American Buddhist Net

“If only there were evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” --Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
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August 7, 2008

Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who exposed the horrors of Soviet slave-labor camps, was buried yesterday in a cemetery filled with evocations of Communist cruelty and the fight against it that defined his life.

Solzhenitsyn's death Sunday at 89 silenced one of Russia's most influential figures, a man regarded by mourners as critical in destroying the Soviet Union. His funeral and burial at Moscow's Donskoi Monastery offered evidence of his renown -- the Russian president was there as military honor guards fired rifles in salute and white-robed priests sang dirges.

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The word "porphyry" mysteriously shot through my head this morning the instant I woke up. I didn't know what it meant so I decided to look it up. Below is a link to the Wikipedia entry on porphyry, which I thought was pretty interesting. Robyn
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Porphyry is a variety of igneous rock consisting of large-grained crystals, such as feldspar or quartz, dispersed in a fine-grained feldspathic matrix or groundmass. The larger crystals are called phenocrysts. In its non-geologic, traditional use, the term "porphyry" refers to the purple-red form of this stone, valued for its appearance.

The term "porphyry" is from Greek and means "purple". Purple was the color of royalty, and the "Imperial Porphyry" was a deep brownish purple igneous rock with large crystals of plagioclase. This rock was prized for various monuments and building projects in Imperial Rome and later. Pliny's Natural History affirmed that the "Imperial Porphyry" had been discovered at an isolated site in Egypt in AD 18, by a Roman legionnaire named Caius Cominius Leugas (Werner 1998). It came from a single quarry in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, from 600 million year old andesite of the Arabian-Nubian Shield.

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Tens of thousands bowed their heads at a ceremony in the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Wednesday, the 63rd anniversary of the world's first atomic attack, as the city's mayor hit out at countries that refuse to abandon their bombs.

A bell tolled at 8:15 a.m. to mark the exact moment when the bomb dubbed "Little Boy" was dropped on the city killing tens of thousands immediately and many more later from radiation sickness.

"We who seek the abolition of nuclear weapons are the majority," Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba said in a speech at the Peace Memorial Park, attended by the ambassador of nuclear-armed China, as well as Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda and elderly survivors of the attack.

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August 05, 2008
By Karen Jeffrey

-The earliest written account of kite flying was about 200 B.C. when the Chinese General Han Hsin of the Han Dynasty flew a kite over the walls of a city he was attacking to measure how far his army would have to tunnel to reach past the defenses.

- Kite flying was eventually spread by traders from China to Korea, and across Asia to India. Each area developed a distinctive style of kite and cultural purpose for flying them.

-During the Silla Dynasty of Korea around the year 600, General Gim Yu-sin was ordered to subdue a revolt. However, his troops refused to fight. They had seen a large shooting star fall from the sky and believed it to be a bad omen. To regain control, the General used a large kite to carry a fire ball into the sky. The soldiers, seeing the star return to heaven, rallied and defeated the rebels.

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The heirs of the Knights Templar have launched a legal battle in Spain to force the Pope to restore the reputation of the disgraced order which was accused of heresy and dissolved seven centuries ago.

Fiona Govan, Madrid Correspondent
Last Updated: 1:07PM BST 04 Aug 2008

The Association of the Sovereign Order of the Temple of Christ, whose members claim to be descended from the legendary crusaders, have filed a lawsuit against Benedict XVI calling for him to recognise the seizure of assets worth 100 billion euros (£79 billion).

They claim that when the order was dissolved by his predecessor Pope Clement V in 1307, more than 9,000 properties as well as countless pastures, mills and other commercial ventures belonging to the knights were appropriated by the church.

But their motive is not to reclaim damages only to restore the "good name" of the Knights Templar.

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August 5, 2008

Go'o Shrine in Kyoto on the western side of the Imperial Palace is dedicated to all things pig.

The shrine enshrines Wake no Kinomaru (733–799), an adviser to the Heian Period Emperor Kammu (737–806), and the courtier's sister Hiromushi.

Instead of the usual komainu (mythical lion-like beasts) standing guard outside the shrine, a pair of wild boar do the job instead.

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...Kashmiris thus find themselves not simply sandwiched between India and Pakistan, but they are caught in what I would call a web of the interplay of complex and dubious historical forces. Such being our historical experience, J&K’s deepening crisis cannot be resolved overnight. Nor can it be merely explained in terms of one factor, as for example, Hindu-Muslim divide on the basis of religion, the problematic nature of ethnic diversities or a territorial conflict between India and Pakistan. We need to understand dispassionately the nature of our crisis which, in my opinion, is essentially related to our historical and civilisational identity as a nation.

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August 02, 2008
By Greg Sabatino

In 1943, a girl named Sadako Sasaki was born in Hiroshima, Japan.

On Aug. 6, 1945, an event took place that forever changed the face of the earth as the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

This year, on that same day, 63 years after the Hiroshima attack, the Kamloops Buddhist Temple will host an event commemorating the bombing of Hiroshima in an attempt to remind people of the devastation the bombing and horrors of war cause.

