As the new year approaches, I find myself bracing for the inevitable wave of pressure: new workout challenges, rigid New Year’s resolutions, and countless techniques promising to reshape my body and push me beyond my limits.
As a yoga practitioner and instructor, I strive to approach myself with gentleness. Yet, I often can’t help but think, “Maybe this is the year I unlock this asana?” or “How can I improve my classes this year?” and the constant, “I really need to focus on my shoulder flexibility.” These thoughts, coupled with the piling resolutions, often lead to achievement-based motivation that eventually brings disappointment. I’ve found the pressure of resolutions and specific goals is a thief of joy when it comes to movement.
Everything changed when I began incorporating more mindfulness into my yoga and movement practices. Moving my body through space is a gift — a miracle — and a fleeting one at that. There is no specific goal — no asana or feat of strength — that holds more significance than the sheer act of moving and the awareness of being alive. My goals have since become functional and rooted in what truly matters to me. Now, I try to ask myself, “What’s important to me? What can I ask of my body? What brings it joy, and how can I preserve these functional moments for as long as I can?”
I want to keep my arms strong for helping my dad shovel snow in the winter, and my hips mobile for bending down to pick weeds from the garden in the spring. My yoga practice can help these things, but it’s also a joy just on its own.
The three offerings below provide tips and tools for cultivating mindful movement in daily life, and the reminder that our movement can be a precious tool for connecting our bodies and minds. I hope they bring you some space and ease this weekend.
–Martine Panzica, assistant digital editor, Lion’s Roar
Anyone who has spent time with children can tell you how marvelous it is to witness a child experience things for the first time. The major events are so significant, like taking their first steps, or saying their first words. But for me, witnessing the small, mundane moments carries such magic — like tasting ice cream for the first time, their first sight of a butterfly, or pushing a ball downhill and watching it roll by itself.
There is a type of magic that happens when you observe a child experience these things we take for granted — things that we barely notice anymore. Their excitement and awe is so contagious, it’s as if you’re experiencing them for the first time as well. When I think about the Buddhist concept of “beginner’s mind,” I think of this child-like mind — a mind full of possibilities, without preconceptions.
As seasoned practitioners, we might find ourselves at a point where our practice feels stale. Over the years, we may lose perspective and find that our practice has become a habit — a chore even. With the excitement of discovering something new long faded, practice becomes just another thing we fit into our busy day. We fail to see how our practice is relevant to this very moment, forgetting to look at what’s going on right now. As Shunryu Suzuki Roshi famously said, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
A beginner’s mind approach can help us to come back to square one. Whether you’re a beginner or seasoned practitioner, coming back to square one can help us keep our practice relevant and fresh.
What would it be like to experience the mundane as new again? How would it feel to sit on the cushion for the first time? I invite you to find out.
Anxiety is an inescapable part of being human. As Trudy Goodman reminds usin her teaching in the new January 2025 issueof Lion’s Roar, “As long as we are human, anxiety will arise.” These simple words hold a profound truth: while we can’t avoid anxiety, we can transform how we relate to it.
Buddhist wisdom doesn’t deny life’s challenges — anxiety included — but rather teaches us how to meet them with clarity and compassion. With the right tools, we can meet a challenge like an anxious moment and create space to breathe, soften its grip, and even find freedom.
The January issue of Lion’s Roar is devoted to exploring these tools. Below, we share three powerful practices from the issue for a calm and stable mind. Whether you’re just starting your meditation journey or deepening an existing practice, we hope they’ll help you steady your mind and open your heart.
Being that you’re a “Weekend Reader” reader, I’m going to assume we can agree on a couple of things:
1) Buddhism has a lot to offer us when it comes to understanding our minds, why we suffer, and how we can mitigate that suffering.2) Psychology, too, has a lot to offer us when it comes to understanding our minds, why we suffer, and how we can mitigate that suffering.
So it stands to reason that a “Buddhist Psychology,” likewise, could be a very positive and powerful thing. Indeed, it is very much “a thing” — it’s calledAbhidhamma(Pali), orAbhidharma(Sanskrit) — and is both positive and powerful. So much so that the modern scholar/monk Bhikkhu Bodhi has characterized it as “simultaneously a philosophy, a psychology, and an ethics, all integrated into the framework of a program for liberation.”
