Cities and Kings: Ancient Treasures from Myanmar is the latest in a series of special exhibitions on Southeast Asia curated by the Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) in Singapore. The collection of works traces some 2,000 years of cultural development seen through the art and architecture of emergent cities in Myanmar—an appropriate theme as the two countries celebrate 50 years of diplomatic relations. Some 60 artifacts from museums in Myanmar as well as from the ACM and a private collection are also documented in a catalogue, accompanied by essays from the museum’s curators as well as scholars from Myanmar and overseas.*

In Myanmar’s strife-torn Rakhine State, where ethnic and religious tensions continue to simmer and segregate the Buddhist and Muslim communities, at least one ethnic Rakhine Buddhist, a 46-year-old school teacher, is willing to bridge this tragic divide that has been defined by violence and bloodshed. Since 2014, Maung Than Shwe has been the headmaster of the Basic Education High School (BEHS) in Thet Kay Pyin village, which is attended by children from one of the state’s biggest internment camps for displaced Muslims.

In Mathura, India, kind-hearted villagers and animal lovers are weaving colorful sweaters (calling them jumbo jackets) for elephants at the Elephant Conservation and Care Centre, a project of Wildlife SOS 30 miles north of Agra city. As temperatures in north India drop dramatically during this month, the garments will keep warm the rescued elephants, which suffer from blindness, disabilities, or other conditions caused by their abusers’ appalling treatment.

After a long and difficult journey across the precipices and through the blizzards of the Tian Shan mountain ranges, Xuanzang (fl. c. 602–64) finally reached the town of Bamiyan in modern-day Afghanistan. His celebrated pilgrimage to India was one of astonishing tenacity, aided by the protection of bodhisattvas from the forces of nature, and on this leg of his journey Xuanzang arrived in a valley separating the Hindu Kush from its western extension, the Koh-i-baba. The residents of Bamiyan, according to the Chinese monk, wore furs and rough woolen clothes, and made a living growing spring wheat, flowers, and fruit, and herding cows, horses, and sheep. The people had coarse, uncultivated manners, but Xuanzang admired their simple and sincere religious faith, which they expressed by carving two colossal Buddha images into the rocky northeastern hill overlooking their settlements (a third reclining Buddha recorded in Xuanzang’s journal has yet to be found).

Chinese archaeologists say a submerged Buddha statue that was revealed during maintenance work at a reservoir in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangxi could prove to be more than 600 years old. The ancient Buddhist carving emerged late last year when renovation of a hydropower gate at Hongmen Reservoir near the city of Fuzhou caused the water level to drop by more than 10 meters.

BODH GAYA, India—The 34th Kalachakra Initiation by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, which runs from 3–14 January, has transformed the streets of Bodh Gaya in the eastern Indian state of Bihar. The usually quiet and dusty town in which Shakyamuni Buddha attained enlightenment, dotted with shrines and temples representing all Buddhist traditions, has become a heavily guarded river of humanity. People of all ages, ethnicities, and nationalities, monastics and lay Buddhists alike, walk with open hearts alongside an array of mendicants seeking alms, under the watchful gaze of pickets of armed police, toward the Kalachakra site, enclosed in a vast tent, where the almost two-week-long ceremony is being held.

Kunzang Palyul Odsal Changchub Choling (usually shortened to Kunzang Palyul Choling or KPC), a Tibetan Buddhist center in the United States, has created two stupa peace parks—one near Washington, DC, the other in Sedona, Arizona—to provide places of pilgrimage where people of all spiritual traditions can visit, pray, and meditate to find peace and benefit for themselves and others.

What a year it’s been—brimming with economic and political upheavals that historians will be debating furiously for decades to come! Many joke (with a hint of grim sincerity) that the world might have lost its moorings because of the string of deaths of beloved household names that punctuated 2016, from David Bowie to Muhammad Ali to Prince. There is also a growing awareness of the increasingly critical decline of the planet’s ecological health, which can only mean bad news for humanity. We are all living on borrowed time unless we take radical measures to slow such destructive trends as ocean acidification, the melting of the polar icecaps and Himalayan glaciers, and the rapidly accelerating extinction of species (at least 10,000 each year, by conservative estimates!).

By now, many of us will have seen the familiar Christmas images in advertisements, on billboards, and behind the glass windows of shops. The scenes invoke a cozy warmth and merry conversation, from the fireplace before which couples snuggle to the dinner table around which family members gather, or the snowy town square where old friends catch up. These motifs all share the common theme of encounter, of old and new meetings alike. It is through new or renewed encounters that our world expands, our horizons broaden, and our context deepens into new textures and layers that would never have been discerned had we not met that new “Other.”

This program has enhanced my understanding and practice of Buddhism, leading me to achieve a higher level of inner peace and happiness.” Ben Kwong; executive director KGI Asia Ltd., graduate of 2004.