Buddhism

Chinese archaeologists have claimed that a 1,000-year-old miniature pagoda, unearthed in Nanjing, holds a piece of skull belonging to Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism. The pagoda was wedged tightly inside an iron case that was discovered at the site of a former temple in the city in August. The four-storey pagoda, which is almost four feet high and one-and-a-half feet wide, is thought by archaeologists to be one of the 84,000 pagodas commissioned by Ashoka the Great in the second century BC to house the remains of the Buddha. Ashoka, one of India"s greatest emperors, converted to Buddhism after waging a bloody war in the eastern state of Orissa. He is widelycredited with spreading Buddhism throughout Asia, and across his kingdom, which stretched from Pakistan through Afghanistan and into Iran.

The pagoda found in Nanjing is crafted from wood, gilded with silver and inlaid with gold, coloured glass and amber. It matches a description of another of Ashoka"s pagodas which used to be housed underneath the Changgan Buddhist temple in Nanjing. A description of the contents of the pagoda was also found: a gold coffin bearing part of Buddha"s skull inside a silver box. Although scans have confirmed that there are two small metal boxes inside the pagoda, experts have not yet peered inside. The pagoda is currently on display in the museum. Qi Haining, the head of archaeology at Nanjing Museum, told state media: "This pagoda may be unique, theonly one known to contain parts of Buddha"s skull". But he said there would be a lengthy process before the cases could be opened. In 2001, Chinese authorities found a case that was said to contain a relic of Buddha"s hair, but declined to open the welded box in case it damaged the contents. De Qing, an expert in Buddhism in Nanjing, said: "The discovery of the relic will have a huge influence on the cultural history of Buddhism in China and will establish Nanjing as a premier site.

View: Full Article | Source: The Telegraph

A boy chosen by the Dalai Lama as a reincarnation of a spiritual leader has opted to turn his back on the Buddhist order, claiming that he had been taken away from his family and that he had suffered a great deal as a result of him being chosen."As a toddler, he was put on a throne and worshipped by monks who treated him like a god.

But the boy chosen by the Dalai Lama as a reincarnation of a spiritual leader has caused consternation – and some embarrassment – for Tibetan Buddhists by turning his back on the order that had such high hopes for him."

View: Full Article | Source: GuardianUnlimited

The Sarnath Buddhist monastery, in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, is revered as the site of the Buddha"s first discourse after his enlightment - the stream from which the teachings of Buddhism flowed.But if you visit the monastery between 20 and 31 January, you couldwitness the start of a new stream of teaching.

More than 30 Tibetan monks, plus a handful of nuns, will be collaborating with a team from San Francisco"s Exploratorium ("the museum of art, science and human perception") to build exotic machines to create patterns from sunlight using cardboard, dowels, reflective sheets of mylar and electroniccomponents.

View: Full Article | Source: New Scientist

The Dalai Lama is the most influential person in the world, according to Time magazine. He draws crowds that no other spiritual leader or politician could hope to match, and sits there laughing, exuding an infectious joy, despite the suffering that he and the Tibetan people have known. Unique, celibate, idealistic, compassionate, exotic - he seems to look at life in a different way to everyone else. What is his secret? According to these two books, it lies in the fact that his mind was trained from an early age in an abstruse religious tradition that makes no distinction between the spiritual and temporal worlds.Unlike the plethora of Hollywood meditators and their celebrityappendages who claim friendship with the Dalai Lama, Alexander Norman has known him well for two decades.

As the ghostwriter of his autobiography, Freedom in Exile, and the ethical guidebook Ancient Wisdom, Modern World, he spent more than 250 hours interviewing him. In the eccentric world of Tibetology, it may not be strange that Norman also happens to be a practising Roman Catholic, a former British Army officer and a vintage-aircraft enthusiast.Starting from the first principle that the Dalai Lama is a series of reincarnations of the Bodhisattva Chenrezig, his book sets out to examine the historical roots of the lineage. It is not always a pretty story. Several Dalai Lamas were murdered at a young age, and one was a notorious seducer who drank hard, wore his hair long and refused to take monastic vows. Norman seems at times to be shocked by the fruits of his own research. His starting point is the savage murder in 1997 of one of the Dalai Lama's closest allies in a doctrinal dispute, which he calls “a case of hitting the goat to scare the sheep”. Delving into Tibet's past, he examines a complex interplay of sorcery, reincarnation, divination and the assertion of worldly power. The establishment of the institution of the Dalai Lamas in 1578 arose out of a rivalry between monasteries, regional warlords and the Mongolian descendants of Genghis Khan, who all needed spiritual sanction for their actions. The story that follows is some distance from what we are used to in contemporary political discourse: we meet a protector deity who emerges from a lotus flower, “his mouth open with warm blood bubbling at the corners”, a key religious text that has been hidden under a rock for several hundred years, and agrou......