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Thursday, November 1, 2012

Angkor Wat mystery solved?

(LiveScience.com)
Aerial view of central temple at Angkor Wat, showing the moat and causeway and the central tower surrounded by four smaller towers. The suburbs surrounding the central city were the largest suburbs in the world all due to water management with 1,000,000+ inhabitants (Alexey Stiop/livescience.com).
  
Angkor Wat Buddha faces (Dvillaret/flickr.com)
The massive sandstone bricks used to construct the 12th-century temple of [Cambodia's] Angkor Wat were brought to the site via a network of hundreds of [artificial] canals, according to new research.
  
The findings shed light on how the site's 5 million to 10 million bricks, some weighing up to 3,300 pounds (1,500 kgs), made it to the temple from quarries at the base of a nearby mountain [with technology from space].
  
"We found many quarries of sandstone blocks used for the [Buddhist and Hindu] Angkor temples and also the transportation route of the sandstone blocks," wrote study co-author Estuo Uchida of Japan's Waseda University, in an email. More

"YogaWoman" (film)

YogaWoman.TV; Amber Dorrian, Wisdom Quarterly
() Movie now showing in Los Angeles and other major markets
 
The wonders of inner peace (Yogag33k)
Yoga, as spiritual exercises and an ancient Vedic philosophy, was brought to the West from India by a lineage of male teachers (gurus) and their disciples (chelas). But now a generation of women are leading the way. They're strong, they're inspiring, and they're radically changing people's lives. "YogaWoman" is a groundbreaking film, uncovering a global phenomenon that has forever changed the face of yoga.
  
Comments
Shiva-Shakti, the masculine-feminine in everyon
(Notch76) I am a man, and I practice yoga, but my understanding is that a major aspect of the practice is the move toward dissolving the ego along with any attachment to one's identity (including gender) in favor of a realized oneness with all. That being said, I don't take issue with the fact many women find peace, comfort, and strength through yoga practice. I think it's beautiful when anyone makes such a discovery.
  
(Wendyness01 replying to MagicPonyRides) Unless you have "exposure" in the yoga community (the "casting couch" approach works), one's ability to make a living teaching yoga is VERY limiting. I know several yoga teachers who can't make a living teaching yoga so they "mate poach." Most yoga teachers that I know here in the West are female, NOT married, and DON'T have children. Not very empowering.
  
(ChannelStudioPeace) How fantastic! A film about yoga and women! Yoga's a wonderful way of entering sacred space, feeling your power, and experiencing the connection to yourself and the universe around you. It's interesting how the cycle has shifted from yoga being practiced and taught exclusively by men at one time to today it being practiced and taught almost exclusively by women. As a female practitioner and yoga teacher, I can't wait to see the movie!
  
(Wayne Barrow) As a male with only a cursory interest in yoga, I was blown away by this insightful film as it gave me a fascinating insight into this noble art from a female perspective. I wish the filmmakers and people involved in the production all the best for producing a quality and entertaining product. I wish people would actually see the documentary all the way through before passing judgment!

Peaceful Buddhists on murderous rampage?

Dhr. Seven, Wisdom Quarterly; Abbot Ven. Karunananda, Ph.D., Bodhi Vihara
In this anti-Buddhist propaganda photo suggesting Buddhists monks (Tibetan lamas) are up to no good standing among corpses, what is really happening is quite the opposite. Lamas were brought in to bless and comfort victims after a massive Himalayan landslide in Tibet -- in this inflammatory, undated photo tagged with a url link to a video reporting atrocities committed against Burma's minority Muslim Rohingyas, which the world seems to be ignoring: tinyurl.com/93hqzme.
    
UPDATE: The editors of Wisdom Quarterly are not apologists (defenders the faith ready to explain any and every negative thing away). If monastics or  nominal lay "Buddhists" harm others, we report it. Reports have reached us that Buddhists did NOT go on murderous rampages. They might have, but there is a more plausible explanation. Rohingyas are in a tense stand off with their coompatriot neighbors, Burmese Buddhist villagers and co-religionist Muslims in nearby Bangladesh. Buddhists are angry about a sensational rape of a Buddhist female by Rohingya boys, ongoing drug dealing, and general anti-social behavior. But it is alleged that Rohingyas set fire to their own villages using gun powder provided to them from some outside source agitating for change. Rohingyas want to have their plight recognized, so they had to do something to get sympathy and vital humanitarian relief from either the world in general or Bangladeshi officials in particular.
  
Burma has a history of massacring minorities.
The worldwide MIC (transnational military-industrial complex) has succeeded in sucking in some Buddhists, tragically pitting some poor Burmese villagers against their fellow countrymen, an ethnic minority known as the Rohingya. Neighboring Muslim Bangladesh has refused to help save lives and prevent this nascent genocide by admitting Rohingyas attempting to flee the violence, which goes both ways with Rohingyas attacking minority Bangladeshi Buddhist temples and villagers and majority Burmese Buddhists retaliating.

