buddhism

"The universe that we inhabit and our shared perception of it are the results of a common karma. Likewise, the places that we will experience in future rebirths will be the outcome of the karma that we share with the other beings living there. The actions of each of us, human or nonhuman, have contributed to the world in which we live. We all have a common responsibility for our world and are connected with everything in it. ... If the love within your mind is lost and you see other beings as enemies, then no matter how much knowledge or education or material comfort you have, only suffering and confusion will ensue."

"Bodhicitta is the medicine which revives and gives life to every sentient being who even hears of it."

"Buddhas bear the same relation to sentient beings as water does to ice. Ice, like stone or brick, cannot flow. But when it melts it flows freely in conformity with its surroundings. So long as one remains in a state of delusion he is like ice. Upon realization he becomes as exquisitely free as water. And remember, there is no ice which does not return to water. So you will understand there is no difference between ordinary beings and Buddhas except for one thing - delusion. When it is dissolved they are identical."

"According to Buddhism, individuals are masters of their own destiny. And all living beings are believed to possess the nature of the Primordial Buddha Samantabhadra, the potential or seed of enlightenment, within them. So our future is in our own hands. What greater free will do we need?"

"Above all, you must constantly train your mind to be loving, compassionate, and filled with Bodhicitta."

"The Buddha preaches the Law with a single voice, but each living being understands it in his own way."

"Ratnākara, you should understand that an upright mind is the pure land of the bodhisattva. When the bodhisattva attains , then beings who are free of flattery will be born in his country. A deeply searching mind is the pure land of the bodhisattva. When he attains Buddhahood, beings who are endowed with blessings will be born in his country. A mind that aspires to or enlightenment is the pure land of the bodhisattva. When he attains Buddhahood, beings dedicated to the Great Vehicle will be born in his country."

"Ratnākara, the various kinds of living beings are in themselves the Buddha lands (buddhakṣetra) of the bodhisattva. Why so? Because it is by converting various beings to the teachings that the bodhisattvas acquire their Buddha lands. It is by persuading various beings and overcoming their objections that the bodhisattvas acquire their Buddha lands. It is by inducing the various living beings to enter into the Buddha wisdom in such-and-such a land that they acquire their Buddha lands. It is by inducing the various living beings to develop the capacity for bodhisattva practices in such-and-such a land that they acquire their Buddha lands. Why is this? Because the bodhisattva's acquisition of a pure land is wholly due to his having brought benefit to living beings. Suppose a man proposes to build a mansion on a plot of open land. He may do so as he wishes without hindrance. But if he tries to build it in the empty air, he will never be successful. It is the same with the bodhisattvas. It is because they wish to help others to achieve success that they take their vow to acquire Buddha lands. Their vow to acquire Buddha lands in not founded on emptiness."

"All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists. This Mind, which is without beginning, is unborn and indestructible. It is not green nor yellow, and has neither form nor appearance. It does not belong to the categories of things which exist or do not exist, nor can it be thought of in terms of new or old. It is neither long nor short, big nor small, for it transcends all limits, measure, names, traces and comparisons. It is that which you see before you - begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error. It is like the boundless void which cannot be fathomed or measured. The One Mind alone is the Buddha, and there is no distinction between the Buddha and sentient things, but that sentient beings are attached to forms and so seek externally for Buddhahood. By their very seeking they lose it, for that is using the Buddha to seek for the Buddha and using mind to grasp Mind. Even though they do their utmost for a full aeon, they will not be able to attain it. They do not know that, if they put a stop to conceptual thought and forget their anxiety, the Buddha will appear before them, for this Mind is the Buddha and the Buddha is all living beings. It is not the less for being manifested in ordinary beings, nor is it greater for being manifest in the Buddhas."

"Revelations. Ellora magnificent. Ajanta curiously subtle and fascinating-I have for the first time since my return to India learnt something from somebody else's work."