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Sunday August 03, 2008

NEW YORK.- An installation of 30 palm-leaf folios from Indian illuminated manuscripts will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on July 29, 2008. Featuring some of the earliest surviving Indian manuscripts, dating from the 10th to the 13th century, Early Buddhist Manuscript Painting: The Palm-leaf Tradition will center on one remarkable Mahayanist Buddhist text, the Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita Sutra ('Perfection of Wisdom'), illustrated through the Museum's rare holdings of eastern Indian and Nepalese illuminated palm-leaf manuscripts, book-covers, initiation cards, thankas, and sculptures.

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Good piece, worth reading, especially if you are not familiar with the history of this area. Moreover, given the importance of Buddhist Gandhara, Taxila, and Greco-Bactria, and given the known influence of these regions on both Indian and Chinese Buddhism, it is hard not to conclude that Eastern Mediterranean coastal areas were also deeply influenced by these kingdoms and that consequently early Christianity was influenced by Buddhism. Some say that it was profoundly influenced. Central Asia is one of the world's most important historical regions, though constant changes in the area often obscure that fact. ABN
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August 1, 2008
Pervaiz Munir Alvi

Pakistan is home to the ancient Gandhara Civilization. Its Buddhist character, which this civilization is best known for, was first established in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when colonial British military men and archeologists discovered various ancient religious sites near the city of Taxila in the Potowar region of Pakistan.

However since independence of Pakistan, the late 20th century studies and research conducted both by the Pakistani and Western scholars have documented and confirmed that Gandhara Civilization was not always Buddhist in character but had also gone through some well defined Hellenistic and Parthian periods as well.

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Thu Jul 31, 2008

LONDON (Reuters) - The world's oldest recorded joke has been traced back to 1900 BC and suggests toilet humor was as popular with the ancients as it is today.

It is a saying of the Sumerians, who lived in what is now southern Iraq and goes: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap."

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Walking in the footsteps of Apache chief Mangas Coloradas

Story and photos by Jerry Eagan

...A friend recently asked, "How do you find the places you hike?" Read the history, I replied. Once I've got a "target area" in mind, I go. Once there, I ask the spirits of the Apache, Anglos and Hispanics who were there: Where do you want me to go? What do you want me to see? Find? Who are you? Reveal yourself to me. After I explained this process, my friend said, "Well, then, it seems the Spirits lead you." I don't take that lightly, and I feel grateful for those gifts from "them."

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By Jeremy Hsu
posted: 30 July 2008

An ancient astronomy calculator appears to show the four-year cycle of the early Greek competitions that inspired today's Olympic Games.

Newly uncovered inscriptions on the 2,100 year-old device reveal names linked to the Olympiad cycle of games once celebrated among ancient Greek city-states.

"It's a surprise to find this on what we thought was an astronomical instrument," said Alexander Jones, a science historian at New York University who coauthored a study on the findings that are detailed this week in the journal Nature.

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Mon Jul 28, 2008

SUKHUMI, Georgia (Reuters) - In the capital of Georgia's breakaway province of Abkhazia, cracked steps lead up to a battered 1970s monument featuring a baboon.

"Polio, yellow fever, typhus, encephalitis, smallpox, hepatitis and many other human diseases were eradicated thanks to tests on primates," the inscription reads.

Once the pride of Soviet science, Sukhumi's Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy is now a shadow of the pioneering centre that helped defeat polio and saved countless thousands of lives in World War Two with penicillin treatments.

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The most credible story about D.B. Cooper I have heard. ABN
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Sunday, July 27, 2008
By SCOTT SCHWEBKE

OGDEN -- Even now, Maurice Richards is reluctant to talk about the strange encounter that may help crack the most baffling unsolved crime in FBI history.

The Ogden attorney believes that, about 30 years ago, he may have come face to face with D.B. Cooper, the hijacker turned folk hero who commandeered a Boeing 727 en route from Portland, Ore., to Seattle.

After obtaining a $200,000 ransom, Cooper parachuted from the plane into the dark abyss of the Pacific Northwest and the psyche of a stunned nation, never to be seen again.

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Did D.B. Cooper retire to Depoe Bay on the Oregon coast?

29th July 2008

An Australian publisher has refused demands by its Hong Kong-based printer to revise a new reference book to please nervous Chinese officials on the eve of the Olympic Games.

Melbourne-based publishers Hardie Grant say passages in its new Book of Knowledge relating to Mao Zedong, Tibetan Buddhism and the Chinese Communist Party are off limits, The Age newspaper reported on Tuesday.

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2008-07-24

There are several caves in Bayan Ulaan Mountain that stretches from Bayan Delger village of Tuv aimag to Tsenkher Mandal village of Khentii aimag. In 1969, an explorer H.Perlee excavated the cave north of Khushig Mountain and found some evidences proving that Buddhist lamas had lived in that cave until recently. He also discovered stone tools, broken parts of vase and bones of livestock. He noted these are the evidence to prove people were using that cave in Stone Age.

