Aperitif

2021 ◽  
pp. 19-24
Author(s):  
James McHugh
Keyword(s):  
Previous Birth ◽  
The World ◽  
Birth Story ◽  
The Buddha

To set the scene of drinks and drinking in India, the Aperitif presents a translation from Pali of a previous birth story of the Buddha, The Birth Story of the Jar (Kumbha Jātaka), where we learn how a rogue discovered the drink called surā that had arisen spontaneously. Then he shared it with another man, and subsequently they learned to brew surā and propagated this dangerous yet attractive substance in the world. This short Buddhist tale gives some sense of the popular understanding of how brewing worked, and the story also illustrates some of the classic perceived dangers of drink and intoxication.

The concepts of Ayurveda and Pāli Literature in connection to Psychotherapy

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kolarkar Rajesh Shivajirao ◽  
Kolarkar Rajashree Rajesh
Keyword(s):  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Code Of Conduct ◽  
Economic Consequences ◽  
Ultimate Truth ◽  
Traditional System ◽  
The World ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Buddha

The perfect balance of Mind and body is considered as complete health in Pāli literature as well as in Ayurveda. Pāli literature and Ayurveda have their own identity as most ancient and traditional system of medicine in India.The universal teachings of the Buddha are the most precious legacy ancient India gave to the world. The teachings are a practical code of conduct, a way of purity and of gracious living. There is a scientific study of the truth pertaining to mind and matter, and the ultimate truth beyond. In fact, the Buddha should be more appropriately known as a super-scientist who studied the entire laws of nature governing the Universe, by direct personal experience. The Buddha's rational teachings are clearly explained in the Eight-fold Noble Path, divided in three divisions of Sīla (morality), Samādhi (mastery over the mind), Paññā i.e. ‘Pragya' (purification of the mind, by developing insight). In Ayurveda Psychotherapy can be done by Satvavajaya Chikitsa and good conduct. Aim is to augment the Satva Guna in order to correct the imbalance in state of Rajas (Passion) and Tamas (Inertia). Sattvavajaya as psychotherapy, is the mental restraint, or a "mind control" as referred by Caraka, as well as Vagbhata is achieved Dnyan (education), Vidnyan (training in developing skill), Dhairya (development of coping mechanism), Smruti (memory enhancement), Samadhi (concentration of mind). According to WHO, Mental disorders are the common problem. The burden of mental disorders continues to grow with significant impacts on health and major social, human rights and economic consequences in all countries of the world.

The Buddha's Path of Peace

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Gombrich
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Environmental Concern ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
The Core ◽  
World Today ◽  
Introductory Overview ◽  
The World ◽  
The Buddha

The Buddha’s Path of Peace sets out the basic instructions for the life-changing way of the Buddha (the so-called “Noble Eightfold Path”) wholly in the context of contemporary and everyday life, personal experience, human relationships, work, environmental concern and the human wish for peace. In this book, the core of the Buddha’s teaching is comprehensively cast in modern models of thought—borrowed from science and philosophy—and informed by contemporary concerns. The reader, who may be completely new to Buddhism, is accompanied along the Path with practical exercises that are fully explained. The Path begins with an introductory overview and then proceeds through Right Speech, Right Acting, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Concentration, Right Mindfulness, Right Understanding and Right Resolve, and concludes with a short chapter on the relevance of the Path to the multiple crises facing the world today. The reader is mentored throughout by practical meditational and contemplative exercises, with tables, diagrams, analogies and stories. Gradually the reader who has followed this handbook with commitment will feel the benefits of growing peacefulness, wisdom and compassion.

