Buddhism : a religion & philosophy that repudiates the authority of the Vedas & the existence of a soul or God, & in which rebirth & karma cease when one extinguishes their root-cause, namely Desire. They are based on the Four Noble Truths & the Noble Eightfold Path enunciated by the Buddha. “The first Buddhist Council met Rājagriha (present Rājgir in present Bihar), soon after the death of Buddha. It was attended by the Theras (Buddhist elders) & presided over by their senior Mahākassapa. As Buddha had left none of his teachings in writing so at this Council three of them, Kashyapa – the most learned, Upāli – the oldest, & Ananda, the Buddha’s favourite disciple, recited his teachings which were thereafter transmitted orally by teachers to disciples. A century later the Second Council met at Vaishāli to settle a dispute on questions of discipline; it decided on rigid discipline & revised the Buddhist scriptures which were still unwritten. (In Buddha’s lifetime, Vaishāli was the capital of the Lichchhavis who had an aristocratic republican form of government in which every noble had an equal role. It is believed that it was on this form of administration that the Buddha, who visited the city several times, had organised his Buddhist Saṇgha.) The Third Council met under the patronage of Emperor Ashōka, according to tradition, 236 years after the Buddha’s death. It is believed to have drawn up the Buddhist canon in the final form of Tripitaka or Three Baskets. The Fourth & last Council met during the reign of the Kushān king Kanishka (c.120-144 AD) & adopted authorised commentaries on the Buddhist canon. It was attended mainly by the followers of Hināyāna (Theravada), & also those of Mahāyāna which included eminent Buddhists like Ashwaghosha, Nāgārjuna & Vāsumitra who enjoyed the patronage of Kanishka, had gained greater followers. [S. Bhattacharya: 185, 538, 583, 889] Sri Aurobindo: “Every time the Light has tried to descend it has met with resist¬ance & opposition. Christ was crucified…. Buddha was denied. Sons of Light come, the earth denies & rejects them; afterwards, accepts them in name to reject them in substance. Only a small minority grows towards a spiritual birth, & it is through them that the Divine manifestation takes place…. If kings & emperors had left Buddhism to those people who were really spiritual it would have been much better for real Buddhism. It was after Constantine embraced Christianity that it began to decline…. The same thing happened to Mohammedanism (see Islam)…. When kings & emperors try to spread religion they become like Asoka, i.e., they make the whole thing mechanical, & the inner truth is lost.” [Purani, Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo, 2007:576-79]
... countries adjacent to his empire at a date removed from this period? The Greeks and Buddhism There is also the fact that to the whole Greek world Buddhism in any expressible form was an unknown quantity until we reach the 2nd century A.D. "Greece," says R.C. Majumdar, 1 "knew nothing of Buddhism previous to the rise of Alexandria in the Christian era. Buddha is first mentioned by Clement... nothing to do with the Gupta dynasty but to whom a deep interest in Buddhism can be attributed. One of them, instead of Narasimhagupta, could have been the Buddha-lover and the patron of Nālandā University. Yes, we must refrain from exaggerating the patronage of Buddhism by the Guptas. But it cannot be denied that to find Buddhism developing and expanding within India in the three centuries before... these two a monk named Mahendra might very well have brought Theravadin Buddhism to Ceylon. Such an event would be quite in accord with the Guptas' general policy towards Buddhism and with Samudragupta's patronage of all learning as well as with his declared relations with "Simhala" and "other islands". It would be natural that Buddhism should get encouraged under him and launch a mission to this island ...
... India but also abroad and even in countries where Buddhism is practised. It is another form of the heresy that if Hinduism bore the caste system for several centuries it has failed "to yield anything substantive". Buddhism and Hinduism Here we may remind our recent critic that in the very religion he wished to embrace, in Buddhism itself, it is not Buddha's humanism that is the living... scheduled classes, announced his desire to embrace Buddhism because of the lot of the "untouchables" in Hindu society - a lot which seemed to him a pointer to a lack in Hinduism of the sense of human brotherhood. He also declared that if Hinduism bore the caste system for several centuries it had failed "to yield anything substantive". According to him, Buddhism stands in striking contrast to this religion... as we have said, there is a subtle trend among Hindus themselves to exaggerate social values and thus play into the hands of critics of Hinduism. In one sense we may say the trend is towards Buddhism, for Buddhism is more prone than any other religion to be interpreted, in spite of its founder's aim and teaching, as a secular system. It does away with all metaphysical inquiry and discourages every m ...
... the passage from the Ignorance to the higher Truth. The Ignorance has to be extinguished in order that the Truth may manifest. Different Kinds of Buddhism Buddhism is of many kinds and the entirely nihilistic kind is only one variety. Most Buddhism admits a Permanent as beyond the creation of Karma and Sanskaras. Even the Sunya of the Sunyapanthis is described like the Tao of Lao Tse as a Nothing... rehash of Buddhism in Vedantic terms born of a modern mind. The Permanent of Buddhism has always been supposed to be Supracosmic and Ineffable—that is why Buddha never tried to explain what it was; for, logically, how can one talk about the Ineffable? It has really nothing to do with the Cosmos which is a thing of sanskaras and Karma. There is no reason why the passage about Buddhism [ in an essay... spirituality. There are elements in most Yogas which enter into this one, so it is not surprising if there is something in Buddhism also. But such notions as a Higher Evolution beyond Nirvana seem to me not genuinely Buddhistic, unless of course there is some offshoot of Buddhism which developed something so interpreted by the author. I never heard of it as part of Buddha's teachings Page 433 ...
... apply to a good deal of Hindu mysticism and to the views of Sri Aurobindo, but there are other views to be found in the Tantra and especially in Mahayana Buddhism which are much nearer to Capra's view. I find that most people in the West find Buddhism far more congenial than Hinduism as a philosophy of life. So you see we really differ very profoundly. I agree that there is an 'inner bond' between... cherished substance of our own faiths assume a light which never was intended to be there and to see everything in them sub specie Aurobindonis and forget that neither in Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity nor Islam has Sri Aurobindo discerned the immediate knowledge of the Supermind - he has not hesitated even to declare that multifarious'Hinduism itself cannot be equated to his... pressure as illustrating ho more than a new insight into what had been achieved in the past - what, according to you, Christianity had done 2000 years ago and what, according to others, Vedism or Buddhism or Islam had accomplished earlier or later. Sri Aurobindo's specific mission is intimately linked with the fact of evolution - the rising by some means or other from lower grades of embodied consciousness ...
... and another in the South. Ah! as for Buddhism. The people of the South and the North have different kinds of imagination. The southern people are generally more rigid, aren't they?... I don't know, but for Buddhism, the Buddhism of the South is quite rigid and doesn't allow any suppleness in the understanding of the text. And it is a terribly strict Buddhism in which all notion of the Godhead in any... don't know. The Buddhism of the South is written in Pali and that of the North in Sanskrit. And naturally, there is Tibetan Buddhism written in Tibetan, and Chinese Buddhism written in Chinese and Japanese Buddhism in Japanese. And each one, I believe, is very very different from the others. Well, probably there must be several versions of the Ramayana. And still more versions of the Mahabharata—that indeed... images. But the Buddhism of the South has the austerity of Page 325 Protestantism: there must be no images. And there is no divine Consciousness, besides. One comes into the world through desire, into a world of desire, and abandoning desire one goes out of the world and creation and returns to Nirvana—even the nought is something too concrete. There is no Creator in Buddhism. So, I don't ...
... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2 The Mission of Buddhism BUDDHISM came as a blaze of lightning across the sky of India's tradition; it was almost a fiery writing on the wall, bearing the doom of a world. Buddhism opposed and denied some of the very fundamental principles upon which the old world rested. It was perhaps the greatest iconoclastic... ignored in the Buddhistic scheme. Philosophically, in regard to ultimate principles, Buddhism was another name for nihilism, creation being merely an assemblage of particles of consciousness that is desire; the particles scattered and dissolved, remains only the supreme incomparable Nirvana. But pragmatically Buddhism was supremely humanistic. As it took man as a rational animal, at least as a s... human consciousness. First of all, it denied the tradition itself; it did not recognise the authority and sanctity of the purve pitarah , the ancient fathers, nor their revealed knowledge, the Veda. Buddhism enjoined the priority and supremacy of the individual's own consciousness, own effort and own realisation. Be thou thy own light. Work out thy own salvation. That was the injunction given. Not to ...
... The legend reflects the fact that mutual interest in Buddhism kept China and India in contact around the sixth century AD, a fact that is confirmed in the work of the great twentieth-century sinologist, Dr Joseph Needham. Furthermore, it implies that from very early times, meditation and martial exercises were complementary aspects of Buddhism; the one passive and static, the other active and moving... of Indian art and sciences. Among the arts he advocated were martial skills of armed and unarmed combat. Buddhism never succeeded in ousting the traditional Hinduism as the first religion of India, although it survived there for more than 1,500 years. Yet, when the teachings of Buddhism reached China, they immediately attracted the attention of courtiers, scholars and aristocrats. Records... before the birth of Buddha in the mid-sixth century BC, but as Buddhism gathered strength they were joined by monks from India. Consequently, by AD 65 the first Buddhist community had been established in China. That event marks the beginning of an invasion of Chinese custom and thought by the culture and philosophy of the Indians. Buddhism gradually became a powerful force within China and as it did ...
... Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism. New York: Verry, 1964. David-Neel, Alexandra. Buddhism: Its Doctrines and Its Methods. London: B.I. Publications, 1977. Mukherjee, Radha Kumud. Ancient Indian Education. London: Macmillan, 1951. Niirada, Thera. trans. The Dhammapada. London: John Murray, 1972. Davids, Rhys. Buddhism. Delhi: Indological Book House, 1973. Page 101... ground that this teaching did not lead to aversion, absence of passion, cessation, quiescence, knowledge, supreme wisdom, and Nirvana, but only as far as the realm of nothingness 1. Adapted from Buddhism by Rhys Davids, Indological Book House, Delhi, 1973. Page 91 Siddhartha next approached Uddaka, the sage of Rajagriha with 700 pupils. Siddhartha was intellectually and spiritually so... teachings, and finally all five gave their adhesion to the Light revealed to them. 1. This story is to be found in Seal's Romantic Legends from the Chinese, p. 245, and it is related in Buddhism by Rhys Davids. page-96 The Great Teachers as Examples It is said that education is a preparation for life; and this is true, although it would be truer to say that all life is perpetual ...
... the Vedanta? or this emancipation different from the Vedantic mukti? If it were so, there would never have been all this quarrel between Buddhism and the Vedantic schools. It must be a new-fangled version of Buddhism or else it was a later development in which Buddhism reduced itself back to Adwaita. The phrase "all things are eternally immersed in Nirvāṇa" seems to me at once bold and beautiful and... of Supermind. It seems to me that the number of people in the world accepting our Yoga of transformation would not be as large as those who accepted Buddhism, Vedanta or Christianity. Nothing depends on the numbers. The numbers of Buddhism and Christianity were so great because the majority professed it as a creed without its making the least difference to their external life. If the new c... About the One there are different versions. I just read some where that the Buddhist One is a Superbuddha from whom all Buddhas come—but it seemed to me a rehash of Buddhism in Vedantic terms born of a modern mind. The Permanent of Buddhism has always been supposed to be Supracosmic and Ineffable—that is why Buddha never tried to explain what it was; for, logically, how can one talk about the Ineffable ...
... Buddhism and Hinduism I BUDDHISM, or for that matter, Christianity or Mohammadenism or any credal and personal religion, is easy to understand. For they are each of them a single and simple entity, whereas Hinduism is a multiple and complex organism. The difference is that between a tree, a huge mighty tree, may be, and a vast and tangled forest. Buddhism, for example... again that Buddhism rises sheer in its monolithic structure, an Asokan pillar towering in its linear movement; Hinduism has its towers, but they are part of a vast architecture, spread out on ample and chequered grounds-even like a temple city. II Hinduism, one may even say, Indianism, has cast Buddhism out of India, the mother country, to the wonder of many. Buddhism came to rub... to have been the motto given. Buddhism saw and accepted a world of misery; therefore it knew how to touch the human heart, open up the doors in human consciousness to sympathy and compassion and love. Life it envisaged as an unreal persistence and therefore awakened and installed there the fiery urge towards withdrawal, ascension and transcendence. It was Buddhism that canonised the way of asceticism ...
... of Buddha? We know nothing really. So when I speak of Buddhism, I am not really questioning Buddha himself so much as... the church that has been built around him. Towarnicki: Do you recall Sri Aurobindo's position with regard to... not Buddhism, but the teaching of Buddha himself? It's very difficult to talk about it, because Buddhism has become synonymous with a particular way of being and... answer that none of the yogis have, none of the Illusionists have, and none of the Buddhists have. Page 70 Towarnicki: Unless these are just the by-products of Buddhism? By-products? Towarnicki: Of Buddhism. But I... Towarnicki: Because, undoubtedly, if you go back to the origin, if you read the words of Buddha himself and the teaching of the principal Masters, that's... and living. So we can only discuss it in terms of Buddhism, not in terms of Buddha. That isn't possible. Page 71 And it has been very useful. Buddhism has been very useful in the evolution of human consciousness to help us or force us to PUNCTURE certain appearances. But it's the FIRST step! And what's the second step? That's it. That was my question.... That's where I was at ...
... that time it was the Sankhya method which was very commonly 1 adopted by those who followed the path of knowledge. Subsequently, with the spread of Buddhism, the Sankhya method of knowledge must have been much overshadowed by the Buddhistic. Buddhism, like the Sankhya non-Theistic and anti-Monistic, laid stress on the impermanence of the results of the cosmic energy, which it presented not as Prakriti... × At the same time the Gita seems to have largely influenced Mahayanist Buddhism and texts are taken bodily from it into the Buddhist Scriptures. It may therefore have helped largely to turn Buddhism, originally a school of quietistic and illuminated ascetics, into that religion of meditative devotion and compassionate action which has... admitted neither the Vedantic Brahman nor the inactive Soul of the Sankhyas, and it made the recognition of this impermanence by the discriminating mind its means of liberation. When the reaction against Buddhism arrived, it took up not the old Sankhya notion, but the Vedantic form popularised by Shankara who replaced the Buddhistic impermanence by the cognate Vedantic idea of illusion, Maya, and the Buddhistic ...
... especially mentions Buddhism. Sri Aurobindo 4 - after asserting it to be "a misrepresentation to say that Indian culture denies all value to life, detaches from terrestrial interests and insists on the unimportance of the life of the moment" - says: "To read these European comments one would imagine that in all Indian thought there was nothing but the nihilistic school of Buddhism and the monistic... all Indian art, literature and social thinking were nothing but the statement of their recoil from the falsehood and vanity of things.... "Even the most extreme philosophies and religions. Buddhism and Illusionism, which held life to be an imperma-nence or ignorance that must be transcended and cast away, yet did not lose sight of the truth that man must develop 1.christianity and... Page 71 himself under the conditions of this present ignorance or impermanence before he can attain to knowledge and to that Permanent which is the denial of temporal being. Buddhism was not solely a cloudy sublimation of Nirvana, nothingness, extinction and the tyrannous futility of Karma; it gave us a great and powerful discipline for the life of man on earth. The enormous positive ...
... that-ness, ought no more haunt the serious seeker. “Hence Buddhism denies,” in the words of Zimmer, “the force and validity of everything that can be known.” In the final analysis, which derives a Page 43 certain spiritual support also, there is “neither the realm of life and death nor that of release. Moreover there is no Buddhism and no boat, since there are neither shores nor waters... philosophic inheritance of his age, and reinterpreted it with special reference to its needs. Though Hindu thought had practically triumphed over Buddhism, the latter had instilled its secret strength into the people. The shadow of distrust which Buddhism threw over cherished beliefs did not completely vanish... It was a critical period in the history of the Hindu nation, when there was a general sense... waters between. There is no boat, and there is no boatman,—no Buddha. The great paradox of Buddhism, therefore, is that no Buddha has ever come into existence to enlighten the world with Buddhist teachings.” ( Philosophies of India ) Powerful metaphysics it indeed is. Such extreme negations of whatever is, phenomenal or essential, is the boldest step taken by the Enlightened. Occult-spiritually, this ...
... many-sided, elastic and flexible, Buddhism imposes it as the one cause of rebirth & a mechanical and in its action an ineluctable Necessity & rigid chain; while Vedanta becomes by its fundamental conception the gospel of a recovery by self-realisation in outward consciousness of an always existing freedom & mastery in a world which is secretly anandamaya, all-blissful, Buddhism becomes by its fundamental... that the law of Karma is nothing else than a statement of the soul's entire subjection to the law of cause and effect. The idea belongs both to ancient Buddhism and modern Rationalism, but is stated in either philosophy on different grounds. Buddhism Page 494 denies the real existence of soul, Rationalism denies it existence altogether, trenchantly & simply. To the modern rationalist the... by that movement itself and not inherently, it yet mistakenly erects one nodus or one stream of mechanical Nature into the false idea of a self. This is the attitude towards life and existence of Buddhism, of materialistic Rationalism and, with one all-important modification, of Mayavada. On the other hand, if we hold the mechanical Force to be subordinate to the self-conscious, self-governing existence ...
... cultural traditions. Cottingham rightly points out that the problem is more fundamental. Comparing Buddhism and Islam, he points out that while according to Islam, and for that matter according to Judaism also, the ultimate reality is absolutely and unqualifiedly One Personal being, according to Buddhism, ultimate reality Page 104 is not personal at all, and it even negates any appellation... account of the fact that praxis counted more than doctrine, there has been a continuous stress towards accommodation and even synthesis. When Jainism and Buddhism developed as anti-Vedic religions, the conflicts between Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism manifested sharply; but even then these three religions absorbed each other, and by this absorption, they were enriched and even in the days of sharpest... that all religions share a number of core ethical values, and as long as these core values are practiced, it does not matter whether one belongs to Christianity or to Judaism or to Hinduism or to Buddhism. This solution tends to regard pluralism of religions to be comparable to the pluralism of the methods of cooking or to the pluralism of the forms of sport. It is, however, realized that the differences ...
... The future of Buddhism seemed especially bright under the Mauryan dynasty, which lasted from 322 to about 184 BC. The first king of this dynasty, Chandragupta Maurya (322- 298 BC), came closer to uniting India than had any earlier ruler; only the extreme south escaped his domination. The third Mauryan king, Asoka (ca. 273-ca. 232 BC), became a Buddhist, and with his support Buddhism developed into... into the first great missionary religion. In Asoka's days Buddhism was accepted in most parts of India and throughout Ceylon. Later it spread to the countries of Southeast Asia and across the mountains into China. And with Buddhism went Indian art, literature, and philosophy. The influence that India still exercises in eastern Asia began with this cultural expansion under Asoka. Suggestions for further... further reading Arnold, Sir Edwin. The Light of Asia (Many editions). Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism. New York: Verry, 1964. David-Neel, Alexandra. Buddhism : its Doctrines and its Methods. London: B.I. Publications, 1977. Dhammapada, The. Trs. Thera Narada. London: John Murray, 1972. Saddhatissa, H. Buddhist Ethics. London: Alien & Unwin ...
... heard of. Then Buddhism came in as a topic. NIRODBARAN: Lokanath Bhikshu, an Italian convert, tried to call me back from here. I found him rather illogical. SRI AUROBINDO: All preachers are illogical. Were you a fervent Buddhist? Is there much Buddhism where you come from? NIRODBARAN: There are about one or two million Buddhists, but there is practically nothing of Buddhism. THE MOTHER:... MOTHER: Is Northern or Southern Buddhism professed? NIRODBARAN: Southern. THE MOTHER: In China and Japan too no real Buddhism is found—only ceremonies. In Ceylon, they say, there is still some authentic Buddhism. NIRODBARAN: Also in Burma nothing authentic remains, I am told, but the Burmese people show a great respect for their Bhikshus. DR. MANILAL : Yes, respect for the appearance and not ...
... towards Buddhism is understandable, because to the European rational mind its rationalism has an appeal. It was first through Buddhism that Europe came to and began to know India. Blavatsky founded Theosophy on Buddhism. Next they understand Shanker in Europe and for many years the Europeans thought there was nothing in India except Shanker’s Adwaita. But if X has taken to Buddhism his sex abhoration... they say. (The topic underwent a change.) Disciple : I am reminded of Sadhaka X whose Sadhana seemed to be going on very well...who is now attracted Page 152 to Buddhism. I do not know if he has been attracted to some woman – but there was some such indication. Sri Aurobindo : It is sad if it is true. In one of his letters to Y he wrote that one need not... abhoration is not justifiable. Buddhism is the most exacting path. It is most unindulgent, severe and dry; it is a path of Tapasya. Disciple : He had perhaps great mental pride. Sri Aurobindo : May be also vital over-confidence. Disciple : He said to Y that sex was not a problem for him. Page 153 Sri Aurobindo : That is over-confidence. Perhaps ...
