Vajrayana, Mahayana, and Theravada are the most practiced forms of Buddhism today but there were a lot of changes within the Mahayaha practice when the expansion of Buddhism crossed the Silk Road.

"In the contemporary world the meeting of Buddhism and Islam is most often imagined as one of violent confrontation. Indeed, the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 seemed not only to ...

IN OCTOBER 2013, Ross Ulbricht was arrested by the FBI and charged with money laundering, conspiracy to commit computer hacking and conspiracy to traffic narcotics. Two years earlier, Ulbricht had ...

Mahāyāna is the name of one of the two primary branches of Buddhism. The word is formulated from the Sanskrit “mahā,” meaning great or large, and “yāna,” meaning vehicle. Taken together, the term can ...

This story appears in the June 2010 issue of National Geographic magazine. The human skeletons were piled up like signposts in the sand. For Xuanzang, a Buddhist monk traveling the Silk Road in A.D.