Central Asian Buddha: Female warrior training

(National Geographic) Superskilled with Eva zu Beck: I trained like a Mongolian horseback warrior for five (5) days [to learn the skills Prince Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha, learned on his white pony Kanthaka and during archery competitions of his day in Gandhara/Scythia/Saka/Shakya Land]

• Buddhism in Mongolia
• Buddhism in Central Asia
  
• Buddhism in Afghanistan
• Buddhas of Bamiyan
• Buddhism in Ukraine

How much PAIN would you rather? (sutra)

Ven. Sujato (trans.) Salla Sutta (SuttaCentral.net) edited by Dhr. Seven, Wisdom Quarterly

“Mendicants, an unlearned ordinary person feels pleasant, painful, and neutral feelings. A learned noble disciple [one anywhere along the four stages of enlightenment] also feels pleasant, painful, and neutral feelings. What, then, is the difference between a learned noble disciple and an ordinary unlearned person?”

“Our teachings are rooted in the Buddha. …”

“When an unlearned ordinary person experiences painful physical feelings, she or he sorrows and wails and laments, beating the breast and falling into confusion. One experiences two feelings, physical and mental.

One is bad enough. Why make it worse?

“It is like a person who is struck by an arrow only to be struck with a second arrow. That person experiences the feeling of two arrows.

“In the same way, when an unlearned ordinary person experiences painful physical feelings, one sorrows and wails and laments, beating one’s breast and falling into confusion. One experiences two feelings, physical and mental.

“When one is touched by painful feeling, one resists it. The underlying tendency for revulsion [aversion, resistance, hate, dosa] towards painful feeling underlies that.

“When touched by painful feeling, one looks forward to enjoying sensual pleasures. Why is that? It is because an unlearned ordinary person does not understand any other escape from painful feeling apart from [the temporary and unfulfilling distraction of] sensual pleasures.

“Since one looks forward to enjoying sensual pleasures, the underlying tendency to greed [lust, craving, grasping, clinging, lobha] for pleasant feeling underlies that.

“One does not truly understand feelings’ origin, disappearance, gratification, drawback, and escape. The underlying tendency to ignorance [delusion, confusion, wrong view, moha] about neutral feeling underlies that.

“If one feels a pleasant feeling, one feels it attached. If one feels a painful feeling, one feels it attached. If one feels a neutral feeling, one feels it attached.

“One is called an unlearned ordinary person who is attached [clinging] to rebirth, old age, and death, to sorrow, lamentation, pain, sadness, and distress, one who is attached to suffering [disappointment, unsatisfactoriness], I say.

Noble disciples

“When a learned noble disciple experiences painful physical feelings, one does not sorrow nor wail nor lament, beating one’s breast and falling into confusion. One experiences one feeling: physical, not mental.

“It is like a person who is struck by an arrow but not struck by a second arrow. That person would only experience the feeling of one arrow.

“In the same way, when a learned noble disciple experiences painful physical feelings, one does not sorrow nor wail nor lament, beating the breast and falling into confusion. One experiences one feeling, physical, not mental.

“When one is touched by painful feeling, one does not resist it. There is no underlying tendency for revulsion towards painful feeling underlying that.

“When touched by painful feeling, one does not look forward to enjoying sensual pleasures. Why is that? It is because a learned noble disciple understands an escape from painful feeling apart from sensual pleasures.

“Since one does not look forward to enjoying sensual pleasures, there is no underlying tendency to greed for pleasant feeling underlying that.

“One truly understands feelings’ origin, disappearance, gratification, drawback, and escape. There is no underlying tendency to ignorance about neutral feeling underlying that.

“If one feels a pleasant feeling, one feels it detached. If one feels a painful feeling, one feels it detached. If one feels a neutral feeling, one feels it detached.

“One is called a learned noble disciple who is detached from rebirth, old age, and death, from sorrow, lamentation, pain, sadness, and distress, one who is detached from suffering, I say.

“This is the difference between a learned noble disciple and an unlearned ordinary person.

Summary in verse

“A wise and learned disciple is unmoved

by feelings of pleasure and pain.

This is the great difference in skill

between the wise and the ordinary.

