When I first read the second truth, I had goose bumps, because I knew my life was heading in the direction of suffering. All the choices in my life were on the path of suffering, and all the things I was doing in my life too, kept me on the path of suffering.  At age fourteen I had chosen to live on the streets. I had gone off the rails. Eighteen months with my biological mother from the ages of eleven to twelve and a half had taught me to self medicate. No adult could tell me what to do. I was going to take complete control of my life. And so …

I snapped this on my iPhone yesterday at Seattle’s Asian Art Museum. The pose and style of the statue look Greco-Roman because they are. It’s a Gandharan statue of the Buddha before his enlightenment. Gandhara, now in Pakistan, was in the Classical Greek sphere of interest, and it’s where the first Buddha images were made.

Adam Yauch, one of the founders of the hip-hop group the Beastie Boys, has died of cancer at the age of 47.

Yauch, who went by the name MCA, had been battling cancer since 2009.

Yauch was a practicing Buddhist, who actively supported Tibetan causes.

In 1994, he established the Milarepa Fund — an organization dedicated to the promotion of nonviolence — and became a leader of the movement to liberate Tibet from Chinese occupation. The fund was named after the 11th century Tibetan singer-yogi Milarepa, and was originally intended to distribute royalties from Yauch’s Beastie Boys’ 1994 songs “Shambhala” and “Bodhisattva Vow,” which had sampled the chanting of Tibetan monks, to …

The Bonsall Community Sponsor Group has filed an appeal to the county Planning Commission’s April decision to allow a Buddhist monastery in Bonsall to expand into a meditation center.

County spokesman Gig Conaughton said the appeal could be heard by the Board of Supervisors sometime this summer.

The Bonsall Community Sponsor Group opposed the expansion of the Dai Dang Monastery when the project went before the local board, and group members argued that it would be inappropriate for the area at last month’s Planning Commission meeting.

Opponents also included neighbors, a local farmer and the Farm Bureau.

The monastery is at 6326 Camino del …

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This will be the largest Thai Buddhist temple outside of Bangkok. It’s being built right now a little outside Boston, in Raynham, Massachusetts.

Monks in saffron robes chanted a traditional blessing as the uppermost steel girder was hoisted 100 feet in the air and placed atop what will be the largest Thai Buddhist temple outside of Bangkok and the tallest structure in Raynham. [See previous stories for the background.]

“As a Buddhist, there is great merit in participating in building this beautiful temple, not just for the Thai people but for all mankind,” said architect Been Z. Wang of Architectural Resources Cambridge at the “topping off” ceremony Thursday morning for the NMR Meditation Center at 382 South Street East.

Dignitaries from Thailand, members of the local …

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The benefits of meditation come with regular practice, and that means making it part of your life. That’s one of the great challenges of learning meditation, so here are ten tips for establishing a meditation practice.

1. Get some instruction

You can learn the techniques of meditation from books and CDs: there are some good ones around (check out our shop). But it helps a lot to learn from a real person.Take a course – or go to a class where you can ask questions about the issues. In time, it helps to have friends or even teachers who are more experienced meditators than you are.

2. Settle on a practice that …

It’s not what you’d expect at a school: students being asked not to think!

“We are calling it a mental recess,” said Greg Graber, the head of middle school at Lausanne Collegiate School. “We really think this is going to help them, to sit and do nothing for 10-15 minutes and try to relax their minds to get distressed and unplugged.”

The Lausanne Collegiate School in East Memphis is trying a different way to get kids focused.

Starting in September, Middle schoolers 10 to 14 years old are going to get the option, of skipping recess to sit and do nothing.

“Have you ever tried meditation?” …

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Training physicians in mindfulness meditation and communication skills can improve the quality of primary care for both practitioners and their patients, University of Rochester Medical Center researchers report in a study published online this week in the journal Academic Medicine.

As ways to improve primary care, the researchers also recommend promoting a sense of community among physicians and providing time to physicians for personal growth.

“Programs focused on personal awareness and self-development are only part of the solution,” the researchers stated. “Our health care delivery systems must implement systematic change at the practice level to create an environment that supports mindful practice, encourages transparent and clear …

“Love thy neighbor” is preached from many a pulpit. But new research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that the highly religious are less likely to be motivated by compassion when helping a stranger than are atheists, agnostics and less religious people.

In three experiments, social scientists found less religious people’s generosity was consistently driven by compassion. For highly religious people, however, compassion was largely unrelated to how generous they were, according to the findings which are published in the July issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

The results challenge a widespread assumption that acts of generosity and charity are largely driven by feelings of empathy and …