"Despite these depredations, Cave I is still rich in masterpieces. Here, on one wall, is (probably) a Bodhisattwa—a Buddhist saint entitled to Nirvana, but choosing, instead, repeated rebirths in order to minister to men. Never has the sadness of understanding been more profoundly portrayed; one wonders which is finer or deeper—this, or Leonardo’s kindred study of the head of Christ.VIII On another wall of the same temple is a study of Shiva and his wife Parvati, dressed in jewelry. Nearby is a painting of four deer, tender with the Buddhist sympathy for animals; and on the ceiling is a design still alive with delicately drawn flowers and fowl. On a wall of Cave XVII is a graceful representation, now half destroyed, of the god Vishnu, with his retinue, flying down from heaven to attend some event in the life of Buddha; on another wall is a schematic but colorful portrait of a princess and her maids. Mingled with these chef-d’æuvres are crowded frescoes of apparently poor workmanship, describing the youth, flight and temptation of Buddha."

"The caves at Ajanta, besides being the hiding-place of the greatest of Buddhist paintings, rank with Karle as examples of that composite art, half architecture and half sculpture, which characterizes the temples of India. Caves I and II have spacious assembly halls whose ceilings, cut and painted in sober yet elegant designs, are held up by powerful fluted pillars square at the base, round at the top, ornamented with flowery bands, and crowned with majestic capitals; Cave XIX is distinguished by a façade richly decorated with adipose statuary and complex bas-reliefs; in Cave XXVI gigantic columns rise to a frieze crowded with figures which only the greatest religious and artistic zeal could have carved in such detail. Ajanta can hardly be refused the title of one of the major works in the history of art."

"Richard Lannoy, the most scintillating interpreter of Indian culture to date, writes: At first sight it is the genial “Buddhist humanism” which strikes the visitor Itothe fresco caves]. Yet these reassuringly human scenes are not quite what they seem to be. For one thing, even the best preserved are exceedingly elusive to “read”; one must make an appreciable effort to slow down one's reading of their visual language in order to perceive the spatial and tactile relations established between the figures. There is no recession - all advance towards the eye, looming from a strange undifferentiated source to wrap around the viewer. This is not an optical illusion of cave-light; on close examination it will be found to result from a controlled use of almost equal tones in the variation of local colour. A patch of green, say, juxtaposed to a patch of red, is of very nearly the same tonality when photographed in monochrome. Because of this tonal equality one is constantly discovering new figures which were unseen through the deliberately unaccented or “suppressed” tonality of detail, and the tempo of this slow discovery is very precisely calculated. Every figure has a counterfigure, every body an anti-body. Each figure is inseparable from its environment. The optical basis of this technique is very simple and is frequently used by Bonnard, Vuillard, and Matisse to obtain a hallucinating, visionary effect; the later, psychedelic poster artists made a trick of it. One can assume that the Ajanta painters discovered the effect under similar lighting conditions. There is one vital difference, however; at Ajanta there is no source of light in the caves, a fact which says much about the metaphysic of the cave sanctuaries. Objects are their own light when experienced by all the senses in harmony, and such harmony was the goal of the cave ritual. When viewed by flickering light, as was intended, only' fragmentary glimpses of the colours and lines of the objects depicted can be obtained. A body undulates towards the eye from an indistinguishable blur; moments (perhaps minutes) later, a second body wells out of the blur and is seen to be intertwined with the first. The viewer is so involved in this optical assimilation that his relation to the other figure only proceeds gradually from the tactile to the emotional recognition of its significance. It cannot be reduced to verbal interpretation, as it is pure tactile sensation."

"But we cannot judge these works in their original form from what survives of them today; and doubtless there are clues to their appreciation that are not revealed to alien souls. Even the Occidental, however, can admire the nobility of the subject, the majestic scope of the plan, the unity of the composition, the clearness, simplicity and decisiveness of the line, and among many details the astonishing perfection of that bane of all artists, the hands. Imagination can picture the artist-priest who prayed in these cells and perhaps painted these walls and ceilings with fond and pious art while Europe lay buried in her early-medieval darkness. Here at Ajanta religious devotion fused architecture, sculpture and painting into a happy unity, and produced one of the sovereign monuments of Hindu art."

"Modern art has led me to the comprehension and appreciation of Indian painting and sculpture. It seems paradoxical, but I know for certain that had we not come away to Europe, I should perhaps never have realized that a fresco from Ajanta... is worth more than the whole Renaissance!"

