The Chinese authorities have ordered Larung Gar Buddhist Institute in Sertar County, in western China’s Sichuan Province, to reduce admissions—in particular of nuns, and of monks and nuns from other regions of China—in an effort to curb the rapid growth of the monastery’s population.

A perceived increase in intolerance and extremist ideologies has been a growing concern across the global political and religious landscape in recent years. No community, it seems, is immune from such conservatism, including Buddhist societies in South and Southeast Asia. However, while there may appear to be commonalities to conflicts between Buddhists and Muslims in Myanmar, Thailand, and Sri Lanka when viewed from afar, the fault lines of violence are rooted in very specific historical, contextual, and localized issues and circumstances.

Sixty Chinese students enrolled at Hangzhou Buddhism Institute in China’s eastern Zhejiang Province this month for a free six-day summer camp to study Sanskrit, the literary and liturgical language of Buddhism and other religions. Amid the growing popularity of Buddhism, yoga, and Indology in China, the study of this ancient Indian language is rapidly gaining traction among a new generation of students.

Buddhist monks led a ritual at Bangkok’s Erawan Shrine on Wednesday morning for the victims of Monday’s deadly bomb attack as the popular shrine reopened to the public. The monks chanted to guide the spirits of those killed, and received offerings of lotus flowers and incense from grief-stricken relatives of the victims.

Guangdong, China -- A Chinese millionaire has given up his fortune and all material possessions in order to become a Buddhist monk. Liu Jingchong, a businessman from Guangdong Province, moved into the mountains to live in total isolation after an epiphany in 2012 made him desire a 'minimalist life'.

As a devastating deluge of rains and flooding continues to exact a frightening human and economic toll in Myanmar, government departments report that its Buddhist heritage is also being threatened by what is the worst natural disaster to hit the country since Cyclone Nargis killed nearly 140,000 people in May 2008.

New York City’s Rubin Museum of Art will host a series of sessions by Buddhist author Sharon Salzberg and other teachers from the New York Insight Meditation Center in August and September to teach mindfulness and discuss the relationship between meditation and art.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima at 8.15 a.m. on Monday, 6 August 1945 incinerated a city. Three days later a second bomb was detonated over Nagasaki. The two nuclear blasts resulted in the deaths of more than 200,000 people, mostly civilians. Now, 70 years later, in memorial ceremonies held all over the world to commemorate the occasion and pray for the dead, Buddhist monastics and lay people joined people of all faiths to appeal for peace.

A restoration project that took 18 years has finally come to an end. On 31 July, Sri Lanka’s president Maithripala Sirisena hosted a puja, or prayer ritual, to unveil the restored Abayagiriya Chaithya (stupa) and to declare the site open to the public. Directed by Sri Lanka’s Central Cultural Fund (CCF), the project cost a total of Rs519.5 million (US$3.9 million).

Buddhism’s remarkable receptiveness has enabled it to evolve into a tradition of great diversity. Through pragmatic absorption and negotiation rather than conquest or imposition, Buddhism has enriched both itself and the cultures in which it has found a home. This receptivity was amply demonstrated when monks filtered into China from northern India and Central Asia, and when Japan and Korea adopted Buddhism from Tang dynasty (618–907) China and made it uniquely their own. One interesting phenomenon over the past several decades has been the proliferation of Buddhism in the West, Latin America, and Africa. In these traditionally non-Buddhist regions, Buddhism must be even more receptive in order to navigate established, globalizing cultures and trends. In the West, these established cultures are based broadly on a Christian heritage that is both complemented and contradicted by an increasingly normative secular, scientific worldview and social liberalism.