A learned disciple who has appraised the Teaching

discerns this world and the next.

Desirable things do not disturb the mind

nor is one repelled by the repulsive.

Both favoring and opposing

are cleared and ended and are no more.

Knowing the stainless and sorrowless state,

one who has gone beyond rebirth

understands rightly.”

• SOURCE: Sallatha Sutta: "The Arrow" (SN 36.6) Pali language sutras

People in Americas 130K ago (G. Hancock)

Proof of Great American Flood and more

(History Drops) There were humans here at least 130,000 years ago. Did civilization begin in the Americas thousands of years before Sumer, which was only 6,000 years ago? Graham Hancock presents America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization, Part 3 of 3, in Graham's hometown, Bath, England, in 2019. Here he presents highlights from his famous 2019 bestselling book, America Before was a New York Times Top 10 nonfiction bestseller. #grahamhancock #science #history #geology

America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

(Audible Logo) Graham Hancock is the author and narrator in this Macmillan Audio. It has 4.7 out of 5 stars with 3,884 ratings. Was an advanced civilization lost to history in the global cataclysm that ended the last Ice Age?

Graham Hancock, the internationally best-selling author, has made it his life's work to find out. In America Before, he draws on the latest archeological and DNA evidence to bring his quest to a stunning culmination.

We’ve been taught that North and South America were empty of humans until around 13,000 years ago -- among the last great landmasses on earth to have been settled by our ancestors (the Clovis people).

But new discoveries have radically reshaped this long-established [and gatekeepers at the university enforced] picture, and we now know that the Americas were first peopled more than 130,000 years ago -- many tens of thousands of years before human settlements became established elsewhere.

Hancock's research takes us on a series of journeys and encounters with the daring scientists [who dared to defy the gatekeepers and status quo] responsible for the recent extraordinary breakthroughs.

In the process, from the Mississippi Valley to the Amazon Rainforest, he reveals that ancient "New World" cultures share a legacy of advanced scientific knowledge [likely gifted to them by the Star People] and sophisticated spiritual beliefs with supposedly unconnected "Old World" cultures.

Have archeologists focused for too long only on the "Old World" in their search for the origins of civilization while failing to consider the revolutionary possibility that those origins might in fact be found in the "New World"?

America Before is the culmination of everything that millions of people have loved in his body of work over the past decades, namely a mind-dilating exploration of the mysteries of the past, amazing archeological discoveries, and profound implications for how we lead our lives today. More

• Graham Hancock (grahamhancock.com) via History Drops, Jan. 29, 2024; Pat Macpherson, Xochitl, Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Mind over Matter

Buddha Groove (buddhagroove.com) rewritten by Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly

Zen story: Mind over Matter

A conceited young archer dared a Zen master who was renowned for his archery to a competition.

The youth’s skill was extraordinary. His first arrow hit the target, a distant bull’s eye. His next split the first arrow in two.

“Think you can match that?” he asked the old Zen master with a condescending tone.

Rise above: How to raise mind over matter?

Instead of responding, the elderly Buddhist monk gestured to the young man to follow him higher up the mountain until they arrived at a deep gorge. There an old and unsteady log spanned the chasm in place of a bridge.

The Zen master serenely walked onto the log, then standing at the center of it, took aim at a distant tree, and with a clean movement released his arrow. It flew straight to meet its target.

“Your turn now,” he said to the young man, as he casually stepped back onto the edge of the cliff.

The youth stared down into the gaping chasm and began to tremble uncontrollably. He could not bring himself to place his foot on the unsteady log, much less take aim at anything beyond it.

The master observed, “You have great control over that bow, but as for the mind that wields it...”

• The ego, for which we do so much, is not the way to real skill and power. See through it and awaken to reality. Source

Sasquatches in Lake Arrowhead, CA (video)

Investigative Reporter Rob McMillan (ABC7.com, Feb. 15, 2018); Lloyd Pye; The Press-Enterprise; Seth Auberon, Pfc. Sandoval, Xochitl (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly UPDATED

This is the "Bigfoot" Native Americans called Sasquatch and countless other names.