"In the early nineteenth century, when Europeans first visited the Ajanta caves, they had no literary precedents through which to determine what they saw. Thus they saw very little beyond hunting scenes, domestic scenes, seraglio scenes, Welsh wigs, Hampton court beauties, elephants and horses, an Abyssinian black prince, shields and spears, and statues that they called 'buddha' because of the curly hair."

"The earliest dateable Indian painting is a group of Buddhist frescoes (ca. 100 B.C.) found on the walls of a cave in Sirguya, in the Central Provinces. From that time on the art of fresco painting—that is, painting upon freshly laid plaster before it dries—progressed step by step until on the walls of the caves at AjantaVII it reached a perfection never excelled even by Giotto or Leonardo. These temples were carved out of the rocky face of a mountain-side at various periods from the first to the seventh century A.D. For centuries they were lost to history and human memory after the decay of Buddhism; the jungle grew about them and almost buried them; bats, snakes and other beasts made their home there, and a thousand varieties of birds and insects fouled the paintings with their waste. In 1819 Europeans stumbled into the ruins, and were amazed to find on the walls frescoes that are now ranked among the masterpieces of the world’s art."

"Herodotus, wrote in 400 BC that in India there were "trees growing wild, which produce a kind of wool better than sheep’s wool in beauty and quality, which the Indians use for making their clothes.” During this period, the famous Ajanta Cave carvings show innovative cotton growers in India had invented an early roller machine to get the seeds out of the cotton."

"The temples have been called caves, for in most cases they are cut into the mountains. Cave No. XVI, for example, is an excavation sixty-five feet each way, upheld by twenty pillars; alongside the central hall are sixteen monastic cells; a porticoed veranda adorns the front, and a sanctuary hides in the back. Every wall is covered with frescoes. In 1879 sixteen of the twenty-nine temples contained paintings; by 1910 the frescoes in ten of these sixteen had been destroyed by exposure, and those in the remaining six had been mutilated by inept attempts at restoration.21 Once these frescoes were brilliant with red, green, blue and purple pigments; nothing survives of the colors now except low-toned and blackened surfaces. Some of the paintings, thus obscured by time and ignorance, seem coarse and grotesque to us, who cannot read the Buddhist legends with Buddhist hearts; others are at once powerful and graceful, a revelation of the skill of craftsmen whose names perished long before their work."

"The svastika, commonly used as an aniconic representation of the Buddha, is also homologous with the wheel. If the svastika is compared with the figure of the cross inscribed within a circle, the basic equivalence of the two symbols is apparent, the rotation of the wheel being indicated in the first case by the circumference of the circle and in the svastika by the lines at right angles to the four arms of the cross, which are to be thought of in the manner of ribbons streaming in the wind. Like the wheel, the svastika represents movement about a fixed and unmoving axis and, like the wheel, it is a symbol of the generation of universal cycles from a forever-Present Centre. It represents the generation of currents of energy, and is a symbol of the action of immutable Principle, the "unmoved mover", within manifestation."

"When I was a schoolboy in England, the old bound volumes of Kipling in the library had gilt swastikas embossed on their covers. The symbol's 'hooks' were left-handed, as opposed to the right-handed ones of the Nazi hakenkreuz, but for a boy growing up after 1945 the shock of encountering the emblem at all was a memorable one. I later learned that in the mid-1930s Kipling had caused this 'signature' to be removed from all his future editions. Having initially sympathized with some of the early European fascist movements, he wanted to express his repudiation of Hitlerism (or 'the Hun,' as he would perhaps have preferred to say), and wanted no part in tainting the ancient Indian rune by association. In its origin it is a Hindu and Jainas symbol for light, and well worth rescuing."

"This reversal of the swastika's meaning, from a sign of luck (always depicted on the hand of opulent Ganesh) to a sign of evil, is somewhat like the story of the Christian image of the devil : he is depicted with buck's horns, a clear reference to the horned god of Paganism (like the Pashupati on one of the Indus seals). The positive imagery of Paganism got integrated into Christian imagery, but then as the symbol of evil. Now that we are no longer bound by the compulsions of the missionary project, we may clear the horned god, as well as the swastika, of the evil aura with which outsiders have covered them... I think it is a matter of sensitivity to display those swastikas only in very modest ways, for as long as people who have lived through the horrors of the Nazi regime are with us... some time in the next century the Swastika may regain its rightful place as a profound and timeless symbol, untainted by the accidental and misconceived association with Nazism."

