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    Anagarika Dharmapala Paid Member

    Born to a devout Buddhist family in 1864, David Hewivitarne became Anagarika Dharmapala, the leading light of the Buddhist Renaissance Movement in Sri Lanka. As a child, Dharmapala was sent to Christian missionary schools, where his education, if comprehensive by European standards, showed little respect for Buddhism. By the age of nineteen, he had mastered the rudiments of Christian theology and knew more than half the Bible by heart, knowledge he used to highlight the hypocrisy he perceived in his missionary instructors. More »
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    The Religion of Science: Paul Carus and the "Gospel of Buddha" Paid Member

    By Robert Sharf
    The“Gospel of Buddha”is a relatively small volume of passages culled from the Buddhist canon and arranged, like the biblical gospels, into “chapter and verse.” First published in English in 1894, by the turn of the century this collection was probably the single most popular Buddhist catechism in the world. By 1915 it was in its thirteenth English edition, with versions having appeared in Japanese, Chinese, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Urdu. More »
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    Alexandra David-Niel Paid Member

    Alexandra David-Niel lived 100 years. She was born in France in 1868, the period of la belle epoque, and died there in 1969, soon after the student riots in Paris. In between she spent fourteen years studying Buddhism in Asia and, at the age of 55, became the first Western woman to enter the Tibetan city of Lhasa. It is tempting to think that she was born too soon, but so free and bold a…Alexandra David-N�el lived 100 years. She was born in France in 1868, the period of la belle epoque, and died there in 1969, soon after the student riots in Paris. More »
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    Dragon Wisdom Paid Member

    By David Guy
    As the wife of a prominent Chicago attorney she had had a great deal of experience at entertaining," wrote Mary Farkas in a 1967 obituary of Ruth Fuller Sasaki that appeared in the monthly newsletter Zen Notes. Sasaki, who during her first marriage to a corporate lawyer had been Ruth Fullcr Everett, had joined the Buddhist Society of America in 1938 on the same night as her friend Mary Farkas. In the obituary, Farkas seemed to speak with genuine admiration of this early incarnation of Mrs. Sasaki and of virtues that sound quaint today but were not in the 1920s, when Everett was a young woman. "There was no dish she wouldn't try to make, no problem of gardening, decorating, or construction she wouldn't undertake to solve," wrote Farkas. More »
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    The Second Buddha Paid Member

    By David Loy
    Image: Nagarjuna receives the Perfection of Wisdom scripture from a nagini. Beside him is Aryadeva, who elaborated his teaching. In the sky, astride a lion, is the Bodhisattva of Wisdom, Manjushri, in human guise.  More »
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    The Second Buddha Paid Member

    IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT, after the Buddha, the single most important figure in the entire Buddhist tradition was a monk named Acharya Nagarjuna, sometimes called the Second Buddha. As is the case with many religious giants, we know little about the historical Nagarjuna. Scholars usually place him sometime in the late second century C.E., but he may have lived a hundred years before or after that period. According to tradition, Nagarjuna was a scholar-monk� More »