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...
View ArticleBUDDHIST 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...
View ArticleBUDDHISM 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...
View ArticleAN 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...
View ArticleTHE 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,...
View ArticleANICONISM
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,...
View ArticleBUDDHA 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...
View ArticleTHE 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...
View ArticleWAS 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...
View ArticleTHE 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...
View ArticleBUDDHA 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...
View ArticleTHE 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....
View ArticleTREES & 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...
View ArticleGANDHARA—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...
View ArticleTHE 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...
View ArticleDATING 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...
View ArticleSOURCES 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...
View ArticleTHE 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...
View ArticleVIDEOS 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...
View ArticleBUDDHISM 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...
View ArticleBUDDHA 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...
View ArticleWAS 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...
View ArticleWAS 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...
View ArticleWHO 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,...
View ArticleTHE 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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