Buddhists From India

"Imagine, Ananda, a cesspool, of a man’s depth, brimful of dung and a man fallen in, head and all—though a man appear, ready to help, to do the friendly, to set him in safety, to lift him out; yet were he to go all round that cesspool, he would not see even the prick-end of a horse-hair of that man unsmeared with dung by which to grasp and lift him out. And it is even so with Devadatta, Ananda, when I saw not a bright spot in him—not even the prick-end of a horse-hair in size—then I declared: ‘Gone wayward, hell-bound for a kalpa, unpardonable is Devadatta.’"

"The first Patriarch in China came from the west to the eastern lands at the instruction of the Venerable Prajñātara. For the three years of frosts and springs during that ocean voyage, how could the wind and snow have been the only miseries? Through how many formations of cloud and sea-mist might the steep waves have surged? He was going to an unknown country: ordinary beings who value their body and life could never conceive [of such a journey]. This must have been maintenance of the practice realized solely from the great benevolent will to transmit the Dharma and save deluded emotional beings. It was so because the transmission of Dharma is [Bodhidharma] himself; it was so because the transmission of Dharma is the entire Universe; it was so because the whole Universe in ten directions is the real state of truth; it was so because the whole Universe in ten directions is [Bodhidharma] himself; and it was so because the whole Universe in ten directions is the whole Universe in ten directions."

"舉梁武帝問達摩大師：「如何是聖諦第一義？」 摩雲：「廓然無聖！」 帝曰：「對朕者誰？」 摩雲：「不識。」 帝不契，達摩遂渡江至魏。"

"達磨面壁。二祖立雪斷臂云。弟子心未安。乞師安心。 磨云。將心來。與汝安。 祖云。覓心了不可得。 磨云。為汝安心竟。"

"Seeing through the mundane and witnessing the sublime is less than an eye-blink away. Realization is now. Why worry about gray hair?"

"The essence of the Way is detachment. And the goal of those who practice is freedom from appearances."

"Unless they see their nature, how can people call themselves buddhas? They're liars who deceive others into entering the realm of devils. Unless they see their nature, their preaching of the Twelve-fold Canon is nothing but the preaching of devils. Their allegiance is to Mara, not to the Buddha. Unable to distinguish white from black, how can they escape birth and death?"

"To find a buddha, you have to see your nature. Whoever sees his nature is a buddha. If you don't see your nature, invoking buddhas, reciting sutras, making offerings, and keeping precepts are all useless. Invoking buddha's results in good karma, reciting sutras results in a good memory; keeping precepts results in a good rebirth, and making offerings results in future blessings–but no buddha."

"Trying to find a buddha or enlightenment is like trying to grab space. Space has a name but no form. It's not something you can pick up or put down. And you certainly can't grab it. Beyond this mind you'll never see a buddha. The buddha is a product of your mind. Why look for a buddha beyond this mind?"

"Many roads lead to the Path, but basically there are only two: reason and practice."

"Neither gods nor men can forsee when an evil deed will bear its fruit."

"Simplicity, courage, restraint, sacrifice, commitment, are the essence of the name Deenbandhu Rama. Ram is with everyone, Ram is with everyone. With the message and grace of Lord Rama and Mother Sita, the Bhoomipujan ceremony of the temple of Ramlala became an occasion for national unity, fraternity and cultural congregation."

"Because the vaccine is for everyone. Because the government should pay more attention to the public than organising events. Because everyone has the right to know where the PM Care funds are being spent. Because instead of exporting the vaccine, the government should focus on vaccinating every citizen."

"He went from east to west subduing all who were not obedient; the elephants were not unharnessed, nor the soldiers unhelmeted."

"The East has always been very fortunate in being supported with a very strong foundation of Buddha Dharma. ... The downside is that the changes of the modern world, and the East trying to keep up with the economic development—as we call it—process often has distanced laymen from the Buddhist teachings. Livelihood and survival as well as the increase of material belongings has become so very strong, that oftentimes we find the seriousness with which Dharma is practiced is limited to monastic institutions."