Lloyd Pye presents SCIENTIFIC evidence establishing the existence of Sasquatch creatures.

They are not apes but monstrous humans.

CRESTLINE, California - A Crestline woman [with her two daughters and video camera] said she spotted a [group of] Sasquatches in the San Bernardino Mountains.

[She shot video, called 911, was ignored, and has now] filed a lawsuit to prove it.

"If they wanted to hurt us that day, they [the Bigfoot creatures] could have," Claudia Ackley said. "We were right there."

 
Ackley was hiking a trail in Blue Jay [near Lake Arrowhead] with her two daughters on March 17, 2017, between 6:30 and 7:00 pm. She said her daughters noticed it first.

"They're [my daughters are] standing right there frozen looking at something," Ackley said. She believes they were looking at [a massive] Bigfoot [creature and two smaller Sasquatches].

"He looked like a Neanderthal man with a lot of hair," Ackley said. "About 800 pounds. I was trying to tell it to please not hurt us, and that's when he just stared at me."

Ackley said the Sasquatch was perched in a tree, about 30 feet above the ground. She said there were two other Sasquatches nearby.


(The Press-Enterprise, Feb. 13, 2018) Crestline woman claims she saw Sasquatch in San Bernardino Mountains. Claudia Ackley of Crestline is suing the state of California to get Sasquatch recognized as a real species.

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Note creatures' conical skulls, human faces.

"All I'm thinking is, 'Please don't get near us because I have my children,'" she said.
 
Ackley called 911, but said the authorities didn't believe her.

"I'm sorry; you saw a bear,'" Ackley [claims the recorded 911 operator] said. "And I said, 'No; this was no bear. I know what I saw.'"

Ackley has filed a lawsuit against the State of California, as well as the California Department of Fish and Wildlife [who know these cryptozoological creatures exist], for refusing to [publicly] acknowledge the existence of the species. The spokesperson for the CDFW would not comment because of the pending lawsuit.

Game wardens know they're REAL but get in trouble for talking.

"They're on our property. They knock on our walls. They look through our windows," Ackley said. "It's more and more and more." More + ABC VIDEO

• In BUDDHISM, Hinduism, Jainism, and ancient Vedic tradition, these very intelligent (at times cannibalistic) ogres are called by various names: Yakshas, Yetis, Asuras, Rakshasas, shapeshifting  Bhutas

Sasquatch around family and Los Angeles?



(Angeles Sasquatch, Sep. 25, 2017) Crestline Bigfoot? #ProjectGoAndSee. Exploring new areas of the San Bernardino Nat'l Forest, just for fun, just to go and see.

• Is Bigfoot/Sasquatch ridgewalking in Angeles National Forest? (Part 1 by Patricia Hansen)
• Bigfoot talked to me!? Caught on audio/video (SnowWhiteBigfoot)

Angry Indian Goddesses, saving India's forest, going to Cuba, undercover in Saudi Arabia...

PRI's The World; Crystal Quintero, CC Liu, Seth Auberon, Wisdom Quarterly; PBS (Frontline)

Bollywood in Hollywood: Los Angeles hosts the 2016 Indian Film Festival April 6-10.

"Angry Indian Goddesses" official trailer, a Pan Nalin film at Indian Film Festival, Los Angeles

These Indian women protect forests better than men. The village men agree.

.

Even the monsoon rains don’t keep the women of Ghunduribadi, a tiny tribal village in India’s eastern state of Odisha (Orissa), from patrolling the nearby forest at dawn.
 

Clad in colorful saris and armed with sticks and machetes, they file in the rain through rice fields and onto a muddy path that leads into 500 acres of wooded hills in the Nayagarh district. They’re looking for intruders that come to cut down their trees without permission.

Women's patrol nabbed three illegal loggers from nearby village and brought them to the local council. If not for the presence of reporter, they would've beaten the men (Sam Eaton).

 

Not long ago these women would have been considered trespassers here. Nearby, there are heavy stone markers laid down by the British in the 1800s when the government declared this forest its own.