... note of Mahayana Buddhism which laid stress on universal compassion and fellow-feeling was seen as an ethical application of the spiritual unity which is an essential idea of Vedanta. The Buddhistic theory of karma could have been supported from the utterances of the Brahmanas and the Upanishads. Actually, the Vedic tradition absorbed Page 23 all that could be of Buddhism, but rejected... kept India's soul Page 16 alive through the centuries. Like a fountain of inexhaustible life-giving water, they have never failed to give fresh illumination. It is even being said that Buddhism was only a restatement of one side of the Upanishadic experience, although it represented a new standpoint and provided fresh terms of intellectual definition and reasoning. Even in the thought of... in our own times. It is true that the Upanishads are concerned mainly with the inner vision and not directly with outward .human action; yet, all the highest principles of ethics held out by Buddhism, Jainism and later Hinduism are products of the very life and significance of the truths to which they give expressive form and force. They even present the supreme ideal of spiritual action founded ...
... development one can see the inner continuity with the Vedic and Vedantic origins. It is true that at one time it seemed as if a discontinuity would take place. Buddhism seemed to reject all spiritual continuity with the Vedic religion. Buddhism seemed also to be a sharp new beginning. But the ideal of nirvana came to be perceived as a negative and exclusive statement of the highest Vedantic spiritual... strongest note of Mahayana Buddhism which laid a stress on universal compassion and fellow-feeling was seen as an ethical application of the spiritual unity which is an essential idea of Vedanta. The Buddhistic theory of karma could have been supported from the utterances of the Brahmanas and the Upanishads. Actually, the Vedic tradition absorbed all that it could be of Buddhism, but rejected its exclusive... kept India's soul alive through the centuries. Like Page 87 a fountain of inexhaustible life-giving water, they have never failed to give fresh illumination. It is even being said that Buddhism was only a restatement of one side of the Upanishadic experience, although it represented a new standpoint and provided fresh terms of intellectual definition and reasoning. Even in the thought of ...
... my disappointment I found that the author got over the Gordian knot of Nirvana by pretending there was no knot at all. To be a countryman of the great Gautama and yet to quote H.G.Wells on Buddhism—this was beyond belief. How could H.G.Wells probe into the soul of a man who would have regarded the seer of the outer shape of things-to-come as totally ignorant of the inner shape of things as... n service, the moral practice of so-called unselfishness, is undoubtedly a help towards spiritual attainment, as it weakens the bonds of a too narrowly personal life, but it is not the goal of Buddhism. It is one of the steps to the goal which is Nirvana. And it is a step which could very well lead nowhere near Nirvana if the various other steps which have little connection with service to humanity... considered Page 32 disappointing too. The author responsible for it had shown a penchant for Western vitalism, the combative adventurous élan of modern Europe and declared Buddhism a warped and unhealthy thing in comparison despite certain features which he could not help eulogising. He viewed the Master somewhat peculiarly. He gave him a lot of compliments with one hand ...
... divine manifestation takes place. What remains of Buddhism today except a few edicts of Asoka and a few hundred thousand Buddhists? NIRODBARAN: Asoka helped in propagating Buddhism. SRI AUROBINDO: Anybody could have done that. NIRODBARAN: But didn't it become all-powerful through his aid? SRI AUROBINDO: If kings and emperors had left Buddhism to those people who were really spiritual, it would... would have been much better for real Buddhism. That is always the case with spiritual things. It was after Constantine embraced Christianity that it began to decline in its substance. The King of Norway, about whom Longfellow wrote a poem, killed all the people who were not Christians and thus succeeded in establishing Christianity! The same happened to Mohammedanism where it succeeded and the followers... followers of the Prophet became Caliphs. Not kings and emperors but those who are truly spiritual keep spirituality alive. NIRODBARAN: Asoka sacrificed everything for Buddhism. SRI AUROBINDO: But he remained an emperor till the end. When kings and emperors try to spread a religion, they make the whole thing mental and moral and the inner truth is lost. Asoka succeeded in being Asoka: that's all ...
... manifestation takes place. What remains of Buddhism today except a few decrees of Asoka and a few hundred thousand Buddhists? Disciple : Asoka helped in propagating Buddhism. Sri Aurobindo : Anybody could have done that. Disciple : But it is through his aid that it became all-powerful. Sri Aurobindo : If kings and emperors had left Buddhism to those people who were really spiritual... spiritual it would have been much better for real Buddhism. It was after Constantine embraced Christianity that it began to decline. The king of Norway, on whom Longfellow wrote a poem, killed all people who were not Christians Page 48 and thus succeeded in establishing Christianity! The same happened to Mohammedanism. When it succeeded, the followers of the Prophet became Khalifas... Khalifas, then the religion declined. It is not kings and emperors that keep alive spirituality but people who are really spiritual that do so. Disciple : Asoka sacrificed everything for Buddhism. Sri Aurobindo : But he remained emperor till the end. When kings and emperors try to spread religion they become like Asoka i.e. make the whole thing mechanical and the inner truth is lost. ...
... Buddhist? Is there much Buddhism in your parts? Disciple : About one or two million people are Buddhists and there is nothing of Buddhism in what they follow. Mother : Nothing or something of Buddhism? Disciple : Something. Mother : In China and Japan also no Buddhism is left. Only ceremonies remain. In Ceylon they say there is still some authentic Buddhism. Disciple ...
... panthāḥ . The strongest note of Mahayana Buddhism, its stress on universal compassion and fellow-feeling, was an ethical application of the spiritual unity which is the essential idea of Vedanta. 3 The most characteristic tenets of the new discipline, Nirvana and Karma, could have been supported from the utterances of the Brahmanas and Upanishads. Buddhism could easily have claimed for itself a Vedic... gave to already established motive-ideas a more predominant place or effective form. At one time indeed it seemed as if a discontinuity and a sharp new beginning were needed and would take place. Buddhism seemed to reject all spiritual continuity with the Vedic religion. But this was after all less in reality than in appearance. The Buddhist ideal of Nirvana was no more than a sharply Page 207... Vedic origin and the claim would have been no less valid than the Vedic ascription of the Sankhya philosophy and discipline with which it had some points of intimate alliance. But what hurt Buddhism and determined in the end its rejection, was not its denial of a Vedic origin or authority, but the exclusive trenchancy of its intellectual, ethical and spiritual positions. A result of an intense stress ...
... since then kaihogyo monks have served as the mainstay core masters of Tendai Buddhism. The Path of the Spiritual Athlete ... Of all the disciplines practiced on Hiei, the mountain marathon — kaihogyo — has had the greatest appeal over the centuries, for it encompasses the entire spectrum of Tendai Buddhism — meditation, esotericism, precepts, devotion, nature worship, and work for the... young pilgrim monk, giving him the name So-o, "one who serves for others". Ennin initiated So-o into the Tantric mysteries of Tendai and also described the great mountain pilgrimages of Chinese Buddhism.... Later in a dream, So-o heard a voice telling him: "All the peaks on this mountain are sacred. Make pilgrimages to its holy places following the instructions of the mountain gods. Train hard... emergence of a marathon monk from doiri is compared to Sakyamuni Buddha's descent from the Himalayas following his Great Awakening. As one of the gyoja's relatives remarked, "I always dismissed Buddhism as superstitious nonsense until I saw my brother step out of Myo-o-do after doiri. He was really a living Buddha." . . Around 3:30 A.M. the gyoja, twenty to thirty pounds lighter, returns ...
... statements in Buddhism about the Self. In one place, he says, it doesn't recognise the Self and in another it takes the Self as the sole refuge and giver of enlightenment. PURANI: Yes, that is a famous quotation. But we thought that Buddhism doesn't recognise the Self. SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, perhaps it means the phenomenal self. SATYENDRA: Krishnaprem gives a different interpretation to Buddhism. He says... That agrees with my experience. SATYENDRA: In one of his letters I saw that he didn't agree with you about some idea of Buddhism. I don't remember exactly what it was. SRI AUROBINDO: What I might have said or now say about Buddhism is based on the current idea about Buddhism. Krishnaprem puts his own interpretation. NIRODBARAN: He follows the Mahayana school. SRI AUROBINDO: Mahayana is nearer ...
... forces immediately act. Q: Zen Buddhism...Isn't that also another way of distorting? A : Yes, Zen Buddhism is a limited approach to man's fulfilment. It is a solution, but a very limited solution, because Page 104 of its attitude, so far as the current Zen Buddhism is concerned; I don't know what is its origin, but current Buddhism is more or less overburdened by a sort of... scheme of things. It makes such an effect on the human being that he is turned from the purpose of self-fulfilment. If one looks at pain through a microscope it would look very big, and that is what Buddhism seems to have done. It forgets how much pleasure and delight also are there. Pain alone does not exist. These aspects which exaggerate one aspect of the whole creation can give a lop-sided... of nihilistic outlook—and also a justification of the present as the only possible thing to be attained. Q : In my experience with people who have been interested in Buddhism, it is the fact of meditation that apeals to them. In this active world it is something they have not thought of before,—serenity, and relaxation. That is one of the things that appeals. A : That is only a washback ...
... what Shankara said and it was necessary in his age that Jnana should be exalted at the expense of works; for the great living force with which he had to struggle, was not the heresies of later Buddhism—Buddhism decayed and senescent, but the triumphant doctrines of the Karmakanda which made the faithful performance of Vedic rites & ceremonies the one path and heaven the only goal. In his continual anxiety... phenomena (prapancha) there is one Truth and one only. All the Smritis, the Puranas, the Darshanas, the Dharmashastras, the writings of Shaktas, Shaivas, Vaishnavas, Sauras, as well as the whole of Buddhism and its Scriptures are merely so many explanations, comments and interpretations from different sides, of these various aspects of the one and only Truth. This Truth is the sole foundation on which... breathing out from the innumerably-peopled furnaces of pain blast & mar with unconquerable smoke of Hell the light & peace of the saints! And how strangely was the slight, but sweet and gracious shadow of Buddhism distorted in the sombre & cruel minds of those fierce Mediterranean races, when they pictured the saints as drawing added bliss from the contemplation of the eternal tortures in which those they had ...
... Maya is illusion, a deceit of the thinking consciousness, then indeed there can be no truth anywhere in the world except that indefinable Existence which we cannot comprehend and which, after all, Buddhism, not without logic and plausibility, setting it down as another & more generalised sanskara, a false sensation of consciousness in the eternal Void, denies. And yet man is so constituted that he must... from this misery & darkness into bliss and light. It is part and a great part of Kali Kalila, the chaos of the Kali. Page 79 India has always attempted, though not, since the confusion of Buddhism, with any success, if not to keep the three to their proper division of labour—which, with the general growth of ignorance became impossible—at least, always to maintain or re-establish, if disturbed... fortresses & points of departure, spreading among the half-intellectual, capturing even the intellectual—vague figures of Theosophy, Spiritualism, Mental Science, Psychical Research, Neo-Hinduism, Neo-Buddhism, Page 81 Neo-Mahomedanism, Neo-Christianity. The priests of Isis, the adepts & illuminati of Gnosticism, denied their triumph by the intervention of St Paul & the Pope, reborn into this ...
... see Appendix I: Sri Aurobindo's Teaching and Method of Practice. Ego, Self, and Being Eckhart Tolle alludes to a Zen Master who, when asked about Buddhism, summed up its essence in four words: "No self, no problems." The self, Buddhism teaches, is an illusion and the cause of all suffering. Eckhart, too, regards the illusion of self as the "core error" of the ordinary consciousness and begins... ego—is a substitute for the true self that is "rooted in Being." Though Eckhart's experience of Being is that of an impersonal Reality—as is the Buddhist concept of Non-Being—Eckhart, unlike Buddhism, speaks of the Reality as endowed with personal attributes such as Intelligence, Love, and Benevolence, and as the power that operates in the universe, and which has an impetus to manifest Itself... grows in the evolution from life to life, supporting the physical, vital, and mental nature, is the psychic being (Gr. psukhé, soul), representative of Jivatma. In Eckhart's teaching, as in Buddhism, the notion of a personal self is completely illusory; there is nothing like a true self of the individual. The "innermost I" that Eckhart speaks of is nor an individual self (Jivatma) but the ...
... believe it even Buddhi, intellect, is Jada. We in this Yoga need not accept it. The Westerners liked Buddhism for its strong rationalism. Its logic led up to Shunyam, the void: the non-being state is the aim and there is a strong note of agnosticism in Buddhism, which appeals to the Europeans. In Buddhism, the universe is something: hangs in the air, so to speak. You don't know on what basis it stands... one sense sharp and helps one to get away from bondage to Prakriti. SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, it is categorical. They believe in two realities, Purusha and Prakriti, as the final elements. Sankhya and Buddhism were first appreciated by Europe because of their sharp distinction between Purusha, who is consciousness, and Prakriti, which they believe to be Jada, inconscient. According to Sankhya, Prakriti ...
... utmost importance in the present day. Before the Bhagavadgita with its great epic commentary, the Mahabharata of Vyasa, had time deeply to influence the national mind, the heresy of Buddhism seized hold of us. Buddhism with its exaggerated emphasis on quiescence & the quiescent virtue of self-abnegation, its unwise creation of a separate class of Page 330 quiescents & illuminati, its sharp... laboured to confirm the Pandavas in their scruples. On Krishna rests the final word & his answer is such as to shock seriously the conventional ideas of a religious teacher to which Christianity & Buddhism have accustomed us. In a long & powerful speech he deals at great length with Sanjaya's arguments. We must remember therefore that he is debating a given point and speaking to men who have not like... its magnificently ordered polity and its noble social fabric. It is by clinging to a few spars from the wreck that we have managed to perpetuate our existence, and this we owe to the overthrow of Buddhism by Shankaracharya. But Hinduism has never been able to shake off the deep impress of the religion it vanquished; and therefore though it has managed to survive, it has not succeeded in recovering ...
... philosophies and religions, Buddhism and Illusionism, which held life to be an impermanence or ignorance that must be transcended and cast away, yet did not lose sight of the truth that man must develop himself under the conditions of this present ignorance or impermanence before he can attain to knowledge and to that Permanent which is the denial of temporal being. Buddhism was not solely a cloudy s... self-knowledge. Buddhism arrived at a later stage and seized on one side of these ancient teachings to make a sharp spiritual and intellectual opposition between the impermanence of life and the permanence of the Eternal which brought to a head and made a gospel of the ascetic exaggeration. But the synthetic Hindu mind struggled against this negation and finally threw out Buddhism, though not without... present in the totality of Indian culture. There has been indeed from early times in the Indian mind a certain strain, a tendency towards a lofty and austere exaggeration in the direction taken by Buddhism and Mayavada. This excess was inevitable, the human mind being what it is; it had even its necessity and value. Our mind does not arrive at the totality of truth easily and by one embracing effort; ...
... illusory self in order to get oneself free from suffering (Dukha). Thus, in both Hinduism and Buddhism, the object of spiritual practice is individual liberation. In Eckhart's teaching, as in Buddhism, the egoic self is regarded as an illusory form and as the cause of all suffering. However, unlike Buddhism, Eckhart looks upon the illusory form as a temporary manifestation of Being, the Reality concealed... from that of Hinduism and Buddhism—pertains to the aim of life and the object of spiritual practice. All the various schools of Hinduism aim at liberation (Mukti or Moksha) from the bondage of the ego and the cycle of incarnation by the realization of the true Self. Cessation of birth in the world is thus viewed in Hinduism as the ultimate culmination of yoga. In Buddhism, too, the aim of spiritual ...
... g the Celtic, Scandinavian and Slavonic idealism, mysticism, religionism, and the direct and open penetration of Buddhism, Theosophy, Vedantism, Bahaism and other Oriental influences in both Europe and America.” 15 Christ, who according to Sri Aurobindo was influenced by Buddhism and Vaishnavism, brought the experience of the soul and therefore of individual spirituality to the Hebrews, the People... from Pythagoras to Plato and the Neo-Platonists; the result was the brilliantly intellectual and unspiritual civilisation of Greece and Rome. But it prepared the way for the second attempt when Buddhism and Vaishnavism filtered through the Semitic temperament entered Europe in the form of Christianity . Christianity came within an ace of spiritualising and even asceticising the mind of Europe; it... lacking, the spiritual experience, we have to turn to the East, more especially to India, “the heart of Asia”, whose spiritual attainments have spread across the whole of Eastern Asia in the form of Buddhism, in South-East Asia in the form of Brahmanism, and in West Asia through its influence on Christianity. Few have had such a high, and well-founded, opinion of India as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother ...
... modern enough in language and simple enough in style to be popular, the Puranas. Moreover, the conception of Veda popularised by Buddhism, Page 168 a Scripture of ritual and of animal sacrifice, persisted in the popular mind even after the decline of Buddhism and the revival of great philosophies ostensibly based on Vedic authority. It was under the dominance of this ritualistic conception... ancient Scripture relegated to the inferior position it occupies in the thought of Shankaracharya? I presume there can be little doubt that the chief agent in this work of destruction was the power of Buddhism. The preachings of Gautama and his followers worked against Vedic knowledge by a double process. First, by entirely denying the authority of the Veda, laying a violent stress on its ritualistic character... and its place was taken by the only religious compositions which were modern enough in language and simple enough in style to be popular, the Puranas. Moreover, the conception of Veda popularised by Buddhism, Sanscrit as the more common & popular means of religious propaganda and by giving them a literary position and repute, it made a general return to the old generality of the Vedic studies practically ...
... Certainly the world has received it through him, in India and beyond? I am not myself drawn so strongly to Buddhism as to the completeness of the Indian vision, which is at once life-affirming and also sees life as maya and is apt to produce also asceticism and renunciation - it includes Buddhism, and is not in any case a historical religion, as I think you have pointed out. Or maybe that point... will be lit up and leave in the soul an intense revelatory aspect of the Eternal's own infinite variety. I am glad you are drawn to the Indian vision rather than to Buddhism or any other partial experience. The core of Buddhism is already there in certain utterances of the Upanishads just as the mayavada of Shankara is anticipated in some deliverances of the same scripture. Buddha and Shankara... featureless transcendent Atman-Brahman was deemed a final necessary step from a world which for all its teeming labour seemed to him incapable of lasting reformation. Knowing that in its central drive Buddhism itself in spite of its exaggerations was not alien to the Indian ethos, India has absorbed its twin movements - a grand liberation from phenomenal selfhood and a boundless compassion for creatures ...
... Vivekananda brought in the idea of service of humanity from Christianity—and also from Buddhism. Both Vivekananda and Gandhi derive it from them. But I don't understand why they speak of serving humanity only! Buddhism, as well as Jainism, includes animals also in its idea of service. Even then the chief idea in Buddhism is Karuna, compassion. The ancient sages too were less exclusive. They said, sarve... AUROBINDO: Yes, yet he had to do it for himself before he could do it for others. SATYENDRA: Tibetan Buddhists say, "Nirvana is only a stage." SRI AUROBINDO (surprised) : Is that so? PURANI: In Buddhism they have two paths: knowledge and devotion. They consider Buddha an Avatar. SRI AUROBINDO: It is the Mahayana path that goes through devotion. But isn't it a fact that all Buddhists utter: Buddham... Tibetan Lamas are believed to be in a direct line from Buddha. But to find the true Dalai Lama is not easy at all. You know about the various signs by which he has to be recognised? SATYENDRA: Is Zen Buddhism alive in Japan? SRI AUROBINDO: Oh yes. Lady Batesman is going there to study it. The Zen Buddhists have a very severe discipline. PURANI: I am told that in Lamas the meditation is very rigorous ...
... cultural traditions. Cottingham rightly points out that the problem is more fundamental. Comparing Buddhism and Islam, he points out that while according to Islam, and for that matter according to Judaism also, the ultimate reality is absolutely and unqualifiedly One Personal being, according to Buddhism, ultimate reality is not personal at all, and it even negates any appellation of oneness or plurality... account of the fact that praxis counted more than doctrine, there has been a continuous stress towards accommodation and even synthesis. When Jainism and Buddhism developed as anti-Vedic religions, the conflicts between Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism manifested sharply; but even then these three religions absorbed each other, and by this absorption, they were enriched and even in the days of sharpest... that all religions share a number of core ethical values, and as long as these core values are practiced, it does not matter whether one belongs to Christianity or to Judaism or to Hinduism or to Buddhism. This solution tends to regard Pluralism of religions to be comparable to the pluralism of the methods of cooking or to the pluralism of the forms of sport. It is, however, realized that the differences ...
