A photograph of a Buddha statue at Nagaloka Buddhist Center in Portland, Maine, taken when I was leading a workshop there a few weeks ago.

Another Greco-Indian statue from Gandhara.

Notice the beautiful carved base, which itself contains three Buddha figures along with attendants.

I took this detail of a Tibetan Thangka painting on my iPhone at the Seattle Buddhist Center just before doing a workshop on the Satipatthana Sutta with the men’s sangha there tonight.

Last night I gave a talk and led a meditation at the Buddha Day celebrations, where we commemorate the Buddha’s enlightenment.

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.

As I arrived at work today, the signmakers were just starting to hang Wildmind’s new sign outside of the mill building that we moved into back in February. We’re very pleased with the way it looks.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

From “Anthem,” by Leonard Cohen.

The UK’s Daily Mail has a collection of photographs of this meditating lemur, taken by Belgian-born amateur photographer Sebastian Degardin, who lives in Finchley, north London.

The photographs were taken on a forest path in a nature park in Mons, Belgium.

Check out the rest of the pics here.

[Click on the image for a larger version.]

This Buddha statue reclines gracefully on the ledge of one of the windows in the “yoga room” (it’s called that, although there’s hardly ever any yoga done there) below the shrineroom at Aryaloka Buddhist Center in Newmarket, NH.

A large stone Buddha head I photographed while I was leading a workshop at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY.

This photograph was taken on a recent retreat.

I love the tenderness of the little bird sitting in the Buddha’s left hand as he meditates. It says something about the gentle kind of effort that’s required in meditation. An image I used to use in my teaching — but which I had forgotten about until this moment — was that the quality of effort we use in meditation aims toward the kind of effort we’d make in holding a baby bird. We don’t want to hold our attention so firmly that we crush our sensitivity, but we also don’t want to hold our attention so gently that the object …