Gleanings in Buddha-Fields

I started writing this a day after Sir Patrick Stewart passed away. I was one of those kids who grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I remember watching the first episode Encounter At Farpoint and his series finale All Good Things, and all the good episodes in between. Captain Picard was always there, a role model and an amazing actor. It is a painful ...

Recently, I have been absorbed in the latest Fire Emblem game Fortune’s Weave, and I saw this little comment by one of the characters, Orchel:1

To Western audiences, this might not seem like much, but this statement paraphrases a Buddhist teaching.

In Japanese-Buddhism there is an old proverb (first

From the podcast Tai-gi Made Easy, I recently learned the Taiwanese-Hokkien proverb:

五肢指頭仔伸出來無平長。
Gōo ki tsíng-thâ...

While visiting Japan last July, I had enjoyed matcha tea a few times at certain tea houses, both in Aizu-Wakamatsu and in Kamakura. Until recently, I w...

Japanese language is grammatically different from both European languages and Sinitic (Chinese) languages. It is considered an agglutinative language where sounds are tacked on to the end of a word to enhance the meaning. English fuses sounds together: ran, run, runs are all based on the same verb, but the sound changes to fit the nuance, whereas Japanese instead add...