British Empire entered and robbed the richest country/empire in the world, what is now called India. The British and their colonial rule extracted resources on a mass scale, impoverishing the richest country the world had ever know, enriching themselves and promoting racist white elitism and European commerce. The East India Company is much to blame, but the Crown took it over and bears the responsibility for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and theft beyond human comprehension. It did not only steal tangible resources, it stole mathematical ideas, first giving due credit to the original inventors of things like the concept of zero then misappropriating, taking credit, enlarging the reputations of white scholars, denigrating and finally erasing others. Many of the great Islamic/Muslim discoveries in math and architecture were also marginalized, erased, and absorbed into British and white European lore. Whites did it all. India, Africa, and the New World contributed nothing.
An Unholy Alliance: Monks and the Military in Myanmar
(Al Jazeera English, March 18, 2019) With almost 90 percent of Myanmar/Burma's population being devoted Theravada Buddhists, the religion [like neighboring Thailand] has been at the heart of the nation's very identity for centuries.
But while the pillars of Buddhist teachings are love (metta), compassion, and peace, there is a very different variation to the philosophy being taught at the Ma Ba Tha ("Patriotic Association of Myanmar") monastery in Yangon/Rangoon's Insein township.
The monks there are connected to one of the world's worst humanitarian crises, the systematic persecution and genocide of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Rakhine state.
Al Jazeera's unprecedented access to the Ma Ba Tha monastery and its leaders offers a glimpse into how their ultra-nationalist agenda is becoming the blueprint for the political structure of the country.
Is the joining of forces between monks and the dictatorial generals threatening Myanmar's young and fragile parliamentary democracy that incorporates Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi?
Once upon a time there was a tiny Indian woman leading an inconspicuous life in Calcutta, India.
No one would have ever guessed how profoundly she would influence Buddhism in America, its evolution, teaching, and practice. How could that be?
The impoverished title Knee Deep in Grace is very misleading. It is actually the life story of Dipa Ma Barua, along with the essential spiritual teachings that make her a towering figure in contemporary Buddhism.
The Insight Meditation Society extended retreat facility behind IMS (dharma.org)
She was a student of Anagarika Munindra and a teacher of American luminaries Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Sharon Salzberg, among others. She sent them back to the U.S. from India to teach, and they did as they were instructed, founding the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts.
While Dipa Ma (lit., "Dipa's mother" or figurately, "motherly light, island, or refuge") experienced fame in her lifetime. She had a following of many American, Indian, Burmese, and Bangladeshi students.
She was like the female saints of the Vedas, "remarkable women...from the dawn of history...who achieved realization while cleaning their homes and raising their children" (Daughters of the Goddess: Women Saints of India).
She was remarkable in her ordinariness, astounding in her natural grounding in the reality of the present moment.
Author Amy "Amita" Schmidt
Dipa Ma was a primary teacher of Salzberg, Kornfield, and Goldstein, who have been among the most influential "importers" of Theravada Buddhism to America.
Through the centers they founded -- Spirit Rock, IMS, and many related centers they encourage and support like Insight LA -- and the teachers trained in them (the author, Amy Schmidt, among them), Dipa Ma continue to touch countless lives.
Jack Kornfield described the power of Dipa Ma's influence: "Without anything said or done, just the impact of meeting a person so developed can be enough to change one's whole way of life."
Knee Deep in Grace is filled with intimate stories collected over a period of ten years, both from prominent Western meditation teachers and from Dipa Ma's enlightened daughter and grandson and her Calcutta students.
Dipa Ma addressed her teaching to ordinary people in her apartment complex and her extended family. Her iconoclastic style of daily-life "immersion" practice brought many of her students to awakening.
And as this small book testifies, her long time students as well as new ones find that she continues to guide and inspire their meditation practice. The book also goes into Dipa Ma's attainment of magical powers (iddhi).More
AUTHOR: Amy "Amita" Schmidt is a LCSW who for six years was a resident teacher at Insight Meditation Society. She continues to offer spiritual support to meditators by phone and teaches insight meditation (vipassana) nationally. Info: amitaschmidt.com.
Who Are the Bengali Buddhists? Ven. Karunananda, Abbot
California Bodhi Vihara, Long Beach, CA
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While the mystic poet Rabindranath Tagore, the modern saint Dipa Ma (Nani Bala Barua), and her guru Anagarika Munindra may get all the attention, Bangladesh actually has a long and storied history of Buddhism. From its first contact with the Buddha, according to Canonical records, delivering a discourse to its oppression by the Mughal Empire of Akbar and his descendants, Banga (as it was once known) and the Chittagong Baruas have preserved the original message of the Buddha Gautama’s dispensation.
Bangladeshi Buddhists maintain the original form of Buddhism, the "Teaching of the Elder" [enlightened arhats, the immediate disciples of the Buddha]. And California now has the distinction of housing the first Indian subcontinental monastery outside of Asia.
In the 8th century, when Buddhism yet thrived in its birthplace India -- when Southern Nepal, Assam in the north, the state of West Bengal, and Eastern Pakistan were all a part of Bharat (“India” proper) -- King Shashanko came into power and laid waste to Buddhism in India. He was the forbear of the famous "Hindu" systematizer Sri Shankara Acarya, who amalgamated divergent traditions prevalent in the subcontinent into one organized religion.
King Shashanko converted to Brahmanism, slaughtering monks and razing famous Buddhist universities. He then converted people by force, displacing Buddhism as the dominant religion of Bihar. The king even went so far as to order the destruction of the original Bodhi tree, under which Siddhartha Gautama gained enlightenment to become the Buddha. He died of leprosy within seven days as a result.
Tibetan historical accounts, namely the Rajata Ramgini, record the litany of atrocities. This sent waves of fleeing monks and lay Buddhists east to what is now Bangladesh. Monks, to preserve their lives and their ordinations, disrobed except for saffron shreds around their fingers. They trekked over the perilous mountains of Assam and the wilds of Nagaland to the Buddhist stronghold of the Arkanese kings (Arkanese kings which ruled in Burma)....
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