Living in the light of humility, kindness and compassion is the deep lesson and timeless inspiration of Bodhi Day. When we celebrate Bodhi Day this year I hope that we can celebrate it as a 21st century holiday, embracing the full weight of Buddhism's long history without being limited by it.

When I was asked to join a "Kalachakra" -- a circle-of-life pilgrimage to where Prince Siddhartha discovered the realities of the world under the Bodhi Tree -- I jumped at the chance.

At the end of the hottest decade on record, we are surrounded by unprecedented droughts, floods, crop losses and technological accidents. Has western enlightenment run its course?

These days, thanks to the "law of attraction," the Buddha's model of awakening may seem more attractive than Ananda's. But in my experience, the spiritual life oscillates between both.

In the new enlightenment, the point is no longer merely the liberation of the individual; it's the evolution of self, culture and cosmos through the individual

In our conversation, I asked Thich Nhat Hanh whether he regarded King, whom he had known, as a bodhisattva, an enlightened being. The monk responded with an unequivocal yes.

Between my sessions of reading about this visionary high tech future, our group would periodically dismount and swarm into some of the most awesome and impressive Tibetan style Buddhist monasteries in the world