred water at a Buddhist temple, national media reported Tuesday.
Supreme Patriarch Non Nget Non Nget said he could not understand why the women were naked at the pagoda in the first place, and said such practices should not reoccur.