"Karma is simply the wholeness of a cause, or first action, and its effect, or fruition, which then becomes another cause. In fact, one karmic cause can have many fruitions, all of which can cause thousands more creations. Just as a handful of seed can ripen into a full field of grain, a small amount of karma can generate limitless effects."

"A careful reading of the Gita would show anyone that it fully supports the enslavement of Shudras and OBCs, a process initiated by the Rig Veda itself. Rig Veda formulated the caste structure in Purusha Suktha and the Gita upheld it."

"All parasites suffer from a constant fear of individualism. . . . The Brahmins as a community shared the animal instinct of not being able to produce anything from the earth. This human caste differs from all the other social communities ever since human beings evolved out of the apes. . . . This unusual instinct of parasitism forced the Brahmans to construct a social process of spiritual fascism that became the fortress of this parasitism."

"Historically-upper castes have suppressed the lower-caste masses with weapons, as the Hindu gods’ origin itself is rooted in the culture of weapon usage. The SC/ST/OBCs will then have to turn to a war of weapons in the process of elimination of Hindu violence from India."

"Hinduism has destroyed all positive elements that normally exist in a human being. During the period their energies were diverted to manipulate education, employment, production and development subtly. Their minds are poisoned with the notion that productive work is mean and that productive castes are inferior. No ruling class in the world is as dehumanized as the Indian brahminical castes. They can be rehumanized only by pushing them into productive work and by completely diverting their attention from the temple, the office, power-seeking, and so on."

"Hinduism is a religion of violence. All killed their enemies and became heroic images. This is the only religion in the world where the killer becomes god. Whom did they kill? From Brahma to Krishna, those who were killed were Dalitbahujans. Now these images and the stories and narratives and everything is out there in the . Now, because of this, the consciousness of worshipping the killer or worshipping violence did not give any space for human rights. So my question is the human rights discourse must start with an anti-warrior position."

"Hinduism always used violence as creed. For Hinduism, for Hindu dharma, resolving of a conflict is only by killing. There is no other discourse. Debate is not there. You have to kill the enemy. Whereas Buddha believed in discourse and resolving the conflict. So in a system where you have the two streams of thought, debate and discourse, human rights and anti-human rights, even the left has to take that historical tradition and examine its potential and use it for its propaganda systems. It is in this context that I have been saying that there is no use if you simply borrow concepts from the West. Christianity has a different ethic; it was an ethic of sacrifice. is a symbol of sacrifice, it is not a killing symbol. The lamb is a productive symbol."

"I have a feeling that if a Dalitist state gets established it will be a far better Socialist model for the world than the other models which were already established because Dalitbahujan society was never so , there is no such constructed religion like that, it has been much more spontaneous, and they have lived for such a long time with that kind of a thinking. So from that to a kind of conscious educated Dalitist socialist system, I think that the productive forces would get released a thousand times, and equality will come much better but it should be under Dalit leadership. Now if under Dalit women leadership if a Dalitist state and society is established I think we will see a very bright future for the whole country."

"Yes, I hate Hinduism. Hinduism is not ours, it is against us. If we have to become Hindus, the Brahmins will have to change the entire religious texts, our food habits, our gods and goddesses and images. I am angry at the Hindu gods. Look at the images of Hindu gods. They wield weapons. We read that Hindu gods killed our own ancestors. How can I worship the killers as divine? What kind of a religion is it? There are three major religions — Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. These major religions were constructed by prophets who sacrificed and struggled in life for people's liberation. All these three religions never said that the larger sections of their people were born from the feet of God."

"Just as the Brahmins are shouting Hinduise India, we should shout Dalitise India. Shout that we hate Hinduism, we hate Brahmanism. Capture the Hindu temples by expelling the Brahmins from them. … The hated must hate. They must become powerful and organised. I want to create anger."

"In ancient and medieval India, no Hindu priest would subjugate himself to the rule of law. That was the basic reason why no Hindu institution could evolve a spiritual democratic culture within the religion. We are now living in a borrowed system of political democracy."

