Removing The Sheen From Buddhism

[Husky]

Bharatvarsh2



Posted Today, 02:07 AM



Quote

The nAstika tilopA from the va~Nga country is highly regarded among Tibetans. He was an aggressive subversionist of former dharma. He says in apabhraMsha:

bamhA vihNu mahesura devA | bohisattva ma karahu seva | deva ma pUjahu titya Na jAvA | devapUjAhi Na mokkha pAvA ||



Here tilopA says: bodhisattva, do not worship the deva-s brahmA, viShNu and maheshvara; do not do pUjA to deva-s do not go to tIrtha-s. One does not get mokSha by doing pUjA to deva-s. Earlier, the sthaviravAdin buddhaghosha (born a brAhmaNa in magadha) who calls upon the nAstika-s to desist from hearing the rAmAyaNa or the bhArata. Actually, this strain is an original aspect of the tAthagata-s that passed unchanged through the transition of the yAna-s. Umakant Mishra points to a li~Nga in the Soro village of Orissa that has been defaced by the carving of a nAstika dharaNi on it. So the pAShaNDa-s were ready to put these words into practice. Yet we are repeatedly told that it is the Astika-s who were the buddha-busters (to borrow a favorite term of the Mohammedan: bhut-shikhan).



http://manasataramgini.wordpress.com/201...of-tilopa/

Somethings don't change I guess.



Then may I paste the following? It was originally the appendage to this old post on the article "Ram temple below Babri structure - Dr B.B. Lal". Be forewarned: I remember being seriously ticked off back when I wrote it. (I left it out for that reason. Not sure I finished it.)

But posting as-is now, except I am highlighting the occurrence of Shivalingam:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>



I almost forgot -

[color="#0000FF"]ADDED:[/color]



And yet, some nonsensical claims have been staked - again.



http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?...54,0,0,1,0

UK-based Buddhist body stakes claim over disputed Ayodhya site

Indopia, August 17,2009



[color="#0000FF"]Faizabad , India -- A UK-based Buddhist organisation has staked claim over the disputed site in Ayodhya, claiming that the actual birth place of Ram could be somewhere in Afghanistan.[/color]

[color="#9932CC"](Uh, not more of that recently-invented loser thesis about afghanistan. The secular - i.e. christocommunista - side keeps floating multiple new theories just so that Hindus can waste time disproving all of them and still never get their Temple ground back. Hindus should just take the temple site back and tell muslims they're lucky we don't retake Mecca in the name of the ancient polytheistic Arabians who honoured their Gods and keep it safe for when Arabians revert to their TRUE religion: that of the Arabian Gods.)[/color]





Ambedkar Social& Buddhist movement of UK has staked the claim in a petition which will come up for hearing at a local court tomorrow.





Advocate Harishankar Maurya, who will plead the case of Buddhist party in the court, said,"Our case is pending before the court since 1991 but the court is neither rejecting our case nor transferring it to the special bench of the high court hearing the Ayodhya case."



The petition was filed by the organisation&aposs Indian branch Bhartiya Bauddha Darshan Society in the court of civil judge senior division here in the year 1991 before the demolition of the Babri Masjid.



[color="#0000FF"]Staking claim over the disputed site in Ayodhya, the Buddhist body has demanded that the land be handed over to them[/color] or they be made a party in the Ayodhya suit which is being heard by a special court.



The Buddhist body has filed the suit against both Hindu and Muslim parties, the Archeological Survey of India, Union Home Ministry and Government of Uttar Pradesh.

Note that the neo-"buddhists" lying is not what is galling in all the above (their silly claims have been heard before), but the fact that a purportedly global *Buddhist* site - buddhistchannel.tv - is repeating their nonsense.