You could say that psychology and the Buddhist view go together like peanut butter and jelly. Yet, the Abhidharma/Abidhamma doesn’t exactly have a reputation for tastiness — Buddhist teachers sometimes even downplay it, saying it’s too difficult, too “dry” for many of us to relate to. But what if it were served with a glass of milk (so to speak)?
In his new series of Abhidharma teachings atBuddhadharma— Lion’s Roar’s special section for folks who want to deepen their study and practice of Buddhism — Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche has found a way to make it all go down easier, so that any of us can “take the first step to freedom” and bring Buddhist psychology to bear in our relationships with others, and ourselves.
Plain-spoken and laden with warmth and encouragement, Mingyur Rinpoche’s teachings include an introduction to the Abhidharma, a short practice, a video to help us get in touch with the way our mind and body are interconnected, and a teaching on how the Abhidharma helps us transform our suffering, our experience, and our very selves. All this is rounded out, too, by reflections andan Abhidharma Q&A with Edwin Kelley, a supportive guide in Mingyur Rinpoche’s work to help us all taste the Abhidharma for ourselves.
It’s all atBuddhadharmanow. Just follow the links below. Thank you for your practice!
Yes, it’s true that America has taken a dramatic turn away from my values as a Buddhist and mindfulness meditator. It is true that fear, grievance, and what Buddhism calls the three poisons — aggression, greed, and ignorance — are on the ascent. It is true that Americans have made an historically bad choice, one I know they will deeply regret in the end.
But right now, I’m trying not to think too much about that — about bad people and the bad things they want to do. There’ll be plenty of time to do that later, and to resist them.
Right now I’m thinking about goodness — about all the good people, with good values, and the good things they can do together. People like you and tens of millions of other people of goodwill. Starting now, we can come together to offer America a different and powerfully positive alternative.
For me, and perhaps for you, that means focusing on my practice of Buddhism and mindfulness. They offer us the guidance we need to follow the path of wisdom, compassion, and peace so we can each contribute to making a better future a real alternative.
Lion’s Roar is dedicated to offering the kind of wisdom and meditations we need so badly to come together, to get us through this bad time, and to inspire the country to move forward again. Here’s some of what the dharma offers us. This is the goodness we need now.
Over the summer, I found myself faced with the challenge of tidying up my humble 650 sq. ft. home, which had accumulated 15 years’ worth of clutter. When I first moved into this small but wonderful space, I had already read Marie Kondo’s renowned book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and its sequel, which teaches her famed organizing method of going through your belongings and keeping only what “sparks joy.” Despite my knowledge of her method, my “stuff” still piled up over the years. Too much, it seemed, sparked joy for me — especially when an IKEA opened in my neighborhood in 2017, filled with colorful things I just had to take home.
In the heat of the summer, I’d had enough of the clutter. My unfinished basement had filled up with old furniture and pretty boxes I accumulated throughout the years, molding under the season’s humidity. My living space had also become full of things I wasn’t necessarily using or even appreciating. While digging through the clutter, I found a copy of the late Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Making Space. Freshly inspired, I was excited to clean up and make space for a meditation corner, hoping to turn my small home into a peaceful retreat. But it turned out to be far from easy — I am my mother’s daughter, after all.
I come from a family that was influenced by the custom of feeling mottainai— a sense of regret over letting anything go to waste, which most post-war parents in Japan were taught. Older generations that grew up influenced by this concept find Kondo’s all-or-nothing style daunting, perhaps even severe — quite different from her cheerful smile. Many start reading her books only to give up after a few chapters.
My mother, for example, loves to keep pretty wrapping paper, ribbons, and boxes to reuse for gift-wrapping. The problem is, she’s never come up with a savvy way to make use of them. Neither have I, unlike Ruth Ozeki, who discusses her great approach to repurposing inconvenient but important items as an artist in her piece “Nothing is Wasted.”
Interestingly, as Cristina Moon discusses in “Zen and the Way of Tidying,” Kondo’s method isn’t just about tidying, but rather serves as a philosophy for approaching life itself. Her approach gives people like my mother and me a kinder, more enjoyable path to decluttering that can also be applied to our hearts and minds. The idea is to thank items before letting them go if they no longer bring joy — a concept that can feel revolutionary to those who, like my mother’s generation, carry a lot of guilt over throwing things away. But a clear space can also lead to a clear mind, which allows us to better ourselves and the world around us as a result.
