As we saw in the previous installment of this series, eighth-century Japan finally succeeded in importing the three elements (Buddhist images, the “Dharma,” or law, and the “sangha,” or community of ...

The uninitiated can find Rav Michael Laitman on YouTube, the video-sharing Web site. The white-bearded Jewish mystic is on camera, answering questions about the meaning of life posed by famous Israeli ...

Ayoung Buddhist monk crossed the sea to China as a member of a Japanese mission sent there during the Tang Dynasty (618-907). That monk was Kukai (774-835), also known posthumously as Kobo-Daishi. In ...

The popular notion of Kabbalah – the Kabbalah of red strings, holy water, and incantations – has attracted a following in recent years among Hollywood celebrities and others. This type of “Kabbalah” ...

The dreary official chronicles of conventional 20 th-century art history have completely ignored the memory of Augustus Knapp, who reached an audience of millions and captured their hungry ...

From the ninth century CE, two esoteric schools (Shingon and Tendai) took on a dominant role in Japanese Buddhism and laid down the foundations for almost all subsequent developments in the centuries ...

The orthodox view of Christianity is that Jesus preached the same doctrine to all men—there was no inner circle of “initiates” with special knowledge, as in Gnosticism and the mystery religions. The ...