But now, under India’s landmark 2006 Forest Rights Act, tribal villages like Ghunduribadi can claim title to their ancestral lands, some 150,000 square miles of forest all across India. That’s an area almost the size of California, making it one of the largest land reforms in India’s history. More

Secret activists use cameras to show repression by Saudi authorities

Environmentalists fear Americans will ruin Cuba's biodiversity

Fighting North Korea's dictatorship through flash drives

This Latina (Guatemalan) rapper thinks hip-hop can unite all women

Brutal Bronze Age battle discovery changes understanding of history

Is pressure to set records turning polar adventure into a lying game?

"Tex-Mex Gringa" musician is proud to carry on the family name

It's NOT a den of terrorists. Here's a different picture of Molenbeek

Did Putin save the day for Assad/Syria or create a bigger challenge?

Scientists hail latest quantum computer as "holy grail" of computing

Why Buddhist-Cambodia's sex workers may not need to be saved

Syrian gov't recaptures the ancient city of Palmyra from CIA/ISIS

China says: Stop giving things embarrassing Western names!

Activists use secret cameras to show repression by Saudi authorities

Brutal Bronze Age battle discovery changes understanding of history

• What happens when you win the lottery?

Doubt and Uncertainty bar Enlightenment

Dhr. Seven, Amber Dorrian, Wisdom Quarterly; Ralph Lebeau (bitstrips.com); Nadia Isakova

Buddhist novices (samaneras) offering light to the Buddha reclining into final nirvana in Pagan (Bagan) temple, Burma (Nadia Isakova/flickr.com)

   

Far East novices (wellhappypeaceful.com)

Speculation is a wondrous thing with two edges. It takes us further than we can go based on the evidence, and it possibly misleads us when regarded as more than speculation. Once the Buddha said to his disciples:

 

"Ascetics, there are two kinds of people who slander the Tathagata [the Wayfarer, the Buddha]. First, there is one who explains what was not said by the Tathagata as said by the Tathagata and, second, there is one who explains what was said by the Tathagata as not said by the Tathagata. These two slander the Tathagata" (Abhasita Sutra).

C'ya at the finish line, sucka (hiltonbarbour.com)

Given the risk of this, Is it better never to speculate? Or is it simply necessary to make clear when speculating? Many teachers, indeed, fear to speculate; it seems the wiser. But in the West, we can be reckless, not realizing why the Buddha held back some times.

 

"What's the use?" sighed Eeyore

For instance, is world eternal or not or, moreover, will everyone eventually attain the goal of emancipation, which is nirvana? To answer either way is harmful. Any answer is a bad answer. The Buddha explained why. In the first case, if everyone is sure to reach the goal, why put forth effort? Relax like an overconfident hare. If not everyone, why put forth effort? It may not make a difference, so wallow in pity like Eeyore.

Old man and bow (ogijima.com)

More famously, there was a monk, Malunkya-putta, who asked the Buddha all the imponderable polemic questions: Is it this way or that (e.g., is the animating principle and the body one or are they different), are things finite or infinite, and so on. The Buddha more famously answered that he had not promised to answer these questions (which the Buddha teaches do not lead to dispassion, appeasement, direct wisdom, or enlightenment/liberation), but that being asked them was like a person shot by an arrow not allowing a master physician to remove it until that doctor told him who shot it, why he shot it, what he made the arrow out of, and so on.
  
The person would surely die before these -- and other questions that would arise -- were answered. Yet, that person would not have done what should be done, would not have laid down the burden by developing direct-insight, and glimpsing nirvana (MN 63). If the Buddha is offering a message of liberation, so rare in the universe, and all we would rather do is find out about the universe, are we not being just as silly?

"It is just as if one were wounded with an arrow smeared with poison. Friends and companions, kith and kin would find a physician, but that person would say: 'I won't have this arrow removed until I know the caste of the shooter,' 'I won't have this arrow removed until I know the shooter's name and clan... the shooter's size... color [race] whether dark, brown, or golden... home... the bow type... the bowstring material... the shaft's nature, wild or cultivated... whether the feathers of the shaft were vulture, stork, hawk, peacock... That person would die but those things would still remain unknown.

Knowing-and-seeing replaces questioning.