... sanction, then he becomes the Bharta, the supporter of nature, then Bhokta, the one who enjoys the nature, and ultimately he is the Ishwar, the Lord of nature. (4) BUDDHISM Buddhism developed psychological systems of self- discipline whose chief aim is to free man from " suffering ". It has not the positive aim of the Upanishads and the Vedanta. It may be called a pragmatic... idea which is basic to Buddhism is that there is no substratum for the individual being; in fact, Page 129 there is no real individual, it is only a flux—a constant flow. of consciousness which gives the illusion of the persistent individual. Psychologically it worked out a system of self-control and of mental concentration which is a great contribution of Buddhism. It got entangled,... as other systems of psychological disciplines also did, into the regions of the vital being and often neglected the eightfold path for the grace of the various powers of the Buddhistic pantheon. Buddhism accepts rebirth as a necessary corollary to the doctrine of Karma which renders the temporary subject to re- actions of Karma and consequently to rebirth. In the Nirvana the ego, perhaps the ...
... David-Néel In the meantime Mirra came to be on friendly terms with an extraordinary woman, Alexandra David-Néel. She may have met her for the first time when Madame David-Néel was giving a talk on Buddhism at the Guimet Museum, a place that crops up time and again in the lives of the Westerners who played a part in the discovery of the East. ‘The Paris of the fin de siècle discovers Asia in the footsteps... many times, and, even when still a little girl, had had an unexpected contact with one of the mummies there and with certain artefacts used by Egyptian royalty. Mirra had already been practising Buddhism in the minister’s box at the opera. This time, while listening to Madame David-Néel, who was a convinced and practising Buddhist, she saw the Buddha present near the speaker, ‘not above the head but... the Bhagavad Gita, the Rig Veda, the Dhammapada and other essential texts, and discovered her vocation as an orientalist and a Buddhist. Her biographer, Jean Chalon, points out: ‘For Alexandra Buddhism was not a religion but a philosophy.’ In 1892 she travelled to Ceylon and visited Colombo, then Madurai, Benares and Darjeeling on the subcontinent. As a member of the Theosophical Society she ...
... classless primitiveness. Buddhism is in tune also with the virtues underlined by Gandhi whose personality powerfully colours the thought of our leaders - the virtues of nonviolence and humanitarian fellow-feeling. The Asoka wheel is, therefore, considered most appropriate as an emblem of the Indian consciousness. But it is blissfully forgotten that the heart and core of Buddhism is none of these aspects... conservation and utilisation of outward life-resources. The choice of that Buddhist emblem, the Asoka wheel, is in keeping with both the secular mood and the labourer-emphasis. For, in the first place, Buddhism, by its denial of either a personal-impersonal Godhead or a persistent soul and its refusal of metaphysical exploration and its insistence on a purely psychological approach to self-perfection, functions... life of mankind at large. It is also forgotten that Nirvana is so much above the head of the common man and so difficult of attainment that mankind at large can never have anything to do with it. Buddhism, in a very important sense, is as little democratic as it is secular. The Nature of the Indian Genius It is, moreover, not fully in consonance with the Indian genius. Page 34 ...
... its Karma, it does not get liberation. But isn't liberation a consummation of the result of Karma, at least according to Buddhism? Not that I know of, in the ordinary theory. Karma always produce fresh karma' it is only the cut from karma that produces liberation Buddhism seems to say that we are bound to the chain of Karma and so past Karma is always guiding our present and future. In that... one is helped to become a Bodhisattwa—just as sattwic deeds and feelings help to become less murky with the Ignorance. But it is knowledge that liberates according to both Buddhism and Vedanta, not Karma. According to Buddhism, one can't explain then the play of forces behind any action, or would it say that even that has been arranged and determined by past Karma? I suppose so. But isn't ...
... Upanishads and in some rare descriptions of the later philosophical or spiritual records, we have mostly ambiguous, confusing or misleading statements on this subject. Some later philosophies like Buddhism or Illusionism look upon the soul as a conglomeration of tendencies and Karma, which ultimately have to be extinguished. For them there is no reality of the soul-entity. Some others look upon the... in India a very powerful anti-Vedic tradition, and there are a number of philosophies which refuse to accept the authority of the Veda. The important among them are the philosophies of Jainism, Buddhism, Charvaka. It must be said, however, that the Vedic seers themselves did not regard their own experiences to be used dogmatically. The Vedas themselves are a record of experiences and they... the vital and the aesthetic nature of man and turn them into stuff of the spiritual life. But this great effort and achievement which covered all the time between the Vedic age and the decline of Buddhism, was still not the .last possibility of the spiritual and religious evolution open to Indian culture. A further development through the third stage was attempted, but it was arrested as it synchronized ...
... civilisation he mirrors than between Vyasa's and Valmiki's. He came when the daemonic orgy of character and intellect had worked itself out and ended in producing at once its culmination and reaction in Buddhism. There was everywhere noticeable a petrifying of the national temperament, visible to us in the tendency to codification; philosophy was being codified, morals were being codified, knowledge of any... now they prevailed and became supreme, occupying the best energies of the race and stamping themselves on its life and consciousness. In obedience to this impulse the centuries between the rise of Buddhism and the advent of Shankaracharya became, though not agnostic and sceptical, for they rejected violently the doctrines of Charvak, yet profoundly scientific and outward-going even in their spiritualism... and the sensitive appreciation of trees and plants and hills Page 164 as living things, the sentimental feeling of brotherhood with animals which had influenced and been encouraged by Buddhism, the romantic mythological world still farther romanticised by Kalidasa's warm humanism and fine poetic sensibility, gave him exquisite grace and grandeur of background and scenic variety. The delight ...
... Page 195 × The only religion that India has apparently rejected in the end, is Buddhism; but in fact this appearance is a historical error. Buddhism lost its separative force, because its spiritual substance, as opposed to its credal parts, was absorbed by the religious mind of Hindu India. Even so, it survived in... practice and a complete freedom of thought in religion as in every other matter have always counted among its constant traditions. The atheist and the agnostic were free from persecution in India. Buddhism and Jainism might be disparaged as unorthodox religions, but they were allowed to live freely side by side with the orthodox creeds and philosophies; in her eager thirst for truth she gave them their ...
... and religious civilisation and culture,—that, then, is the important issue. When the rationalist critic denies that India is or ever has been civilised, when he declares the Upanishads, the Vedanta, Buddhism, Hinduism, ancient Indian art and poetry a mass of barbarism, the vain production of a persistently barbaric mind, what he means is simply that civilisation is synonymous and identical with the cult... question remains open; the dispute is only narrowed to its central issue. A more moderate and perspicacious rationalistic critic would admit the past value of India's achievements. He would not condemn Buddhism and Vedanta and all Indian art and philosophy and social ideas as barbarous, but he would still contend that not there lies any future good for the human race. The true line of advance lies through... first it was a slight and superficial touch, at most an intellectual influence on a few superior minds. An academic interest or an attracted turn of scholars and thinkers towards Vedanta, Sankhya, Buddhism, admiration for the subtlety and largeness of Indian philosophic idealism, the stamp left by the Upanishads and the Gita on great intellects like Schopenhauer and Emerson and on a few lesser thinkers ...
... their shoulders; those who have progressed with the help of Buddhism do not want to leave it and they carry it on their shoulders, and so this hampers the advance and you are indefinitely delayed. Once you have passed the stage, let it drop, let it go! Go farther. Mother, the present religio-political movement for the revival of Buddhism... What? Oh! I don't take part in politics. It is altogether... Thailand, Japan and elsewhere. If you are speaking of the historical fact, I think they would all tell you that it is to the Gautama Buddha of India they pray, but in fact, each one of these branches of Buddhism, and many more, has its own conception of the Buddha, and it is the conception of a godhead which is worshipped in statues, much more than a divine being, so... If you show me a statue and ask me ...
... Scientist, my opponent from mere ideas the truth of which cannot be demonstrated by definite evidence or actual experiment. All Hindu philosophies, however, not only the Vedantic, but Sankhya and Buddhism agree in rejecting the materialistic reading of the Universe and oppose to the well-tested certainties of Science certainties as well-tested of their own. Hindu thought has its own analysis of the... subsequent in time to the ethereal; there must therefore have been a previous energy which evolved ether out of causal matter. To this original Matter Sankhya gives the name of Prakriti, while Vedanta & Buddhism, admitting the term Prakriti, prefer to call it Maya. But Prakriti is not in itself sufficient to explain the origin of the universe; another force is required which will account for the activity... Vedanta agrees and emphasizes what Sankhya briefly assumes,—that Purusha & Prakriti are themselves merely aspects, obverse and reverse sides, of a single Supreme entity or Self of Things. Buddhism, still more trenchant, does away with the reality of Purusha and Prakriti altogether and regards Cosmic Evolution as a cosmic illusion. The necessity for positing another force than Prakriti arises ...
... many-sided epic literature, beginning of art and science, and evolution of vigorous and complex society. Also there emerged Buddhism, which seemed to reject all spiritual continuity with the Vedic roots. And yet, Indian religion, after absorbing all that it could of Buddhism, preserved the full line of its own continuity casting back to the ancient Vedanta. Indeed, there was still a great change... experience there is a continuity between the Veda and the Puranas. V The great effort of the Puranas or the Purano-Tantric age covered all the time between the Vedic age and the decline of Buddhism. But this was not the last possibility of the evolution of religion in India. It appears that there is a hidden design in the development of Indian religion. It certainly aims to mediate between God ...
... Aditi, who has been described in the Veda as the Mother of the gods or the cosmic powers and beings of the Truth. Tantric philosophy and Tantric yoga have influenced both Jainism and Buddhism, and thus, the Tantric Buddhism and Tantric Jainism bear the stamp of the Vedic yoga. The Shaiva Siddhanta and various forms of Shavism Page 8 can also be understood only when we have a true grasp of... historically the yoga of Patanjali and has in recent times been expounded by Swami Vivekananda, contains the concept of kundalini and chakras, which are special features of Tantra. Tantric Buddhism and Tantric Jainism are also systems of synthesis; and various forms of Shavism and Vaishnavism, whatever their specialized differences, reflect a good deal of Tantric system and spirit of synthesis ...
... of the Upanishads. According to him, this would offer a truer fulfilment to the individual than would the paths of Buddhism, Vedic ritualism and Bhakti. In this process, however, he assimilated into his work some of the elements present in these three forms. In the case of Buddhism there is even an obvious line of continuity, both in terms of the actual experience that underlies it and the intellectual... a giant of a man — in learning and in the pursyit of truth — who stalks through the country on foot in an attempt to rejuvenate spiritual seeking and right intellectual understanding. At the time, Buddhism was still powerful and Jainism was at its zenith, Vedic rites -were falling into disrepute and a sterile ritualism, accompanied by much futile discussion, was widespread. The way of devotion to ...
... book. (Laughter) SRI AUROBINDO: You remind me of a British worker who said, "It must be true because I saw it in print." (Laughter) DR. MANILAL: In that case all Buddhism and jainism are false. NIRODBARAN: Not Buddhism! PURANI: Why false? There are records by which it could be proved that Buddha did exist whereas there is no proof of his previous births, of the existence of other Bodhisattvas... disbelieve it? SRI AUROBINDO: Disbeliefis easy. Beliefis difficult. But it does not matter at all whether Buddha and other Bodhisattvas existed. The thing is whether what has been said as regards Buddhism can be verified by experience. That is the important thing. PURANI: They usually regard four things as possible proof of a fact — Shruti, Anumana, Anubhava, Aptavakya. DR. MANILAL: Aptavakya ...
... and space, in no place and no being however luminous he may be; for Truth is infinite, forever marching onward. But man always takes upon himself an endless burden , said the Mother in a talk about Buddhism. He refuses to let go of anything from his past, and so he stoops more and more beneath the weight of a useless accumulation. Have a guide for part of the way, but once you have travelled that part... them, they cling to it; they won't let go of it. Those who have made some progress with Christianity do not want to give it up, and carry it on their backs; those who have made some progress with Buddhism do not want to leave it, and carry it on their backs. This weighs you down and slows you terribly. Once you have passed through a stage, drop it; let it go! And move on! Yes, there is an eternal... × 17 Shankara (788-820 A.D.), mystic and poet, theorist of Mayavada or the doctrine of illusionism, which supplanted Buddhism in India. × 18 The Problem of Rebirth, 16:241 ...
... immense. But it has also profoundly [affected] the thought of the West in many of the most critical stages of [its] development; at first through Pythagoras and other Greek philosophers, then through Buddhism working into Essene, Gnostic and Roman Christianity and once again in our own times through German metaphysics, Theosophy, and a hundred strange and irregular channels. One can open few books now... identity is very strong in religions based largely on the sentiment of Love and Faith. I and my Father are One, cried the Founder of Christianity; I and my brother man & my brother beast are One, says Buddhism; St Francis spoke of Air as his brother and Water as his sister; and the Hindu devotee when he sees a bullock lashed falls down in pain with the mark of the whip on his own body. But the feeling of... the unreality of non-sentience will become clear when the nature of sentience is better understood. It will be said that the escape from pleasure as well as pain is after all the common goal of Buddhism & Vedanta. True, escape from limited pleasure which involves pain, escape from pain which is nothing but the limitation of pleasure. Both really seek absolute absence of limitation which is not a ...
... its factors, may & must coexist, but not a thing which is at once one and many. Therefore Logic sets to work to get rid of one or both of the two irreconcilable, yet strangely reconciled opposites. Buddhism dismisses the Many as phenomena of sensation, the One as an ideative illusion of sensation; it gets rid of the unity in sum as a mere combination of sensational factors in the figure of the chariot... originally, Buddha seems to have turned aside from the problem and declared to his disciples, Seek not to know, for to know, even if it be possible, helps not at all & leads to no useful result. Buddhism was satisfied with having got rid of the original, actual & pressing contradiction in this world here & now which it had set out to destroy. Adwaita asserts the One on the ground of ultimate experience;... assert its rights & liberties; but it has died, as the patients of Molière's doctors had the felicity of dying, according to the rules of the science; therefore it is satisfied. It is not, however, Buddhism & Adwaita alone, but every logical philosophy that arrives at a similar result; we find always that when we would explain existence in an ultimate term which shall be subject to logic, we fail; we ...
... terrestrial interests and insists on the unimportance of the life of the moment. To read these European comments one would imagine that in all Indian thought there was nothing but the nihilistic school of Buddhism and the monistic illusionism of Shankara and that all Indian art, literature and social thinking were nothing but the statement of their recoil from the falsehood and vanity of things. It does not... The ancient Aryan culture recognised all human possibilities, but put this highest of all and graded life according to a transitional scale in its system of the four classes and the four orders. Buddhism first gave an exaggerated and enormous extension to the ascetic ideal and the monastic impulse, erased the transition and upset the balance. Its victorious system left only two orders, the householder... which we find it fiercely attacked in the Vishnu Purana under the veil of an apologue, for it weakened in the end the life of society by its tense exaggeration and its hard system of opposites. But Buddhism too had another side, a side turned towards action and creation and gave a new light, a new meaning and a new moral and ideal power to life. Afterwards there came the lofty illusionism of Shankara ...
... paragraphs were done, I stumbled upon another book of his: The Indian Spirit and the World's Future (1953). In the year 1950 he had felt cut to the quick by a well-known Indian leader embracing Buddhism, while heaping scorn and castigation on Hinduism. He wrote a profound and courageous "A Defence of Hinduism", which is included in this volume. It seems Hinduism had not yet become a word of abuse... (f) 'Without the least violation of its own character it [Hinduism] can take the essence of the religion of Buddha to its bosom, even as it can take that of Christianity or Mohammedanism.... But neither Buddhism nor Christianity nor Mohammedanism can take Hinduism into itself. They are intent on converting all souls to one type and to confine the illimitable and protean Spirit to a single formula and a solitary... In this heyday of 'human rights', when others exercise their right at will to exploit or convert or strike, Hindus alone have no right to defend themselves! Splendid! That Hinduism, unlike Buddhism or Christianity or Mohammedanism, has respectfully given rightful place to all of them is concretely proved if one visits a Sri Ramakrishna Temple. The main prayer hall always displays pictures of ...
... aware. Though I was still interested in Christianity, after having gone through a period of agnosticism, and contemplated entering a Christian seminary and monastery, I was slowly drawn to Zen Buddhism through the person of Suzuki Roshi, a Zen master in San Francisco. For the first time, I had come into contact with someone who was truly different, who lived what he taught and appeared to manifest... controversies were going on that were not helpful to inner progress. Summing it up, this whole life has been an exposure to different religious orientations and spiritual paths. I was born into Buddhism, baptized into Christianity, initiated in Hindu Tantra, instructed in Sufism, and guided through all these experiences by the Supreme Shakti we call the Mother. What I have learned from all these... spiritual realization which can be a more solid basis for Sri Aurobindo’s yoga of transformation. In short, all these spiritual paths have helped me to understand Sri Aurobindo’s yoga in greater depth. Buddhism leads to the silent mind, Christianity to devotion, Islamic Sufism to the science of the heart and Hindu Tantra to the effective manifestation of the Divine’s Will upon the earth, i.e. the Shakti ...
... interested me very, very much and I decided to write to her.’ But he got no answer, not even to a second letter. In the following four years he got involved in ‘many experiences, the study of Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, life in the temples and, at night in my home, the continuation of my studies of Indian, Japanese and Chinese spirituality.’ He went through ‘alternations of light and darkness, of advance... been employed as an engineer with the Ministry of Transport and Communications — ‘I had a whole section of the Seine, mostly in Paris, under my direction’ — he left for Japan in 1920 to study Zen Buddhism. ‘I knew — yes, I knew, for it was a certainty to me — that my life would be a life of spiritual realization, that nothing else counted for me, and that somewhere on earth, and I mean effectively ...
... partly patronised both the Buddhist and the Jain faiths. Perhaps we should give up the role popularly ascribed to Shankara as one who effectively uprooted Buddhism from India. It seems more true to hold that the tide of Muslim invasion submerged Buddhism. Such an opinion would untie our hands a good deal and what would be ruled out is the earliest date mentioned by some traditional-minded Indian scholars... hundred years within which or after which to place Kumarila Bhatta and hence Shankara. On this view the frequent contention that Shankara who is said to have brought about the decline of Buddhism could not have come after the reign of Chandragupta II which historians acclaim as "the Golden Age of Hinduism" cannot stand. Besides, the Imperial Guptas, true to the typically tolerant spirit of ...
... light.’ 47 The Richards had left Japan a few months before Saint-Hilaire’s arrival. In the following four years he ran a laboratory and was involved in ‘many experiences, the study of Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, life in the temples and, at night in my home, the continuation of my studies in Indian, Japanese and Chinese spirituality.’ In 1924 Saint-Hilaire travelled to Mongolia in the company... education and the Cartesian intellectual environment in France. After the war he was employed as an engineer with the Ministry of Transport and Communications, but in 1920 he left for Japan to study Zen Buddhism. ‘I knew … yes, I knew , for it was a certainty to me – that my life would be a life of spiritual realization, that nothing else counted for me, and that somewhere on Earth, and I mean effectively ...
... come to do. In the age that Shankara lived in, it was right that Jnana should be exalted at the expense of works. The great living force with which he had to deal, was not the heresies of later Buddhism, Buddhism decayed and senescent, but the triumphant Karmakanda which made the faithful performance of Vedic ceremonies the one path and heaven the highest goal. In his continual anxiety to prove that these... teachers, for a deep and vexed problem which has troubled the Hindu consciousness from ancient times. There are, as we know, three means of salvation; salvation by knowledge, the central position in Buddhism; salvation by faith & love, the central position in Christianity; salvation by faith & works, the central position in Mahomedanism. In Hinduism, the Sanatandharma, all these three paths are equally ...
... disintegrate its enduring composition. It is at once infinitely yielding & plastic and infinitely persistent in its general character. It casts essential Buddhism out of India and replaces it by a huge phantasmagorical complex Hinduised Buddhism; it constantly purges mysticism out of Europe and replaces essential Christianity with its sublimely tender and delicate Oriental psychology by a strenuous... obscure or at any rate so imperfectly understood have exercised over the thought of millenniums the vast and pervasive influence of which we know, so pervasive that all positive Indian thought, even Buddhism, can be described as Vedic in origin and shaping spirit when not Vedic or even when anti-Vedic in its garb and formed character? Thought has other means of survival and reproduction than its ordinary ...