First, that their claims are nonsense:



http://koenraadelst.voi.org/books/finale/ch3.html

3.6. The Buddhist gambit



More or less since the beginning of the historical dispute, some secularists have felt that the denial of Islamic iconoclasm in general and of its application to Ayodhya in particular would be unsustainable. So, to weaken the Hindu position vis-à-vis the historical debt which Islam has incurred, they attributed a similar iconoclasm to Hinduism, with Buddhism as the victim. But in the present round of the Ayodhya debate, there has not been more than a vague hint at this scenario, and for good reason.



[color="#0000FF"]There was a little problem with this thesis, viz. the inconvenient fact that Buddhism has flourished in India for 17 centuries under almost uninterrupted non-Buddhist Hindu rule, and that many Buddhist monasteries and universities were still functioning in India at the time of the Muslim invasions. It was the Muslim conquerors who destroyed the entire Buddhist establishment of North India in just a few years following the fatal battle of Tarain (1192), where Mohammed Ghori defeated Prithviraj Chauhan to storm into the Gangetic plain. But here again, the secularists counted on their own overwhelming grip on the influential media to get away with their newly launched myth. So now, numerous people in India and abroad (most damagingly in Buddhist countries which should have been India’s natural allies) actually believe that there was a time when Hindus demolished Buddhist temples and slaughtered Buddhist monks.[/color]

[color="#9932CC"](And yes, they do believe it. That is why buddhistchannel.tv reprint others' false patently anti-Hindu allegations like: [/color]

http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?...73,0,0,1,0

Buddhist monuments systematically destroyed in India

[color="#9932CC"]Includes a zillion references to how the Evil Brahmoons supposedly destroyed and took over Buddhist temples for the "brahminical" - they mean Hindu - religion. Even the criminal silence on the existence of the Hindu religion itself by calling everything brahminical onlee is anti-hindooism.)[/color]



From there, it was but a small step to claiming that, if the Ayodhya site had been taken by Muslims from a native Indian religion at all, the aggrieved party must have been the Buddhists, not the Hindus. Or better still, if there had been a Hindu temple at the site when the Muslim conquerors came to level it, that temple itself had forcibly replaced an earlier Buddhist building as part of the massive Hindu persecution of the poor hapless Buddhists. However, in the documentary record, there is not the slightest indication of a Buddhist presence at that particular site, even though elsewhere in Ayodhya the Buddhist presence (including that of the prominent philosophers Asanga and Vasubandhu) is well-attested. The Jains still have a number of sites in Ayodhya associated with several of their Tirthankaras, but neither Buddhist nor Jain tradition ever laid claim to the Rama Janmabhoomi site.



The material implication of anti-Buddhist iconoclasm at the site, whether Hindu or Muslim, is that distinctively Buddhist temple remains should be found below the mosque, either directly below it or underneath a layer of Hindu architecture. However, the archaeological search in the 1970s and in 1992 has not uncovered any such exclusively Buddhist artefact. And in 2003 again, nothing specifically Buddhistic has surfaced at the site.



To be sure, it is rather artificial to conceive of Buddhism as a separate tradition from Hinduism, (depends on the definition of Hinduism: if Hinduism is declared a universal religion as some have insisted that it be) and in their artistic conventions, the two have a lot in common. So, some artefacts could be Buddhist as well as Hindu, e.g. the new ASI report, in describing the “massive structure below the disputed site”, states that one of the architectural fragments belonging to the 12th century, is “similar to those found in Dharmachakrajina Vihara of Kumaradevi at Sarnath which belongs to the early 12th century” (quoted by Anjali Mody: “ASI report raises more questions”, The Hindu, 27 June 2003). Kumaradevi was the Buddhist wife of Govindachandra, king of Kanauj, and the remains of the building she patronized have been interpreted as those of a Buddhist monastery. But this interpretation has been disputed (as Mody recounts), and the said type of architectural fragments could not decide the matter precisely because it formed part of a pan-Indian culture in evidence in both Hindu and Buddhist buildings. By contrast, what was found at the contentious site in Ayodhya, when not part of this indistinctive pan-Indian register, was distinctively part of the non-Buddhistic traditions of Hinduism. Interestingly, in the pre-medieval layers, indications of Shiva and Devi (goddess) worship have been found, so the history of the temple site was not exclusively Vaishnava. But it was definitely not Buddhist.



