Kate MOSS, yes, she sounds familiar and related to us, all waifish, skin all lichen-like (crepey).
.
Don't look at me. I'm not a Moss!
Trees are greening, flowers are blooming, birds are nesting – why? Spring is in the air! Despite the happy days this brings, be wary of what else may be lurking in deep, dark forests. From German folklore, let's explore the world of the moss people.
In German folklore, moss folk resemble dwarves (called kumbhandas in Buddhistcosmology and gnomesin much of Europe), nearly the size of human children. But they are covered in green moss, with skin that looks gray, and a lot of hair like lichen.
Their arms and legs appear as “knotted maple bark.” Centuries ago, humans considered them part of the fairy realm dedicated to trees and the forest in general.
.
For unknown reasons, the moss people population consisted mostly of females. These “fairies” were known to borrow things from humans and, at other times, ask for help from them.
Maiden (Kettle Quill/Deviant Art)
Occasionally, they would ask humans for breast milk to feed their own moss babies. They repaid their benefactors with good advice or bread.
However, one had to be wary of their quick tempers. If one gave them caraway bread, for instance, they would become very angry and cry, “Caraway bread, our death!”
Some tales describe them as behaving like changelings in that they would sometimes steal very small human children. Female moss people, called Mossfraulein (“moss women”)... More: Moss People creeping out of forests
K. Nizamis and Ven. Thanissaro (trans.) via accesstoinsight.org, Apara Lakuntaka Bhaddiya Sutra: "Another Discourse About Bhaddiya the Dwarf" (Ud 7.5 PTS: Ud 76) edited by Wisdom Quarterly
Thus have I heard. On one occasion the Blessed One [the Buddha] was dwelling in Sāvatthi, in Jeta Forest, in Anāthapiṇḍika's park.
At that time Venerable Bhaddiya the Dwarf approached walking close behind a large number of monks. The Blessed One saw him from afar, walking close behind many other monks -- of bad complexion, bad appearance, dwarfish, of a form that would be despised by most monks [1].
Seeing Ven. Bhaddiya the Dwarf, the Blessed One addressed the monks: "Meditators, do you see that monk from afar, walking close behind those many other monks, the one with the bad complexion, bad appearance, dwarfish, of a form that would be despised by most monks?"
"Yes, it is just so, venerable sir."
"Meditators, that monk is of great power, great eminence. There is no well-gained meditative attainment that has not already been attained by that monk. For the benefit for which persons of good lineage rightly go forth from home into the left-home life, the ultimate culmination of the supreme life [of a wandering ascetic], in this very life, he himself, having seen with his own eyes and realized the higher knowledge, having personally attained it, he abides."
Then, having understood the significance of this moment, the Blessed One breathed an inspired utterance:
Faultless, adorned in white,
the one-way chariot rolls on:
See it coming, undisturbed,
with oozing flow cut off, nirvanered [2].
NOTES
1. The Commentary (of Dhammapāla, post 5th Century CE) says yebhuyyena bhikkhūnaṃ paribhūtarūpan'ti puthujjanabhikkhūhi ohīḷitarūpaṃ (PTS Ud-A 369). "'For most of the monks, having a despised kind of form': having a kind of form scorned or viewed with disgust [ohīliṭa] by the monks who are just ordinary people [puthujjanas]." See also SN 21.6.
2. See also SN 41.5, in which Ven. Kāmabhū recites this stanza to a lay devotee named Citta, and asks him how its meaning should be understood. Citta then proceeds to offer his interpretation of its meaning.
The Dwarf Ven. Thanissaro (trans.), Lakuṇṭha Sutra: "The Dwarf" (Ud 7.5, PTS: Ud 76) edited by W.Q.
Thus have I heard. On one occasion the Blessed One was staying near Sāvatthī in Jeta's Grove, in Anāthapiṇḍika's monastery. On that occasion Ven. Bhaddiya the Dwarf, following behind a large number of monks, was coming to see the Blessed One.
From afar the Blessed One saw Ven. Bhaddiya the Dwarf coming, following behind a large number of monks -- ugly, unsightly, stunted, treated with condescension [1] by many of the monks. Seeing him, the Blessed One addressed the monks:
"Meditators, do you see that monk coming from afar, following behind that large number of monks, the ugly, unsightly, stunted one treated with condescension by many of the monks?"
"Yes, venerable sir."
"That, meditators, is a monk of great power and great might. The attainment already attained by that monk is not of the sort easily attained by anyone. And by means of it he has reached and abides in the supreme goal of the supreme life for which persons of good lineage rightly go forth from home into the left-home life, directly knowing and seeing it for himself right in here and now."
Then, realizing the significance of this, the Blessed One on that occasion exclaimed:
Faultless,
canopied in white,
the single-spoked chariot rolls along.