... taints. The yellow robe is taken as the symbol of consecration to the spiritual life, the external sign of renunciation of all that is not an exclusive concentration upon the spiritual life. What Buddhism means by "impurities" is chiefly egoism and ignorance; because, from the Buddhist standpoint, the greatest of all taints is ignorance, not ignorance of external things, of the laws of Nature and of... other. "I have done good": the thought rejoices him and his happiness increases more and more as he follows the way that leads to the celestial world. It would almost seem from these texts that Buddhism accepts the idea of a hell and a heaven; but that is quite a superficial way of understanding; for, in a deeper sense, this was not the thought of the Buddha. The idea on which he always insisted... zealous Buddhists tell you that ordinary religions captivate you by enticing you with the glittering advantages that you will find after death in their Paradise, if you practise their principles. Buddhism, on the other hand, has neither hell nor heaven. It does not terrify you with eternal punishment nor does it tempt you with celestial felicities. It is in the pure Truth that you will find your ...
... Besides providing a picture, partly precise partly ambiguous, of the military, political and social state of the country, it sketches the various religious practices. It has no noticeable pointer to Buddhism but records, among other things, that the worship of Heracles (the Greek for "Hari-Krishna") which is the cult of Vāsudeva-Krishna (Vaishnavism, Bhagavatism) was in full swing at Mathurā among the... Samudragupta in later Gupta inscriptions, Sarvarājochchhettā, "Mower of all Kings). Samudragupta, though a Vaishnavite, was a great patron of Art, Literature and Philosophy in general and encouraged Buddhism, so that it revived from the slump into which it seems to have fallen before and during the time of his father Chandragupta I. 280 B.C. The probable time of the final recension of the Bhagavad... reign-period - 308-268 B.C. - give grounds for the belief that he was formally consecrated on his throne by Aśoka, whose reign started one year before Devānampiyatissa's ended and whose conversion to Buddhism and possible despatch of a Buddhist mission to Ceylon could not have preceded the conscience-searing Kalihga war in the 8th year of his reign. The Allāhābād Pillar Inscription's expression ...
... felt she was going to be converted. When she saw me, when she was sitting in front of me, she would feel she was going to be converted. And she didn't want that. She wanted to keep her Buddhism, her nihilistic Buddhism, materially expressed as Communism. When I said goodbye to her, she had magnificent eyes. She looked at me... luminous eyes, with such force, such beauty. She knew she wouldn't... But it's HER THOUGHT that is like that. And very insistent, very insistent—again and again.... So what happened? At first, because I hadn't seen her [after her death], I thought it was her old Buddhism and she had gone into some Nirvana. But then, her thought constantly coming like this: "And what happens when one leaves one's body?" That's the strange thing. And it's Page 310 SHE who's ...
... not the Will of the Divine and the Decree of the Time-Spirit. He had been commissioned to salvage the absolute reality of the Brahman out of the nebulous uncertainty and studied imprecision in which Buddhism had sunk it. He 120. Akṣar ā t sambhavati vi ś vam — The universe is born of the Akshara, the Immutable Absolute. Page 251 did a great service to Hinduism, and the greatness... East alone can save mankind. Through all these ages Asia has been seeking for a light within, and when- ever she has been blessed with a glimpse of what she seeks, a great religion has been born, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Mahomedanism, with all their countless sects. But the grand workshop of spiritual experiment, the Page 262 labo ratory of the soul has been India... politics or society, so in individual life, this effort continues from age to age. Self-control, self-repression, renunciation of pleasure and pain, Stoicism, Epicureanism, asceticism, Vedanta, Buddhism, Monism, Mayavada, Rajayoga, Hathayoga, the Gita, the paths of knowledge, devotion and work - these are different ways to the same goal. The aim is the conquest of the body, the shaking off of ...
... asceticism advocated and preached by some of the schools of Vedanta, Buddhism and Jainism. It exerts a positively discouraging and withering effect on life in the world. The second attitude of qualified rejection is of a much wider applicability. The Vedanta as interpreted by Shankara, the catholic forms of Mahayana Buddhism, Jainism and Christianity accept action as a preliminary means of ... development, will either lie supinely dormant or chafe in resentful repression—they can never be transformed and divinely dynamic. It was the renunciation of action under the fateful spell of Buddhism and illusionistic Vedantism that atrophied the veins and arteries of the Indian society and caused its eventual decay and subjection to foreign domination. A religion or spirituality that disdains ...
... also because, in Muhammad Iqbal (and his Asrar-i-Khudi or 'The Secrets of the Self), "Islam found its own Aurobindo". As for Buddhism, it represents "the same kind of spirituality as Sankara's Vedanta; it is not primarily interested in this world". There is Zen Buddhism, of course, but "Zen is cosmic consciousness; and would be duly gathered into the integral and * This and the following... "greater Man" or Superman and unite all in the mystic body of "Cosmic Christ" or Sachchidananda. One final question: How about the other great religions of our time? Islam, for example, and Buddhism; and also - how about Marxism, which is as good as a religion for millions? In the course of three lectures on 'Evolution and the Modern World' given at St. Stephen's College, Delhi, in 1970, Professor ...
... this one marvellous inheritance of ours, the Vedanta. Nor is it only to Hindu streams that this great source has given of its life-giving waters. Buddhism, the teacher of one third of humanity, drank from its inspiration. Christianity, the offspring of Buddhism, derived its ethics and esoteric teaching at second-hand from the same source. Through Persia Vedanta put its stamp on Judaism, through Judaism ...
... any kind of existence and action in the world as incompatible and we might be inclined to argue that the use of the word is by itself sufficient and decides the question. But if we look closely at Buddhism, we shall doubt whether the absolute incompatibility really existed even for the Buddhists; and if we look closely at the Gita, we shall see that it does not form part of this supreme Vedantic teaching... he is the friend of all existences, therefore is the sage who has found Nirvana within him and all around, still and always occupied with the good of all creatures,—even as the Nirvana of Mahayana Buddhism took for its highest sign the works of a universal compassion. Therefore too, even when he has found oneness with the Divine in his timeless and immutable self, is he still capable, since he embraces ...
... religious spirit. The great ages of Asia, the strong culminations of her civilisation and culture,—in India the high Vedic beginning, the grand spiritual stir of the Upanishads, the wide flood of Buddhism, Vedanta, Sankhya, the Puranic and Tantric religions, the flowering of Vaishnavism and Shaivism in the southern kingdoms—have come in on a surge of spiritual light and a massive or intense climbing... long-suffering, self-sacrifice, harmlessness, forgiveness, compassion, benevolence, beneficence are its common themes, are in its view the very stuff of a right human life, the essence of man's dharma. Buddhism with its high and noble ethics, Jainism with its austere ideal of self-conquest, Hinduism with its magnificent examples of all sides of the Dharma are not inferior in ethical teaching and practice ...
... people and kept its soul alive through the long procession of the centuries, constantly returned to for light, never failing to give fresh illumination, a fountain of inexhaustible life-giving waters. Buddhism with all its developments was only a restatement, although from a new standpoint and with fresh terms of intellectual definition and reasoning, of one side of its experience and it carried it thus... to us by approach to and oneness with the self-existent and universal spirit. And though mainly concerned with an inner vision and not directly with outward human action, all the highest ethics of Buddhism and later Hinduism are still emergences of the very life and significance of the truths to which they give expressive form and force,—and there is something greater than any ethical precept and mental ...
... in the world accepting the truth of our Yoga of Transformation would not be as large as those who accepted Buddhism, Vedanta or Christianity." Here is Sri Aurobindo's answer. Notice his humour. I draw your attention to his humour. "Nothing depends on the number. The numbers of Buddhism or Christianity were so great because the majority professed it as a creed without its making the least difference ...
... Veda, unlike modern or post-Buddhistic Hinduism which is oppressed with Buddha's sense of universal sorrow and Shankara's sense of universal illusion,— Shankara who was the better able to destroy Buddhism because he was himself half a Buddhist. Ancient Hinduism aimed socially at our fulfilment in God in life, modern Hinduism at the escape from life to God. The more modern ideal is fruitful of a noble... helped mankind. Paganism increased in man the light of beauty, the largeness and height of his life, his aim at a many-sided perfection; Christianity gave him some vision of divine love and charity; Buddhism has shown him a noble way to be wiser, gentler, purer; Judaism and Islam how to be religiously faithful in action and zealously devoted to God; Hinduism has opened to him the largest and profoundest ...
... supracosmic Absolute. The thing to be overcome is the Ignorance which makes us blind and prevents us from realising Brahman in the world as well as beyond it and the true nature of existence. Shankara, Buddhism, Evolution I don't know that I can help you very much with an answer to your friend's questions. I can only state my own position with regard to these matters. 1) Shankara's explanation of the... energy; it is that pure condition into which compounds including what we call elements must go when they pass by disintegration into Nirvana. 5) Nirvana. What then is Nirvana? In orthodox Buddhism it does mean a disintegration, not of the soul—for that does not exist—but of a mental compound or stream of associations or saṁskāras which we mistake for ourself. In illusionist Vedanta it means ...
... Chandragupta I be brought into relation with Jainism, how would his dynasty belong to the spiritual lineage of Vardhamana - that is, Mahāvīra? No doubt, the Guptas patronized Jainism no less than Buddhism but they were, 1."Aśoka the Great", The Age of Imperial Unity, p. 89. 2. The Political History of Ancient India, 5th Edition (Calcutta University, 1950), p. 376. The author's footnote... scrutinizing the foreign sources for matter on Indian history, writes: "...by far the most important and interesting of all foreign witnesses are the numerous Chinese pilgrims who visited the Holy Land of Buddhism, between A.D. 400 and 700. Fa-hsian [or Fa-hien], the earliest of them (A.D. 399-414), gives life to the bald chronicle of Chandragupta Vikramāditya, as constructed from inscriptions and coins." ...
... the East alone can save mankind. Through all these ages Asia has been seeking for a light within, and whenever she has been blessed with a glimpse of what she seeks a great religion has been born, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Mahomedanism with all their countless sects. But the grand workshop of spiritual experiment, the laboratory of the soul has been India, where thousands of great spirits... lifted for a while into communion with God and spirituality become the dominant note of human life. What Christianity failed to do, what Mahomedanism strove to accomplish in times as yet unripe, what Buddhism half-accomplished for a brief period and among a limited number of men, Hinduism as summed up in the life of Sri Ramakrishna has to attempt for all the world. This is the reason of India's resurgence ...
... Plato and the Neo-Platonists; the result was Page 141 the brilliantly intellectual and unspiritual civilisation of Greece and Rome. But it prepared the way for the second attempt when Buddhism and Vaishnavism filtered through the Semitic temperament entered Europe in the form of Christianity. Christianity came within an ace of spiritualising and even of asceticising the mind of Europe;... the veil of German metaphysics, more latterly by its subtle influence in reawakening the Celtic, Scandinavian and Slavonic idealism, mysticism, religionism, and the direct and open penetration of Buddhism, Theosophy, Vedantism, Bahaism and other Oriental influences in both Europe and America. On the other hand, there have been two reactions of Europe upon Asia; first, the invasion of Alexander with ...
... unchanged against the attack of Time. Buddhism has come and gone and the Hindu still professes to belong to the Vedic religion held and practised by his Aryan forefathers; he calls his creed the Aryan dharma, Page 135 the eternal religion. It is only when we look close that we see the magnitude of the illusion. Buddha has gone out of India indeed, but Buddhism remains; it has stamped its giant ...
... whole part of the atmosphere that pulls you out of life—Buddhism and all those things, the whole nihilism. It puts you in contact with that: the flight out of life. And it's not intellectual, it's not the ideas, not the words, not the facts, it's... What is it? I wondered a few times what made the book catch on to the nihilist atmosphere of Buddhism? That's what would explain... It's not that people don't ...
... , after Buddha's descendants: it isn't what Buddha himself is said to have preached. There is a controversy here. Of course, Alexandra belonged to the Buddhism of the South, which is very rigid and absolutely rejects all the fancies of the Buddhism of the North with its innumerable bodhisattvas and all the stories (they've got so many stories! pulp novels). And she rejected all that, saying it wasn't ...
... myths telling in most cases about a coincidence or accident that caused us to get lost here, but none of those tales offers a convincing rationale. The reasons for escape from life as systematised by Buddhism, for instance, or by Advaitic Illusionism are much more convincing. In fact these religions, with India as their centre of propagation, have convinced and converted whole peoples. Sri Aurobindo... in the world that is a misery. There is no other falsity and no other cause of sorrow.” 10 This is the reason why an important part of The Life Divine is actually an argumentation against Buddhism and Advaitic Illusionism. They are, according to Sri Aurobindo, responsible for India’s deterioration because of their exclusive concentration on “the other world”. He esteemed Gautama the Buddha ...
... left of his superhuman effort except the presence of some followers in a corner of what is now the Indian state of Bihar. The subsequent development of Buddhism and its branching out in many variations and directions is impressive. In its heyday, Buddhism in one form or other covered most of the Asian continent and became the faith and the way of life of millions of people; it simultaneously created a ...
... senses, the vital and the aesthetic nature of man and turn them into stuff of the spiritual life. But this great effort and achievement covered all the time between the Vedic age and the decline of Buddhism. Vaishnavism and Shaivism flourished during this period, and although there were during this period conflicts of religions and claims of superiority of one system of religion or Yoga over other systems... systems, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Purva Mimamsa and Uttara Mimamsa and their numerous interpretations arid commentaries. These six systems are Vedic systems of philosophy. There developed also Buddhism and Jainism and their numerous philosophical systems which did not accept the authority of the Vedas. Similarly, Carvaka philosophy, the philosophy of materialism, which also developed during this ...
... the entire land from the Northern Himalayas to the Southern Indian Ocean, created one common culture. The second period covers a long period, roughly, from 600 B.C. to 800 A.D., during which Buddhism arose, and, while the old still continued to live and even develop, new elements came to occupy the Indian experimentation. Great experiments were conducted in democracy and democratic monarchy, and... kingdom of India under the leadership of Chandragupta Maurya and his teacher and prime minister, Chanakya, came to be built up under the shock of the invasion of Alexander, the Great. Hinduism and Buddhism clashed and clasped each other, resulting in confusion and yet enrichment, impelling wider understanding and mutual assimilation. There came about hardening of certain institutions coupled with opulence ...
... before his crucifixion? 10. Christ is one of the three Avatars mentioned by Sri Aurobindo, the other two being Krishna and Buddha. 11. Strange! Buddha was born in India but Buddhism almost disappeared from India. 12. Buddhism is the first established religion with a founder of its own while Sikhism is the latest; etc. And five minutes are over. And the Mother retires. The novice sadhaka' s ...
... significant quotation in his book, Buddhism, which indicates the succession of steps through which a budding thought in the mind of a man passes, in order to finally shape the destiny of the doer: "Sow a thought, reap an act; Sow an act, reap a habit; Sow a habit, reap a character; Sow a character, reap a destiny. (Christmas Humphreys, Buddhism, p. 106) An important ...
... historic connection with India from the very earliest times and was bound to it by the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism. Similarly, Burma (now called Myanmar) was first united into a single kingdom in 1044 under the ruler Anawrahta, who made it the centre of Theravada Buddhism. In the 19th century the country came under British control. The British took Tenasserim and Arakan in 1826, ...
... is transformed into it. (The subject from this point underwent a change) Disciple : A manuscript is said to have been found in Tibet which says that Christ came to India and learnt Buddhism then went back to Jerusalem and preached his gospel. Page 208 Sri Aurobindo : It is a very old story. I believe it was a Russian who invented it. I heard it when I came back from... more real way than the physical. It is very difficult to separate what the founder stood for and what has been added on to his name afterwards. For instance, very little of what is now known as Buddhism was taught by Buddha. Take the doctrine of karma – compassion. It was brought in by the teachers of the Mahayana school. Disciple : According to popular belief among the Jains Krishna is now ...
... After all that ground gained, one can add more and more. The European mind is much taken up with Buddhism. Magre was first a Buddhist. Blavatsky was much influenced by it. Next, when the Europeans understood Shankara they considered that there was nothing more in India than Shankara's Vedanta. Buddhism is most severe and exacting. It is one of the most difficult paths, a path of hard Tapasya. N ...
... according to that feeling. But what I want to know is whether Jainism accepts any intermediary such as a Guru who helps a disciple in the spiritual path. There are religions like Buddhism who don't believe in such things. Buddhism strongly says that one has to rely on one's own effort. Nobody can help one. By the teachings or precepts or instructions, the path can be shown - that's all—but no other direct ...
... been written late. Disciple : Buddha was born about 500 B. C. Sri Aurobindo : It is not so early as that; all the puranas are posterior to Buddhism. They are a part of the Brahminical revival which came as a reaction against Buddhism in the Gupta period. Disciple : The Puranas are even the earliest, supposed to have been written about the 3rd or the 4th century A. D. Sri ...
... : But in that case again there may be another Chauri Chora ! Disciple : He also spoke at Bombay on the Anniversary of Gautama Buddha and said Buddhism was not given sufficient trial. Sri Aurobindo : Christianity and Buddhism, I am afraid, will ever remain without being given a trial. They make such a demand on human nature that it cannot be fulfilled so long as man is what he ...
... of pain in the scheme of things. Yesterday, I pointed out how the slightly exaggerated view of the place of pain in the scheme of human life brought about a lopsided view of life and its remedy in Buddhism. In this chapter, we might be able to put pain in its proper place in the economy of the universe; and also the possibility, not of avoiding pain, but if possible, of transforming it. Buddha thought... it is manifestation. Now, any withdrawal would be only a negative solution. In that way Buddha also gave a sort of solution, which is a half solution and couldn't be applied to life. That is why Buddhism had to go out of India. It is possible to give a partial solution and say "withdraw." If you withdraw you can get only a temporary solution. You cannot get a radical solution at all by withdrawal ...
... than intellectual faculties can the truths of a supra-human or suprasensuous order, if at all they exist, be really known. Religion, Page 555 except in ethical & rationalistic creeds like Buddhism and Confucianism which have put aside all such questionings as outside the human domain, has always insisted that revelation is the indispensable angel and intermediary and the intellect at best only... also is admitted in certain fields of the argument; but men have different experiences, even different ultimate experiences. Adwaita asserts the pure self as an ultimate experience of consciousness; Buddhism denies it, holds it to be an illusion and goes beyond to the experience of Page 557 psychological Nothingness. Yet again, logical argument is called in to decide the question. Therefore ...
... complement each other and still leave unformulated the essence of what our soul, founded on the One, knows and is—of what we in truth are. The imaginary character of this world which brought forth Buddhism at the same time as it declared the Void alone to be real; the impregnation of the universe by Tao; the one God apparently distinct from his creation of Judaism and later religions—Christianity and... enlightened person only succeeds in fixing the idea of the eternal Present, or of the both supra- and omni temporal dimension, compared with which the dimension in which we live becomes unreal, as in the Buddhism and Mayavada of India, or is looked on as a poor relative. And thus, as we have already mentioned, even when those who were inspired—in whom the highest faculties of the entire human species were ...
... been chosen by the Infinite." 57 Some aspects of practice taught by Eckhart, such as attention to the present moment, may give the impression that it is akin to the practice as taught in Buddhism, which is preeminently a path of self-effort. Thus Eckhart narrates the story of a disciple who asks the Master, "Can you please write down something for me so that I can remember what Zen is all... cannot understand attention with the mind, says Eckhart, because it pertains to a state of consciousness that is beyond mind. Attention spoken of by him does not depend on personal effort as it does in Buddhism, but on the arising of Presence. Attention as viewed by Eckhart is deeper in another way than attention as ordinarily understood. He says that doing one thing at a time, which is how one Zen ...
... such as the pure Adwaitin and the Buddhist which say that you must rely upon yourself and no one can help you; but even the pure Adwaitin does in fact rely upon the Guru and the chief mantra of Buddhism insists on saranam to Buddha. For other paths of sadhana, especially those which, like the Gita, accept the reality of the individual soul as an “eternal portion “ of the Divine or which believe... into which compounds including what we call elements must go when they pass by disintegration into Nirvana. Page 1`72 5. Nirvana What then is Nirvana? In orthodox Buddhism it does mean a disintegration, not of the soul – for that does not exist – but of a mental compound or stream of associations or samskaras which we mistake for ourself. In illusionist Vedanta ...
