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Channel: The Buddha Myth--A Skeptic's Guide
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BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY LINK

Trade between East and West is of great antiquity. Cuneiform tablets as early as 2400 BCE describe shipments of cotton cloth, spices, oil, and grains, from the Indus Valley region to the Near East. The...

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BUDDHIST RELIC CULT

Relics were used in early Buddhism to represent embodiments of a transcendent or imminent or otherwise absent Buddha. From Kandy to Kathmandu to Kyoto, there was hardly a Buddhist site that did not...

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BUDDHISM AND JAINISM

From : Wisdom QuarterlyJainism: an extreme Buddhist school? [Rajagriha] was King Bimbisara's capital, and it is equally important to the Jains, whose tradition parallels Buddhism to such a degree that...

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AN 18th CENTURY BUDDHIST MIND

The shrine of the Buddha's footprint, Pra Puttabat, Saraburi, Thailand."We might urge that evil consists in existence, and good in non-existence; that therefore the sum-total of existence is the worst...

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THE TRAVELS OF XUANZANG, 629--645 CE

"Around his dreams the dead leaves fall;Calm as the starred chrysanthemumHe notes the season glories come,And reads the books that never pall."L. Cranmer-Byng.Map shows route taken by Xuanzang,...

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ANICONISM

Worship of the Dharmachakra,Sanchi, 2nd-1st century CE.Aniconism refers to the art in which portrayals of the Buddha in human form did not occur. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,...

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BUDDHA BEFORE BUDDHOLOGISTS

The story of Buddhism is a distinctively modern and, until recently, non-Buddhist thing to tell. Even the term Buddhism is of recent vintage. In seventeenth-century Europe, only four religions were...

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THE SOURCES OF THE JATAKAS

The Jatakas, or Buddha birth stories, are found in the Sutta Pitaka of the Tripitaka, and consists of 547 jatakas, each containing an account of the life of Buddha during some previous incarnation as a...

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WAS ASHOKA A BUDDHIST?

Ashoka was the Indian Constantine, or more correctly, Constantine was the Roman Ashoka. But who was Ashoka?Diodotus I may have been Ashoka.Buddhists claim that King Ashoka (273-232 BCE) converted to...

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THE LANGUAGE OF BUDDHISM

Ashokan inscriptions are the earliest records of Indian writing. Two kinds of scripts were known in ancient India: Kharosthi, employed in Gandhara (Eastern Afghanistan and Northern Panjab) from the 4th...

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BUDDHA AS A CATHOLIC SAINT

The story of Barlaam and Iôasaph or Josaphat is the legend of Buddha retold in a Christian setting which was translated into Greek and Latin and other European languages and which first became popular...

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THE WEST'S DISCOVERY OF BUDDHISM

Buddhism, which had flourished in India for centuries, was already a tree dying from the top by the seventh century CE when the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang traveled there in search of Buddhist scriptures....

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TREES & FLOWERS IN BUDDHISM

Trees are there, Lord, which glow in crimson now,In quest of fruit they've cast aside their leaves.But still the blossoms hang there, red as blood.Now is the time, o Lord, to travel there.For trees in...

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GANDHARA—LAND OF THE BUDDHA?

Loriyan-Tangai. Relief of Buddha surrounded by worshippers. Lahore Museum. Notice Buddha's moustache.Gandhara seems to have taken to Buddhism with surprising speed and vigor, based on the...

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THE BIRTH OF THE BUDDHA

The Scripture of the Savior of the World,Lord Buddha--Prince Siddartha styled on earthIn Earth and Heavens and Hells Incomparable,All-honoured, Wisest, Best, most Pitiful;The Teacher of Nirvana and the...

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DATING THE BUDDHA (448--368 BCE)

This skeptic of course doesn't believe in a historical Buddha; but if there had been, when would he have lived? Most scholars now believe that Buddha lived much later than the traditional date adhered...

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SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF THE BUDDHA

Mendicant monks--Sukhodaya (Sukhothai).Sukhodaya, Thailand.The biography of the supposedly historical Buddha is recorded in the Buddhist canon, written four centuries and more after his death. This...

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THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES

What can we say of a supposed historical figure whose life story conforms virtually in every detail to the Mythic Hero Archetype, with nothing, no "secular" or mundane information, left over?... Thus...

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VIDEOS RE BUDDHISM (VARIOUS SOURCES)

1. This video explains Buddha's Enlightenment, but it also goes on to state that Buddha expressly forbade images of himself to be made. Now where do they get this? In the entire corpus of Buddhist...

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BUDDHISM IN THE GLOBAL AGE OF TECHNOLOGY

An interesting talk by a distinguished scholar of Buddhism, Lewis Lancaster, who founded the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative to use the latest computer technology to map the spread of various...

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BUDDHA AS A BUSINESSMAN

This is an interesting talk by Professor Gregory Schopen, chair of the UCLA Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and an authority on ancient Indian Buddhism, who has been separating Buddhist fact...

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WAS BUDDHA HISTORICAL?

On these grounds, then, it is here submitted that the traditional figure of the Buddha, in its most plausibly rationalized form, is as unhistoric as the figure of the Gospel Jesus has been separately...

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WAS BUDDHA A SCYTHIAN?

The Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed. The Thracians make theirs have gray-eyes and red-hair. And if oxen and horses and lions had hands and could paint with their hands, and produce...

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WHO WERE THE SCYTHIANS/SAKAS?

"Behold, he shall come up like clouds,And his chariots like a whirlwind.His horses are swifter than eagles.Woe to us, for we are plundered!"Thus prophesized Jeremiah of Judea around 627 BCE, (Jeremiah,...

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THE THESIS

Religion can never reform mankindbecause religion is slavery.Robert G. Ingersoll,1833-1899.Seated Buddha (Flickr photo),Pakistan or Afghanistan, ancient region of Gandhara.A myth is an idea that, while...

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