There is a quiet courage in writing Buddhist books for children. The task seems simple enough: tell a story, offer a moral, add bright illustrations, and perhaps include a few words about kindness, mindfulness, or peace. Yet anyone who has tried to speak meaningfully with children about the Dharma knows that the simplicity is deceptive. Children are often more perceptive than adults. They can sense when a lesson is too heavy-handed and boring, when beauty is being used merely as decoration without substance, or when a story does not trust them enough to ask real questions.
So when Priya Kumari offered to send me her two latest children’s books about Buddhism, I was a bit uncertain. But after reading each with my six-year-old daughter several times over the last two months, I can happily say that My Vesak: Day of Buddha (Eternal Tree Books 2026), illustrated by Urvashi Dubey, and Leaf Talks Peace: Buddha’s Message of Harmony (Eternal Tree Books 2026), illustrated by Anusha Santosh and featuring a foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, meet this challenge gracefully. Together, the two books offer young readers two complementary gateways into Buddhist life—one through the shared celebration of Vesak, the other through interdependence as taught by a single leaf. One moves outward into the world of festivals, temples, lanterns, offerings, and communities. The other moves inward, inviting children to contemplate connections, harmony, nature, and the possibility of peace.
My Vesak is perhaps the more explicitly educational of the two. It introduces young readers to Vesak, also knownas Buddha Purnima, the festival commemorating the birth, awakening, and death or parinirvana of the Buddha. Vesak is among the most important observances in the Buddhist world, particularly in Theravada communities, although its meanings and celebrations extend far beyond any single Buddhist culture—and it is even drawing attention and recognition beyond the Buddhist world.*
Kumari’s book wisely does not treat Vesak as a single, uniform holiday. Instead, it presents the festival as a living, global expression of devotion and remembrance. Young readers encounter celebrations across Asia and around the world filled with lanterns, temple visits, flower offerings, acts of generosity, community gatherings, and artistic expressions of gratitude. The book’s publisher describes it as introducing children to “the origins of Buddhism and the journey of Prince Siddhartha to enlightenment,” while also showing how millions of Buddhists celebrate through “lantern parades, temple ceremonies, flower offerings, and acts of kindness.” (Eternal Tree Books)
This global framing is one of the book’s great strengths. For Buddhist families in North America and elsewhere, children’s literature has often lagged behind lived religious diversity. Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and secular holidays have long had a place on library shelves, yet Buddhist holidays remain underrepresented in mainstream children’s publishing. My Vesak helps fill that gap. School Library Journal has praised the book as “engaging and educational,” noting that it would be a welcome addition to holiday and picture book collections. (School Library Journal) And Kirkus Reviews called it, “a celebration and appreciation of Buddhism that may resonate with a wide audience.” (Backcover)
That wide audience matters. The book will naturally be useful for Buddhist families wishing to see their own traditions reflected in children’s literature. But it will also serve teachers, librarians, interfaith educators, and families with no prior knowledge of Buddhism. This is a Buddhist book, certainly, but not in a narrow or sectarian sense. It is an invitation to cultural literacy, religious imagination, and reverence.
Urvashi Dubey’s illustrations support this work beautifully. They do not merely decorate the text; they help children see that Buddhist practice is embodied. Vesak is not an abstract doctrine. It is light, color, food, flowers, movement, family, community, and memory. It is the Dharma made visible in collective life.
If My Vesak moves across cultures, Leaf Talks Peace moves through the cosmos by way of the small and ordinary. Its central figure, a leaf named Harmony, becomes a gentle teacher of interdependence. The premise is charmingly simple—a leaf can reveal the whole world. In this, the book stands in a long Buddhist tradition of seeing reality in a grain of sand, a drop of water, a breath, or a single moment of awareness. The leaf contains sunlight, rain, soil, air, time, space, and countless forms of life. To see the leaf clearly is to see that nothing exists alone.