"How do you change ancient prejudices in any society? You do it through repositioning caste at childhood. If young children are taught respect over a bedtime story or in class, that could help enormously"

"Reform your texts, reform your history. Say leather is not untouchable to God, the barber's knife is not untouchable to God. Take a Dalit priest and a Brahmin priest to celebrations. Do these symbolic things. Let them (high-caste Hindus) come and sit with Dalits in their huts and eat with them"

"For centuries the so called goddess of education was against the dalit learning, reading and writing in any language. She was the goddess of education of only the high castes — mainly of the brahmins and baniayas."

"The opposition to the habits of those who eat beef is cultural fascism. Certain sections of the elite are still not ready to accept the food habits of the vast majority of Dalits and other socially oppressed"

"The dalit's main agenda is not reservations. My way of equality is English education. Even if 10% of our children got English education, the intellectual field would have changed. This country would have changed. My hope is education, not reservation — and I emphasize, English education"

"The practice of untouchability brutalises human self beyond repair. The nation’s energies are being destroyed by this practice, which has spiritual, moral, ethical and ideological sanction of the Hindu religion."

"Since Ambedkar embraced Buddhism in 1956, almost all Buddhist viharas in India are headed by dalits as monks worshipping Buddha in Pali language. And if the brahmins convert to Buddhism, they will be equals with dalits in all spheres of Buddhist religion."

"Large number of tribes, Dalits and Backward Castes have a historical food culture of beef. The anti-beef agenda has been in the Brahmanical fold. It began with the South Indian Brahmins and then spread to the North and became part of the Gandhian movement. My question is, how can the state impose a certain food culture on people? The state has nothing to do with food. They can give certain food to people depending on the market, but cannot impose that you can or cannot eat certain food items. If beef eating is bad for Brahmins or Baniyas or certain upper castes, then the state is imposing that on the rest of the society. So the state is actually becoming a theocratic state."

"Buddhism today is a dalitist religion and Hinduism is a brahminic religion with oppositional spiritual positions about human equality and man-woman relations."

"The fight for rights and assertion is almost over. Now the fight is for intellectual equality, and that is where everything becomes controversial or problematic for upper castes."

"If the God believed by a person doesn’t have democratic values, where will this person get those democratic values from? In fact, shouldn’t they explain why they create such Gods who are violent, undemocratic and anti-women?"

"Where is the honour in killing someone? Why are caste-based murders being labelled as honour killings? Dalits are being killed for their caste, so these are caste hatred killings and they should be called that."

"These anti-Hindu forces are exploiting the Aryan Invasion Theory to the hilt, infusing crank racism in vast doses into India’s body politic. Read, e.g. Kancha Ilaiah’s book Why I Am Not a Hindu (Calcutta, 1996), sponsored by the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, with its anti-Brahmin cartoons: move the hairlocks of the Brahmin villains from the back of the head to just in front of their ears, and you get exact replicas of the anti-Semitic cartoons from the Nazi paper, Der Stürmer"

"the book Why I Am Not a Hindu by Kancha Ilaiah, a convert to Christianity. I have seen post-Christian Westerners grimly use it as a formidable argument against Hinduism, not realizing that it is an ordinary missionary pamphlet against caste, to which Hinduism is falsely reduced. Unlike Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not a Muslim, hefty tomes written by apostates who knew their childhood religion very well, Why I Am Not a Hindu is a caricature for simpletons. It starts out with a few interesting sketches of caste life in his childhood village, but then descends into unwarranted theoretical speculations for which he is simply not equipped. Essentially he assumes, like most haters of Hinduism, that “Hinduism is caste, wholly caste and nothing but caste”, and that the only way to break free from caste is to destroy Hinduism root and branch. The author is hopeful that Hinduism is indeed losing out, and a recent book by him muses about a “post-Hindu India”. That is of course the missionary vision."

"Ten years (of reign) having been completed, King Piodasses (Piyadassi) made known (the doctrine of) Piety to men; and from this moment he has made men more pious, and everything thrives throughout the whole world. And the king abstains from (killing) living beings, and other men and those who (are) huntsmen and fishermen of the king have desisted from hunting. And if some (were) intemperate, they have ceased from their intemperance as was in their power; and obedient to their father and mother and to the elders, in opposition to the past also in the future, by so acting on every occasion, they will live better and more happily."

"Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, honors both ascetics and the householders of all religions, and he honors them with gifts and honors of various kinds. But Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, does not value gifts and honors as much as he values this — that there should be growth in the essentials of all religions. Growth in essentials can be done in different ways, but all of them have as their root restraint in speech, that is, not praising one's own religion, or condemning the religion of others without good cause. And if there is cause for criticism, it should be done in a mild way. But it is better to honor other religions for this reason. By so doing, one's own religion benefits, and so do other religions, while doing otherwise harms one's own religion and the religions of others. Whoever praises his own religion, due to excessive devotion, and condemns others with the thought "Let me glorify my own religion," only harms his own religion. Therefore contact (between religions) is good. One should listen to and respect the doctrines professed by others. Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, desires that all should be well-learned in the good doctrines of other religions."

"This progress among the people through Dhamma has been done by two means, by Dhamma regulations and by persuasion. Of these, Dhamma regulation is of little effect, while persuasion has much more effect. The Dhamma regulations I have given are that various animals must be protected. And I have given many other Dhamma regulations also. But it is by persuasion that progress among the people through Dhamma has had a greater effect in respect of harmlessness to living beings and non-killing of living beings."

"Although Ashoka was victorious in this horrific and gruesome war, he felt remorse for all the suffering he had caused and hence turned to Buddhism. He wrote in his Edict Thirteen that: The Kalingas were conquered by His Sacred Majesty the King when he had been consecrated for eight years. One hundred and fifty thousand persons were thence carried away captive, and one hundred thousand were there slain, and many times that number perished. Directly after the annexation of the Kalingas, began his Sacred Majesty's zealous protection of Dharma, his love of Dharma, and his giving instruction in that. Thus arose His Sacred Majesty's remorse for having conquered the Kalingas, because the conquest of a country previously unconquered involves the slaughter, death, and carrying away captive of the people. That is a matter of profound sorrow and regret to His Sacred Majesty."

"In the political sense Ashoka had failed; in another sense he had accomplished one of the greatest tasks in history. Within two hundred years after his death Buddhism had spread throughout India, and was entering upon the bloodless conquest of Asia. If to this day, from Kandy in Ceylon to Kamakura in Japan, the placid face of Gautama bids men be gentle to one another and love peace, it is partly because a dreamer, perhaps a saint, once held the throne of India."

"When Buddhism first emerges in what may be termed the light of history, it is as an established system highly favoured by the great king Asoka, about 250 B.C. It is made clear by his edicts that only a small number of scriptures, whose titles are only partially identifiable with known extant writings, were then recognised as preserving the spoken discourses of the Buddha."

"So impressive was Ashoka's example that many other Asian monarchs adopted it. Japan's Prince Shotuku, for example, used it to unify the Japanese nation and improve international relations. For this policy, the renowned historians Arnold Toynbee and H.G. Wells have called Ashoka the greatest monarch who ever lived."

"Asoka (264 to 227 B.C.), one of the great monarchs of history, whose dominions extended from Afghanistan to Madras... is the only military monarch on record who abandoned warfare after victory. He had invaded Kalinga (255 B.C.), a country along the east coast of Madras, perhaps with some intention of completing the conquest of the tip of the Indian peninsula. The expedition was successful, but he was disgusted by what be saw of the cruelties and horrors of war. He declared, in certain inscriptions that still exist, that he would no longer seek conquest by war, but by religion, and the rest of his life was devoted to the spreading of Buddhism throughout the world. He seems to have ruled his vast empire in peace and with great ability. He was no mere religious fanatic."

"For eight and twenty years Asoka worked sanely for the real needs of men. Amidst the tens of thousands of names of monarchs that crowd the columns of history, their majesties and graciousnesses and serenities and royal highnesses and the like, the name of Asoka shines, and shines, almost alone, a star. From the Volga to Japan his name is still honoured. China, Tibet, and even India, though it has left his doctrine, preserve the tradition of his greatness. More living men cherish his memory to-day than have ever heard the names of Constantine or Charlemagne."

"In the history of the world there have been thousands of kings and emperors who called themselves "their highnesses," "their majesties," and "their exalted majesties" and so on. They shone for a brief moment, and as quickly disappeared. But Ashoka shines and shines brightly like a bright star, even unto this day."