A Quarter Century to Find the Blue Demon In late 1999, I had a strange vision of a blue demon fucking a red woman. He had four faces. A few weeks later, a loose page fell out of a book on tantra. They were on it. There was no explanation. The image had been in …
Stok and Matho: A Kingdom and a Living Ceremony, Twenty Minutes Apart The driver quoted me three thousand rupees for the day. Stok, Matho, four to five hours, dropoff back at my hotel. I had a feeling he was padding it a little. The union sheet for the same loop runs closer to two thousand, …
What happens when Buddhism runs into religions that didn’t grow up next to it, the Abrahamic faiths and, at its own root, Hinduism. Some of these encounters produced quiet blending that lasted centuries. One produced an entirely new religion, deliberately engineered to contain them all.
Thirty articles. That’s how long it took to walk through every step of buying a cheap house in Otaru — from browsing akiya banks to filing taxes as a foreign homeowner in Hokkaido. If you’ve read all of them, you know more about this process than most people who’ve actually done it. This last one …
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The Kumari is a living goddess, the incarnation of Taleju, a form of Durga worshipped as the protector deity of the Malla kings who once ruled the Kathmandu Valley.
I’ve spent 28 articles telling you why buying property in Otaru is feasible, affordable, and maybe brilliant. Now I’m going to tell you everything that could go wrong. This isn’t the part where I hedge my enthusiasm with a paragraph of disclaimers and then reassure you everything will be fine. Some of these risks are …