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Thursday, June 28, 2012

Buddhist artifacts in Maldives destroyed

OnIslam.net; Wisdom Quarterly
Few realize that the diving paradise known as the Maldives, most of which is at or close to sea level and doomed to destruction as the planet warms due to manmade and natural causes, used to be Buddhist.
  
Now some entity or agency has brought about a coup and is trying to create international outrage by destroying priceless Buddhist art and history. What kind Company or clandestine service would do such a thing? Surely not the CIA, who created the Taliban to make war for the military-industrial complex possible in Afghanistan. So we do not know who it was, but we do know it was not the CIA.
The Maldives are sinking
MALE, Maldive Islands - The destruction of several historical priceless Buddhist artifacts exhibited at the Maldives National Museum has alarmed Maldivians, provoking warnings of a possible rise of Islamic extremism and Taliban-style intolerance in the holiday paradise.

"They have effectively erased all evidence of our Buddhist past," a senior museum official, who asked for anonymity, told Agence France Presse (AFP) on Sunday, February 12, at the now shuttered building in the capital Male.
 

"We lost all our 12th century statues. They were made of coral stone and limestone. They are very brittle and there is no way we can restore them," he explained.

Last Tuesday, Maldives' first democratically-elected president Mohamed Nasheed resigned following three weeks of protests that were joined by a police mutiny.

During the coup that ousted President Nasheed, scenes of violence resulted in the wanton destruction of historical treasures.

The destruction occurred when a handful of men stormed the Chinese-built museum and destroyed its display of priceless artifacts from the nation's pre-Islamic era.

The incident echoed the 2001 destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan by the Taliban, damaging the nation's image. More 
 
Why is someone destroying Maldivian statues?
Similar to the [CIA-created] Taliban’s destruction of priceless Buddhist and historic artifacts in 2001, an Islamic extremist group has vandalized and destroyed precious Buddhist and Hindu statues in the Maldives. This kind of destruction is derived from extremist beliefs, which are almost always rooted in fear of anything different. Any extreme (whether liberal or conservative) is dangerous because when we believe that we alone are good, then we're more likely to justify intolerance, destruction, and killing. Destroying an ancient statue is tragic, but statues crumble with time anyway. Intolerance, however, quickly destroys happiness, lives, families, countries, and planets. More

Penguins are sexually depraved perverts (video)

Periscopepost.com expanded by Wisdom Quarterly

Are penguins perverts? New pamphlet reveals “sexual depravity” of birds
[It's not just rapist ducks.] Century-old Antarctic account alleges necrophilia and sexual abuse among penguins.
  
Background
Deviants? (slapthepenguin.com)
A pamphlet has emerged detailing apparent sexual depravity among penguins. Written by George Levick, a scientist with the 1910-13 Scott Antarctic Expedition, Sexual Habits of the Adélie Penguin contains observations of necrophilia and sexual coercion and abuse carried out by gangs of “hooligan” penguins.
  
According to the BBC Levick’s account was considered so shocking that it was left out of the official version of his published work on penguins, with the Natural History Museum suggesting a compromise: “The then keeper of zoology at the museum, Sidney Harmer, decided that 100 copies of the graphic account should be circulated to a select group of scientists.”
Only two copies remain, one of which was recently discovered among the museum’s papers. This isn’t the first time the sexual behavior of penguins has hit the headlines. In 2011, a Canada [Toronto] zoo sparked outrage after deciding to separate “gay” penguin couple Buddy and Pedro in order to encourage them to find female mates. The story was dubbed “Brokeback Iceberg.”

WARNING: Gay themes in comedic gay context, coarse language! "Homo-
sexuality is found in over 450 species. Homophobia is found in only one." 
The many gay animal species bring the practice's abnormality into question.
 
But will the latest allegations of necrophilia and sexual abuse damage the penguin community’s cute image for good? 
  