... reason why the passage about Buddhism should be omitted. It gives one side of the Buddhistic teaching which is not much known or is usually ignored, for that teaching is by most rendered as Nirvana ( sunyavada [nihilism]) and a spiritualised humanitairianism. The difficulty is that it is these sides that have been stressed especially in the modern interpretations of Buddhism and any strictures I may have ...
... Allah's own followers. Though they have rightly felt a great vital force released by their Prophet, their goal is still the life beyond just as in Christianity and Zoroastrianism, Judaism and Buddhism, except that Buddhism for all its emphasis on a supra-cosmic Nirvana as the summum bonum has the doctrine of reincarnation which implies a sustained interest in earth-life rather than a looking forward to ...
... form and force, but with a wider, more variable and subtler action of both upon each other and another history than it had at first seen to be possible. It might even arrive at a sort of vitalistic Buddhism, admitting Karma, but admitting it only as the action of a universal Life-force; it would admit as one of its results the continuity of the stream of personality in rebirth by mental association,... but not inevitable; it might be a phenomenal fact, an actual law of life, but it would not be a logical result of the theory of being and its inevitable consequence. Adwaita of the Mayavada, like Buddhism, started with the already accepted belief—part of the received stock of an antique knowledge—of supraphysical planes and worlds and a commerce between them and ours which determined a passage from ...
... synthesis was established, leaning finally towards asceticism and renunciation, and maintained itself until it was in its turn displaced and disorganised by the exaggeration of its own tendencies in Buddhism. The sacrifice, the symbolic ritual became more and more a useless survival and even an encumbrance; yet, as so often happens, by the very fact of becoming mechanical and ineffective the importance... inner sense to new generations whose whole manner of thought was different from that of the Vedic forefathers. The Ages of Intuition were passing away into the first dawn of the Age of Reason. Buddhism completed the revolution and left of the externalities of the ancient world only some venerable pomps and some mechanical usages. It sought to abolish the Vedic sacrifice and to bring into use the ...
... universal effect of Buddhism and Christianity has been the force of their ethical, social and practical ideals and their influence even on the men and the ages which have rejected their religious and spiritual beliefs, forms and disciplines; later Hinduism which rejected Buddha, his saṅgha , and his dharma , bears the ineffaceable imprint of the social and ethical influence of Buddhism and its effect ...
... and the animal in us which we have still failed to transform or outgrow. We should be inclined to wonder how these fancies of children found their way into such profound philosophical religions as Buddhism and Hinduism, if it were not so patent that men will not deny themselves the luxury of tacking on the rubbish from their past to the deeper thoughts of their sages. No doubt, since these ideas... Ethics? then ethics of the mud, muddy. The true foundation of the theory of rebirth is the evolution of the soul, or rather its efflorescence out of the veil of Matter and its gradual self-finding. Buddhism contained this truth involved in its theory of Karma and emergence out of Karma but failed to bring it to light; Hinduism knew it of old, but afterwards missed the right balance of its expression ...
... to know only Illusionism and Buddhism and to accept them as the whole wisdom of Asia ( sagesse asiatique ); but even there he misinterprets their idea and their experience. Adwaita even in its extreme form does not aim at the extinction of existence, the adoption of nothingness, the end of the being and destruction of the essence. Only a certain kind of Nihilistic Buddhism aims at that and even so that ...
... given time, but precisely the one that the new truth wants to go beyond. To give but one example of those sad "spiritual diversions" which clutter History, Buddhism was largely corrupted in a sizable part of Asia by a whole Tantric and magic Buddhism. The falsity lies not in the old spirituality which the new truth seeks to go beyond, but in the eternal fact that the Past clings to its powers, its means ...
... 1966), I Thiruvenkatacharya, V., Astronomical Paper quoted in Pandit Kota Venkatachalam's Chronology of Kāshmir Reconsidered Thomas, E. J., "Aśoka, the Imperial Patron of Buddhism", The Cambridge History of India, edited by E.J. Rapson, 1922, I Thomas, F. W., "Chandragupta, the Founder of the Maurya Empire", "Political and Social Organisation of the Maurya... Buddha, iii, 48, 69, 96, 205, 241, 242, 254, 311, 360, 367-9, 508, 509, 543, 544, 545, 591, 592; date of his nirvāna, 33-6, 227, 231, 360, 590; tooth-relic, 41, 370-71 'Buddha-head', 238 Buddhism and Buddhists, 240, 241, 242, 361, 395, 402-9 Buddhist Councils, 242 Buddhist Kingdoms, 379 Budhagupta, 404, 431, 494, 508, 512 Buhler, G„ 265, 270, 329, 586, 587 Bussagli, 445 ...
... civilisation he mirrors than between Vyasa's and Valmiki's. He came when the daemonic orgy of character and intellect had worked itself out and ended in producing at once its culmination and reaction in Buddhism. There was everywhere noticeable a petrifying of the national temperament, visible to us in the tendency to codification; philosophy was being codified, morals were being codified, knowledge of any... now they prevailed and became supreme, occupying the best energies of the race and stamping themselves on its life and consciousness. In obedience to this impulse the centuries between the rise of Buddhism and the advent of Shankaracharya became — though not agnostic and skeptical, for they rejected violently the doctrines of Charvak — yet profoundly scientific and outward-going even in their spiritualism ...
... been very late. PURANI: Buddha was born 550 B.C. SRI AUROBINDO: This Purana is not so early as that. All the Puranas in fact are posterior to Buddhism. They are a part of the Bramanical revival which came in the Gupta period as a reaction to Buddhism. PURANI: They are supposed to have been written about the third or fourth century A. D. SRI AUROBINDO: Probably. In the Vishnu Purana Buddha ...
... read Krishnaprem's review of The Life Divine?. NIRODBARAN: Yes. SRI AUROBINDO: How do you find it? (Nirodbaran gave a laugh.) SATYENDRA: He says that the two denials are the same as in Buddhism— their avoidance points to the middle path. PURANI: And Mahayana's equation of Nirvana and Samsara also is the same teaching as in The Life Divine —about the acceptance of life. SRI AUROBINDO:... of the acceptance of life. The Hinayana school does not. SATYENDRA: Everybody finds things in The Life Divine according to their own predilection. Somebody found Tantra and Krishnaprem finds Buddhism. SRI AUROBINDO: Especially as he is in a Buddhistic phase now. NIRODBARAN: Sisir says that the reviewers should give quotations from the writers. That is the modern trend now. SRI AUROBINDO: ...
... anything but evil; (b)a final deliverance from all bodily life, present and to come, is the greatest of all blessings, the highest of all boons and the loftiest of all aims (Monier Williams, Buddhism). Indeed, 'the body is the sphere of suffering'; it is also 'the origin of suffering' (Milinda-pañha). Suffering, subjectively, is desire, tanhā; objectively, suffering lies in embodiment... body (Sutta Nipāta). There is no pain like the body (Dhammapada). A complete release from suffering is possible only by emancipation from body and matter; hence, the summum bonum of Buddhism and the constant endeavour and ultimate hope of the Buddhist is the absolute escape from corporeal existence. (ii) In Jaina tradition 1 : The suffering individual, for the Jaina, is a ...
... Harappa Page 195 (iii) Upanishad; Ramayana and Mahabharata (iv) Vasistha, Vishwamtira, Lopamudra, Yajnavalkya, Maitreyi Part II (i) Buddha and Mahavira (ii) Buddhism and Jainism (iii) Invasion of Alexander the Great (iv) Chandragupta Maurya (v) Ashoka III (i) Kushans and Kanishka (ii) Chandragupta, Samundragupta and Vi... life and paths of wisdom (b) Materialism, Asceticism and the Middle Path (c) Spirit of tolerance, assimilation and synthesis (d) True understanding of religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism. (e) Synthesis of spiritual experience. 2. Indian Literature: (a) Sanskrit and Tamil (b) Birth of modem Indian ...
... is estimated that there are 64 of them. Page 461 into stuff of the spiritual life. But this great effort and achievement covered all the time between the Vedic age and the decline of Buddhism. Vaishnavism and Shaivism flourished during this period, and although there were during this period conflicts of religions and claims of superiority of one system of religion or Yoga over other systems... systems, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Purva Mimamsa and Uttara Mimamsa and their numerous interpretations and commentaries. These six systems are Vedic systems of philosophy. There developed also Buddhism and Jainism and their numerous philosophical systems which did not accept the authority of the Vedas. Similarly, Carvaka philosophy, the philosophy of materialism, which also developed during this ...
... mythology, history, and people of India. It was in this plain that the great kingdoms of India, found their home. Also it was in Page 159 this place that the essence of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism were established in India. In short, the Ganga river has been the lifeline of India, economically, spiritually and culturally. The mighty Ganga (also Ganges) emerges... The religious diversity of India No wonder then that India is today known all over the world as the "Land of several Religions". Ancient India witnessed the birth of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism; but all these cultures and religions intermingled and acted and reacted upon one another in such a manner that though the people speak different languages, practise different religions, and observe ...
... covering the entire land from the Northern Himalayas to the Southern Indian Ocean created one common culture. The second period covers a long period, roughly from 600 B.C. to 800 A.D., during which Buddhism arose and, while the old still continued to live and even develop, new elements came to occupy the Indian experimentation. Great experiments were conducted in democracy and democratic monarchy, and... kingdom of India under the leadership of Chandragupta Maurya and his teacher and prime minister, Chanakya, came to be built up under the shock of the invasion of Alexander, the Great. Hinduism and Buddhism clashed and clasped each other resulting in confusion and yet enrichment impelling wider understanding and mutual assimilation There came about hardening of certain institutions coupled with opulence ...
... establishment of the Mauryan empire under the lead of Chandragupta Maurya and his adviser, Kautilya (or Chanakya), the life and work of Ashoka, who provided royal sanction to Buddhism and gave a great impetus to the spread of Buddhism not only in India but even in other Asian countries, and, finally, the decline and fall of the Mauryan empire. This period marks also the beginning of the Purano-Tantric age ...
... sharp and so it helps one to get away from the bondage of Prakriti. Sri Aurobindo : Yes, it is categorical. They believe in the two, Purusha and Prakriti, as the final elements. Sankhya and Buddhism were both first understood and appreciated by Europe, – Sankhya because of its sharp distinction between Purusha and Prakriti, which they believe to be jada – inconscient. Prakriti, in Sankhya, is... Prakriti appear conscious. They believe that even Buddhi – the Intelligence – is also jada – inconscient. Page 177 We in our yoga need not accept it. While the Europeans liked Buddhism for its strong rationalism. Its logic led it up to Shunya – the state of non-being, which is its aim to reach. There is also a strong note of Agnosticism in it which appeals to the Europeans. It is ...
... of these mighty forces to compass their own supremacy, and once at the helm of thought gave permanence to the power by which they stood, until two religions, the most hostile to Nature, in the east Buddhism, her step-child Christianity in the west, completed the evil their predecessors had begun. Hear the legend of Purush, the son of Prithivi, and his journey to the land of Beulah, the land of blooming ...
... which the ideas of 1789 might rest until the world was fit to understand them better and really The ideas themselves were not new; they existed in Christianity and before Christianity they existed in Buddhism; but in 1789 they came out for the first time from the Church and the Book and sought to remodel government and society. It was an unsuccessful attempt, but even the failure changed the face of Europe ...
... helped mankind. Paganism increased in man the light of beauty, the largeness and height of his life, his aim at a many-sided perfection; Christianity gave him some vision of divine love and charity; Buddhism has shown him a noble way to be wiser, gentler, purer, Judaism and Islam how to be religiously faithful in action and zealously devoted to God; Hinduism has opened to him the largest and profoundest ...
... religions of love and works, whose strength is that they satisfy and lead Godwards the most active and developed powers of our humanity,—for only by starting from these can knowledge be effective. Even Buddhism with its austere and uncompromising negation both of subjective self and objective things had still to found itself initially on a divine discipline of works and to admit as a substitute for bhakti ...
... where mortality and immortality cease to have any meaning? Page 73 The Upanishad does not put to itself the question in this form and language which only became possible when Nihilistic Buddhism and Vedantic Illusionism had passed over the face of our thought and modified philosophical speech and concepts. But it knows of the ineffable Absolute which is the utter reality and absoluteness ...
... merely an illustration of the religion and an expression of its thought and its religious Page 310 feeling, history and legend, but a revealing interpretation of the spiritual sense of Buddhism and its profounder meaning to the soul of India. To understand that—we must always seek first and foremost this kind of deeper intention—is to understand the reason of the differences between the ...
... have understood, nor any more perhaps the Pope who anointed him? Constantine gave the victory to the Christian religion, but there is nothing Christian in his personality; Asoka not only enthroned Buddhism, but strove though not with a perfect success to follow the path laid down by Buddha. And the Indian mind would account him not only a nobler will, but a greater and more attracting personality than ...
... early Vedantic intuitional forms or in those later developments of it, such as the Gita, which belong Page 23 to the period of its most vigorous intellectual originality and creation. Buddhism itself, the philosophy which first really threw doubt on the value of life, did so only in its intellectual tendency; in its dynamic parts, by its ethical system and spiritual method, it gave a new ...
... forces and inspiring life. The difference in spirit and mould between the epics and the speech of Bhartrihari and Kalidasa is already enormous and may possibly be explained by the early centuries of Buddhism when Sanskrit ceased to be the sole literary tongue understood and spoken by all educated men and Pali came up as its successful rival and the means of expression for at least a great part of the ...
... immediate purpose and not inconsistent with the works of the Spirit. After all, the orthodox Ashram came into being only after Brahman began to shun all connection with the world and the shadow of Buddhism stalked over all the land and Ashrams turned into monasteries. The old Ashrams were not entirely like that; the boys and young men who were brought up in them were trained in many things belonging ...
... once to Pondicherry and saw me on her way to the North—that was before the Mother came here. Mother knew her very well in Paris. Even before she went to Tibet she was a Buddhist and deeply versed in Buddhism. As to the authenticity of all in this book (magic, mysticism) Mother cannot say as she has not read it. But she is not a woman with any imagination or invention and has a rather hard positive mind ...
... 208 Britain, see under England British. the, see under English British rule (in India), 9, 18·19,31, 40(fn), 43 , 46(fn), 60,61, 158. 178.202, 219(fn), 230, 231 Buddha. 92 . 106, 144,204,213 Buddhism, 92, 112 , 129, 137, 177 bureaucracy, 58, 68, 135, 220 business. 216, 240 Page 263 C Caliph (Sultan of Turkey), 149(/11) capitalism, 154, 200 capita lists, 77 ...
... Delight but desire. This delight of creation, self-manifestation, self-expression—there is an entire line of seekers and sages who have considered it not as a delight but as a desire; the whole line of Buddhism is of this kind. And instead of seeing the solution in a Oneness which restores to us the essential Delight of the manifestation and the becoming, they consider that the goal and also the way are ...
... throughout the world who are convinced of the truth of a teaching, but that doesn't make them capable of realising it. For instance, all Buddhists, the millions of Buddhists in the world who profess that Buddhism is the truth—does this enable them to become like a Buddha? Certainly not. So, what is so surprising about that? I told you why there are people who accept this even after having read and studied ...
... this adventure in Time behind by overleaping the gulf can men reach the Eternal? That is what seems to be at the end of one line of experience which has been followed to its rigorous conclusion by Buddhism and a little less rigorously by a certain type of Monistic spirituality which admits some connection of the world with the Divine, but still opposes them in the last resort to each other as truth ...
... Bradley, tried to express their conclusions about it in terms that recall some of the expressions in the Arya. The idea in itself is not new; it is as old as the Vedas. It was repeated in other forms in Buddhism, Christian Gnosricisrn, Sufism. Originally, it was not discovered by intellectual speculation, but by the mystics following an inner spiritual discipline. When, somewhere between the seventh and fifth ...
... there is nothing much to choose, they are equally bad. Page 210 Sri Aurobindo has told us that this was a fundamental mistake which accounts for the weakness and degradation of India. Buddhism, Jainism, Illusionism were sufficient to sap all energy out of the country. True, India is the only place in the world which is still aware that something else than Matter exists. The other countries ...
... reason that no great religion has ever come out of the West. Asia on the other hand is full of interest in Brahman and she is therefore the cradle of every great religion. Christianity, Mahomedanism, Buddhism and the creeds of China and Japan are all offshoots of one great and eternal religion of which India has the keeping. India's Mission So with India rests the future of the world. Whenever she ...
... once more made them part of herself. So she dealt with the Greek, so with the Scythian, so with Islam, so now she will deal with the great brood of her returning children, with Christianity, with Buddhism, with European science and materialism, with the fresh speculations born of the world's renewed contact with the source of thought in this ancient cradle of religion, science and philosophy. The vast ...
... are the play and renders them in the end inert, feeble, narrow, unelastic, incapable of energetic reaction to force and circumstance. That was the final result in India of the agelong pressure of Buddhism and its supplanter and successor, Illusionism. No society wholly or too persistently and pervadingly dominated by this denial of the life dynamism can flourish and put forth its possibilities of growth ...
... bound in the forms of caste would not touch nor succour, its greater swiftness to give relief where it is needed, in a word, the active compassion and helpfulness which it inherited from its parent Buddhism. Where it could not apply this lever, it has failed totally and even this lever it may easily lose; for the soul of India reawakened by the new impact is beginning to recover its lost tendencies. ...
... very idea of Being into the supreme NonBeing is necessary for the fullest and freest possession of Being itself. This would be from the synthetic standpoint the justification of the great effort of Buddhism to exceed the conception of all positive being even in its widest or purest essentiality. Thus by dissolution of ego and of the attachment to birth the soul crosses beyond death; it is liberated ...
... for our immediate purpose. Merely to draw back from all identification with form is to draw away towards the Stillness, the Infinity & the cessation of all this divine play of motion. Ever since Buddhism conquered Vedic India and assured the definite enthronement of the ideal of Sannyasa in opposition to the ideal of Tyaga, this consummation has been constantly praised and held up before us in this ...
... is the ordinary idea of Yoga, it is the preparation and purification by the yama-niyama of Patanjali or by other means in other Yogas, e.g., saintliness in the bhakti schools, the eightfold path in Buddhism etc., etc. In our Yoga the evolution through sattwa is replaced by the cultivation of equanimity, samatā , and by the psychic transformation. It is a very beautiful character that you describe ...
... was only disproving the view that not having succeeded in seven or eight years meant unfitness and debarred all hope for the future. The man of the wall stands among the greatest names in Japanese Buddhism and his long sterility did not mean incapacity or spiritual unfitness. But apart Page 202 from that there are many who have gone on persisting for long periods and finally prevailed. It ...
... by, to love your enemies and those who hate you, to return good for evil are the first ethical inferences from the Vedantic teaching; they were fully expressed in their highest and noblest form by Buddhism five hundred years before they received a passionately emotional and lyrical phrasing in Judaea and were put widely into practice Page 282 in India more than two thousand years before ...
... least possible that liberty and the compulsion of Karma are not such unbridgeable opposites, but that behind and even in Karma itself there is all the time a secret liberty of the indwelling Spirit. Buddhism and Illusionism too do not assert any external or internal predestination, but only a self-imposed bondage. And very insistently they demand of man a choice between the right and the wrong way, between ...
... both Knowledge and Ignorance—by renunciation of life, by recognition of the universal impermanency of things and the vanity of cosmic existence. But our mind cannot remain satisfied—the mind of Buddhism itself did not remain satisfied—with this evasion at the very root of the whole matter. In the first place, these philosophies, while thus putting aside the root question, do actually make far-reaching ...
... substance? Then indeed a divine transmutation becomes conceivable. We have seen that the Non-Being beyond may well be an inconceivable existence and perhaps an ineffable Bliss. At least the Nirvana of Buddhism which formulated one most luminous effort of man to reach and to rest in this highest Non-Existence, represents itself in the psychology of the liberated yet upon earth as an unspeakable peace and ...
... of man's mind and life into the truth of the Spirit, its perfection by the power of the Spirit, the solidarity, unity, mutuality of all beings in the Spirit. This was the Eastern ideal carried by Buddhism and other ancient disciplines to the coasts of Asia and Egypt and from there poured by Christianity into Europe. But these motives, burning for a time like dim torchlights in the confusion and darkness ...