"Contrary to what Indian secularists would like to insunate before ignorant Western press correspondents, Hindus have never strayed from the traditional use and interpretation of the swastika, and never allowed it to be tainted by the misunderstandings of semi-literate political agitators in Europe."

"Bhikkhus, you should train thus: 'We will guard the doors of our sense faculties. On seeing a form with the eye, we will not grasp at its signs and features. Since, if we left the eye faculty unguarded, evil unwholesome states of covetousness and grief might invade us, we will practice the way of its restraint, we will guard the eye faculty, we will undertake the restraint of the eye faculty.'"

"Monks, you should dwell with the doors to your senses well-guarded.On seeing a form with the eye, do not grasp at any theme or details by which — if you were to dwell without restraint over the faculty of the eye — evil, unskillful qualities such as greed or distress might assail you. Practice for its restraint. Guard the faculty of the eye. Secure your restraint with regard to the faculty of the eye."

"When the Taliban ordered the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, a secularist choir assured us that this had nothing to do with genuine Islam. To me it seems rather pretentious for secularists with their studied ignorance of religions to claim better knowledge of Islam than the Taliban, the "students (of Islam)", whose mental horizon consists of nothing but the detailed knowledge of Islamic theology and jurisprudence."

"You know, when I despair, I don't always have before my eyes the apocalyptic scenes of September 11. ... Often with the two Towers that no longer exist overlap the two Buddhas which the Taliban destroyed in Afghanistan. The two images mix, unite, become the same thing, and I think: have people already forgotten it? Not me. In fact when I look at the two little Buddhas I keep in my living-room which an old monk persecuted by the Khmer Rouge gave me in Pnomh Penh, my heart is tightening. And instead of two small brass Buddhas I see the two huge Buddhas in the valley of Bamiyan."

"But who cut the Bamian, still more colossal, statues, the tallest and the most gigantic in the whole world, for Bartholdi’s “Statue of Liberty” (now at New York) is a dwarf when compared with the largest of the five images. Burnes, and several learned Jesuits who have visited the place, speak of a mountain “all honeycombed with gigantic cells,” with two immense giants cut in the same rock.... Central Asian traditions say the same of the Bamian statues. What are they, and what is the place where they have stood for countless ages, defying the cataclysms around them, and even the hand of man, as in the instance of the hordes of Timoor and the Vandal-warriors of Nadir-Shah? Bamian is a small, miserable, half-ruined town in Central Asia, half-way between Cabul and Balkh, at the foot of Kobhibaba, a huge mountain of the Paropamisian (or Hindu-Kush) chain, some 8,500 feet above the level of the sea. In days of old, Bamian was a portion of the ancient city of Djooljool, ruined and destroyed to the last stone by Tchengis-Khan in the XIIIth century. The whole valley is hemmed in by colossal rocks, which are full of partially natural and partially artificial caves and grottoes, once the dwellings of Buddhist monks who had established in them their viharas. Such viharas are to be met with in profusion, to this day, in the rock-cut temples of India and the valleys of Jellalabad. It is at the entrance of some of these that five enormous statues, of what is regarded as Buddha, have been discovered or rather rediscovered in our century, as the famous Chinese traveller, Hiouen-Thsang, speaks of, and saw them, when he visited Bamian in the VIIth century. When it is maintained that no larger statues exist on the whole globe, the fact is easily proven on the evidence of all the travellers who have examined them and taken their measurements. Thus, the largest is 173 feet high, or seventy feet higher than the “Statue of Liberty” now at New York, as the latter is only 105 feet or 34 metres high. The famous Colossus of Rhodes itself, between whose limbs passed easily the largest vessels of those days, measured only 120 to 130 feet in height. The second statue, cut out in the rock like the first one, is only 120 feet (15 feet taller than the said “Liberty”).† The third statue is only 60 feet high — the two others still smaller, the last one being only a little larger than the average tall man of our present race. The first and largest of the Colossi represents a man draped in a kind of toga; M. de Nadeylac thinks (See infra) that the general appearance of the figure, the lines of the head, the drapery, and especially the large hanging ears, point out undeniably that Buddha was meant to be represented."