See him coming, untroubled:
one whose stream is cut,
free from all bonds [2].
NOTES 1. The Commentary notes that misbehaving monks liked to stroke his hands and catch hold of his ears. 2. In SN 41.5, Citta the householder explains this verse as follows:
Faultless stands for virtues. Canopied in white stands for release. Single-spoked stands for mindfulness. Rolls along stands for coming and going. Chariot stands for this body composed of the four elements...
Passion [greed] is a trouble; aversion [hatred] is a trouble; delusion [ignorance, confusion, wrong view] is a trouble. These have been abandoned by a meditator whose defilements (asavas, kilesas, samyojanas) have been cut off — their roots destroyed, made [barren] like a palmyra stump, deprived of the conditions of development, not destined for any future rebirth. That's why the meditator whose defilements have ended is said to be untroubled.
Him coming stands for the arahant.
Stream stands for craving. That has been abandoned by a meditator whose defilements have been cut off — its roots destroyed, made [barren] like a palmyra stump, deprived of the conditions of development, not destined for any future rebirth. That's why a meditator whose defilements have been cut off is said to be one whose stream is cut.
Passion is a bond; aversion is a bond; delusion is a bond. These have been abandoned by a meditator whose defilements have been cut off — their roots destroyed, made like a palmyra stump, deprived of the conditions of development, not destined for any future rebirth. That is why a meditator whose defilements have been cut off is said to be free of bonds.
Archaeologist Armand Salvador Mijares was digging in this island cave in 2007 when he discovered an ancient bone unlike a modern human's (Callao Cave Archaeology Project).
.
Ancient bones and teeth found in a Philippine cave may rewrite human history
The realm of the Mountain King (Edvard Grieg)
An unusual species of human [Hobbit?] apparently lived on the island of Luzon in the Philippines as recently as 50,000 years ago.
Based on teeth and bones found there, scientists suspect that these early humans probably stood less than 4 feet tall and had several apelike features.
Yet, the researchers say, the bones are distinctlyhuman -- from a previously undiscovered species.
The first clue was a bone that surfaced in 2007. Archaeologist Armand Salvador Mijares was digging in a cave on the island of Luzon and found a toe bone.
He says it didn't look like a modern human bone. "There's something peculiar with this bone," he recalls thinking. But one bone wasn't enough to say for sure who or what it belonged to. More
Since the beginning of time, elves have been the stuff of legend in Iceland, but locals here will earnestly tell you that elves appear regularly to those who know how to see them.
Construction sites have been moved so as not to disturb the elves, and fishermen have refused to put out to sea because of their warnings: here in Iceland, these creatures are a part of everyday life.But, honestly, do they really exist?
Anthropologist Magnus Skarphedinsson has spent decades collecting witness accounts, and he’s convinced the answer is yes.
He now passes on his knowledge to curious crowds as the headmaster of Reykjavik’s Elf School.
“There is no doubt that they exist!” exclaims the stout 60-year-old as he addresses his “students,” for the most part tourists fascinated by Icelanders’ belief in elves.
What is an elf?
Time is not the same in parallel worlds. Man dances with fairies for an hour, but in human time he was in the fairy ring for two weeks, in a strange case reported in Welsh folklore (T. H. Thomas, Plucked from the Fairy Circle).
.
Our language comes from hidden people.
What exactly is an elf? A well-intentioned being, smaller than a person, who lives outdoors and normally does not talk. They are not to be confused with Iceland’s “hidden people,” who resemble humans and almost all of whom speak Icelandic.
To convince skeptics that this is not just a myth, Skarphedinsson relays two “witness accounts,” spinning the tales as an accomplished storyteller.
The first tells of a woman who knew a fisherman who was able to see elves who would also go out to sea to fish.
"Hidden People" speaking Icelandic: devas?
One morning in February 1921, he noticed they were not heading out to sea, and he tried to convince the other fishermen not to go out either. But the boss would not let them stay on shore.
That day, there was an unusually violent storm in the North Atlantic. But the fishermen, who had heeded his warning and stayed closed to shore, all returned home safe and sound.
Seven years later, in June 1928, the elves again did not put out to sea which was confusing because there had never been a fierce storm at sea at that time of year. Forced to head out, they sailed waters that were calm but caught very few fish.
“The elves knew it,” the anthropologist claims.
The other “witness” is a woman in her eighties, who in 2002 ran into a young teen who claimed to know her. Asking him where they had met, he gave her an address where she had lived 53 years ago where her daughter claimed she had played with an invisible boy.
“But, Mum, it’s Maggi!” exclaimed the daughter when her mother described the teen.
“He had aged fives times slower than a human being,” said Skarphedinsson.
