The Teachings of Siddhartha
"The man who was to become the Buddha was born about 563 BC of
kshatriya stock at a place called Lumbini. This is situated in
the Terai region of what today is the kingdom of Nepal, immediately
below the Himalayan foothills on the northern edge of the plain
of the River Ganges, due north of the holy city of Benares. He
was given the name Siddhartha and took the clan name Gautama.
His father, Shuddhodana, has been variously described as the king
or leader of a local people known as the Shakyas or even just
as a prominent citizen of Kapilavastu, the Shakyan capital. The
Shakyas were in fact just one of the number of more or less independent
peoples then inhabiting this part of northern India, who were
politically organized into tribal republics ruled by elected aristocracies."
"...During the third century BC, Buddhism received a tremendous
boost in India when it came under the patronage of the great Ashoka
Maurya, the grandson of Chandragupta Maurya, who had by force
of arms created a mighty empire in India."
"He...performed copious good works, setting up hospitals for both
humans and animals, causing wells to be dug, and, as an alternative
to military conquest, he applied himself to spiritual conquest.
His new 'soldiers' were missionaries armed with the good news
of the dharma. They went in many directions. Some even came to
the West: to Egypt, Syria, Macedonia, Epirus, and Cyrene (in north
Africa). These efforts do not appear to have been very effective
in the long-run; on the other hand, his mission to Sri Lanka was
a lasting success."
"After Ashoka, Buddhism became adopted by the Greeks in the north
of India, and one of their kings, Menanadros (Pali name, Milinda;
reigned c. 155-130 BC), was a great champion of the dharma. His
debate with a bhikshu name Nagasena that led to his becoming a
lay disciple is preserved in a celebrated post-canonical dialogue,
The Questions of King Milinda (Milinda-Panha). Royal patronage
was also extended to Buddhism by Kanishka, a Scythian king who
ruled a wide tract of land in northwest India, probably around
the first century AD."
- John Snelling, The Buddhist Handbook
"Whereas classical yoga is a concentration practice, Buddhist
insight meditation is an awareness practice. Whereas yoga emphasizes
the development of unwavering attention on inner objects, insight
meditation emphasized fluid attention to all objects, both inner
and outer. Here all stimuli are observed and examined as precisely
and minutely as awareness will allow. The aim is to examine and
understand the workings of body and mind as fully as possible
and thereby to cut through the distortions and misunderstandings
that usually cloud awareness. 'To see things as they are' is the
motto of this practice, and this seeing can become very sensitive
indeed."
"The Buddhist mediator's microscopic awareness becomes so sensitive
that it is able to dissect the sense of self into its component
stimuli. Thus the meditator perceives not a solid unchanging ego
or self sense, but rather a ceaseless flux of thoughts and images
of which that ego is composed. This is the experience of 'no self'
in which the sense of a permanent egioc self is recognized as
an illusion. This illusion of a continuous self or ego is a product
of imprecise awareness that arises in much the same way as an
apparently continuous movie arises from a series of still frames.
The meditator's precise awareness sees through this egoic illusion
and hence frees the meditator from egocentric ways of thinking
and acting."
- Roger N. Walsh, The Spirit of Shamanism
"It was taught by the Buddha, oh Monks, that the past, the future,
physical space, and individuals are nothing but names, forms of
thought, words of common usage, merely superficial realities."
- Madhyamika Karika Vrtti
"Stars, darkness, a lamp, a phantom dew, a bubble,
A dream a flash of lightning, and a cloud:
Thus we should look upon all that was made."
- Vajracchedika
"We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime
within man is the Soul; the wise silence; the universal beauty,
to which every part and particle is equally related."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson "Thine own intellect, which is now
voidness, yet not to be regarded as the voidness of nothingness,
but as being intellect itself, unobstructed, shining, thrilling,
and blissful, is the very consciousness, the All-good Buddha."
- Bardo Thodol
"It seems that originally the Tibetans were a primitive, largely
nomadic and pugnacious people whose warlike activities caused
more than a few headaches for their neighbors. As their power
and organization grew, they were able, for instance, to launch
campaigns in China itself and on one occasion captured the capital,
Sian. Spiritually they inclined to animism and other primitive
magical beliefs and practices. A species of priest existed among
them called bon-po, who are usually described as shamans, through
more specifically the name implies that they recited mantras which
could be used for exorcism, invoking powerful spirits and so forth.
The bon-po may also have been concerned with the death rituals
of the early kings."
"Tradition had it that it was only with the arrival of the Tantric
adept Padmasambhava (or Guru Rinpoché) towards the end of the
eighth century AD that success was ensured. He alone possessed
the occult know-how necessary to subdue the demoniac forces inimical
to the transmission of Buddhism. He could counter magic with magic,
and emerge victorious. One of his particular feats was to conquer
the spirits that hitherto had been frustrating the building of
Samye (completed 787 AD), the first Buddhist monastery of Tibet.
"It should be noted in passing that the old demons and spirits
were not annihilated, as they would have been in the West, with
all the grim paraphernalia of witch-hunts and inquisitions; rather
they were obliged to submit to the dharma. Thereafter they continued
to play a tolerated if subordinate role as 'dharma protectors'.
Psychospiritually, this could be seen as the assimilation of the
magical-mythical in the collective Tibetan psyche, whereas in
the West it was ruthlessly repressed."
- John Snelling, The Buddhist Handbook
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