Inspired by the three stories below, I’m planning my own tidy-up festival this weekend. While my home isn’t quite decluttered yet, I’m on my way to creating the peaceful space I’ve envisioned, thanking all I choose to let go of along the way.
As the leading Buddhist media organization in the English language,Lion’s Roaris of course dedicated to offering Buddhism’s profound teachings and powerful meditation techniques. From experts to beginners, we aspire to serve everyone who can benefit from Buddhist wisdom, and we do that through a full range of content.
Yet that’s not enough. To truly benefit the world and as many people’s lives as possible, we also need to present universal human truths—ones Buddhism teaches so effectively about—in ways that anyone can relate to and benefit from, no matter what their beliefs are.
That’s whyLion’s Roaris offering a unique five week on-line program starting next week called “Five Keys to the Complete Path of Mindfulness.” This offers us the opportunity to learn about and practice a new approach to mindfulness, one that deepens and expands its benefits to our lives and our society.
The five keys to Complete Mindfulness — meditation, insight, ethics, compassion, and community — are both the path to a good human life and essential parts of it. None of these is inherently Buddhist, or necessarily religious at all. They are a simply human path, one based on universal human aspirations and universal human qualities.
Through the brilliant work of the secular mindfulness movement pioneered by Jon Kabat-Zinn, millions of people are enjoying the benefits of a regular mindfulness practice. As we do at Lion’s Roar, secular mindfulness often draws on Buddhist teachings. After all, the Buddha was the world’s first mindfulness teacher and Buddhists are the world’s mindfulness experts.
Yet mindfulness meditators know that what they are doing is not Buddhist or non-Buddhist, spiritual or secular. They are simply training, and benefiting from, the universal human ability to pay attention. Similarly, our ability to see reality clearly, to live ethically, to be kind and compassionate, and to live in community are simply parts of who we are as human beings. Reflecting the natural goodness of human nature, beyond any religion or belief system, they are the path to the happy, meaningful, and beneficial life that is the goal of the human journey.
The “Five Keys to the Complete Path of Mindfulness” online program starts next Thursday with a keynote discussion about how to harness the full power of the present moment with renowned mindfulness teachers Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman. Then over the course of the next five weeks, five outstanding teachers — Diana Winston, Rick Hanson, Rhonda Magee, Christopher Germer, and Rev. angel Kyodo williams — will show us how to transform our lives by practicing the five keys to The Complete Path of Mindfulness. I hope you’ll join us for this unique and life-changing event.
The three jewels — or “Triple Gem,” as I was taught — were the first Buddhist concepts to leave an imprint on me as a child. Admittedly, this might’ve been because the term, to my young ears, sounded like something straight out of a video game. But it was also thanks to the melodious Pali chant that began every religious gathering I attended:
Buddham saranam gacchāmi
Dhammam saranam gacchām
Sangham saranam gacchāmi...
Following my parents’ lead, I’d parrot my intention to take refuge in the Buddha, dharma, and sangha. Before long, I knew the words by heart, but had no sweet clue what I was actually saying. Throughout my youth, I’d recite them on autopilot — out of tradition and habit — never contemplating their meaning.
It wasn’t until adulthood that I considered how the chant might not be purely ceremonial. And in recent years, I’ve realized the need to move beyond a literal understanding.
Take the Buddha, for example. This first jewel refers, of course, to the historical figure, but it also includes other enlightened beings, both pre- and post-Siddhartha. Moreover, while this element represents the ideal, it also signifies our potential to attain that ideal. We all possess buddhanature.
Dharma, the second jewel, represents the Buddha’s teachings. But finding refuge in the dharma isn’t necessarily about burying oneself in volumes of scripture. What truly matters is the consistent application of those teachings. Through practicing and integrating this wisdom, dharma becomes the path to awakening.
Finally, the sangha conveys community. Initially, I thought this referred only to noble or monastic beings—awakened individuals, monks, and nuns — a view shared by many Buddhists. Later, my definition expanded to include all Buddhist practitioners, another common interpretation. But now? My personal notion of sangha encompasses all beings: those offering me comfort as well as those who test my patience. After all, the latter provides invaluable checkpoints on my spiritual path — opportunities to double down and deepen my practice — even if I don’t always recognize it in the heat of a moment.