"Whether the view is held that the world is eternal or not, Malunkya-putta, there is still birth, old age, death, grief, suffering, sorrow and despair -- but these can be ended in this very life! I have not explained them because they are not useful, they are not conducive to tranquility, they do not result in nirvana. What I have explained is disappointment, the cause of disappointment, the destruction of disappointment, and the path that leads to the destruction of disappointment. This is useful, this leads to letting go, to dispassion, to perfect wisdom."

Are the Various Realms Real?

The Wheel of Existence depicting Buddhist cosmology (Arrow River Hermitage)

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The historical Buddha taught that there were 31 Realms of Existence, which proficient meditators are able to access and verify. This is a simplified cosmology, of course, because each plane is more complex and diverse than any map could easily indicate. For example, the Human plane we are all familiar with is interspersed with invisible worlds we know little about.

Within this apparently straightforward realm, there are invisible microscopic worlds, worlds under the sea (with sea-serpents and sea-nymphs), anthropomorphic bird beings (garudas), the incomprehensibly complex animal world (ticcharana), the realm of hungry ghosts (petas), serpents/reptilians (nagas), goblins (yakkhas), and light beings (bhumi-devas or dryads), and sycophantic angels (gandhabbas). From time to time, the world is visited by extraterrestrials (asuras) and even gods (brahmas) and demigods (devas) and miserable demons (rakshasas and maras).

The Buddha consulting with brahmas ("gods"). More IMAGES of the Buddha and other beings

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Humans themselves are not one thing but rather live such different lives that a visitor from outer space would probably not recognize one as being the same species as the other or as any different from primates (including yetis and ogres). The questions runner deeper than Homo sapiens. Are there other genetic lines, or what exactly are kinnaras, suparnas, dakinis, rakshasas, rudras, and bhutas?

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What are the three dominant types of non-human beings the Buddha repeatedly makes reference to when speaking of this world "with its devas and maras and brahmas" from his very first sermon (Setting in Motion the Wheel of the Truth) onward (SN 56.11; SN LVI 11, etc.).

(For a general discussion of these beings, see Wikipedia "Kinnara Kingdom" or "cryptozoology").

The complexity of the world Buddhism lays out boggles the mind, except that the mind chooses to dismiss this cosmology as mythical, arcane, or simply the product of a superstitious and unscientific Indian cultural inheritance. As for the existence of "mermaids" (sea devas), just to reference one example, one would need to explain away the Buddha's chief disciple Maha Mogallana's declaration:

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"In the middle of the ocean

There are mansions aeon-lasting,

Sapphire-shining, fiery-gleaming

With a clear translucent lustre,

Where iridescent sea-nymphs dance

In complex, intricate rhythms"

(MN 50.25, Nanamoli/Bodhi translation).

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Naturally, the question arises from time to time:

Are the various realms real?

Arrow River Forest Hermitage

This question, although natural enough, is hopelessly naive. Before we can even begin to answer it we need to get some inkling of what exactly "reality" is anyway. And that is far from a straightforward question.

We could turn this question on its head and ask just how real is this familiar human realm we live in? It is a plain fact that everything we know and experience is a product of our sense organs. We never know the external world itself, but only our fabricated image of it, built up by the mind from incoming sense data. The ultimately real remains an elusive abstraction.

Some writers have tried to explain away the various realms as purely psychological states. There may be some truth to this, so long as we are consistent enough to include the present "reality" as well. It is certainly true that we can access heavenly and hellish mind-states while in the human form. But that does not at all preclude the possibility of arising after death into a more intense and inclusive form of those states.

To deny categorically the possibility of heaven and hell being, in some sense at least, real, is to be very narrow-minded. Who can say what possibilities exist within the universe? Why should the limit of the familiar be the limit of the real?

Finally, it should be noted that the Buddha himself was quite clear on this question.

Since there actually is another world, one who holds the view "there is another world" has right view (MN 60). It is known to me to be the case, that there are gods (MN 100). There can be no doubt of the sense in which the Buddha taught about karma, rebirth and the various realms.

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The Goddess Ambika leading the eight Mother Goddesses in battle against the Demon Raktabija, folio from Devimahatmya (Glory of the Goddess), early 18th century book/manuscript (Indian history as mythology),