Calm down, dears, they’re just penguins
Dr. Levick's notebook coded in Greek (BBC)
“What is happening here is the projection of human values onto a different species,” wrote Tim Stanley on a Telegraph blog. We seem to forget that penguins – and indeed other animals – don’t make moral choices, or have a sense of sexual identity. “At the same time that we more ruthlessly exploit animals than ever before, we also seem determined to find qualities within them that we can empathise with. We want to turn them into mirrors of ourselves,” Stanley said. 

Further research clarifies penguin perversion
Douglas Russell, curator of birds at the Natural History Museum, told The Observer that this apparently depraved behavior can be easily explained: young adult penguins are sexually inexperienced and simply don’t understand how to behave during mating season. “A dead penguin, lying with its eyes half-open, is very similar in appearance to a compliant female. The result is the so-called necrophilia that Levick witnessed and which so disgusted him,” Russell explained.

Scary scene in "Happy Feet" of seal predation and Robin Williams shtick

Part III: It's Been a Long Time (sutra)

Maurice O'C. Walshe, "Great Discourse on the Lineage" (DN 14); Dhr. Seven, Wisdom Quarterly
Spiritual evolution occurs in cycles (bisquich.com)

The Buddha: "Then the Bodhisattva Vipassi thought, 'I have found the insight-way to enlightenment, namely:
  1. "By the cessation of mind-and-body, consciousness ceases;
  2. by the cessation of consciousness, mind-and-body ceases;
  3. by the cessation of mind-and-body, the six sense bases cease;
  4. by the cessation of the six sense bases, contact ceases;
  5. by the cessation of contact, feeling ceases;
  6. by the cessation of feeling, craving ceases;
  7. by the cessation of craving, clinging ceases;
  8. by the cessation of clinging, becoming ceases;
  9. by the cessation of becoming, birth ceases;
  10. by the cessation of birth aging and death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and distress cease. Thus this whole mass of suffering ceases." 
"And at the thought, ‘Cessation, cessation,’ there arose in the Bodhisattva Vipassi insight into things never before realized accompanied by knowledge, vision, awareness, and light.
  
Buddha Peace Pagoda inset (Valdnad)
"Then, disciples, at another time the Bodhisattva Vipassi dwelled contemplating the rise and fall of the Five Aggregates of Clinging: 'Such is the (1) body, such its arising, such its passing away; such is (2) sensation... such is (3) perception... such are the (4) formations [usually represented by volition]... such is (5) consciousness, such its arising, such its passing away.'
  
"And as he remained contemplating the rise and fall of the Five Aggregates of Clinging, before long his mind was freed from the corruptions, freed without remainder. [That is, he became completely enlightened and liberated from all future rebirth.]
  
"Then, disciples, the Blessed One, the Arhat, the fully-enlightened Buddha Vipassi thought, 'Suppose I were now to teach Dharma?' Then he thought, 'I have attained to this Dharma, which is profound, hard to see, hard to grasp, peaceful, excellent, beyond reasoning, subtle, to be apprehended by the wise.
   
"'But this generation delights in clinging, rejoices and revels in it. But for those who so delight, rejoice, and revel in clinging this is hard to see, namely, the conditioned [dependently originated] nature of things. 
   
"Equally hard to see would be the calming of all the mental formations, the abandonment of all substrates of rebirth, the waning away of craving, dispassion, cessation, [so as to see] nirvana. And if I were to teach Dharma to others and they did not understand, that would be wearisome and troublesome."
  
"And to the Buddha Vipassi there occurred spontaneously this verse never heard before:
  
"This that I’ve attained why should I proclaim?"
Those full of lust and hate can never grasp it.
Upstream this Dharma subtle, deep does aim.
So hard to discern, the passion-blinded cannot see it."
   
Maha Brahma (Thai Erawan Shrine)
"As the Buddha Vipassi pondered in this way, his mind was inclined to inaction rather than to teaching the Dharma. And, disciples, the Buddha Vipassi’s reasoning became known to a certain Great Brahma [telepathically], who thought:
  
"'Alas the world is perishing. It will be destroyed because the mind of Vipassi, the Blessed One, the Arhat, the Fully Enlightened Buddha, is inclined to inaction rather than to teaching the Dharma!'
   