But this is not a simple case of neighbor-on-neighbor violence. Pres. Thien Sein of Burma has admitted that the monstrous Myanmar military -- which in 2007 attacked, imprisoned, and slaughtered uncounted Buddhist monks and pro-democracy protesters in the ongoing Saffron Revolution -- has been systematically executing Rohingya. The military junta headed by Burmese dictator Gen. Than Shwe have ruthlessly attacked and waged war against many of Burma's ethnic minorities, including Buddhists along the its mountainous borders with Thailand and China.
What is going on?
Stop! Consider the consequences of shortsighted action (karma)! Hatred will never cease by hatred. Every gain will mean even more loss (Ahsanul Bari).
  
We go to Bangladeshi Buddhist abbot and scholar Ven. Karunananda, Ph.D. for comment. 

WQ: "Venerable sir, Buddhists are killing Muslims?"

VK: "Villagers are fighting, but this has absolutely nothing to do with religion. This is not a religious crusade or anything Buddhist monastics sponsor. Rohingya attacked Buddhists in Bangladesh; Buddhists in Burma are attacking Rohingya."

WQ: "Where is Hillary Clinton in all this?"

VK: "That is a good question."

WQ: "Worse yet, where is our heroine Nobel Peace Laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi?"

VK: "This is a very delicate matter, very tragic."

There is a dictum in Buddhism that any person who attacks another is wrong to do so, but a person who retaliates is worse. Revenge is NOT justified in Buddhism, contrary to Western conceptions of God and Jewish-Christian ideals of vengeance, following a tribal God(s) into war against neighbors.
  
Fortunately, New Testament Christians speak of a new ideal (forgiveness) and a new God (Issa/Jesus) replacing the warring eye-for-any-eye mentality attributed to YHWH.

But many Christians in the West (US, UK, EU, and the Holy See) do not distinguish Old and New Testament Gods when it comes to such things as revenge, war, imperial-crusades, and ethnic-genocides. Conducting war in the name of One God (peruse the Christian Bible's Book of Judges if there's any doubt) and world domination is a mainstay in the Far West and, sadly, the Middle East as well.
  
The CIA can't make all this war without some help from a minority of Muslims bent on upholding the eye-for-an-eye mentality of monotheistic tradition. But to whom are we to attribute most of the violence in the world today?

Who does what?
(americanbedu.com)
Photographer Kombizz Kashani rhetorically asks: "Who started the first world war? Muslims?? Who started the second world war? Muslims?? Who killed ten million aborigines in Australia? Muslims?? Who dropped nuclear bombs on civilian [non-combatants] in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Muslims?? Who killed more than 100 million Native American-Indians in North America? Muslims?? Who killed more than 50 million indigenous-Indians in South America? Muslims?? Who trafficked ~180 million Africans as slaves with 88% of them dying or being thrown into the Atlantic?? Muslims??"

No, they weren't Muslims! They were mostly [nominal] Christians.

Let's define "terrorism." If a non-Muslim does something untoward, it's a "crime." But if a Muslim commits the exact same misdeed, it's "terrorism." We first have to disabuse ourselves of this biased double-standard.

Buddhist Halloween with Ven. Thanasanti

Wisdom Quarterly
Theravada nun Ven. Thanasanti, Halloween Dharma Punx, Hollywood (Wisdom Quarterly)

Against the Stream welcomed American Theravada Buddhist nun Amma Thanasanti Bhikkhuni for an extended teaching visit. There are several chances to meditate and hear her teach, ask questions, and share community (sangha) building in simple conversation. Scheduled events from Halloween to Nov. 5, 2012 include:
  • Oct 31: Halloween night, 7:30-9:30, Melrose Center. Come in costume, take some candy, listen to the Dharma from a California native in robes for 22 years. This even was recorded by Wisdom Quarterly for those trick-or-treating elsewhere for Samhain.
  • Nov 3: Living on the Razor's Edge: Amma and JoAnna Harper team to spend a day investigating desire and renunciation. 10-4 at Melrose - a dana only day.
  • Nov 4: Picnic and Games on the Beach in Malibu. Join Amma and the ATS sangha for some meditation and a relaxed gathering Sunday morning from 10:30 till... Bring a dish or something to share.
  • Nov 5: Monday night meditation. Amma closes out her time with us by teaching the Monday evening class at Dharma Punx, Santa Monica.
  
(HeyItsWilliam/flickr.com)
Ven. Thanasanti began meditating over 30 years ago and has been a Buddhist nun for over 20 years. After two decades in monasteries associated with [Thai tradition] Ajahn Sumedho and Ajahn Chah, she returned to the US and founded Awakening Truth (awakeningtruth.org), an organization whose mission to support a nun's (bhikkhuni) training monastery and a new interface between monastic and lay Buddhist practitioners in the modern world. Amma's work spans Dharma teachings, non-dual meditation, depth psychology, subtle body somatics, and the Divine Feminine. She teaches meditation as an art and skill, integrating body, heart, and mind to experience our natural state of wisdom, love, and peace. She has taught meditation internationally for over 15 years. Currently she resides at Shakti Vihara Hermitage in Colorado Springs.