Surveys suggest about half of Icelanders believe in elves.
“Most people say they heard [about them] from their grandparents when they were children,” said Michael Herdon, a 29-year-old American tourist attending Elf School.
Iceland Magazine says ethnologists have noted it is rare for an Icelander to really truly believe in elves. But getting them to admit it is tricky. ... More
This very odd creature was seen in an office in Mexico City in January 2016. Trained biologist Brien Foerster has had a hard time thinking it fake. More: lamarzulli.net
.
Body of bizarre winged humanoid found
That's one of the bad ones.
A group of paranormal researchers are attempting to determine the nature and origins of a strange winged creature [Latin American/Iberian duende, Filipino duwende, or Buddhist kumbhanda?] discovered in Mexico.
The tiny oddity boasts what appears to be a humanoid body along with a set of wings, causing some to suggest that it could be a fairy or an alien [or a goblin or elf judging by the head and vicious teeth].
Brien Foerster says that he spotted the bizarre creature floating in a specimen jar at an office in Mexico back in January.
Since then, it has been subjected to X-ray and DNA analysis, which showed that the organic form contains an inner skeleton [and buckshot indicating that it was shot out of the sky and killed by a human].
In the video, which unveiled the creature, author L.A. Marzulli speaks with a man who appears to be the scientist who conducted the tests.
They conclude that the oddity could not be a hoax because the X-ray scan would have revealed it as such if it were a doll or some other fabrication.
Buddhist "fairy" = Earth devi.
In light of the bone structure found inside the creature, researchers hope to extract and analyze DNA from it to learn more about what it might be. [The first test was inconclusive because it had sat too long in formaldehyde].
Despite the fantastic nature of the creature, it would be best to exercise caution before leaping to a paranormal conclusion, since a number of previous "alien bodies" have been disproved in the past.
Nonetheless, it is hoped that future tests on the mysterious discovery will show whether it has a terrestrial or extraterrestrial origin. More
(NOVA with Robert Krulwich) "The Little People of Flores" - The best thing about the "Hobbits" [Buddhist kumbandhas, Spanish duendes] of Indonesia is that they still exist! Guest: Dr. Jared Diamond (UCLA).
Kumbhandās are a class of beings (gnomes) in Buddhist cosmology classified with yakkhas (ogres, yetis), rakkhasas (demons, killer yetis), asuras (titans, giants), and others. Virūlha is the regent sky-king overseeing them. They have large bellies (kumbhanda=gourd), and their genitals are also large like pots (kumbho viya), which is how they get their name (D.iii.198; DA.iii.964).
Fossils suggest that island life shrank our "Hobbit" relatives
Among the hominin fossils found at the Mata Menge site on the Indonesian island of Flores was part of a lower jaw (Kinez Riza/Nature).
Modern ape C. Joyce
It's easy to think that evolution led inevitably to modern humans, the cleverest of apes. But there were some strange excursions along the way. Take, for example, the Hobbits.
That's the nickname for a 3-foot-tall human relative that once lived in what is now Indonesia. A new discovery suggests that it was island life that created this dainty creature.
Hobbit: human or ape? (Kinaz Riza/Nature)
[But this is a ridiculous excuse that hides the truth of super ancient human roots and diversity. Forbidden archeology is a name for ignored and hidden evidence for human antiquity, the existence of many offshoots, some of them giants others robust and our presence as Homo sapien sapiens, said to be 30K years old when we go back perhaps 300M years, as Michael Cremo explains to the consternation of gatekeepers promoting Darwinian evolution that is demonstrably mistaken. Because the physical evidence cannot possibly be explained by the favored theory, it cannot possibly exist, but it does, so it is forbidden.]
Assuming Hobbits are not human but apes, a reconstruction of Homo floresiensis by Atelier Elisabeth Daynes will add hair and ape features to a human body (Kinaz Riza/Nature).
Anthropologists first found the bones of the Hobbits in 2004 on the Indonesian island of Flores. Their scientific name is Homo floresiensis.
They were chimp-size, with tiny brains and long arms, but they had stone tools and teeth much like ours. They lived about 60,000 years ago [but new mainstream science evidence pushes back that date to 700,000 years]. Who were they?
One idea had it that larger human ancestors from Africa -- likely Homo erectus -- ended up on this island. Then they shrank [a ridiculous explanation but scientists are desperate explain away the evidence], because on islands, animals sometimes evolve to become smaller.
But up to that point, there was no evidence that this "island dwarfism" applied to human ancestors, and people had a hard time accepting it.
"For some reason," says Aida Gomez-Robles, an anthropologist at George Washington University, "when we saw that the same thing can happen to us, to humans, this is when people started to think, 'Oh, my God, this is not possible.'" In fact, some scientists believed Hobbits were just modern humans with some abnormality, like microcephaly, that changed their head shape and made them smaller.
