Who’s Blocking the Buddha?
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A friend has just returned from China and informed me that this site is blocked there. This doesn’t come as a huge surprise, although I don’t know how that fits with our analytics, which show a hundred or so visits scattered across the country. Most originate in the city of Beijing, but many are sprinkled across the mainland, small peach dots on the Google map. Visitors in the northeastern city of Harbin on the Songhua River, down in Dali (home of 25 ethnic minorities), and Lanzhou on the route of the old Silk Road. I imagine the one soul, here…there, finding her way to these pages. Is censorship scattershot? Where else worldwide might one try to log on to join in the Buddha killing and fail? Tell us, travelers, and readers from afar. If you’re reading this, where are you now?

Meera Subramanian is an editor of Killing the Buddha and writes about the environment and culture for Nature, InsideClimate News, Virginia Quarterly Review, Orion, and others. Her first book is A River Runs Again: A Natural History of India from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka (PublicAffairs, 2015). Visit her at meerasub.org.