A meditation teacher reimagines the birth of Siddhartha Gautama from Queen Maya’s perspective.

The road to Lumbini, Nepal—the birthplace of the Buddha—is littered with industry. Cement companies, brick kilns, steel mills, and a paper mill all manufacture goods alongside the Bhairahawa-Lumbini highway, a stretch of land that falls within the Lumbini Protected Zone—an area of a 15km radius around the UNESCO World Heritage Site, meant to be industry-free. […]

… Or how many lamps in the Buddha’s birthday tree? Either way, yesterday’s post about Vesak got me wondering: when was the Buddha born? As it turns out, there is a long scholarly discussion on the date of the Buddha’s birth (is anybody surprised?). The traditional date given in most Southeast Asian countries is 624 […]