Below you’ll find pieces from thecurrent issueofLion’s Roaras well as our archive, all which explore the three jewels. While reading, I encourage you to reflect on the different insights you might unearth from this foundational concept, even if the (very human) impulse is to gloss over it. Revisiting the basics allows us to recommit to these teachings, and can even lead to deeper realizations. Our perspectives are constantly evolving, and we can often learn from what we think we already know.
Whether this Weekend Reader serves as your introduction to the three jewels or your thousandth revisitation, I hope you find the refuge you seek. Rest assured, it’s always there for you.
As we walk the dharma path, questions inevitably arise. Whether we’re struggling with doubts about our personal practice, or pondering how Buddhist teachings relate to our everyday lives, these questions present opportunities for growth and a deeper understanding of the dharma.
On the Buddhadharma homepage, you’ll find our dedicated “Ask the Teachers” section with a number of articles featuring three teachers from different Buddhist traditions offering their insights on a range of questions about life and practice. This section provides a unique opportunity to explore the big and small questions that emerge on the spiritual path — not only from the perspective of your own tradition, but also through fresh insights offered by other Buddhist approaches. Whether you’re seeking guidance on meditation, ethics, or daily life challenges, “Ask the Teachers” invites you to broaden your understanding and gain a richer, more holistic view of the dharma from a diverse set of voices.
So, whether you are wondering how to work with depression, how to share the dharma with your kids, how to keep your practice fresh, how reincarnation works, or whether there is a soul in Buddhism, “Ask The Teachers” offers answers that will help you develop clarity and a fresh perspective on these topics. By expanding our view and listening to a number of voices, we can gain deeper insight and practical wisdom, enriching our understanding of the dharma. Below are three of my favorite questions answered by different teachers. May they help you to navigate your path with greater wisdom and confidence.
From www.lionsroar.com
Mindful Movement that Lasts
As the new year approaches, I find myself bracing for the inevitable wave of pressure: new workout challenges, rigid New Year’s resolutions, and countless techniques promising to reshape my body and push me beyond my limits.
As a yoga practitioner and instructor, I strive to approach myself with gentleness. Yet, I often can’t help but think, “Maybe this is the year I unlock this asana?” or “How can I improve my classes this year?” and the constant, “I really need to focus on my shoulder flexibility.” These thoughts, coupled with the piling resolutions, often lead to achievement-based motivation that eventually brings disappointment. I’ve found the pressure of resolutions and specific goals is a thief of joy when it comes to movement.
Everything changed when I began incorporating more mindfulness into my yoga and movement practices. Moving my body through space is a gift — a miracle — and a fleeting one at that. There is no specific goal — no asana or feat of strength — that holds more significance than the sheer act of moving and the awareness of being alive. My goals have since become functional and rooted in what truly matters to me. Now, I try to ask myself, “What’s important to me? What can I ask of my body? What brings it joy, and how can I preserve these functional moments for as long as I can?”
I want to keep my arms strong for helping my dad shovel snow in the winter, and my hips mobile for bending down to pick weeds from the garden in the spring. My yoga practice can help these things, but it’s also a joy just on its own.
The three offerings below provide tips and tools for cultivating mindful movement in daily life, and the reminder that our movement can be a precious tool for connecting our bodies and minds. I hope they bring you some space and ease this weekend.
–Martine Panzica, assistant digital editor, Lion’s Roar
Back to the Beginning
Anyone who has spent time with children can tell you how marvelous it is to witness a child experience things for the first time. The major events are so significant, like taking their first steps, or saying their first words. But for me, witnessing the small, mundane moments carries such magic — like tasting ice cream for the first time, their first sight of a butterfly, or pushing a ball downhill and watching it roll by itself.
There is a type of magic that happens when you observe a child experience these things we take for granted — things that we barely notice anymore. Their excitement and awe is so contagious, it’s as if you’re experiencing them for the first time as well. When I think about the Buddhist concept of “beginner’s mind,” I think of this child-like mind — a mind full of possibilities, without preconceptions.
As seasoned practitioners, we might find ourselves at a point where our practice feels stale. Over the years, we may lose perspective and find that our practice has become a habit — a chore even. With the excitement of discovering something new long faded, practice becomes just another thing we fit into our busy day. We fail to see how our practice is relevant to this very moment, forgetting to look at what’s going on right now. As Shunryu Suzuki Roshi famously said, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
A beginner’s mind approach can help us to come back to square one. Whether you’re a beginner or seasoned practitioner, coming back to square one can help us keep our practice relevant and fresh.