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Himalaya: Land of the Snow Lion
October 4, 2008 through March 1, 2009

Baldeck explores the territory, often called "between heaven and earth," encompassing ethnic, cultural and historical Tibet, which stretches from the western Himalaya mountains of Ladakh (northern India), to Bhutan, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, and east into Sichuan and Yunnan provinces. Her photographs offer a compelling look at an ancient, mostly Buddhist world through portraiture, landscapes, architecture and still life.

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Kathmandu, July 22 (IANS) After a Nepali of Indian origin representing a community that ranked at the bottom of Nepal’s social ladder became the first president of the country, the federal republic can see another astounding change in its social landscape if a debutant but powerful ethnic party manages to wrest the post of prime minister.

Bijay Kumar Gachchhedar, chief of the Madhesi Janadhikar Forum parliamentary party, is laying stake to the executive post, saying his party has the support of two other major parties, whose alliance Monday succeeded in defeating the Maoists in the nation’s historic first presidential election.

If Gachchhedar has his way, he will become the first prime minister from the Tharu community, a group that was among the first inhabitants of Nepal but were displaced by migrants from India and Nepal’s hills from the fertile Terai plains along the Indo-Nepal border.

In the course of time the Tharus, who were the descendants of royal families, including the one in which Gautam Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, belonged, became landless paupers and were forced to become bonded slaves by the new migrants.

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By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: July 22, 2008

The observance lasted but a few minutes. For that brief ritual, the visitors had traveled nearly 7,000 miles — from Shimoda, Japan, to Brooklyn, U.S.A. It might seem a long way to go to lay flowers on the grave of someone who has been dead these last 130 years. Not if you’re from Shimoda, though. Not if the grave is that of a New Yorker named Townsend Harris.

Many of you may now be wondering, Townsend Who?

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Monday 21st July, 2008

Scientists have determined that the emerging new understanding of the Indus Civilization suggests that it might have been "a powerhouse of commerce and technology in the 3rd millennium B.C.E."

According to a recent report in the journal Science, though there is much written about the Indus Civilization, this report is different because it highlights how our scientific - in this case archaeological - knowledge on the subject is not only expanding, but changing.

Striking new evidence from a host of excavations on both sides of the tense border that separates India and Pakistan has now definitively overturned the second-class status given to the Indus Civilization.

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...they invented the first musical instrument ‘played without a player’. This device could create its own music with no human influence. It was called the Aeolian harp. Built by the Greeks probably in the fifth century BC it represents the first automatic instrument in history.

The harp got its name from the Greek god Aeolus, the ruler of winds, and with a good reason. The instrument is basically a wooden box which has two bridges connected by strings. The strings are all of the same lengths but can vary in thickness and, very importantly, tuning. It was placed near an open window so the wind currents could pass over the string goading random compositions. Varying pitches could be produced thanks to the diversity of the strings or the power of the wind. The later is responsible also for the intensity of the sound which could range from being barely audible to loud.

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The 60-foot tall Moreton Bay Fig symbolizes the founding of the Koyasan Buddhist Temple in downtown Los Angeles in 1920.

By Joanna Lin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
12:50 PM PDT, July 17, 2008

Los Angeles designated Little Tokyo's Aoyama Tree as a cultural-historic monument today.

The 60-foot tall Moreton Bay Fig symbolizes the founding of the Koyasan Buddhist Temple downtown in 1920.

The tree was planted in what Deanna Matsumoto of the Little Tokyo Historical Society called Little Tokyo's formative years, an era of racial segregation when Japanese Americans labored on farms, shipyards and railroads.

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19 July 2008

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Archaeologists and scholars will excavate hundreds of fragments of an ancient Egyptian wooden boat entombed in an underground chamber next to Giza's Great pyramid. They will then try to reassemble the craft.

The 4,500-year-old vessel is the sister ship of a similar boat removed in pieces in 1954 from another pit and painstakingly reconstructed. Experts believe the boats were meant to ferry the pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid in the afterlife.

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Thursday July 10, 2008
John Hooper

It is the very symbol of the glory that was Rome. It figures on the badge of the Serie A side, AS Roma. It was used as the emblem of the 1960 Rome Olympics. For Benito Mussolini, Italy's fascist dictator, there was nothing more representative of the might of the empire he hoped to revive than this magnificent, life-size bronze of a she-wolf suckling the city's legendary founders, Romulus and Remus.

Only problem: it was made 1,700-1,800 years later than supposed.

Until two years ago, the so-called Capitoline Wolf was almost universally recognised as an Etruscan statue from the early part of the 5th century BC. But, according to an article published yesterday by one of Italy's most eminent archaeologists, radio-carbon tests have shown it was manufactured in the Middle Ages.

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Ancient Roman road gets virtual life