... experience if it does not determine it, it would be compelled in the end to suppose that Nature is all and the soul an illusion. This is the conclusion modern Materialism affirms and to that nihilistic Buddhism arrived; the Sankhyas, perceiving the dilemma, solved it by saying that the soul in fact only mirrors Nature's determinations and itself determines nothing, is not the lord, but can by refusing to ...
... never married and men come and go, very common. It's the children of course who suffer. I don't know what the figures are in America. However, many young people here are 'in search of a soul' and Buddhism, Sufi communities and other groups attempting to replace the old stable family and village communities are springing up, some of them very serious and dedicated people. As to my friend Prince ...
... highest synthesis to which we can rise. There is a higher synthesis, humanity; beyond that there is a still higher synthesis, this living, suffering, aspiring world of creatures, the synthesis of Buddhism; there is a highest of all, the synthesis of God, and that is the Hindu synthesis, the synthesis of Vedanta. With us today Nationalism is our immediate practical faith and gospel not because it is ...
... the Veda, unlike modern or postBuddhistic Hinduism which is oppressed with Buddha's sense of universal sorrow and Shankara's sense of universal illusion,—Shankara who was the better able to destroy Buddhism because he was himself half a Buddhist. Ancient Hinduism aimed socially at our fulfilment in God in life, modern Hinduism at the escape from life to God. The more modern ideal is fruitful of a noble ...
... A world which is essentially a world of bliss—this was the ancient Vedantic vision, the drishti of the Vedic drashta, which differentiates Hinduism in its early virility from the cosmic sorrow of Buddhism and the cosmic disillusionment of Mayavada. But it is possible to fall from this Bliss, not to realise it with the lower nature, in the Apara Prakriti, not to be able to grasp and possess it. Two ...
... is easy for our impatient human nature to stride to the conclusion that so it is & all existence or all world-existence at least is illusory, a sensation born of nothingness, a play of zeros. Hence Buddhism, the sensational Agnostic philosophies, Mayavada. Again, it is easy at a certain stage of moral culture to perceive that the moral values put by the emotions, passions and aspirations on actions & ...
... yet full of faith and fervour, accepting all forms of religion because it has an unshakable faith in the One. The religion which embraces Science and faith, Theism, Christianity, Mahomedanism and Buddhism and yet is none of these, is that to which the World-Spirit moves. In our own, which is the most sceptical and the most believing of all, the most sceptical because it has questioned and experimented ...
... of the divine energy, came down among men and brought into their daily life and practice the force and impulse of utter spirituality. And this time it is the full light and not a noble part, unlike Buddhism which, expressing Vedantic morality, yet ignored a fundamental reality of Vedanta and was therefore expelled from its prime seat and cradle. The material result was then what it will be now, a great ...
... influence, we shall find that it gives us a reconciliation Page 47 of the dispute by a view of man's psychology in which both Fate and Free-will are recognised. The difference between Buddhism and Hinduism is that to the former the human soul is nothing, to the latter it is everything. The whole universe exists in the spirit, by the spirit, for the spirit; all we do, think and feel is for ...
... is kin to the old Vedic seers, though not at all a religious mystic in his temperament. The Vedic religion seems to have excluded physical images and it was the protestant movements of Jainism and Buddhism which either introduced or at least popularised and made general the worship of images in India. Here too Heraclitus prepares the way for the destruction of the old religion, the reign of pure philosophy ...
... but the aim was to withdraw from Matter. The aim was to withdraw here ( gesture of drawing all energies upward ) and reject Matter, like all illusionists, you understand. It's the continuation of Buddhism, too. ( silence ) So is it tomorrow that he goes to the beach? 4 Yes. He told me, "My worry is that it may take a long time (if it succeeds), and I have a limited time in India." I replied ...
... inertia? Why did it have to begin with this?... Why? The mind has imagined all kinds of magnificent reasons, it builds constructions—that seems like childishness.... Why? There's the whole side of Buddhism, nihilism and so on, according to which (we can give a translation for children) the Supreme Lord made a mistake! ( Mother laughs ) He blundered, so... And then we'll help Him get out of his blunder ...
... non-theistic or even atheistic trends mostly assumed in India. Materialism, in the modem sense, was never characteristic of such trends. They showed themselves typically in movements like Sankhya, Buddhism and Jainism. Judged from the ordinary point of view, these movements were non-theistic or even atheistic; and yet they were paths leading to a liberation of the consciousness from mere mind: they ...
... thinker I know of who overcomes this inherent limitation of human reason. To cite a couple of examples of this: Although Sri Aurobindo does not accept in its entirety either the philosophy of Buddhism or of the Vedanta as interpreted by Shankara, he is second to none in acknowledging the truth of the spiritual experiences on which these philosophies were based and the great contributions made ...
... Spirit . “The Absolute manifests itself in layers, dimensions, sheaths, levels, or grades – whatever term one prefers … In Vedanta these are the koshas , the sheaths or layers covering Brahman; in Buddhism these are the eight vijnanas , the eight levels of awareness, each of which is a stepped-down or more restricted version of its senior dimension; in Kabbalah these are the sefirot , and so on.” ...
... s from Pythagoras to Plato and the Neo-Platonists; the result was the brilliantly intellectual and unspiritual civilisation of Greece and Rome. But it prepared the way for the second attempt when Buddhism and Vaishnavism, filtered through the Semitic temperament, entered Europe in the form of Christianity. Christianity came within an ace of spiritualising and even of asceticising the mind of Europe; ...
... , fervent Buddhist and explorer-to-be, who would become the first Western woman to enter Lhasa, the forbidden Tibetan capital, in disguise. Mirra Richard also discovered the texts of Hinduism and Buddhism (e.g. the Bhagavad Gita and the Dhammapada). As it was her rule never to remain contented with theories but always to put them to the test, and given her natural endowments for occultism and ...
... all-encompassing ultra-religion of the future. It thus posed a challenge and a threat to existing faiths that generated considerable alarm. With its declared foundations in what purported to be ‘esoteric Buddhism’, its hierarchy of ‘secret masters’ and its all-embracing scope, Theosophy offered a complex framework that incorporated all other creeds within itself.” 647 Together with Theosophy re-emerged ...
... as the chief explanatory concept.” 4 Nevertheless, there is obviously more than scientism (i.e. dogmatic science) in the contemporary world. The adherents of the main religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity, are counted in the hundreds of millions. The Pope draws crowds of hundreds of thousands; in the year 2001 the participants in the Kumbha Mela, at Allahabad in India, the greatest ...
... merged for ever in the Absolute, (the Non-being or the Transcendental) may do so with the result that they will achieve it, but that Nirvana is but a stage (I read this in a book on Tibetan Buddhism too, fancy that!) and those who achieve it have to be reborn again to re-undertake the work of liberation postponed for a time. I mean that I somehow feel that you have written that even Moksha ...
... Through them I really did come in contact, very concretely, with the truth of Page 56 what caused the world's distortion, much better than with all the Hindu stories, far more easily. Buddhism and all similar lines of thought took the shortest path: "The desire to exist is what has caused all the trouble." If the Lord had refrained from having this desire, there would have been no world ...
... hierarchic scale of collaboration or action; a negative cooperation and a positive cooperation. Page 18 To begin with, there's what could be called a negative way, the way expounded by Buddhism and similar religions: the refusal to see. To be in a state of such purity and beauty that there is no perception of evil and ugliness. It's like something that doesn't touch you because it doesn't ...
... he [Sri Aurobindo] showed me it was like that: "You do like this." So if what he showed me is really now established in the world, it must have extraordinary consequences. On the mental heights, Buddhism had already said something like that: your thought, your will goes around the world and comes back to you. "Do not think you can do something with impunity," it says, "because it goes around the world ...
... between Mother and Bharatidi. × Bharatidi was a specialist of Pali (used by the southern schools of Buddhism) and Sanskrit. × The painter who did a portrait of Sri Aurobindo in profile, standing. ...
... Christianity and Islam have very easily solved the problem: "Oh, no, things here will never be fine, but over there they can be perfect." That goes without saying. Then there is the whole of Nirvanism and Buddhism: "The world is an error that must disappear." So it all comes in waves, and the body feels very... you understand, it would like to have a certitude of its possibility. That doesn't often happen to ...
... mind-shaking revelations. One concerned the very physical plane. The Mother had a friend named Alexandra David-Neel. Madame David-Neel also knew Sri Aurobindo a little. She was a student of Buddhism, especially the Tibetan variety about which she has written a very fascinating book. She died recently at the age of 101 or so in Paris. Our Prithwin interviewed her once, before she passed away. ...
... The orthodox Jewish angelology and demonology of Jesus' time had come mainly from Persia, and, as for the Essenes, 'Pythagorism, Orphism, Chaldean astral religion, Parsiism and, apparently, even Buddhism all contributed ingredients much transformed on their way to the Jordan Valley.' 7 The idea of a capsulated Palestinian Judaism Page 88 unaffected by the world's life and thought ...
... aspiration, 3,4, 12, 107, 111, 120 attention, 38, 39, 104, 105, 117, 152 avyaktam, 78 B Bahai faith, 2 being, concept of, 77, 78 Bhagavad Gita, see Gita Buddhism aim of spiritual practice, 144 attention, 104, 105 concept of surrender, 109 egoic self, 144 enlightenment, 151 meditation, 117 perspectives of time, 20, 21 ...
... The Mother omitted “— they are equally bad.” after “choose”. × The Mother corrected “Buddhism, Jainism, Illusionism were sufficient” to “It was sufficient”. ...
... or substantial. 1 The illusoriness of the ego and the unreality of the world mentioned in the experience just described are well-known philosophical concepts, associated chiefly with Buddhism and Vedanta. Here, however, the non-existence of the ego and the unreality of the world are not stated as abstract philosophical concepts but as a direct experience, devoid of any thought or mental ...
... a descent of its Light and Power here is intended that it can be otherwise. Letters on Yoga, pp. 246-49. Page 225 (e) Nirvana What then is Nirvana? In orthodox Buddhism it does mean a disintegration, not of the soul — for that does not exist — but of a mental compound or stream of associations or sa ṁ sk ā ras which we mistake for ourself. In illusionist Vedanta ...
... 339-41 Brahman, 96, 170-71, 296, 374, 375,378, 379 and the Self, 121 cf. Divine, the Bucke, R.M., 371 Buddha, 225, 228, 375, 399 Buddhi, 47, 49, 50, 51, 82, 279 Buddhism (Buddhist), 136, 216, 303, 368, 373, 375 denial of the self, 126 Capra, Fritjof, 316 Central being, 16, 84, 87 cf. Jivatman Centres (of consciousness), 74 Muladhar, 36 ...
... only disproving the view that not having succeeded in seven or eight years meant unfitness and debarred all hope for the future. The man of the wall stands among the greatest names in Japanese Buddhism and his long sterility did not mean incapacity or spiritual unfitness; but apart from that there are many who have gone on persisting for long periods and finally prevailed. It is a common, not ...
... yoga of the Veda in which there was a balance and synthesis between the external and the internal, between the material and the spiritual life. In due course of time, the Upanishads and thereafter Buddhism which grew in later time, the sacrifice and symbolic ritual became more and more a useless survival and even an encumbrance. A sharp practical division came into being, effective though never entirely ...
... was also an important part of the programme of study. In course of time, six Vedangas had developed as also four Upavedas and a number of other sciences and shastras. With the development of Buddhism , a different system of education developed which laid great emphasis on practices of asceticism, rules of dharma and studies of philosophy, medicine and other sciences. This had also effect on ...
... required to assimilate the influences of the great theistic religions of India and similarly of the great theistic religions of the world; we have also to assimilate the recovered sense of the meaning of Buddhism. Relevance of Jainism has also to be underlined. We have to take into account the potent, though limited, revelations of modern knowledge and seeking. A fresh and widely embracing harmonisation of ...
... Buddhist art became not merely an illustration of the religion and an expression of its thought and its religious feeling, history and legend, but a revealing interpretation of the spiritual sense of Buddhism and its profounder meaning to the soul of India. 3 IV Art opens the gates of our consciousness to the depths of truth and beauty; it imparts to our consciousness the sense and ...
... with the help of various practices that underline rigorous practice of truthfulness, non-violence, continence, non-covetousness and burning away of all attachments to possessions. In the yoga of Buddhism, the process of yoga consists of the eight-fold path, namely, of the practice of right beliefs, right aspirations, right speech, right conduct, right mode of livelihood, right effort, right mindedness ...
... with the help of various practices that underline rigorous practice of truthfulness, non-violence, continence, non-covetousness and burning away of all attachments to possession. In the Yoga of Buddhism, the process of yoga consists of the eightfold path, namely, of right beliefs, right aspirations, right speech, right conduct, right mode of livelihood, right effort, right mindedness and right rapture ...
... with the help of various practices that underline rigorous practice of truthfulness, non-violence, continence, non- covetousness and burning away of all attachments to possession. In the Yoga of Buddhism, the process of yoga consists of the eightfold path, namely, right beliefs, right aspirations, right speech, right conduct, right mode of livelihood, right effort, right mindedness and right rapture ...
... the future. A mass of new material is flowing into us; we have not only to assimilate the influences of the great theistic religions of India and of the world and a recovered sense of the meaning of Buddhism, but to take full account of the potent though limited revelations of modern knowledge and seeking; and, beyond that, the remote and dateless past which seemed to be dead is returning upon us with ...
... two centuries after Alexander the Romans, having dominated all of Italy, had already conquered Greece and were on their way to take over and unify the Mediterranean world. In India in 350 Be Buddhism was flourishing. At the time of Alexander's death, the Mauryan dynasty was established (322 BC) and the first King of that dynasty, Chandragupta Maurya (322- 298 BC), came closer to uniting India ...
... Yoga, Zen is quite distinct from religion and philosophy. Yoga and Zen aim at rising above the level of rational search; they aim at direct experience by 1. D. T. Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (London: Rider, 1983), p. 46. 2. Ibid., p. 40. 3. Patanjali's yoga system has come to be called Raja Yoga, which is distinct from other systems of Yoga. According to Patanjali, yoga means ...
... this adventure in Time behind, by overleaping the gulf can men reach the Eternal? That is what seems to be at the end of one line of experience which has been followed to its rigorous conclusion by Buddhism and a little less rigorously by a certain type of Monistic spirituality which admits some connection of the world with the Divine, but still opposes them in the last resort to each other as truth ...
... all idea of the divinisation of life here in the conditions of the material universe. Under this category we may mention en passant the two great schools of world-negating metaphysics — Buddhism with its doctrines of anicca and anāttā (the theory of impermanence and the theory of the non-existence of any soul or self), and Illusionism with its doctrine of Maya — that have weighed heavily ...
... Aurobindo' s Yoga. One practice which most people associate with spiritual pursuit is that of meditation. This is specially true of the West where, particularly due to the influence of Zen Buddhism, spiritual practice is regarded as almost synonymous with the practice of meditation. Referring to this attitude in a critical vein, the Mother remarks, "...when they think of the spiritual life, ...
... not speak of young ascetics who have been freed from all debts in a previous life; but it would be wrong for one who has not made himself ready for asceticism to take to it. Great and magnanimous Buddhism has done no doubt immense good to the country, yet no less harm, because of asceticism spreading Page 166 everywhere and the warrior class (Kshatriya) renouncing their appointed ...
... individual and cosmos, all disappear and Vanish. In compassion, the cosmic communion, there is a trace and an echo of humanism—it is perhaps one of the reasons why Europeans generally are attracted to Buddhism and find it more congenial than Hinduism with its dizzy Vedantic heights; but in the status of the transcendent Selfhood humanism is totally transcended and transmuted, one dwells then in the Bliss ...
... which had a deep effect on civilization. Here the insistence will be on the dynamic and evolutive aspects of history. A few such subjects are listed here: birth and life of Buddha and spreading of Buddhism, life of Christ and the spreading of Christianity (martyrs, conquest of Europe, Crusades, religious wars, the Papacy and the Reformation), life of Mohammed and the expansion of Islam, the Mauryan ...
... in the fold was supposed to be influenced by it. Bahaism has included certain mental concepts also e.g., toleration, universal brotherhood, equality of man and woman, etc. The other day he included Buddhism also, though he seems to know nothing about it. He has about eleven million followers of which two millions are in Europe. If the Madans get a religion of that sort it is much better than what ...
... among the knowers of Brahman. He said : "I only want to take the cows." Not to be attached to property was the idea, but it is quite a different thing from remaining poor. Disciple : Did Buddhism preach poverty ? Sri Aurobindo : There was a division : the monks and the householders. The monks owned no property and for them there was the communal property. For the householders poverty ...
... possible. The Mother tried at one time to impose restrictions and regulations; it didn't work. One has to change from within. There are, of course, other Yogic systems which enforce strict disciplines. Buddhism is unique in that respect. In France also there is a school which enjoins rigorous silence. NIRODBARAN: Is exterior imposition good? SRI AUROBINDO: It can be good, provided one sincerely keeps ...
... What about the Vedic Rishis? SRI AUROBINDO: They accepted life. But the other paths made a sharp cleavage between life and the Brahmic consciousness. It was more markedly so under the influence of Buddhism and lastly Shankara made a sharp cut between the two. SATYENDRA: Why should this cleavage be necessary? SRI AUROBINDO: If you hold that life has no divine purpose, then it is not necessary to ...
... individual and cosmos, all dis. appear and vanish. In compassion, the cosmic communion, there is a trace and an echo of humanism – it is perhaps one of the reasons why Europeans generally are attracted to Buddhism and find it more congenial than Hinduism with its dizzy Vedantic heights. But in the status of the transcendent Self-hood, humanism is totally transcended and transmuted; one dwells there in the Bliss ...
... social and political problems will be solved. Somebody also said that Heard advocates Buddhist fatalism. To which Heard replied that he didn't advocate fatalism at all. Nor is there any fatalism in Buddhism. All human history has been a question of change of consciousness, and Huxley says that the change can come only by spirituality. Hitherto people have worked on the principle of opposition and in ...
... immediate purpose and not inconsistent with the works of the Spirit. After all, the orthodox Ashram came into being only after Brahman began to shun all connection with the world and the shadow of Buddhism stalked over all the land and the Ashrams turned into monasteries. The old Ashrams were not entirely like that; the boys and young men who were brought up in them were trained in many things belonging ...
... Teilhard de Chardin, 443ff; Supermind & Omega Point, 444; Sachidananda and Cosmic Christ, 445; Vedanta & Christianity, 445; Vedantic Christianity, 446; Iqbal as Islam's Aurobindo, 446; compared with Zen Buddhism, 446; with Marxism, 4467; epigraphs in, 448,460,463,469,470, 490,514,516,518,550-1,565,647,656, 658,751 Lights on Yoga, 598 LocksleyHall,S3,S1,9l 'Lotus and Dagger', 34 ...
... static and dynamic Brahman as its two aspects and that of the higher planes of consciousness leading to the Supermind', he is 'already on his way'. 1910 At a talk by Alexandra David-Neel on Buddhism, sees the Buddha in a bluish light, standing beside Alexandra. They become friends and fellow seekers, go often to the Bois de Boulogne gardens, watch the 'grasshopper-like early aeroplanes' take ...
... the Japanese, for all their elegance and culture, and the general atmosphere of friendliness exuded by them, were rather allergic to spirituality. They had their religions, of course - Shintoism, Buddhism, Christianity, with their many sectarian divisions - and they had their picturesque ceremonies, religious and secular, and their elaborate codes of behaviour; but somehow the Japanese as a general ...
... it was Mirra's nature not to do anything by halves; she wrestled - no doubt with encouragement from Richard - with the philosophers and system-makers, the schools of meditation and inner culture. Buddhism, Vedanta, Sufism, Taoism, Zen, Shintoism, Bahaism... all was grist that came to the mill. Yet there was no real breakthrough, no storming of the Gates of Reality. Richard was in politics too, ...
... another instance too of a coincidence forged by occult forces. Mirra knew a young man in her Parisian days: he was a poet and an artist, and a Sanskritist as well, and was specially interested in Buddhism. He had given his photograph to Mirra, who fixed it on a wall above a high desk. It was the time of the First World War, and he had gone to the front. One day when she entered her room, the photograph ...
... discipline in order to maintain society. If the collective life presses too much the vital being of the individual, it may go on strike, discourage life itself as. seems to have happened in case of Buddhism in India. Life in the collectivity is Infra-Rational in the beginning, even religion and ethics of primitive societies are infra- rational. Then a stage comes when it becomes rational i. e. Reason ...
