In the rural mountains of Okayama sits Songenji — a 300-year old Zen temple that is both a pillar of Japanese discipline and tradition and a maverick of globalism and progress. It’s a place where women live and study Zen side-by-side with men as coeds (something once unheard of), and the sangha (monastic order) is mostly Western foreigners.

Do translations of spiritual texts have to be so foreign-sounding? Do non-literal translations distort the words of the prophets and sages? A translator of Chinese Buddhist and Taoist scripture weighs in on the subject.

China’s crackdown on fantasy literature and video games poses a critical obstacle to readers, authors, and those who seek to make these works accessible. Why restrict these apparently innocuous stories? Eric R Stone relays accounts from censored writers who describe how censorship and outright banning of certain concepts, words, and allusions render works of fiction unintelligible.

The unconventional appearance of Ji Gong and the unique experience of hearing the god speak fascinated a foreigner who seeks authentic travel adventure in Taiwan.

Taiwan's Constitutional Court has been effectively paralyzed by the legislature. So what are the real dangers here, and what is being sensationalized?

We've all heard of the four elements of water, earth, fire, and air -- but what about the Five Elements of Chinese philosophy?

For decades, love-starved pilgrims have flocked to the “Xiahai City God Temple” in Taipei to pray to the Man Under the Moon, implore a fate-binding “red cord,” and drink free jujube tea. But why do people come to the Xiahai Fortification Deity’s temple to pray to an unrelated god? Who is the Man Under the Moon and what’s with his red cords? And how did this tiny shrine become such a hotspot for people looking for love?

Backpacking through urban Taiwan series, Day 1

Just as Western soap operas wouldn’t be what they are without evil twins and secret pregnancies, the Taiwanese equivalent of the “8 o’clocker” (八點檔) would lose all its flavor without climactic pans of the camera from shocked expressions down to red crescent blocks on the ground.

A preface to my two-week journey backpacking across the urban west coast of Taiwan in the December of 2020.

If you read my previous article: What Language Do They Speak in Taiwan?, you know that Mandarin is the language of Taiwan in the same way that English is the language of Ireland (as opposed to Irish Gaelic). When it comes to the practicalities of everyday life, these are the languages you need to know to get by.

If you Google: “What language do they speak in Taiwan?” the first thing you’ll likely see is the Wikipedia article for Languages of Taiwan, which lists the distributions of Mandarin, Taiwanese (Hokkien), and Hakka speakers in the ROC. What articles like this won’t tell you, however, are the implications of these numbers, and what things actually look like on the ground.