Tathāgata

1937 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-331
Author(s):  
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
Keyword(s):  
The Sun ◽  
The World ◽  
The Buddha

In Bsos. viii, 781 ff., Mr. E. J. Thomas argues that “Tathagata” may have been taken over by the Buddhist from the Jain Tathāgaya, and that it may be an incorrect Sanskritization of some unknown non-Aryan and non-Dravidian word. This seems very far-fetched. Mr. Thomas does not take any account of possibly Vedic origins, common to Buddhism and Jainism. We have shown incidentally elsewhere that countless Buddhist terms, for example arkat and attā, are purely Vedic, and have argued that the Buddha legend is almost wholly made up of Vedic material with only such modifications as are inevitable when the eternal birth is to be retold in terms of a temporal narrative. We are convinced, in other words, that the Buddha, the “Kinsman of the Sun”, the “Eye of the World”, and “Great Person” of the Pali texts, the Buddha who may be represented in art by a pillar of fire, is an incarnation or descent (avatarana) of the Vedic Agni.

Abruptly Dogen

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kidder Smith
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Full Moon ◽  
The Moon ◽  
The World ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
The Way

In the thirteenth century Dogen brought Zen to Japan. His tradition flourishes there still today and now has taken root across the world. Abruptly Dogen presents some of his pith writings—startling, shifting, funny, spilling out in every direction. They come from all seventy-five chapters of his masterwork, the Eye of Real Dharma (Shōbōgenzō 正法眼藏), and roam through mountains, magic, everyday life, meditation, the nature of mind, and how the Buddha is always speaking from inside our heads. An excerpt from chapter 1, “A Case of Here We Are”: Human wisdom is like a moon roosting in water. No stain on the moon, nor does the water rip. However wide and grand the light, it still finds lodging in a puddle. The full moon, the spilling sky, all roosting in a single dewdrop on a single blade of grass. A man of wisdom is uncut, the way a moon doesn’t pierce water. Wisdom in a man is unobstructed, the way the sky’s full moon is unobstructed in a dewdrop. No doubt about it, the drop’s as deep as the moon is high. How long does this go on? How deep is the water, how high the moon?

Battling the Buddha of Love

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Marie Falcone
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Tibetan Buddhism ◽  
Uttar Pradesh ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Rural India ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
Resistance Movement

This ethnography explores the controversial plans and practices of the Maitreya Project, as they worked to build the “world's tallest statue” as a multi-million dollar “gift” to India. This effort entailed a plan to forcibly acquire hundreds of acres of occupied land for the statue park in the Kushinagar area of Uttar Pradesh. The Buddhist statue planners ran into obstacle after obstacle, including a full-scale grassroots resistance movement of Indian farmers working to “Save the Land.” In telling the “life story” of the proposed statue, the book sheds light on the aspirations, values and practices of both the Buddhists who worked to construct the statue, as well as the Indian farmer-activists who tirelessly protested against it. Since the majority of the supporters of the Maitreya Project statue are “non-heritage” practitioners to Tibetan Buddhism, the book narrates the spectacular collision of cultural values between small agriculturalists in rural India and transnational Buddhists from around the world. The book endeavors to show the cultural logics at work on both sides of the controversy. Thus, this ethnography of a future statue of the Maitreya Buddha—himself the “future Buddha”—is a story about divergent, competing visions of Kushinagar’s potential futures.

3. Animals and the environment

2020 ◽  
pp. 31-47
Author(s):  
Damien Keown
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Meat Eating ◽  
Plant Life ◽  
The World ◽  
The Buddha

Is Buddhism truly an ‘eco-friendly’ religion? ‘Animals and the environment’ examines the implications of Buddhist teachings such as that human beings can be reborn as animals and vice versa. While the Buddhist ‘sublime attitudes’ such as kindness and compassion seem at first to favour animals to a greater degree than we find in Christianity, human life still takes precedence in the hierarchy of living beings. Rules about plant life are unclear, with Buddhist writers acknowledging the beauty of both the wilderness and civilization. Vegetarianism is largely seen as a morally superior diet, but meat-eating was common at the time of the Buddha and is widely practised by monks today. Buddhist attitudes toward the natural world are complex and are to some extent overshadowed by the belief that the world as we know it is fundamentally flawed.

