The day is drawing to a close. Five men and three women, united by a common interest, gather to take another step on their spiritual journey.

The weekly get-together functions as part book club, part oasis for meditation. The Buddhist Path meets Thursdays at the Unitarian Universalist Society of Black Hawk County on Cedar Heights Drive.

To launch the session, members share what they call Buddhist moments, stories from the past week when theory became reality. One man talks about refusing to … Click to read more »

Oxford Press: Miami University is holding a Tibetan Culture Week March 22-26 in preparation of the Dalai Lama’s visit in October.

The week will offer a series of lectures, meditation sessions and a prayer flag ceremony that are free and open to the public.

Tibetan monk Geshe Kalsang Damdul, assistant director of the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics under the direct administration of the Dalai Lama, will lead the events.

The programs come ahead of the Dalai Lama’s visit to Miami University on … Click to read more »

WTAQ: The Dalai Lama will return to Madison this spring – this time to help open the UW’s new Center for Investigating Healthy Minds. The center was created to study the development of the human mind. Its founder, UW neuroscientist Richard Davidson, will speak at a public forum with the Dalai Lama on May 16th as part of the center’s grand opening weekend. Davidson said the highly-regarded peace envoy encouraged him to start the center, when he challenged him … Click to read more »

LA Times: The exiled Tibetan leader speaks to an audience of thousands in what some might consider an incongruous setting. But his message is unchanged: The path to happiness is not paved with stuff.

In his first major public appearance in Los Angeles in more than three years, the Dalai Lama spoke to a crowd of several thousand people Sunday about his hopes for Tibet, the need for dialogue in resolving conflicts and the importance of spurning the material world … Click to read more »

The Independent: The world’s most famous golfer should not feel bad that the leader of the religion he promises to re-embrace had never heard of him until now. The good news is that Tiger Woods and the Dalai Lama share similar views on Buddhism and, perhaps more surprisingly, on infidelity.

That might not have been true until recently, but last week Tiger Woods renounced his adulterous ways, in a carefully crafted apology to his family, fans, and fellow golfers. In … Click to read more »

BBC: The Dalai Lama has arrived in the US ahead of a White House meeting with President Barack Obama on Thursday that has raised objections from China.

The meeting comes amid tension in US-Sino relations, with disputes simmering over US arms sales to Taiwan, claims of Chinese cyber-spying and trade deals.

China, which views the Dalai Lama as a separatist, has warned the meeting will undermine relations.

The US, while moving carefully on the issue, dismissed the fears as needless.

On his arrival … Click to read more »

How did you become involved in the science of meditation?

The Dalai Lama often describes Buddhism as being, above all, a science of the mind. That is not surprising, because the Buddhist texts put particular emphasis on the fact that all spiritual practices – whether mental, physical or oral – are directly or indirectly intended to transform the mind.

So it wasn’t surprising that when a meeting was held in 2000 with some of the leading specialists in human emotions – psychologists, … Click to read more »

In the first of a series of articles, The Rev. Canon Renée Miller explores Buddhist practice from the perspective of her own Christian faith.

The Dalai Lama says that meditation is the cure for every problem. That seems a bold claim to make. When we consider the various small and large problems in our lives, it doesn’t seem that meditation could resolve them. What can sitting in silence, counting our … Click to read more »

Financial Times: Still jet-setting at 74, the Dalai Lama has been in Washington this week to receive an award in Congress and attend a conference on meditation. But, for the first time since 1991, the Tibetan religious leader’s visit to the US capital has not included a trip to the White House.

Barack Obama, US president, is to make his first visit to China next month and any meeting with the Dalai Lama, which would doubtless raise hackles in Beijing, has … Click to read more »

London Evening Standard: If you have ever watched Tiger Woods play golf, you know the look. Brim pulled down over the eyes, which are locked on some point far down the fairway.

Despite all the hubbub, he is locked into the moment.

His opponent stands off to one side gnawing his knuckles, knowing another defeat is just a few holes away. Credit meditation for Woods’ extraordinary focus.