This is, of course, a profound Buddhist teaching. Dependent origination is not easy to explain to adults, much less to children. Yet Leaf Talks Peace approaches the topic through image, rhythm, and wonder rather than abstraction. The book comes across as a child-friendly exploration of interconnection, peace, compassion, mindfulness, and harmony with nature. It conveys the Buddha’s message of living in harmony with nature and all beings and that the Dalai Lama’s foreword praises the book for teaching children this very lesson.
Leaf Talks Peace connects with readers of all ages alike through its warmth and through the presence of guides for parents and children. These back-of-book materials are important. They help adults slow down, ask questions, and draw out the philosophical richness of the story without turning it into a lecture. In this way, the book comes alive in the eyes and imagination of children as it is read to them.
The environmental dimension of Leaf Talks Peace is especially timely. Children today inherit a world of climate anxiety, ecological grief, and often bewildering adult inaction. A book such as this does not ask them to carry the burden of environmental collapse. Instead, it offers a more basic and more healing insight: the world is alive with relationship. We care because we belong. We protect because we are not separate.
This is where Kumari’s two books speak most powerfully to one another. My Vesak teaches children that the Buddha’s life is remembered in community through joy, generosity, and ritual. Leaf Talks Peace teaches that the Buddha’s message can also be found in the quiet contemplation of nature. Together, they present Buddhism not merely as something believed, but as something lived: in festivals, in families, in forests, in classrooms, in acts of kindness, and in the growing moral imagination of children.
There are minor limitations. My Vesak is text-rich for a picture book, and some younger children may need an adult to pace the reading over multiple sittings. Leaf Talks Peace, by contrast, may require adult guidance for children to grasp its deeper philosophical meaning. But these are not serious flaws. Indeed, they may be strengths for families and educators looking for books that can grow with a child. A very young reader may first delight in color, rhythm, and character. An older child may later return to the same pages and discover Buddhist teachings about impermanence, compassion, interbeing, and responsibility.
In my own years of reviewing Buddhist books, the works that have stayed with me most are those that do not simply explain Buddhism, but embody a Buddhist way of seeing. A good Dharma book does not merely hand us information; it turns us slightly, gently, toward life. These children’s books embody the Dharmic spirit of calling the reader and hearer to reflect on life. They ask children—and perhaps more importantly, the adults reading with them—to pause and see the world differently.
That may be the greatest gift of both books. They do not reduce Buddhism to exotic imagery, nor do they flatten it into generic niceness. They show Buddhism as both a philosophy with profound teachings for all ages and lived religion, growing and adapting over time and geography. They also show that peace is not merely the absence of conflict, but a way of perceiving relationship. And finally, they show that a religious day of remembrance can teach us about global community, and that a leaf can teach the Dharma.
At a time when children are surrounded by screens, speed, consumerism, and anxiety, books like these matter. They offer an opportunity for presence, connection, and orientation—for children, families, and communities. They remind young readers that they belong to a world of causes and conditions, communities of memory and practice, and a living Earth that invites tenderness.
May there be many more Buddhist children’s books like these—beautiful, thoughtful, culturally rooted, and generous in spirit. And may the children who encounter them carry forward, in their own ways, the simple and radical message at their heart: that peace begins when we see clearly that we are not alone.
* New York City Buddhists Mark Largest-Ever Vesak Day Celebrations with Mayor Mamdani (BDG), White House Hosts Buddhist Representatives for Fifth Official Vesak Observance (BDG), and Vesak Celebrated in the UN’s Economic and Social Council Chamber (BDG)
See more
My Vesak (Eternal Tree Books)
Leaf Talks Peace (Eternal Tree Books)
My Vesak: Day of Buddha (School Library Journal)
Related features from BDG
Children Should be Educated at the Right Time
Raising Healthy Children
Should Children Take Refuge?
Less Meat More Love! Khyentse Foundation Announces New Book for Children
Introducing the Buddhadharma to Non-Buddhist Parents of School-age Children
