Acharya Kaspalita (temple host)

From Dharmavidya:

We call her Queen Vaidehi. Actually we do not know her name. At the time, twenty-five centuries ago, the word vaidehi probably meant a consort of the king, but she is now established as Queen Vaidehi. She was the mother of Ajatashattru. Ajatashattru means broken hand, on account of a deformity he had. Vaidehi was the wife of…[Read more]

Over on YouTube, underneath one of Dharmaviyda’s talks from the Bodhi retereat last year, someone asked, do we know for definite that the Buddha’s mother died during childbirth?

I said:

‘For definite’ is a tricky concept when we are talking about so long ago. The oldest texts that we have say that the Buddha’s mother died in childbirth.

There is…

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On Sunday evening we were fortunate to host a music of Indian raaga and bhajan. Awantika Dubey sang with William Tooby from the Fold, accompanied by Akash on tabla and John on tanpura. A wonderful music of devotional singing and improvisation by these world class performers.

Here are the videos of the evening.

This morning I opened a newsletter from Dosho Port, an American Zen teacher who trained with Katagiri Roshi.

He began the newsletter by writing:

‘There are two directions for spiritual practice. One is a movement toward escaping the suffering of the world. The other, of which our Zen way is an example, aims at realizing that the 84,000…[Read more]

A teaching by Dharmavidya David Brazier 

Shoko-bo Bencho (1162-1238) was a, perhaps the, leading disciple of Honen Shonin (1133-1212), the principal propagator of Pureland Buddhism in Japan. Nowadays it is common to give this honour to Shinran (1173-1263), but in the important contemporary records of that time, Shinran is not mentioned and…[Read more]