premjan

A lot of people found him to be rather high-handed and he and Indira were responsible for the extremely unpopular forced female sterilization program.

perfectbite

Premjan,

#1 How would an English speaker pronounce the word 'Majjhima'?

and

#2 The mystery of India having nuclear weapons and delivery systems was solved for me when I read a series of essays on India in the New York Review of Books that stated that in a late 20th. century CE border clash with China the Indian government was aghast that their troops were so easily demolished by the sheer numbers of Chinese troops and sought a real deterrent against Chinese aggression. Of course, Pakistan could not have its sworn enemy and neighbour so handily armed and started its own nuclear weapons program and so it goes. Just in case you were wondering.

premjan

Majjhima is the vernacularization of "Madhyama" (middle). English speakers tend to stumble on soft consonants, so I would say "Madyama" to them).

Indians have through long enculturation got used to avoiding overt aggression and even consider it a value (on the other hand, noone like the Indians for covert backbiting, politics, etc.) so I bet they don't know how to react to someone who not only does not give two whits for moral values like nonviolence but shows real determined aggression like the Chinese. Submerging their aggression into an intellectual-technological response would be the first thing an Indian would think of.

I have to say that as I ponder it, Vishnu seems a little plausible to me, because I associate vishnu with the "flow of information". There is matter, and then there is information (a second order property). Even a phycisist would not argue with it. Vishnu is the global pattern of information flow in the universe. Buddha is the flow of causes and effects (slightly different) and the global knowledge of conditioned phenomena. Shiva in contrast is a process, the intellectual process of transcendence of any current mental state. Brahma is creativity.

perfectbite

Premjan,

Mind, in order to have a place to reside, creates matter.

The relationship of Shiva, Vishnu and Rama flashed through my consciousness a number of years ago as did a very brief understanding of the complexity of Karma and Dharma but it all comes down to mind. Mind really is what is.

If you wait for a while the physicists will ever so slowly change their view to something else. NPR had something on today about the embarassment of physicists being unable to account, not for Dark energy, but for Dark matter. 5% of the universe is baryonic and invisible except to the most recently developed incredibly sensitive instruments, 20% is in the visible spectrum where's the rest? Who knows? I am not going to get mystical and say that the rest is the 'Godhead' we surmise exists but physicists are still groping around. Giving them spiritual concepts like Shiva and Vishnu and Brahma may be like giving a baby razor blades to play with.

String theory and gravitational waves are making the rounds again but string theory can only work if space has so many (12 or 14 I think) dimensions. That truly is a rarified intellectual atmosphere. They can have it.

25 years ago I would have really enjoyed this website and getting answers to my questions but I have been silently reading words like Majjihma (Thank You) for so long that it is second nature now not to say them aloud and sometimes even the definitions are driven by the view of the lexicographer so I have come down to saying to myself 'Well, if it is an important concept it will turn up again somewhere else.' I speak only English but in my bookcase I do have a Sanskrit/Chinese concordance (I must have been quite mad when I bought it) and once asked a younger than me non Buddhist Chinese friend to guess at the really old timey ideogram standing for Samsara. He studied it for about 5 minutes and made the motion of a descending helix with his finger. His English wasn't that good then and he had to get a Chinese/English dictionary to show me the word 'whirlpool'. I found out that the Chinese ideograms were so consistently constructed that this child of Mao Tse Tung could pluck meaning from religious ideograms over a thousand years old. I tried reading Chaucer a few years back and had to make do with a translated text.

It doesn't surprise me that India has the political sense it has. My Yoga teacher in Bombay went to New Delhi to assume a goverment position, lasted for less than 3 months and came home very disillusioned.

However, although we could perhaps hope for more, I personally could not expect less from the exceptionally intelligent people that they are - lots of Maya but little of Mara at least that was my impression after 3 months spent there.

Answerer

Being a Bodhisattvas can allready be called as a wise and excellently good person. Its often claimed that becoming Bodhisattvas is the final stage or trial before Buddhahood, actually its only a choice. Some people prefer to attain Arahatship first before becoming a Buddha. (which is said to be a longer path). The goal of the Bodhisattvas is not to become a Buddha until they successully liberate all sentinel beings trapped inside Samara realms of suffering and ignorance.

As for sotapannahood, I believe its called the stage of steam-winner, which is the first stage which many Theravada and Mahayana monks hope to reach first before attaining Arahatship (the fourth stage).

premjan

I actually had not thought about Rama as other than a moralist. I also can't think of Krishna directly as an archetype since he has a human personality. I am a materialist, and I think about mind as a pattern of information that resides within matter.

It is sensible to be disillusioned with government (the American attitude is good). Because it is an illusion that the government should be important or powerful. Here is where Hindus sucumb to the Maya of religion itself, the desire to be enfolded and cared for by a larger entity than themselves.

Paraprakrti

Are you speaking of the ruins found off the coast of Mahabalipuram?

Apparently some scientists disagree with the speculation that it is 1500 years old.

Durham University geologist Glenn Milne told Graham Hancock (who accompanied Oceanographer Monty Halls in the discovery) in an e-mail: “I had a chat with some of my colleagues here in the dept. of geological sciences and it is probably reasonable to assume that there has been very little vertical tectonic motion in this region [i.e. the coastal region around Mahabalipuram] during the past five thousand years or so. Therefore, the dominant process driving sea-level change will have been due to the melting of the Late Pleistocene ice sheets. Looking at predictions from a computer model of this process suggests that the area where the structures exist would have been submerged around six thousand years ago. Of course, there is some uncertainty in the model predictions and so there is a flexibility of roughly plus or minus one thousand years is this date.�?


The false Vasudeva of Pundra incident is one of what? I don't quite follow what you are saying.

perfectbite

Premjan,

In your materialism is consciousness reducible to a material process?

Your archeology may not up to some poster's standards (sunken cities) but that could be because (from what I have read) you are more of a linguist and I have a question for you.

Recently I have come across translations to English from the Pali that have referred to a 'Bodhisattva'. I am not sure that Theravada Buddhism actually subscribes to the term 'Bodhisattva' and am wondering if either;

1. Theravada does actually use the term but very rarely.

or

2. Some translators are taking it upon themselves to make a commonly understood Sanskrit Mahayanist term part of the Pali Theravadan glossary of terms by 'smearing' in translation distinct Theravadan terms with distinct Mahayanist terms.

any ideas?

A recent translation of the Dhammapada substitutes the term 'honored ones' for the term 'Brahmins' which although makes sense actually removes Sakyamuni Buddha from his place and time.

Answerer,

I am having great difficulty :banghead: trying to comprehend why on earth anyone would think that it was even useful to be able to state the various levels and directions of enlightened attainment.

Paraprakrti states that "The Personality of Godhead is the most confidential of transcendental knowledge ..." so no one who is enlightened or intent on enlightenment would come up with such schemes nor would such a person be recognizable but someone (apparently someone with a lot of time on their hands) did come up with such gradated schemes. Are these gradations (which must have required a lot of thought and judgement by the way) a true reflection of reality or are they merely clever extrapolated suppositions?

Answerer

Well, I'm open to that. Anyway, I'm just informing you that those different stages of attainment are what many Theravada and Mahayana monks believe in and they can be found in the Sutras as well.

Of course, not every Buddhists care about or prefer to go through all those stages. For example, most Ch'an or Zen monks, I know, prefer a direct spiritual enlightenment through a sudden realization.


Hmmm, are you a supporter or follower of Hare Krishna?

Paraprakrti

Yes, I am.