What would it be like to experience the mundane as new again? How would it feel to sit on the cushion for the first time? I invite you to find out.
—Mariana Restrepo, deputy editor,Buddhadharma
3 Practices for Anxiety
Anxiety is an inescapable part of being human. As Trudy Goodman reminds us in her teaching in the new January 2025 issue of Lion’s Roar, “As long as we are human, anxiety will arise.” These simple words hold a profound truth: while we can’t avoid anxiety, we can transform how we relate to it.
Buddhist wisdom doesn’t deny life’s challenges — anxiety included — but rather teaches us how to meet them with clarity and compassion. With the right tools, we can meet a challenge like an anxious moment and create space to breathe, soften its grip, and even find freedom.
The January issue of Lion’s Roar is devoted to exploring these tools. Below, we share three powerful practices from the issue for a calm and stable mind. Whether you’re just starting your meditation journey or deepening an existing practice, we hope they’ll help you steady your mind and open your heart.
—Lilly Greenblatt, Digital Editor, Lion’s Roar
Like Peanut Butter & Jelly
Being that you’re a “Weekend Reader” reader, I’m going to assume we can agree on a couple of things:
So it stands to reason that a “Buddhist Psychology,” likewise, could be a very positive and powerful thing. Indeed, it is very much “a thing” — it’s calledAbhidhamma(Pali), orAbhidharma(Sanskrit) — and is both positive and powerful. So much so that the modern scholar/monk Bhikkhu Bodhi has characterized it as “simultaneously a philosophy, a psychology, and an ethics, all integrated into the framework of a program for liberation.”
You could say that psychology and the Buddhist view go together like peanut butter and jelly. Yet, the Abhidharma/Abidhamma doesn’t exactly have a reputation for tastiness — Buddhist teachers sometimes even downplay it, saying it’s too difficult, too “dry” for many of us to relate to. But what if it were served with a glass of milk (so to speak)?
In his new series of Abhidharma teachings atBuddhadharma— Lion’s Roar’s special section for folks who want to deepen their study and practice of Buddhism — Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche has found a way to make it all go down easier, so that any of us can “take the first step to freedom” and bring Buddhist psychology to bear in our relationships with others, and ourselves.
Plain-spoken and laden with warmth and encouragement, Mingyur Rinpoche’s teachings include an introduction to the Abhidharma, a short practice, a video to help us get in touch with the way our mind and body are interconnected, and a teaching on how the Abhidharma helps us transform our suffering, our experience, and our very selves. All this is rounded out, too, by reflections andan Abhidharma Q&A with Edwin Kelley, a supportive guide in Mingyur Rinpoche’s work to help us all taste the Abhidharma for ourselves.
It’s all atBuddhadharmanow. Just follow the links below. Thank you for your practice!
—Rod Meade Sperry & Mariana Restrepo
TheBuddhadharmaeditorial team
Time for Goodness
Yes, it’s true that America has taken a dramatic turn away from my values as a Buddhist and mindfulness meditator. It is true that fear, grievance, and what Buddhism calls the three poisons — aggression, greed, and ignorance — are on the ascent. It is true that Americans have made an historically bad choice, one I know they will deeply regret in the end.
But right now, I’m trying not to think too much about that — about bad people and the bad things they want to do. There’ll be plenty of time to do that later, and to resist them.
Right now I’m thinking about goodness — about all the good people, with good values, and the good things they can do together. People like you and tens of millions of other people of goodwill. Starting now, we can come together to offer America a different and powerfully positive alternative.
For me, and perhaps for you, that means focusing on my practice of Buddhism and mindfulness. They offer us the guidance we need to follow the path of wisdom, compassion, and peace so we can each contribute to making a better future a real alternative.
Lion’s Roar is dedicated to offering the kind of wisdom and meditations we need so badly to come together, to get us through this bad time, and to inspire the country to move forward again. Here’s some of what the dharma offers us. This is the goodness we need now.