... till now. Somebody said that this world will always remain imperfect and subject to suffering and pain and death; this is the constitution of the world and you cannot change it. That is one answer. Buddhism gives a second answer: there is a mechanism; it is there and you know it is due to Karma, action and reaction - when you subject yourself to desire and impulses, it will always have the reaction of ...
... is fantastically illogical. Buddha also said the same thing, but the religion says: "Buddham Saranam Gachchhami." So also in Jainism. Disciple : In Jainism self-mortification persists. In Buddhism there is not. Buddha gave it up after a trial. Buddha and Mahavir were contemporaries but they don't seem to have met. Mahavir was born in Vaisali. Sri Aurobindo : Who? M? ( Laughter) . ...
... that we feel loth to analyse it in order to arrive at its rationale and an estimate of the range of its possibilities. Even the most advanced spiritual seekers and acute thinkers seem to find in it—Buddhism appears to them as an exemplary embodiment of it—a promise of the highest spiritual perfection possible to man on earth. Our deepest reverence and gratitude go to the man who communes with the Spirit ...
... believe everything or nothing. That explains their attraction for Tibet, Bhutan and other places of occult atmosphere. Now-a-days stories and novels are being written with these themes. Japanese Zen Buddhism, and also Chinese Laotze have also attracted their attention. Page 87 I also wrote some stories but they are lost; the white ants have finished them and with them has perished my ...
... very highest and widest which the Supermind alone can give. It accepts and profits by all important wayside experiences: the Sânkhya experience of detached freedom, the silence of the Nirvana of Buddhism, the unfathomable peace of the immanent Immutable, or the thrilled power of the universal Divine, but it proceeds beyond all these to the great goal of its difficult endeavour—the solar illumination ...
... mark of the caste. Now, even this has broken down – what continues as caste is meaningless. Many meaningless things continue in humanity. Before Buddha there were Kshatriyas in Bengal. When Buddhism collapsed there remained two castes – Brahmins and Shudras – other castes rightly resented being called "Shudras". In old times the agriculturist, the trader and the craftsmen were all Vaishyas ...
... appearance of an inert, in- conscient creation, and the human life is full of the play of ignorant forces and is undivine. Many religious and philosophical systems have given great prominence e. g.. Buddhism to this aspect. To Gita the world is not altogether undivine. It devotes four chapters to the Vibhuti Yoga and shows how the world is beautiful, magnificent and divine. Even Matter which is regarded ...
... × Early Letters, 27:437 × Actually, since Buddhism. Pre-Buddhist India was not like that, especially not Vedic India. × This Vishnu Purana, which ...
... "A Mother answered the questions coming from Katak, John Page 213 Walker and Constance, who wish to make a film to express the spirit of Auroville using the symbols of Tibetan Buddhism and the figure of Maitreya, a personification of Love. Q. What is the reality behind the prophecy of Maitreya, the coming Buddha? A. I do not know, I do not feel that Buddha will come in ...
... have depended on the reawakening touch of some divine impulse whenever the spirit of man flagged and failed.... These visitations of immortality in man have been known by different names such as Buddhism, Christianity, the Renaissance, Vaishnavism and the like. Asia forgetful, decadent, dying in "the scorching drought of modem vulgarity" needed most the purifying ablution of such a wave; and ...
... Vedic faith so deeply rooted in the country." (Modern Review, Nov. 1928.) Page 115 in their settlements in the ports on the Coromandel coast. Remember how in the eleventh century, Buddhism had thrived under the Pal and Sen kings of Bengal? That was probably the final great era of Buddhist art and literature in India. Well, the 'foreign' Buddhists had also built their places of worship ...
... four castes multiplied themselves without any true economic need of the country, that all this rigidified into its present form. From historical times we have had religious reformers. Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism, etc. do not care for castes. It was only under the impact of Western ideas that India began to have social reformers. From the time of Raja Rammohan Roy the Hindu society has had numerous ...
... serve at the same time two masters & such different masters? We know the answer of Shankara, the answer of the later Adwaitin, the Mayavadin; and the answer of most religious minds in India since Buddhism conquered our intellects has not been substantially different. To flee the world & seek God, sums up their attitude. There have been notable exceptions, but the general trend hardly varies. The majority ...
... Islam has no meaning for the conscience of modern humanity. The lure of a release from birth and death and withdrawal from the cosmic labour must also be rejected, as it was rejected by Mahayanist Buddhism which held compassion and helpfulness to be greater than Nirvana. As the virtues we practise must be done without demand of earthly or heavenly reward, so the salvation we seek must be purely internal ...
... thinking of this period should have left behind it this immense influence; for it was of the highest and severest intellectual character. The tendency that had begun in earlier times and created Buddhism, Jainism and the great schools of philosophy, the labour of the metaphysical intellect to formulate to the reason the truths discovered by the intuitive spiritual experience, to subject them to the ...
... republics, but it was subject still to a limiting control intended to avoid the possible evils of a too purely democratic method. The monastic system once thus firmly established was taken over from Buddhism by the orthodox religion, but without its elaborate organisation. These religious communities tended, wherever they could prevail against the older Brahminic system, as in the order created by Sh ...
... at all an existence, a consciousness, a bliss, it is beyond the highest and purest positive form of these things that here we can possess and other therefore than what here we know by these names. Buddhism, somewhat arbitrarily declared by the theologians to be an un-Vedic doctrine because it rejected the authority of the Scriptures, yet goes back to this essentially Vedantic conception. Only, the positive ...
... effects on the individuals or collectivities that hear its potent call to the wilderness,—the refusal of the ascetic. It is this revolt of Spirit against Matter that for two thousand years, since Buddhism disturbed the balance of the old Aryan world, has dominated increasingly the Indian mind. Not that the sense of the cosmic illusion is the whole of Indian thought; there are other philosophical statements ...
... In fact, Indian philosophy abhors mere guessing and speculation. That word is constantly applied by European critics to the thoughts and conclusions of the Upanishads, of the philosophies, of Buddhism; but Indian philosophers would reject it altogether as at all a valid description of their method. If our philosophy admits an ultimate unthinkable and unknowable, it does not concern itself with ...
... d, an outer action, while within and detached from them there grows the sense of a separate self-existent being which opens into the realisation of the cosmic and transcendent spirit. 80 Buddhism, another path of knowledge, lays stress on the impermanence and illusoriness of the self, which is viewed as an amalgam of the results of the cosmic energy (presented as Karma, just as in Sankhya ...
... for the arising of Presence. In Sri Aurobindo's yoga, as in Eckhart's teaching, there is no mental code of conduct like the Yama—Niyama (do's and don'ts) of Patanjali or the Eightfold Path of Buddhism for the preparation and purification of the ordinary nature. Page 90 × For Sri Aurobindo's views ...
... regarding each act as an end in itself rather than as a means for attaining a distant goal provides the necessary corrective. It enables one to live for the Divine at each moment and to experience what in Buddhism is regarded as enlightenment—the state in which one lives only in the present moment, forgetful of the self—in the here and now. In other words, the teaching of yoga to consecrate oneself at all times ...
... paradox lies in the difference between the Buddhist and Hindu perspectives of enlightenment. Page 21 Enlightenment Distinguished from Liberation From one viewpoint—prominent in Buddhism—enlightenment is essentially a state of living in present-moment awareness. No time is needed to enter such a state. From another perspective, found in Hindu thought, the enlightened state, usually ...
... nothing else existent. brahmarandhra — (in yoga) the opening at the top of the skull the Buddha —Gautama Buddha also known as Tathāgata (c. 563-c.483 BC), the renowned father of Buddhism. His personal name was Siddhartha. After realising the Truth, he became known as the "Buddha" ("the Enlightened"). buddeḥ paratastu saḥ — that which is supreme over the intelligent ...
... Self. Thus the Vedantic seers who described the Page 367 absolute Reality as Sat-Chit-Ananda (Existence-Consciousness-Bliss) also described it as Asat (Non-Existence, Non-Being). Buddhism, too, which looks upon the notion of self as illusory, regards the state of liberation (Nirvana) as one in which there is an extinction of selfhood in a transcendent Permanence which is Non-Being ...
... the reader. The comparison is meant to help toward a better understanding of both Eckhart's teaching and that of Sri Aurobindo. Eckhart's teaching, which beautifully combines elements from Zen Buddhism, Advaita (nondualist Vedanta), and Christianity, is relatively neutral. However, in its views of the nature of Reality and enlightenment, his teaching is predominantly Buddhist. It is a perspective ...
... the Gita: "A mass of new material is flowing into us; we have not only to assimilate the influences of the great theistic religions of India and of the world and a recovered sense of the meaning of Buddhism, but to take full account of the potent though limited revelations of modem knowledge and seeking; and beyond that, the remote and dateless past which seemed to be dead is returning upon us with an ...
... worlds, we feel there is a gap between the two realms, between the higher and lower hemispheres of global existence. The very concrete experience of this gap is at the basis of spiritual paths like Buddhism and Advaita, as it is the cause of the Western view which puts God, the angels and the saints in heaven, and suffering humanity on earth, in “the valley of tears”. According to the first view the ...
... nature of our true life as a human being — these three beliefs are not only those of Dionysius and the Christian mystics who followed him but also the basic beliefs of all religions, particularly Buddhism — indeed the Four Noble Truths are echoed time and again in medieval words.’ (p. 6) Those ‘essential beliefs’ are also the main pillars of Sufism and of the traditional Yogas. 91 All this allows ...
... Inayat Khan, the prophet of Sufism in the West, gave a talk in her house. She also visited occult séances and addressed various circles. And there was Alexandra David-Néel, the modern prophetess of Buddhism and fearless explorer, who would be the first non-Tibetan woman to enter Lhasa in disguise. For a time they met every day and went for walks in the Bois de Boulogne, where the first airplanes, ‘like ...
... become acquainted with, is considerable. Moreover, “their writings are positively loaded with references to the Vedas, the Upanishads, Taoism (Bohr made the yin-yang symbol part of his family crest), Buddhism, Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kant, virtually the entire pantheon of perennial philosophers.” 35 Consequently Wilber divides the 20th century physicists into two ...
... immediate purpose and not inconsistent with the works of the Spirit. After all the orthodox Ashram came into being only after Brahman began to shun all connection with the world and the shadow of Buddhism stalked over all the land and Ashrams turned into monasteries. The old Ashrams were not entirely like that; the boys and young men who were brought up in them were trained in many things belonging ...
... prophet. The Aryan idea is at the root of integration of personality differently called 'Samsiddhi' or self-realization by Gita, 'Mukti' or freedom by Upanishads, 'Nirvana' or liberation by Buddhism and ' Kai-valyd or integration by Yoga and Jainism. Page 132 With our national weakness for easy apotheosis, we have been multiplying Avataras. Even Swami Narayana {early XIX ...
... from the rest of humanity. There is a touch of the sectarian mind - as in the Semitic religions (judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism) - in contrast to the world-wide attitude of Hinduism and Buddhism. I have nothing against Freemasonry. My father was a master mason of the Lodge "Rising Star" and I would have been initiated if my father had not died at the age of 44. I do not share the ...
... Divine Being, even the vivid concept of it, give not only a proper meaning to the diversity of religious modes in India but also a true sense to the variety of religions in the world. One comes to see Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, Zoroastria-nism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in their specific qualities as well as in their combinations, in a way that none of them by itself can see its own attributes. For ...
... Existentialism I have suggested the Pasca-lian Man standing on his head. Perhaps a closer link with the depth of things would be in terms of an eastern religion. At the heart of Existentialism there is a Buddhism manque, an unrecognised missing of Nirvana, just as at the heart of Romanticism one may discern a would-be Vedanta, the puzzled sense expressed by Shelley: Thou whom, seen nowhere, I feel ...
... types are not strictly distributed between the sexes. Tagore himself of the Gitanjali - lyrics has the bhakta's disposition. As ardent a bhakta as the woman Mirabai was the man Chaitanya, and Buddhism had nuns as well as monks. Incline as it frequently may in one or the other direction exclusively, the psyche in either sex is two-moded. Sri Aurobindo This fact gives ...
... his stress on the Life Force and his disparagement of reason, Schopenhauer became an inspirer of the völkisch movement. He was also the philosopher who, as one of the first Westerners, discovered Buddhism and its techniques of world-negation as a means of escape from an absurd, blindly desire-driven world subjected to Maya . Eckart was, moreover, a devoted admirer of Angelus Silesius (1624-77) ...
... their conclusions about it in terms that recall some of the expressions in the Arya . The idea in Page 352 itself is not new; it is as old as the Vedas. It was repeated in other forms in Buddhism, Christian Gnosticism, Sufism. Originally, it was not discovered by intellectual speculation, but by the mystics following an inner spiritual discipline. When, somewhere between the seventh and fifth ...
... system. To the Buddhists Buddha was not an Avatar at all, he was the soul climbing up the ladder of spiritual evolution till it reached the final stage of emancipation—although Hindu influence did make Buddhism develop the idea of an eternal Buddha above, that was not a universal or fundamental Buddhistic idea. Whether the Divine in manifesting his Avatarhood could choose to follow the line of evolution ...
... question. The Adwaitin in order to find a religious basis for his bare and sterile philosophy, has to admit the practical existence of God and the gods and to delude his mind with the language of Maya. Buddhism only became a popular religion when Buddha had taken the place of the supreme Deity as an object of worship. Even if the Supreme be capable of relations with us but only of impersonal relations ...
... ion for a tenet to which they nevertheless attach the highest importance. The one law of Christianity which replaces all the commandments is to love one's neighbour as oneself, the moral ideal of Buddhism is selfless benevolence & beneficence to others; the moral ideal of Hinduism is the perfect sage whose delight and occupation is the good of all creatures (सर्वभूतहितरतः). It is always the same great ...
... ascent to our ancestors, we of the present generation are compelled to descend. Obliged by the rationalistic assault to enquire into much which they, troubled only by internal & limited disputes, by Buddhism & Sankhya, could afford to take for granted, called upon by modern necessity to study the ideas of the Upanishads in their obscure details no less than in their clear & inspiring generalities, in ...
... such a reign of negation, of stating to the intellectual reason so much of Vedic truth as could still be grasped and justifying it logically. The Six Darshanas were the result of this mighty labour. Buddhism, the inevitable rush of negation, came indeed but it was prevented from destroying spirituality as European negation destroyed it for a time in the eighteenth & nineteenth centuries by the immense ...
... flexible thinkers simply as an unknowable. The difference is that the unknown of Science is something mechanical to which mechanically we return by physical dissolution or laya , but the unknown of Buddhism is a Permanent beyond the Law to which we return spiritually by an effort of self-suppression, of self-renunciation and, at the latest end, of self-extinction, by a mental dissolution of the Idea ...
... developments of modern sentiment, was first brought out from our nature and made prominent by religion, compassion and the love of man first intimately and powerfully enforced by Christianity and Buddhism; if they have now a little developed, it is the natural expanding from seeds that had long been sown. Materialism was rather calculated to encourage opposite instincts; and the good it favoured it ...
... Yoga such as the pure Adwaitin and the Buddhist which say that you must rely upon yourself and no one can help you; but even the pure Adwaitin does in fact rely upon the Guru and the chief mantra of Buddhism insists on śaraṇam to Buddha. For other paths of sadhana, especially those which like the Gita accept the reality of the individual soul as an "eternal portion" of the Divine or which believe that ...
... disciples and followers who gathered around him. But even before he was dead, his teaching had already begun to be Page 76 twisted and distorted. It was only after his disappearance that Buddhism as a full-fledged religion reared its head founded upon what the Buddha is supposed to have said and on the supposed significance of these reported sayings. But soon too, because the disciples and ...
... about him), who had gone to the war. He had enlisted, he was very young; he was an officer. He had given me his photograph. (This boy was a student of Sanskrit and knew Sanskrit very well, he liked Buddhism very much; indeed he was much interested in things of the spirit, he was not an ordinary boy, far from it.) He had given me his photograph on which there was a sentence in Sanskrit written in his ...
... Oh! you are becoming a Buddhist. It's the fashion. Yes? It is said that two thousand five hundred years after his birth... Page 149 Yes, he will return to earth to preach a new Buddhism, is that it? It seems his teaching will come to an end, and will be replaced by something new. Yes, it is that gentleman, what is his name... X, who told you that? But that is his theory ...
... helped mankind. Paganism increased in man the light of beauty, the largeness and height of his life, his aim at a many-sided perfection; Christianity gave him some vision of divine love and charity; Buddhism has shown him a noble way to be wiser, gentler, purer; Judaism and Islam how to be religiously faithful in action and zealously devoted to God; Hinduism has opened to him the largest and profoundest ...
... say that there is a kind of hierarchy of collaboration or action: there is a negative help and a positive help. To begin with, there is a way that might be called negative, the way provided by Buddhism and kindred religions: not to see. First of all, to be in such a state of purity and beauty that you do not perceive ugliness and evil—it is like something that does not touch you because it does ...
... progress. Thus the problem of feminism, as all the problems of the world, comes back to a spiritual problem. For the spiritual reality is at the basis of all others; the divine world, the Dhammata of Buddhism, is the eternal foundation on which are built all the other worlds. In regard to this Supreme Reality all are equal, men and women, in rights and in duties; the only distinction which can exist in ...
... they do not want to move any more. Those who have progressed with the help of Christianity do not want to give it up and they carry it on their shoulders; those who have progressed with the help of Buddhism do not want to leave it and they carry it on their shoulders, and so this hampers the advance and you are indefinitely delayed. Once you have passed the stage, let it drop, let it go! Go farther ...
... fall—it's really unclear how what has come from God could become so bad, but anyway, better not be too logical! it's a fall. The creation is a fall. And that's why they are far more easily convinced by Buddhism. I saw this particularly with Richard, whose education was entirely in European philosophy, with Christian and positivist influences; under these two influences, when he came into contact with Theon's ...
... decomposing, that were still good, but dead, because they didn't have any more air or water. Generally, fish in the sea mean Multitude. 1 But there must be many meanings; I have told you that Buddhism often uses the image of fish as a symbol. Symbolisms, mon petit, there are hundreds and hundreds of them. And people always oppose them, but ultimately they are just different ways of seeing one ...
... Between the two there is nothing much to choose from, they are equally bad. Sri Aurobindo has told us that this was a fundamental mistake which accounts for the weakness and degradation of India. Buddhism, Jainism, Illusionism were sufficient to sap all energy out of the country. True, India is the only place in the world which is still aware that something else than matter exists. The other countries ...
... clue exists in the extant Purānas. He 1 observes that the Purānic account of the Mauryas has suffered more than that of any other dynasty. And he 2 asks in a footnote: "Because its great fame in Buddhism disgraced it in Brāhmanical eyes?" His regular comment concludes: 3 "All agree that the dynasty lasted 137 years. The regnal periods added together (excluding the Matsya list which is incomplete) ...
... Country Mouse (The printer's hand has tried its tricks with me also in the course of editing Mother India. In reprinting some words of Sri Aurobindo on the spiritual visions of the past, the phrase "Buddhism was only a restatement of Vedanta" was saved at the last minute from appearing with "restaurant" in place of "restatement".) If even Hugo with his wide scope and large scale has to be left with ...
... touched by the tremendous truthnces to argue the superiority of that religion: thus "Christian love" is sought to be made out so much greater than the love that flows from the heart of both Hinduism and Buddhism to all creatures and not merely to human beings. Similarly, Krishna, though appreciated, is cut down in comparison to Christ and also relegated to the world of myth. Krishna is obviously historical ...
... in a number of other instances to argue the superiority of that religion: thus "Christian love" is sought to be made out so much greater than the love that flows from the heart of both Hinduism and Buddhism to all creatures and not merely to human beings. Similarly, Krishna, though appreciated, is cut down in comparison to Christ and also relegated to the world of myth. Krishna is obviously historical ...
... two types are not strictly distributed between the sexes. Tagore himself of the Gitanjali-lyrics has the bhakta's disposition. As ardent a bhakta as the woman Mirabai was the man Chaitanya, and Buddhism had nuns as well as monks. Incline as it frequently may in one or the other direction exclusively, the psyche in either sex is two-moded. Sri Aurobindo This fact gives us a clue to ...
... in belief in the survival of death by the human personality. But such beliefs are not the only possible sign of the religious-spiritual temperament. Even Buddhism with its Nirvana and Adwaita with its impersonal Absolute Brahman do not subscribe to them. Einstein has acutely characterized his own ...