So far, the Buddhist escape route has not been tried anymore after the ASI report was presented. Apparently the evidence for the site’s non-Buddhist history is just too overwhelming, and the secularists already have enough to deny.

Meanwhile, the (presumably) NEO-"Buddhist" whinies are back in action wanting Hindus to get lost from the Boddh Gaya Buddhist temple, since it bothers them no end that Hindu priests are also in there (never mind that it was the Buddhists who ran off leaving the temple to its own fate when islamism came to massacre them, and that it had been Hindus who had maintained it respectfully all this while. And it's not like Hindus shoved off Buddha from there to replace with the Hindu Gods.)

The news article says that Buddhist monks are agitating for Hindus to get lost - I had so far assumed it was only the neo-"Buddhist" kind:



http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?...44,0,0,1,0

Buddhist monks want control of Bodh Gaya temple

Sify News, Nov 30, 2009



Bodh gaya, India -- Buddhist monks want control over the management of the Mahabodhi temple in Bodh Gaya, one of Buddhism's holiest shrines. They have decided to intensify their agitation as the Bihar government is not paying heed to their demands.



For a long time Buddhist monks have been demanding total control over the 1,500-year-old temple at Bodh Gaya, located 110 km from here, where the Buddha attained enlightenment 2,550 years ago.



Buddhist monks are unhappy with the Bihar government for 'deliberately' delaying an amendment to the Mahabodhi Temple Management Act, 1949, to ensure Buddhist control over the management of the temple.



'It is clear the Bihar government does not want to favour the Buddhists' genuine demand for total control over the Mahabodhi temple. We will have to fight for it by mobilizing support for it,' Bhadant Anand, president of the Bodhgaya Mahabodhi Vihar All-India Action Committee, said.



The committee has decided to spread its network across India to intensify the agitation for total control over the Mahabodhi temple, Anand told IANS over telephone Friday.





'We will launch a membership drive to induct new people in our fold and will open offices of the committee at different places in the country to mobilize support for our agitation,' Anand said.





Buddhist monks like Anand say the delay is a 'conspiracy' by the government to keep the management under the control of non-Buddhists. 'We fail to understand why non-Buddhists have control over the holiest shrine of Buddhists. We have decided to take up the issue by lobbying support to demand Buddhist control over the management,' he said.



'If the management of temples, churches, mosques and gurdwaras are not under the control of other sects, then why so in the case of the Mahabodhi temple? Buddhists have been given little role in managing the affairs of the temple since 1949,' Anand said.



According to the existing law, the Bodh Gaya Temple Management Committee (BGTMC) should comprise four Buddhists and the same number of Hindu members for a three-year period with the Gaya district magistrate as its ex-officio chairman.

And once again, it isn't just neo-Buddhists anymore, as actual Buddhists - buddhistchannel.tv are repeating their claims everywhere.



As for loony claims of "the evil brahmoons persecuting Buddhism":

http://koenraadelst.voi.org/books/acat/ch3.htm

More than that, a Buddhist member of the Bodh Gaya temple management committee has admitted that “the laudable work of the construction of the Mahabodhi temple” was “undertaken by a Brahmana minister of Shaivite persuasion”.6

6Dipak K. Barua: Buddha Gaya, Bodh Gaya 1981, p.41, with reference to Xuan Zang, who saw the temple in 637 A.D., shortly after it was built, and who explicitly gave the credit to a Brahmin worshipper of Shiva Maheshwara.'