"My heart is also tightening for the way in which they have killed them [the Buddhas of Bamiyan]... They have not acted with the irrationality and bestiality of the Chinese Maoists who destroyed Lhasa in 1951, broke into monasteries and into the palace of the Dalai Lama and like drunken buffalo razed to the ground the monuments of a civilization... The destruction of Lhasa was not preceded by a trial... But in the case of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, there was a real process. There was a real sentence, then an execution was decided based on legal norms or presumed legal norms. It was therefore, a premeditated crime."

"I did not want to destroy the Bamiyan Buddha. In fact, some foreigners came to me and said they would like to conduct the repair work of the Bamiyan Buddha that had been slightly damaged due to rains. This shocked me. I thought, these callous people have no regard for thousands of living human beings – the Afghans who are dying of hunger, but they are so concerned about non-living objects like the Buddha. This was extremely deplorable. That is why I ordered its destruction. Had they come for humanitarian work, I would have never ordered the Buddha's destruction."

"The breaking of statues is an Islamic order and I have given this decision in the light of a fatwa of the ulema (clerics) and the supreme court of Afghanistan. Islamic law is the only law acceptable to me."

"While the Ottomans moved into South-East Europe, the Moghul invasion of India destroyed much of Hindu and Buddhist civilization there. The recent destruction by Moslems in Afghanistan of colossal Buddhist statues is a reminder of what happened to temples and shrines, on an enormous scale, when Islam took over."

"Bamiyan was stormed by Muslims many times. All these images and paintings were destroyed. The images suffered much damage, their hands were mutilated and their noses cut... The damage to colossi did not stop. Aurangzeb ordered cannon-shots to be fired at the colossal images of the Buddha, signs of which can still be seen on them."

"The princes of Bamiyan were converted to Islam probably during the time of Abbasid dynasty, either in the ron of al-Mansur (755-775 A.D.) or in that of al-Mahdi (775-785A.D.).* The conversion of the Bamiyan princes to Islam must have created dismay and a dreadful impact on the fate of the monks and monasteries of this locality. Whether it was on account of the vehment Islamic zeal that led to the persecusion of Buddhists resulting in indiscriminate massacre of the monks and wanton destruction of the monasteries, and presumably some being converted to Islam by persuasion or under pressure, it is remarkable to note that the prince of Bamiyan, after his conversion from Buddhism to Islam, and so also the members of his dynasty enjoyed an influencial position in the court of Baghdad; and the prince of Bamiyan was appointed as the Sher(Ruler) of Bamiyan. In 844 he was also appointed as the Governor of Yaman. The Buddhist community had been left forlorn with no choice but to adopt Islam. In 256 Hizri i.e. 869-870 A.D. Bamiyan was again stormed by Yakub-bin- Laith resulting in the destruction of the images and other embellishments of this great monastic establishment. In the following years he removed some of the beautiful and precious images to Baghdad.! It seems that those images of the Buddha which once adorned many of the niches and which are not now traceable, were then removed from there and despatched to the capital. It also seems possible that the gems and jewels which were studded on the colossal images were also removed. The images suffered much damage, their hands were mutilated and, in particular their noses were battered.2 The dismembering of the colossal images must have continued for a long time on account of the Islamic abhorrence for idols of all kinds. In 970 A.D. Bamiyan witnessed another invasion by Alaptagin, the Turkish Governor of Balkh along with his slave Subaktgin. No doubt, the remaining glamour of Bamiyan was further obliterated, and many embellishments and images which escaped earlier rampages also suffered a lot. The prince of Bamiyan was taken captive. It is well known that Subaktgin, who later founded the Ghaznavi dynasty, was fanatically zealous to propagate Islam. He probably caused more havoc than others; and during his reign Islam was permanently established throughout Afghanistan. In 1222 the armies of Changiz Khan again invaded Bamiyan and caused widespread devastations, leaving nothing untouched except the inaccessible images of the Buddha. The damage to colossi did not stop then, rather they suffered destruction in the middle ages too. Aurangzeb, the Indian Mughal emperor (1658-1707 A.D.) who is noted for his religious fanaticism, ordered cannon-shots to be fired at the colossal images of the Buddha, signs of which can still be seen on them."