... p. 542 Nair notes that "in the time of Emerson (1803-1882) not much knowledge of Indian religious traditions had percolated into the West; thus he refers to the Gita as "the much renowned book of Buddhism'." Then Nair comments: "He was responding to the pure poetry of the Gita, the way it sees the halations around facts when it conceptualises, and transfigures concepts into images whose charges of ...
... Truth, as it is the passage from the Ignorance to the higher Truth. The Ignorance has to be extinguished in order that the Truth may manifest. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - II: Jainism and Buddhism Yoga is in essence the union of the soul with the immortal being and consciousness and delight of the Divine effected through the human nature with a result of development into the divine ...
... for me. Rafters and beams are shattered, and with the extinction of tanha 1 deliverance from repeated life is gained at last." 2 Yes, even if we do not go so far as to assert with Buddhism that a transcendental Nirvana or Extinction should be the ultimate goal of Sadhana, the fact remains that, dissatisfied with the 'Vale of Tears' that our earth-life is, many a seeker on the path ...
... Then we have given the example of Krishna as a teacher and Arjuna as a pupil and the example of the Buddha himself as a student and the Buddha as a teacher. We have also spoken of the system of Zen Buddhism and the Sufi system of teaching and learning and given also a story of a Sufi teacher. Illustrating how he tests his pupils and how a pupil first failed and ultimately succeeds. We have also, among ...
... was followed by the synthesis of the Upanishad. At a later stage, the Bhagavad Gita provided a new synthesis. The conflict that arose in Indian thought as a result of the growth and development of Buddhism was sought to be resolved by the composite philosophy that we find embedded in the Puranas and Tantras. Still later, when the conflict between the various schools of Vedanta became acute, we find ...
... possessed increased that feeling of optimism. A kind of vague humanism appealed to me. Religion, as I saw it practised, and accepted even by thinking minds, whether it was Hinduism or Islam or Buddhism or Christianity, did not attract me. It seemed to be closely associated with superstitious practices and dogmatic beliefs, and behind it lay a method of approach to life's problems which was certainly ...
... now they prevailed and became supreme, occupying the best energies of the race and stamping themselves on its life and consciousness. In obedience to this impulse the centuries between the rise of Buddhism and the advent of Shankaracharya became — though not agnostic and sceptical, for they rejected violently the doctrines of Charvak — yet profoundly scientific and outward-going even in their spiritualism ...
... (according to anti-vivisectionists)? If animal sacrifices are to be made, they may just as well be made to Kali as to one's stomach,—the Europeans who object to it have no locus standi. Buddhism says the killing of mosquitoes, bugs, snakes and scorpions may be done mercifully or mercilessly for self-protection. Certainly. One might just as well object to the killing Of germs by fumigation ...
... also, where she attributes to Japanese Jiu-jitsu some mystic power and makes it a symbol of it. SRI AUROBINDO: I thought that Japanese spirituality is in the Japanese religion which is called Zen Buddhism. There the disciples have to bear blows from the Guru as a test of discipleship. (Smiling) I suppose many would find that inconvenient here. NIRODBARAN: Have you written any stories? SRI ...
... call for a new life, a new race, a new age. Both Mother and Sri Aurobindo have come down here, into this clay world of ours, with a particular mission. It is not to establish another religion like Buddhism, Islam or Christianity. All these -isms are now back in great numbers. But Sri Aurobindo and the Mother do not want to found a religion; they want to establish a new race, a new race of Supramental ...
... Siddhasila, come in? Like all religions, it is fantastically illogical. Buddha also said the same thing but the religion said, "I can take refuge in Buddha." PURANI: There is some similarity between Buddhism and Jainism. Buddha and Mahavira were contemporaries, though they don't seem to have met. Mahavira was born in Vaisali. DR. MANILAL: In Jainism each soul is bound by ignorance and there are four ...
... clear about it. SRI AUROBINDO (with a surprised look) : No. Only by the negative path you arrive at Non-Being, or what the Gita calls the Indeterminate. As I said, it is the same as in Taoism and Buddhism. But it is not really Nothing. What we can say is that no attribute of Being can be posited of it. Taoism says that Non-Being is Everything rather than Nothing. By the affirmative path you come through ...
... religion has also sought to unify mankind on a larger basis, as large indeed as the world itself. The aim of Christendom, of Islam was frankly a conquest of the whole human race for the one jealous Lord. Buddhism and Hinduism did not overtly or with a set purpose attempt any such worldwide proselytism, but their influence and actual working had almost a similar effect: at least in the case of the former, ...
... AUROBINDO: Yes. Shankara speaks of the One and the One-in-Many. For Buddha there is no ultimate Self of all; each by his own effort attains separate liberation. Radhakrishnan is now trying to prove that Buddhism believes in the Self. But then illogicality will come in. SATYENDRA: The Tibetan Buddhists say that Nirvana is a half-way house. SRI AUROBINDO: What is beyond? SATYENDRA: That I didn't find ...
... eating cows at one time? SRI AUROBINDO: Oh yes, sacrificial cows. NIRODBARAN: It was the post-Buddhistic influence that stopped meat-eating. SRI AUROBINDO: No, it was Jainism. In Bengal where Buddhism was once very dominant they used to eat meat. It is remarkable how Jainism spread that influence throughout the whole of India. It was because of jainism that Gujarat is vegetarian. But some carry ...
... that. Krishnaprem speaks according to the Mahayana. Mahayana went much further. Buddha didn't say what Nirvana is and he did not say that Nirvana and Samsara are equal. PURANI: As an authority on Buddhism, Mrs. Rhys Davies seems to be the best person. SRI AUROBINDO: No, she is not very reliable. The Mahayana conception of Nirvana seems to be something like Laotse's Tao. Tao, according to him, is ...
... stereotyped and tied to forms and so degeneration sets in. It is everywhere the same. After long periods of activity, the degeneration comes unless the race finds a renewing source. For instance, when Buddhism came in as a shock, it pervaded the whole of life and brought in a new current everywhere. The saints and Bhaktas can't exert that kind of influence because their urge doesn't pervade the whole of ...
... which it stood firm and erect – was the Vedas, the Knowledge seen by the sages. But there had already-risen a voice of dissidence and discord-that of Buddha, not so much, perhaps, of Buddha as of Buddhism. The Buddhistic enlightenment and discipline did not admit the supreme authority of the Vedas; it sought other bases of truth and reality. It was a great denial; and it meant and worked for a vital ...
... earth cannot progress even when there is the occasion, because of this besetting obstacle. It has many names and many forms. It is Page 279 Sin or Satan in Christianity; Buddhism calls it Mara. In India it is generally known as Maya. Grief and sorrow, weakness and want, disease and death are its external and ubiquitous forms. It is a force of gravitation, as graphically named ...
... 193n Brahmanas, the, 222, 365 Bradley, 326 Britain, 89, 104-5, 128 British Isles, the, 100 Buddha, 8, 50, 54-5, 166, 195, 208, 215-6, 222, 243, 280, 384 Buddhism, 54, 110, 166, 280 Byron, 194 CAESAR, jULIUS, 206, 208, 239, 367,394 Calcutta Review, the, 336n., 339n Camoens, 197 Canada, 106 Cato, 239 ...
... at the other pole to the materialistic — of the eventual prospect of the divine transfiguration of the body and the physical existence of man. Indian thought, in particular, since the advent of Buddhism on the scene, has lived in the 'shadow of this great Refusal' and generally considered that the final end of life for all is the garb of the ascetic. 2 For "all voices are joined in one great ...
... "Karma-vāda" or the "Theory of the Universal Chain of Karma" is one of the basic constituent elements of all the religions and philosophical systems that have sprung up in India. Whether we consider Buddhism or Jainism, post-Buddha Puranic Hinduism or Sikhism, or the orthodox philosophies like Vedanta, Mimansa, Patanjal, etc., we shall find Karmavada occupying everywhere a central position in these doctrines ...
... Chandrashekhar Azad, etc. This is the India that should be loved and cherished. Another aspect of Indian culture is "sarva hitaya" work for the benefit of all. Reference from Bhagavadgita, Buddhism, Jainism and Islam, etc., can be told. In this connection, we can tell the story of Sri Rama; for public welfare he sacrificed his personal life; story of Sri Krishna and Arjuna; *** solidarity ...
... also an important part of the programme of study. In course of time, six Vedangas had developed as also four Upavedas and a number of other sciences and shastras. With the development of Buddhism, a different system of education developed Page 388 which laid great emphasis on practices of asceticism, rules of dharma and studies of philosophy, medicine and other sciences. This ...
... two centuries after Alexander the Romans, having dominated all of Italy, had already conquered Greece and were on their way to take over and unify the Mediterranean world. In India in 350 B.C. Buddhism was flourishing. At the time of Page 91 Alexander's death, the Mauryan dynasty was established (322 B.C.) and the first King of that dynasty, Chandragupta Maurya (322-298 B.C.), came ...
... completed very largely during the Gupta period, although the traditions, practices and even texts are considered to have existed from very early times. A number of Agamas, such as those of Jainism and Buddhism and others are not in harmony with the Vedas, yet most of the Agamas are in consonance with the Vedas. Of these latter, there are three categories, those in which the object of worship and realisation ...
... also shakti bhakti 21 Bhakti Yoga 42 beatitude 27, 28 beauty 31 beyond-ego 88; see also ego Brahman or Ā tman 11, 43, 45, 65, 97 Bramhic silence 2 Buddha 97 Buddhism 92; the Yoga of 43 Chinmaya 84 concentration 28; a certain special method of 52; the method of 26; a line of 42; specific process of 27 daivī prakriti 75; see also prakriti ...
... examination of the notion of God and with the affirmation or denial of the existence of God. Religions have been largely formulated around some conception of 'God', although it is true that religions like Buddhism and Jainism are atheistic in character. But even these atheistic religions affirm the reality of supra-physical entities and supra-physical states of consciousness far above the states of the body ...
... Page 46 influences of the great theistic religions of India and similarly of the great theistic religions of the world; we have also to assimilate the recovered sense of the meaning of Buddhism. Relevance of Jainism has also to be underlined. We have to take into account the potent, though limited, revelations of modern knowledge and seeking. A fresh and widely embracing harmonisation of ...
... Buddhist art became not merely an illustration of the religion and an expression of its thought and its religious feeling, history and legend, but a revealing interpretation of the spiritual sense of Buddhism and its profounder meaning to the soul of India." 3 Art opens the gates of our consciousness to the depths of truth and beauty; it imparts to our consciousness the sense and experience of joy ...
... yogic experience, and even in recent times the yogic quest undertaken by Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, as also by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, has verified the yogic truths of religions like Buddhism and Jainism as also Christianity and Islam and others, and they have been discovered and reconfirmed in their veracity and in their place in the ever-enlarging domain of yogic knowledge. This has ...
... 28,30,37 Brahmanas, 66,87,89 Brahmin, 42, 52 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 30,70 Brihaspati, 13,14 Brihat, 12, 47 British, 50, 84 Buddha, 83 Buddhi, 28 Buddhism, 8,46,59,84 Bull, 73 Caste, 54 Casteism, 62 Charanavyuha, 91 Chaturvarna, 53 Chaldea, 1 Chaitanya, 44,59,85 Chandragupta Maurya, 84 Charvaka, 46, 59 ...
... man the light of beauty, the largeness and height of his life, his aim at a many-sided perfection. Christianity gave him Page 180 some vision of Divine love and charity, Buddhism has shown him a noble way to be wiser, gentler and purer; Judaism and Islam, how to be religiously faithful in action and zealously devoted to God; Hinduism has opened to him the largest and profoundest ...
... on which it stood firm and erect—was the Vedas, the Knowledge seen by the sages. But there had already risen a voice of dissidence and discord—that of Buddha, not so much, perhaps, of Buddha as of Buddhism. The Buddhistic enlightenment and discipline did not admit the supreme authority of the Vedas; it sought other bases of truth and reality. It was a great denial; and it meant and worked for a vital ...
... individual and cosmos, all disappear and vanish. In compassion, the cosmic communion, there is a trace and an echo of humanism – it is perhaps one of the reasons why Europeans generally are attracted to Buddhism and find it more congenial than Hinduism with its dizzy Vedantic heights; but in the status of the transcendent Selfhood humanism is totally transcended and transmuted, one dwells then in the Bliss ...
... 28-30 Brahman, 23, 25, 28, 34, 39, 51, 98, 105, 119, 165,234, 243, 278, 280, 359 Bridges, 88 Browning, Robert, 71 Buddha, 34, 57-8, 130, 133, 242, 267, 274, 277-9, 281-3, 298, 304 Buddhism, 242, 276-8, 280, 282-3 Page 371 Bunyan, 68 -The Pilgrim's Progress, 68 CANADA, 284 Cezanne, 152 Chandidasa,221-2 Char, Rene, 207 "Chanson des Etages" ...
... here that certain features of universal religions could be studied with the methods of comparative studies. Particularly we may emphasise the study of Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Jainism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Sikhism. Along with these religions, there should be a detailed study of the lives of great personalities associated with these religions, or various systems ...
... needed. Fortunately, a great effort has been made during the last two centuries, and we have today a considerable understanding of the truths of the Veda and the Upanishads, of the recovered sense of Buddhism and also of the secrets of the knowledge of the soul that was expressed in the ancient Jaina texts. And we can say with confidence that the ancient Indian records of knowledge manifest profound knowledge ...
... which had their origin in India, but this theory is not held in common by all religions. Even where the theory of rebirth is acknowledged, the nature of the soul is not shared in common. Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism share the belief in rebirth; but in the multi-sided Hinduism itself there is no common belief in regard to the nature and the reality of the soul. The law of karma as understood ...
... Monism of various kinds. I studied the Veda, the Upanishads, the Gita; I studied Nyaya, Vaisheshika; I studied Samkhya and Yoga; I studied Poorva-Mimansa and Uttara-Mimansa. I studied Jainism and Buddhism; I studied Materialism and modern Empiricism; but I found no satisfaction." Page 245 Naveen Chandra paused a little. So I asked him, "What happened next?" He said, "I felt quite desperate ...
... bearing on the problems of human evolution and its future; he has given us basic clues to be found in the ancient Indian wisdom and in the theistic religious traditions and in the recovered sense of Buddhism, as also in the revelations of the modern knowledge to those answers which we need so urgently and imperatively. In fact, his writings have opened up the lines on which we can fruitfully pursue our ...
... and a recovered sense of the meaning ¹. All the Puranic tradition, it must be. remembered, draws the richness of its contents from the Tantra. ². The Cosmic Play Page 91 of Buddhism, but to take full account of the potent though limited revelations of modem knowledge and seeking; and, beyond that, the remote and dateless past which seemed to be dead is returning upon us with ...
... our history and its peculiar training and culture, where the human consciousness has found a particular expression for which one cannot find a parallel. It was what is known as the age of Tantric Buddhism. During this period, a special kind of spiritual discipline and culture had been growing as a result of the Buddhist influence. It extended mainly over north-eastern India, but the whole of north ...
... stress on knowledge. Later on, when Mahayana, the Great Path, came into vogue, there commenced the worship of the Buddha. When the compassion of the Buddha was recognised as the principal trait of Buddhism we moved away from intuition and resorted to inspiration.¹ Bengal is chiefly the field of inspiration. It is inspiration that dominates the field of action, the art and religion of Bengal. Scholars ...
... religion has also sought to unify mankind on a larger basis, as large indeed as the world itself The aim of Christendom, of Islam was frankly a conquest of the whole human race for the one jealous Lord. Buddhism and Hinduism did not Page 94 overtly or with a set purpose attempt any such world-wide proselytism, but their influence and actual working had almost a similar effect : at least in ...
... culture is vast and complex : it has been constantly building new forms adopting them, adapting old forms, changing some and even destroying some. At one time it completely gave the outer forms of Buddhism which it had created. There is an all-round meeting, mixing and clash of ___________________ ² The Foundations of Indian Culture. 4 Ibid Page 35 ...
... Mother at one time tried to impose some restrictions and regulations but it did not work. One has to change from within. There are, of course, other yogic systems which have such strict regulations. Buddhism is unique Page 3 in that respect. There is a school in France [Labratte?] which enjoins strict ...
... Aurobindo : This Purana is not so early as that. All Page 113 the Puranas, in fact, are post-Buddhistic. They are a part of the Brahmanic revival which came as a reaction against Buddhism in the Gupta period." Disciple : They are supposed to have been written in or about the 3rd or 4th century A. D. Sri Aurobindo : Most probably. In the Vishnu Purana Buddha is regarded ...
... emergence of new sects; they solve nothing, and only add to our problems or give further vicious twists to them: The religion which embraces Science and faith. Theism, Christianity, Mahomedanism and Buddhism and yet is none of these, is that to which the World-Spirit moves. In our own, which is the most sceptical and the most believing of all, the most sceptical because it has questioned and experimented ...
... shrink and the Rajputs who were predominantly rajasic occupied Page 8 the throne of India. Northern India was in the grip of wars and internal quarrels and, owing to the decadence of Buddhism, Bengal was overcome with tamas. Spirituality sought refuge in South India and by the grace of that sattwic power South India was able to retain her freedom for a long time. Yearning for knowledge ...
... Pondicherry, now also he hoped and planned to continue his inquiries. The Orient had always fascinated the Richards: India certainly, but also China and Japan. Was Richard interested in observing Zen Buddhism at close quarters? Was he intrigued by the 'still-sitting' movement? For Mirra too, this was an invitation to new horizons. And so they boarded the Kamo Maru at London on 14 March and arrived in ...
... Ashram. It includes life in Yoga". And hence anything that was useful and not inconsistent with the imperatives of the Spirit was permissible activity in the Ashram. Although ever since "the shadow of Buddhism stalked over all the land" and the philosophy of Illusion hypnotised men into inactivity the 'ashrams' became mere monasteries, places of retreat and nooks of quietism, a very different ideal had ...
... President Woodrow 398 Wordsworth, William 5-6, 111, 484, 514 World Union 573, 685-6, 755 Wretched of the Earth, The 773 Yogic Sadhan 91 Yoga Sutras 192 Younghusband, Sir Francis 409 Zen Buddhism 153, 193ff, 288 Zir Naidu 47, 131 Zola, Emile 21fn Zoroaster 482 Page 924 ...
... Why does it descend into human birth? This is a moot problem of religion and philosophy, and upon its solution depend the meaning and purpose of human life, if it is conceded that man has a soul. Buddhism denies the existence of any soul or immortal entity subsisting in the midst of the cosmic flood; therefore, for it there is no meaning or purpose in human life except to dissolve it into its constituent ...
... other world was knotted and unraveled. A small, decisive representation of a "something" whose laws and real movement She was gropingly seeking. “God” had no doubt blessed her with knowing nothing of Buddhism, otherwise She might have fallen into the great illusionist Maya, and further blessed her with knowing nothing of any "ism"—She progressed innocently, alone, with her eyes open in every direction ...
... people the Veda. For thousands of years Vedapuri was a school for young Brahmins where they learnt to chant the Vedic hymns in Sanskrit and to perform complicated sacrifices in the proper way. "Buddhism came and went, and then in the first and second centuries of our era we find on that same Coromandel Coast a Roman settlement mentioned in the Periple by Ptolemy of Alexandria. Heavily loaded ...
... science of spiritual culture, and its subtly graded eightfold process commands universal homage and trust among spiritual seekers. Even non- Hindu schools of Yoga, such as those of Jainism and Buddhism, owe much of the power and perfection of their systems to Râjayoga. But its preponderant preoccupation with meditation and samadhi makes it rather inapt for any substantial life-effectuation and ...
... had mastered all that the Vedantist could teach him, and had entered Nirvikalpa samadhi. One by one Ramakrishna mastered all the different lines of Hindu spirituality: Tantrism, Vaishnavism, Buddhism, etc. His teacher of Tantrism was a Bhairavi, a Brahmin lady. Not only did Ramakrishna master the intricacies of various lines of Hindu spirituality, but he experienced also the essence of Islam and ...
... fighting earth's evils and towards a raising of all desires in her direction, Taoism's sense of a simple universal basis of being which can always rightly uphold and lead one along paths of peace. Buddhism's grand escape into an infinite silence from the mind's "labyrinthine ways" and the wandering urgencies of the little heart, Vedanta's plunge into a boundless Self of selves ever free and serene in ...
... love. This is the reason why the gospels which preach brotherhood spread quickly and excite passionate attachment. This was the reason of the rapid spread of Christianity. This was the reason of Buddhism's rapid spread in this country and throughout Asia. This is the essence of humanitarianism, the modern gospel of love for mankind. None of us have achieved our ideals, but human society has always ...
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