Scientists have now found more tiny, Hobbit-like bones on Flores. Some teeth and part of a lower jaw. Shockingly, the bones date back 700,000 years -- way older than the first Hobbits and predating [accepted dates for] modern humans by hundreds of thousands of years.
Tiny Humans: Finding Hobbits in Flores (Tohari Achmad) The answer might lie at the end of a trail of bones going back nearly 2 million years. Homo erectus, an ancestor described as...
Here is a short video on the Homo Floresiensis, a small hobbit like creature that is more like a human being than originally thought...
Gerrit van den Bergh from Wollongong University in Australia says clearly, this was a long-standing population of very different human relatives.
"Human diversity could have been far greater than we have ever realized," he says. Writing in the journal Nature, van den Bergh suggests that ancient human ancestors, probably Homo erectus, traveled from Africa to Asia. They reached this island, perhaps carried by a tsunami. He notes that the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004 did something like that.
"A week after that event," he says, "several people were picked up out from the sea, some floating 60 kilometers from the coast, and they were just clinging to a tree."
Once the Hobbits got to Flores, van den Bergh surmises, island dwarfism set in -- they slowly got smaller. Scientists found fossil elephants on the island that also did that over time.
This aerial image taken in October 2015 shows the Mata Menge site on Flores where bones dating back 700,000 years were found (Kinez Riza/Nature).
Despite their small brains, the Hobbits were smart enough to make stone tools. But Adam Brumm from Griffith University in Australia says they didn't seem to get any smarter.
"This technology, whatever it was used for, essentially stayed the same for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years on this island," he says, "which is intriguing to say the least."
Clearly, their kind lived long, but ultimately did not prosper. More + AUDIO
A young woman recounts the difficulty of being a clean cut Mormon in New York City, which somehow Mittens Romney is able to do even in dirtier, weirder Washington, D.C. Young Elna Baker is a writer and comedian, whose book The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance was published by Penguin in 2009. She currently resides in NY, but this disclosure was not the highlight of one night at The Moth.
That honor goes to Alan Rabinowitz and his amazing story of hiking in Buddhist Burma in a far off part of the country where the world's only surviving group of Mongoloid pygmies (a kind of human, possibly the kumbhanda of Buddhist lore, going extinct, The Taron) were said to have been spotted by an earlier explorer. He guides his companions in and finds the remnants of the tribe.
Alan Rabinowitz, while searching the Himalayas high in upper Burma, comes across the last of the mysterious Taron people and meets with the locals. More
Buddhism believes in leprechauns, pronounced koom-bawn-dahs. These dwarfish nature spirits ("little people") are a class of wood nymphs. Fairies (earthbound-, tree-, and flying-devas) get most of the attention. But living among them are the often overlooked kumbhandas. Their kingdom is ruled by King Virulhaka, who guards the South. This is an Indian cosmology inherited by the Buddha and shared by Hinduism, Jainism, and other ancient Eastern traditions. The cosmological details have been formalized in Buddhism's 31 Planes of Existence. Leprechauns live in a realm known as Catumaharajika, now largely discounted as mythological. These planes are, however, possible to verify for oneself through the meditative absorptions and other far less wholesome expansions of consciousness.
PARIS (AFP) – The tiny an-cient humans dubbed hobbits, whose remains were discovered on an Indonesian island in 2003, were a previously unknown species altogether, according to two new studies.
Debate has raged in the scientific community since the fossils were found on the island of Flores, with some experts insisting they were descended from Homo erectus and others saying evolution could not account for their small brains.
About three feet (a meter) tall and weighing 65 pounds (30 kilos), the tiny, tool-making hunters may have roamed the remote island as recently as 8,000 years ago. Their fossils are about 18,000 years old.
Many scientists have said Homo floresiensis, as the creature is now formally known, was a prehistoric human stunted by natural selection... More>>
PHOTO: U. of Wollongong, Australia, artist's impression of a human species discovered on Indonesian in 2003. Diminutive humans are a new species, not pygmies with shrivelled brains, researchers reported (Daily Mail/Nat'l Geo).
What three-foot tall humans might have looked like (0:29)
All materials on this site are submitted by editors and readers. All images, unless otherwise noted, were taken from the Internet and are assumed to be in the public domain.
In the event that there is still a problem, issue, or error with copyrighted material, the break of the copyright is unintentional and noncommercial, and the material will be removed immediately upon presented proof.
Contact us by submitting a comment marked "private."
Do not follow this journal if you are under vinaya or parental restrictions. Secure protection by Sucuri.
Wisdom Quarterly: American Buddhist Journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at creativecommons.org/about/licenses.
.jpg)