"So this Great Brahma, as swiftly as a strong man might stretch his flexed arm or flex it again, disappeared from the Brahma plane and reappeared before the Buddha Vipassi. Arranging his upper robber over one shoulder and kneeling on his right knee, he saluted the Buddha Vipassi with joined hands and said:
   
"'Venerable sir, may the Blessed One teach Dharma, may the Well-Farer teach Dharma! There are beings with little dust in their eyes who are perishing from not hearing Dharma: they will become knowers of Dharma!" More

Buddhas of Bamiyan, Afghanistan (new photos)

James Gordon, Los Angeles (photos); text Seven; graphic design CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly

The Buddhas of Bamiyan, Afghanistan -- which the maverick scholar and historian Ranajit Pal, Ph.D. considers to be in vicinity of the original Kapilavastu, where Siddhartha grew up -- is ancient land in Himalayan foothills.
 
Buddhism is steeped in the geography of ancient Greater India (Maha Bharat), which at the time of the Buddha was a collection of loosely aligned territories. There are relics and markers throughout the region (many now outside the country) including ancient northwest Gandhara, present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan. 
   
Note people on foot. The tallest of the Buddhas of Bamiyan may not be the biggest in Asia.
  
India, and its Shakyan neighbor in the northwest, was expansive and fluid. People were aligned with extended family clans, and united by commonalities in language and trade. Buddhism and its precursor "wandering ascetic" (shramana) tradition are found even in the preceding Harappan era along with much of the history the Buddha mentioned, which we can assume was from the Indus Valley Civilization and earlier.
  
Bamiyan valley looking north to snow capped Himalayan range of Koh-i-Baba/Hindu Kush
  
Buddhas are spoken of as having arisen in previous aeons, far earlier than modern archeology is willing to concede that modern humans existed. But another maverick historian and archeologist shows evidence of the great antiquity of humanity (and hybrids) on this planet: Michael Cremo, who is informed not only by science but the ancient Vedas as well, as humans have been devolving through the ages.
  
The area of Bamiyan in Central Asia was Zoroastrian, founded by the asura Zoroaster (Zarathustra), and Buddhist at one time, that is, whatever fragments or memories remained of pre-Shakyamuni buddhas. before Gotama which implies that Buddhism was as old as Zoroastrianism. Dr. Pal contends that "detailed study reveals close links of early Buddhism with Hinduism, Judaism and Zoroastrianism which rose in the Bamiyan-Baluchistan-Gandhara area." 
   
The viewing point over Bamiyan valley from within the head of the tallest Buddha statue
  
(Holger Kersten is an excellent resource for information on ancient Jewish outposts in India). "The crucial fact that the Silk Road passed through the Buddhist heartland has escaped the notice of all," Dr. Pal explains. This is how Buddhism spread, even as the Buddha Gautama went back and forth from his native Kapilavastu to the ancient central kingdom of India, Magadha, where he otherwise spent much of his time teaching. He early on sent enlightened missionaries in all directions to spread the Dharma. They must have reached at least as far as Kalmykia, in indigenously Buddhist Europe.
  
Band-e Amir Bahar, west of and within two miles of the famous Buddhas of Bamiyan
  
Lumbini (Siddhartha's garden birthplace) or Kapilavastu (his hometown) in Nepal is, Dr. Pal contends, an archeological and historical "fraud." Wisdom Quarterly much to the chagrin of the governments of Islamic Afghanistan and Hindu-dominated Nepal and India. (Nepal was once the only Hindu nation in the world; India never was; they both now lean secular with a great financial interest in Buddhist tourism and history). Dr. Pal points out that, "Nothing in the art, archaeology, history or literature of early Nepal has the faintest hint of Buddhism." More photos
  
Shakya -- Siddhartha's clan name -- means "grey earth," a strange feature of Afghanistan.


Reassembling the Bamiyan fragments after the CIA/Taliban's destruction