An essential part of Tiger Woods’ success is what he calls “staying in the present” and … Click to read more »

The Buddhist monk reaches a top speed of 5 mph as he maneuvers his 16-year-old Toyota around the grounds of the meditation center in West Tennessee.

It is a practice excursion to make sure that the monk, Khenpo Gawang Rinpoche, is familiar with the car the next time he takes his driver’s license test.

A scholar among Buddhists, he has the equivalent of a doctorate in religion and literature. That means nothing to driver’s license examiners who have flunked him three times … Click to read more »

Vancouver Sun: Richard Davidson, one of the world’s top brain scientists, believes mental exercise, specifically meditation, can literally change our minds.

“Our data shows mental practice can induce long-lasting changes in the brain,” said Davidson, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

His startling scientific research on the impact of meditation on brain function has implications that go beyond the physical.

Buddhist monks believe mental attributes and positive emotions such as compassion, loving kindness and empathy are skills that … Click to read more »

Commercialappeal.com: I feel like broken a tape recorder talking about the same stuff over and over: hand washing, cough etiquette and social distancing as ways to prevent getting the flu. So I was thrilled to find a 2003 research article from the journal Psychosomatic Medicine (not my usual bedside reading) on how meditation could help us in fighting the flu.

Meditation may seem like an Eastern concept, but in fact it is well grounded in Western religion in the form … Click to read more »

The Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama today confirmed that discussions between the Dalai Lama and a senior US Government delegation took place in Dharamsala on September 13 and 14. The delegation was led by Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor and Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement, and included Maria Otero, Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs (designated to serve concurrently as Special Coordinator for Tibetan Issues) and other US Government officials.

According … Click to read more »

For years westerners have assumed that Buddhists must be a miserable lot: their teachings dwell so much on suffering. But recent scientific research suggests what Buddhists have believed all along. Buddhism — or at least Buddhist meditation — leads to happiness.

Media headlines in the last few years have trumpeted new research … Click to read more »

Are science and spirituality “non-overlapping magisteria” (as the late Stephen J. Gould put it), or can some overlap indeed be found? B. Alan Wallace, lecturer, scholar, and noted Buddhist practitioner, believes that it’s time for scientists and meditators to team up (and indeed for scientists to become meditators) in order to study the mind from within.

Alan Wallace became a Buddhist monk in the early 1970s, ordained by the Dalai Lama in India. … Click to read more »

LA Times: Deep in a remote desert valley, where rattlesnakes lurk in the scrub, Stéphane Dreyfus and several dozen other Buddhists are preparing to undergo a mind-altering journey:

Three years, three months and three days of silence.

There will be no word from the outside world in the Great Retreat, only the deafening quiet of rock and cactus, with seemingly endless time to ponder the emptiness of life.

Dreyfus and his fellow adherents hope to find enlightenment in the silence, a gift they … Click to read more »

A not-entirely-random selection of blog posts on meditation.

A few days ago, the indefatigable Reverend Danny Fisher attempted to start a viral campaign of people reading the Metta Sutta in response to efforts by Burma’s ruling military junta to keep monastics from chanting it at least one large monastery. He has been pleased with the response so far. The Rev. Danny (did we mention that he’s indefatigable?) also carries a link to a … Click to read more »

Xconomy Seattle: One of the big opportunities in biotech over the coming decades may come from neuroscientists who team up with Buddhists. That might sound odd at first, but it’s no joke. This is one of the big ideas on the radar of Bennett Shapiro, the former executive vice president of worldwide basic research at Merck, who lives in Seattle, and serves as a senior partner with Boston’s PureTech Ventures.

Researchers are beginning to get a stronger sense of physiological differences … Click to read more »

AP: Communist Vietnam’s sometimes edgy relationship with religious freedom is being tested in a dispute over a monastery inhabited by disciples of Thich Nhat Hanh, one of the world’s most famous Zen masters.

For four years, the Buddhist monks and nuns at Bat Nha monastery in central Vietnam have been quietly meditating and studying the teachings of the 82-year-old Vietnamese sage who is perhaps the world’s best-known living Buddhist after Tibet’s Dalai Lama.

But lately, they are in a standoff that could … Click to read more »