Nirmāṇa-kāya

1938 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-84
Author(s):  
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
Keyword(s):  
Works Of Art ◽  
The World ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
Pragmatic Equivalence

In the well-known doctrine of the Three Bodies of the Buddha, the physical and earthly manifestation is called a nirmāṇa-kāya, “a body of artifice” or even more literally “a body of measurement”; a body made, then, as images and other works of art are made, by a “measuring out” (root mā). In the Divyâvadāna, ch. xxxvii, the word nimittam is similarly used of the Buddha's appearance which he himself emanates and projects for Rudrâyaṇa's painters, who cannot grasp his likeness unaided. It may be remarked that Indian imagery is always as much or more an iconometry (tālamāna) than an iconography; and that all this has an important bearing on the pragmatic equivalence, in Buddhist iconodule theory, of the verbal, carnal, and fictile manifestations by means of which the Buddha is presented to the world in a likeness. Our present object, however, is rather to point out what has not been generally recognized hitherto, that prototypes of the expressions nirmāṇa-kāya and nimittam occur already in the Brāhmaṇas and Saṁhitās.

The Development of the Civilized Mind in the Ancient Civilizations

Philosophy ◽  
1942 ◽  
Vol 17 (67) ◽  
pp. 250-256
Author(s):  
John Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Primitive Type ◽  
Modern Mind ◽  
The World ◽  
Science Philosophy ◽  
Natural Variations ◽  
Ancient Civilizations ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
Definite Period ◽  
Hebrew Prophets

The positions which are offered for consideration in this paper may be summarized in the following four points:First, there is a civilized type of mind which may be clearly distinguished from a primitive type.Second, the civilized mind developed from the primitive under certain economic and ethnological conditions which are to be described.Third, this emergence of the civilized mind from the primitive took place at a fairly definite period and reached its height in the remarkable efflorescence of genius between the ninth and fourth century b.c., over an area from Egypt to China. This was the appearance in that period of a mind essentially one in character, with natural variations, in the Greek thinkers, the Hebrew prophets, the early Hindu mystical philosophers and the Buddha in India, and the ethical teachers of China of the Confucian school.Fourth, this type of mind with its characteristic powers was achieved once for all and was never lost. In spite of the decay of most of the ancient civilizations, the civilized mind has been transmitted, chiefly through the survival of Greek and Graeco-Hebraic thought, into science, philosophy, and theology to become the modern mind for the world of culture of to-day.

‘A Little World without the World’: Ecclesiastical Foundation Myths in English Reformation Thought

2011 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-222
Author(s):  
Jack P. Cunningham
Keyword(s):  
English Reformation ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
Birth Story

AbstractAs the English Church began to develop in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the question of its origins became highly significant. From the outset the Henrician Reformation had to demonstrate that its claims to national ecclesiastical sovereignty had not been invented by hard-pressed statesmen to extricate the king from an inconvenient deference to the papacy. Thus began an industry that sent scholars delving into the archives in order to recover a historical precedent for independence. Joseph of Arimathea emerged as an early favourite candidate, and King Lucius, Simon Zealot and Aristobulus followed. Then there were the Samotheans, biblical giants that allowed English Reformers to trace their ancestry to Noah. This paper draws on a wide range of contemporary sources in order to explore how the English Reformation struggled with and ultimately failed to provide its Church with a legitimate ancient birth story.

The Buddha's cūḍā, Hair, uṣṇīṣa, and Crown

1928 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 815-841 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
Keyword(s):  
Buddhist Art ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
The World ◽  
The Buddha

A modern student of Buddhism, unfamiliar with Buddhist art, and accustomed to think of the Buddha only as a human and historical figure, would naturally expect to find the Śākya sage represented in art like any other Buddhist friar, with a shaven (muṇḍa) head; and to suppose that such representations could only have existed as memorials, and not as objects of a cult. As a matter of fact, however, the Buddha is always represented, although not in royal garb, as a deity, with a nimbus, lotus or lion throne, and certain physical peculiarities proper to the conception of a MahāPuruṣa and Cakravartin or King of the World. But crowned and otherwise ornamented Buddhas are not unknown, and again, the earliest Indian type differs in several respects from the established formula of the Gupta and later periods. Thus the Buddha iconography presents a number of difficult problems; and amongst these are those referred to in the title of this paper.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document