—Melvin McLeod, Editor-in-Chief,Lion’s Roar
From https://www.lionsroar.com/
Tidying Up
Over the summer, I found myself faced with the challenge of tidying up my humble 650 sq. ft. home, which had accumulated 15 years’ worth of clutter. When I first moved into this small but wonderful space, I had already read Marie Kondo’s renowned book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and its sequel, which teaches her famed organizing method of going through your belongings and keeping only what “sparks joy.” Despite my knowledge of her method, my “stuff” still piled up over the years. Too much, it seemed, sparked joy for me — especially when an IKEA opened in my neighborhood in 2017, filled with colorful things I just had to take home.
In the heat of the summer, I’d had enough of the clutter. My unfinished basement had filled up with old furniture and pretty boxes I accumulated throughout the years, molding under the season’s humidity. My living space had also become full of things I wasn’t necessarily using or even appreciating. While digging through the clutter, I found a copy of the late Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Making Space. Freshly inspired, I was excited to clean up and make space for a meditation corner, hoping to turn my small home into a peaceful retreat. But it turned out to be far from easy — I am my mother’s daughter, after all.
I come from a family that was influenced by the custom of feeling mottainai— a sense of regret over letting anything go to waste, which most post-war parents in Japan were taught. Older generations that grew up influenced by this concept find Kondo’s all-or-nothing style daunting, perhaps even severe — quite different from her cheerful smile. Many start reading her books only to give up after a few chapters.
My mother, for example, loves to keep pretty wrapping paper, ribbons, and boxes to reuse for gift-wrapping. The problem is, she’s never come up with a savvy way to make use of them. Neither have I, unlike Ruth Ozeki, who discusses her great approach to repurposing inconvenient but important items as an artist in her piece “Nothing is Wasted.”
Interestingly, as Cristina Moon discusses in “Zen and the Way of Tidying,” Kondo’s method isn’t just about tidying, but rather serves as a philosophy for approaching life itself. Her approach gives people like my mother and me a kinder, more enjoyable path to decluttering that can also be applied to our hearts and minds. The idea is to thank items before letting them go if they no longer bring joy — a concept that can feel revolutionary to those who, like my mother’s generation, carry a lot of guilt over throwing things away. But a clear space can also lead to a clear mind, which allows us to better ourselves and the world around us as a result.
Inspired by the three stories below, I’m planning my own tidy-up festival this weekend. While my home isn’t quite decluttered yet, I’m on my way to creating the peaceful space I’ve envisioned, thanking all I choose to let go of along the way.
—Megumi Yoshida, Art Director,Lion’s Roar
Practicing the Complete Path of Mindfulness
As the leading Buddhist media organization in the English language,Lion’s Roaris of course dedicated to offering Buddhism’s profound teachings and powerful meditation techniques. From experts to beginners, we aspire to serve everyone who can benefit from Buddhist wisdom, and we do that through a full range of content.
Yet that’s not enough. To truly benefit the world and as many people’s lives as possible, we also need to present universal human truths—ones Buddhism teaches so effectively about—in ways that anyone can relate to and benefit from, no matter what their beliefs are.
That’s whyLion’s Roaris offering a unique five week on-line program starting next week called “Five Keys to the Complete Path of Mindfulness.” This offers us the opportunity to learn about and practice a new approach to mindfulness, one that deepens and expands its benefits to our lives and our society.
The five keys to Complete Mindfulness — meditation, insight, ethics, compassion, and community — are both the path to a good human life and essential parts of it. None of these is inherently Buddhist, or necessarily religious at all. They are a simply human path, one based on universal human aspirations and universal human qualities.
Through the brilliant work of the secular mindfulness movement pioneered by Jon Kabat-Zinn, millions of people are enjoying the benefits of a regular mindfulness practice. As we do at Lion’s Roar, secular mindfulness often draws on Buddhist teachings. After all, the Buddha was the world’s first mindfulness teacher and Buddhists are the world’s mindfulness experts.
Yet mindfulness meditators know that what they are doing is not Buddhist or non-Buddhist, spiritual or secular. They are simply training, and benefiting from, the universal human ability to pay attention. Similarly, our ability to see reality clearly, to live ethically, to be kind and compassionate, and to live in community are simply parts of who we are as human beings. Reflecting the natural goodness of human nature, beyond any religion or belief system, they are the path to the happy, meaningful, and beneficial life that is the goal of the human journey.
