This episode exists because Buddhism is too complex to summarize cleanly — and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Across the series, Extra History compressed 1,500 years of religious evolution, ...

A monk named Xuanzang walked thousands of miles through deserts, bandit territory, collapsing kingdoms, and “dragon-filled rivers” to reach India — then brought home 657 Sanskrit texts that reshaped ...

Buddhism has a growing visibility in mainstream Australia. Tibetan prayer flags fly from many porches across the inner-city, Bunning's Warehouse sells Buddha statues and water-features and Big W sells ...

For Thailand’s Queen Sirikit, the 2007 attack on a minibus in southern Thailand’s Yala province – in which suspected Muslim militants shot eight Buddhists through the head in broad daylight – was ...

Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly invited several scholars to comment on the divisions and direction of Buddhism in America today: Carl Bielefeldt is professor of religious studies and co-director of the ...

Over the weekend, I ran across this 2010 essay on Reason by Brendan O’Neill, who wrote about his frustration with the way Tibetan Buddhism is whitewashed in Western culture. O’Neill, by the way, is an ...

Tibetan Buddhism is a religion in exile, forced from its homeland when Tibet was conquered by the Chinese. At one time it was thought that 1 in 6 Tibetan men were Buddhist monks. The best known face ...

When discussions about science and religion turn into debates about science versus religion, Buddhism mostly gets a pass. Thanks to the work of the Dalai Lama and others, Buddhism can seem far ...

Theravada Buddhism is strongest in Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Burma (Myanmar). It is sometimes called Southern Buddhism and is one of the largest subdivisions of Buddhism. Theravada ...