So Hindus built the temple. Doesn't stop the neo-Buddhists from destroying a Shivalingam at the temple now:

http://koenraadelst.voi.org/books/acat/ch3.htm

In particular, the Ambedkarite neo-Buddhists have started a movement for the “liberation of the Mahabodhi shrine” in Bodh Gaya. Its aim is to remove the statutory four Hindu members of the eight-member temple management committee, and to prohibit worship of a sivalingam in the temple. Quite in contrast with the secularist calls for “composite culture” and for multi-religious worship at the Rama-Janmabhoomi site, this is a demand to free the Mahabodhi site from multi-religious worship and particularly from the “taint” of Hinduism. The agitation has been marked by petty vandalism, as when the neo-Buddhists desecrated their own holiest site, or at least the sivalingam standing there, in October 1992.

http://koenraadelst.voi.org/books/acat/ch3.htm

3. The Bodh Gaya temple controversy



Apparently it's not just neo-Buddhists, but the international kinds that feel called upon to kick out Hindus from the temple:

The movement for the “liberation” of the Mahabodhi temple was formally launched by a Japanese monk, Bhadant Arya Nagarjuna Surai Sasai. His involvement provides a typical example of how people spoiling for a fight tend to attack meek rather than dangerous adversaries. Buddhism has been eclipsed by Christianity in South Korea and among the Indonesian Chinese.3 In Bangladesh, the Buddhist Chakmas of the Chittagong Hill Tracts have been driven out by the Muslim settlers and the Government of Bangladesh. Buddhism is oppressed by Communism in China, North Korea, Tibet and Vietnam. If Sasai had started a similar agitation in those countries, it would not have lasted a single day, and he would have been lucky to get expelled rather than locked up or killed.



By contrast, Buddhism is not oppressed or endangered in India. It is not obstructed in worshipping at its traditional sacred sites, including the Mahabodhi temple, which Hindus have made available for Buddha worship. India provides shelter to the Dalai Lama, and has sanctioned the creation of a network of Buddhist monasteries and institutes, including a Tibetan-Buddhist university (in Sarnath) and the nerve centres of several international Buddhist organizations. It welcomes Buddhist associations from Japan, Taiwan and other countries and allows them to build pilgrim hostels and research institutes in Sarnath, Bodh Gaya and other Buddha-related sites. It is, moreover, one of the few countries where even most non-Buddhists have a sincere respect for the Buddha and his Dharma. And yet, of all places, India is the one where Arya Sasai has to “liberate” Buddhism from Hindu “oppression”.

http://koenraadelst.voi.org/books/ayodhya/ch3.htm

Hindus have nothing to gain from such a law. Hindu temples up for dispute are very few. While Hindus historians have published long lists of mosques built on demolished temples, no-one has come forward with a similar list of Hindu temples. An impression has been created by the dishonest crowd of secularists that there are many Hindu temples that once were Buddhist. Well, let them start with pointing out where these temples are. Let them secondly bring up documentary or archaeological indications for a forcible rather than a mutually voluntary take-over. And let them show that there is an existing Buddhist community with a genuine use in taking over such a temple. I am sure that Hindus will not object, even regardless of whether the same procedure is applied to mosques that have forcibly replaced temples.



The Bodh Gaya temple case, in which Buddhists and non- Buddhists have co-operated to restore this erstwhile Buddhist place of pilgrimage, has clearly proven this willingness on the part of the Hindu leadership. The British interference and the stubbornness of one temple priest have drawn out the process over several decades, but since 1953 the Bodh Gaya temple is functioning as the Buddhist shrine it originally was.16



Two facts about the Bodh Gaya temple case are particularly inconvenient for the secularist theory of Hindu-Buddhist antagonism. One is that a decisive role in the settlement was played by the "Hindu communalist" organization Hindu Mahasabha. The second is that the Bodh Gaya temple was never forcibly taken over nor destroyed by the Hindus.