The “Five Keys to the Complete Path of Mindfulness” online program starts next Thursday with a keynote discussion about how to harness the full power of the present moment with renowned mindfulness teachers Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman. Then over the course of the next five weeks, five outstanding teachers — Diana Winston, Rick Hanson, Rhonda Magee, Christopher Germer, and Rev. angel Kyodo williams — will show us how to transform our lives by practicing the five keys to The Complete Path of Mindfulness. I hope you’ll join us for this unique and life-changing event.
—Melvin McLeod, Editor-in-Chief,Lion’s Roar
Finding Refuge in the Three Jewels
The three jewels — or “Triple Gem,” as I was taught — were the first Buddhist concepts to leave an imprint on me as a child. Admittedly, this might’ve been because the term, to my young ears, sounded like something straight out of a video game. But it was also thanks to the melodious Pali chant that began every religious gathering I attended:
Buddham saranam gacchāmi
Dhammam saranam gacchām
Sangham saranam gacchāmi...
Following my parents’ lead, I’d parrot my intention to take refuge in the Buddha, dharma, and sangha. Before long, I knew the words by heart, but had no sweet clue what I was actually saying. Throughout my youth, I’d recite them on autopilot — out of tradition and habit — never contemplating their meaning.
It wasn’t until adulthood that I considered how the chant might not be purely ceremonial. And in recent years, I’ve realized the need to move beyond a literal understanding.
Take the Buddha, for example. This first jewel refers, of course, to the historical figure, but it also includes other enlightened beings, both pre- and post-Siddhartha. Moreover, while this element represents the ideal, it also signifies our potential to attain that ideal. We all possess buddhanature.
Dharma, the second jewel, represents the Buddha’s teachings. But finding refuge in the dharma isn’t necessarily about burying oneself in volumes of scripture. What truly matters is the consistent application of those teachings. Through practicing and integrating this wisdom, dharma becomes the path to awakening.
Finally, the sangha conveys community. Initially, I thought this referred only to noble or monastic beings—awakened individuals, monks, and nuns — a view shared by many Buddhists. Later, my definition expanded to include all Buddhist practitioners, another common interpretation. But now? My personal notion of sangha encompasses all beings: those offering me comfort as well as those who test my patience. After all, the latter provides invaluable checkpoints on my spiritual path — opportunities to double down and deepen my practice — even if I don’t always recognize it in the heat of a moment.
Below you’ll find pieces from thecurrent issueofLion’s Roaras well as our archive, all which explore the three jewels. While reading, I encourage you to reflect on the different insights you might unearth from this foundational concept, even if the (very human) impulse is to gloss over it. Revisiting the basics allows us to recommit to these teachings, and can even lead to deeper realizations. Our perspectives are constantly evolving, and we can often learn from what we think we already know.
Whether this Weekend Reader serves as your introduction to the three jewels or your thousandth revisitation, I hope you find the refuge you seek. Rest assured, it’s always there for you.
– Sandi Rankaduwa, assistant editor,Lion’s Roar
Ask the Teachers
As we walk the dharma path, questions inevitably arise. Whether we’re struggling with doubts about our personal practice, or pondering how Buddhist teachings relate to our everyday lives, these questions present opportunities for growth and a deeper understanding of the dharma.
On the Buddhadharma homepage, you’ll find our dedicated “Ask the Teachers” section with a number of articles featuring three teachers from different Buddhist traditions offering their insights on a range of questions about life and practice. This section provides a unique opportunity to explore the big and small questions that emerge on the spiritual path — not only from the perspective of your own tradition, but also through fresh insights offered by other Buddhist approaches. Whether you’re seeking guidance on meditation, ethics, or daily life challenges, “Ask the Teachers” invites you to broaden your understanding and gain a richer, more holistic view of the dharma from a diverse set of voices.
So, whether you are wondering how to work with depression, how to share the dharma with your kids, how to keep your practice fresh, how reincarnation works, or whether there is a soul in Buddhism, “Ask The Teachers” offers answers that will help you develop clarity and a fresh perspective on these topics. By expanding our view and listening to a number of voices, we can gain deeper insight and practical wisdom, enriching our understanding of the dharma. Below are three of my favorite questions answered by different teachers. May they help you to navigate your path with greater wisdom and confidence.
—Mariana Restrepo, Deputy Editor, Buddhadharma