The reason I choose to call the eightfold path an advanced teaching is that, while the definitions of each of the practices are relatively easy to teach and understand, their full application and integration takes a lifetime.

Whether it is the internal or external sense of being "maxed out," what is often helpful is to seek a larger landscape in which to hold one's experience. This is not only a skillful means of coping with difficulty, but it is also an aspect of mindfulness and awareness.

In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, according to the Dalai Lama, a person should closely observe a teacher for three years before consenting to be his/her student. It takes that long, apparently, to clearly differentiate Mara from Buddha.

As we enlarge our spiritual capacity to be with all of our experience, we also gain the capacity to be with the all of the experience of greater and greater numbers of beings.

The Dharma continues to be about Culture -- whether we are aware of that or not is a factor which will either lead us to create more freedom or less freedom for all of us.

And why is the Buddha all about culture? Because the Buddha recognized the importance of culture as a path to freedom.

Buddha described the human mind as being filled with drunken monkeys, jumping around, screeching, chattering, carrying on endlessly. We all have monkey minds, Buddha said.

The whole truth is not so simple. At the heart of the Buddha's teaching is something not graspable by intellect alone, not expressible in words alone, not comprehensible by logic alone.

When I first heard the Buddhist teachings on lovingkindness, compassion and forgiveness, I was incredibly skeptical. I saw those heart qualities as undesirable and perhaps unsafe.

If we are to get and stay sober, we need to live less from the lower and more from the higher self. Turning our will and our lives over is the way we do this.

By Vishal Arora Religion News Service NEW DELHI (RNS) The government commissioner charged with promoting "Gross National Happiness" in the tiny Buddh...

It is the work of a true bodhisattva, or open-hearted warrior, to go into the darkest aspects of our society in the hopes that he or she can be a light for all to see.