The Buddhists abandoned the place when they were exterminated by the Islamic invaders, around 1200 AD. It was lying there, deteriorating, even after a Shaiva monk order came to inhabit the domain in 1590. Only around 1880 did a Hindu priest move in to use the building as a temple, after efforts by the king of Myanmar to repair it were stopped because of the Burmese war. The priest was pressured by the British not to make concessions to the foreign (Lankan and, more seriously, Japanese) Buddhists who were working to revive this Buddhist place of pilgrimage. It was this priest's successor who would thwart all attempts at settlement, even when these involved Swami Vivekananda and Surendranath and Rabindranath Tagore. But the settlement won through. Hindus had never forcibly taken the place from the Buddhists, and yet (or should I say : and that's why) they have shown sensitivity to the Buddhists' attachment to the temple, and restored it as one of Buddhism's chief places of pilgrimage.



If there are more such places (and the anti-Hindu crowd claims there are many), let these secularists put their evidence on the table. As a man of scientific temper, I will not forgive them if they repeat their allegation without substantiating it. You see, the case with allegations is simple : either you prove them, or you withdraw them and offer apologies. The secularists should not get away with doing neither one of these two.



Hindus have, until proof to the contrary, no temples to protect from historical claims, and so they have nothing to gain from a law fixing the status of places of worship. But since I don't think these buildings are really the point, I also don't think such a law would hurt the Hindu cause very much. However, it would be wrong to agree to the enactment of such a law as a quid pro quo for the hand-over of the Ram Janmabhoomi site. Since you don't have to pay for what is yours, Hindus should not give anything in return for the Ram Janmabhoomi. And Muslims will show that their new respect for Hindu sacred places is genuine by not making it conditional. The enactment of a further status-quo should be considered on its own merits and not as a part of a deal.

I guess Hindus have no pride, they'll just keep taking it since they (are the only ones to) declare that we are all of the same religion onlee.



Some Hindu builds the temple for the Buddha. Several centuries after islamania ethnically cleanses Buddhism from the region, Hindus restore the temple and start worshipping there: offering prayers to Shiva(lingam).

Now neo-Buddhists desecrate a Shivalingam at the temple and stomp around to get the temple back from the 'evil Hindooos'. Japanese buddhist spearheads agitation to "liberate" the temple from the "evil greedy Hindoos" who have been worshipping there, and an international Buddhist online site publishes neo-buddhist claims as if they are legitimate.

Still we must all be one religion onlee.



Oh just give that Bodh Gaya temple to them. And next time islamania attacks the Bodh Gaya temple (yes it will, give it time), let's see how far the neo-Buddhists get if Hindus do not lift a finger to defend Buddhism in India. They'll probably just do their disappearing act of last time: running off to Tibet and Sri Lanka and Burma waiting for Hindus to keep their temple safe again.



Even the Dalai Lama didn't get a thousand offers to resettle, and it wasn't the Buddhists of say Sri Lanka or Burma or wherever who found a new home for Tibetan refugees, but the Hindus (who, interestingly, continue to be called "pagans", "animists" and "Hindu animists" and "Hindu pagans" on unguarded occasions - slip of the tongue? - by even the Buddhists in Bangladesh. That's fresh - but not unprecedented - coming as it does from non-theistic "idolators" to "polytheistic idolators").



I'm sorry. I don't make friends with people who desecrate my Shivalingam. And then others of the same religion - but say from Japan or the international BuddhistTV - who gang up with them against the Hindus - Hindus who've lost their Shivalingam. For what?

It's like when islamania does the same. Why make a distinction?



This is something I never understood: why is it always only Hindus who claim all Indic religions are an equal part of Hindu religion and that any who calls themselves Hindu but does not automatically include Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism, they are to be threatened that there is No Hindu Religion Otherwise - just a lot of tattered, equally unrelated sects or something. "Either we're all equally related and are part of the Hindu religion, or there is no Hindu religion". (Except that all those other Indic religions are fortunate enough to have their own names and will choose to declare themselves independent religions whenever they want. If only we were allowed that luxury. It's Hindus that won't allow it.)



And does the other side reciprocate ever?