"We now realize that the destruction of the Bamian Buddhas itself was a loud warning signal to the world of far greater devastation that was on the way."

"The ownership and the consumption of goods is a means to an end, and Buddhist economics is the systematic study of how to attain given ends with the minimum means. Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity, taking the factors of production—labour and capital—as the means. The former, in short, tries to maximise human satisfactions by the optimal pattern of consumption, while the latter tries to maximise consumption by the optimal pattern of productive effort."

"The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase of needs tends to increase one’s dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear. Only by a reduction of needs can one promote a genuine reduction in those tensions which are the ultimate causes of strife and war."

"At that time in the great city of Vaishali there was a rich man named Vimalakirti. [...] In a spirit of trust and harmony he conducted all kinds of business enterprises, but though he reaped worldly profits, he took no delight in these."

"One might give alms impartially with a thousand coins of money month by month for a hundred years; but that is not worth a sixteenth part of having confidence in the Buddha. ...of having confidence in the Dhamma. ...of having confidence in the Sangha. ...of those who have mastered Dhamma."

"Beings in the ghost world do not farm, herd cattle, trade, buy, sell, or use gold and money. They survive on merits shared by humans. As water that rains on a mountain-top flows down to the bottom, so will the merits shared from the human world reach the beings in the ghost world. Just as streams of water fill the ocean, so will the merits shared from the human world reach the beings in the ghost world. One should share merits with departed relatives recalling, “He gave to me, he worked for me, he was a relative, friend, and companion.”"

"Someone who grows in money and grain, in wives, children, and livestock, is wealthy, famous, and respected by relatives and friends, and even by royals. When someone grows in faith and ethics, wisdom, and both generosity and learning— a good man such as he sees clearly, and in the present life he grows in both ways."

"What six drains on wealth do they avoid? Habitually engaging in the following things is a drain on wealth: drinking alcohol; roaming the streets at night; frequenting festivals; gambling; bad friends; laziness."

"Selling poison, selling weapons, selling living beings, selling alcohol, selling meat, and, without having inspected (first), pounding sesame and mustard seed (and so on) is wrong livelihood, abstaining from it is right livelihood."

"They pick up riches as bees roaming round pick up pollen. And their riches proceed to grow, like an ant-hill piling up. In gathering wealth like this, a householder does enough for their family. And they’d hold on to friends by dividing their wealth in four. One portion is to enjoy. Two parts invest in work. And the fourth should be kept for times of trouble."

"This Shiva Purana variant establishes a specific power relationship between desire and discipline, as Kama becomes Shiva's gana, one of his troops, permanently attached to the great god."

"That steadfast Kama, begotten of Vasudeva [Krsna] in Rukmini, that one who was known as the destroyer of Sambara, was the handsome Pradyumna who looked like Kama."

"Without announcing himself, Kama pervades our environment and disturbs our equanimity. On another level, the revival of Kama as invisible establishes the dominance of Shiva over Kama, the possibility that ascetic discipline can conquer craving."

"Kama dies in the central story involving his struggle with Shiva, but is resuscitated out of his own ashes so that life can continue. A world without Kamadeva is shown repeatedly to be barren, dry, leafless — indeed, unbearable."

"When the Indians describe Kama in terms of sexual relations they do not mean to restrict the operation of this attitude to just those objects with which one can come into a sexual relationship, but are rather pointing to sexual relationships as typically involving instances of the taking of this kind of attitude."

"This god of desire is known as Kamadeva, literally the god (deva) of desire/passion (Kama). Just as passion forms the backdrop for good stories everywhere, the passion evoked by Kamadeva promises captivating and amusing drama, as well as an exploration of the myriad ethical and philosophical questions raised by desire."