The Buddha holds up a flower and smiles

CC Liu, Seth Auberon (eds.), Wikipedia edit Mahākāśyapa smiles at the lotus flower

The Buddha shows Maha Kassapa a lotus in an apocryphal Mahayana sutra (Hishida Shunso)

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This monk gets it. He understands.

One of the Buddha's Great Disciples, Maha Kassapa (Mahākāśyapa) smiles at a lotus flower the Buddha shows instead of delivering a Dharma talk.

In East Asia, there is a Chan and Zen tradition, first recounted in the The Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp (Chinese 景德傳燈錄, Pinyin Tiansheng Guangdeng-lu), which is a 1036 genealogical record about Chan Buddhism.

According to this tradition, Venerable Mahākāśyapa once received a direct "transmission" from the historical Siddhartha Gautama Buddha.

Artist Hishida Shunsō

Chan and Zen purport to lead their adherents to insights akin to that mentioned by the Buddha in the [apocryphal] "Flower Sermon" (Chinese 拈華微笑, Pinyin Nianhua weixiao, literally, "Holding up a flower and smiling subtly") given on Vulture's Peak, Rajagriha (India), in which the Teacher held up a white flower and just admired it in his hand, without speaking.

All the disciples just looked on without knowing how to react, but only Ven. Mahākāśyapa smiled faintly, and the Buddha picked him as one who truly understood him and was worthy to be the one receiving a special "mind-to-mind transmission" (Pinyin yixin chuanxin).

The painting (wikiart.org) is by Hishida Shunsō, 1897, in the Nihonga style. Source

Vegetarian Diet Cuts Carbon Footprint

Going veggie can slash your carbon footprint: study

BERLIN (AFP, 8/26/08) -- Giving up meat could drastically reduce your carbon footprint, with meat-eaters' diets responsible for almost twice the emissions of those of vegetarians, a German study said today.

A diet with meat is responsible for producing in a year the same amount of greenhouse gases as driving a mid-sized car 4,758 km (2,956 miles), the Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IOeW) said.

But the food a vegetarian consumes in 12 months is responsible for generating the same emissions as driving 2,427 km, the IOeW said in a study commissioned by independent consumer protection group Foodwatch.

The calculations are based on emissions of greenhouse gases, including methane produced by the animals themselves, as well as emissions from food production including manufacturing feed and fertilizer and the use of farmland.

Going vegan -- giving up meat and dairy products -- would cut the emissions released in making what you eat more than sevenfold, to the equivalent of driving 629 km, it said.

And if it is all organic, your food footprint is almost a 17th of that of a meat-eater -- the equivalent of driving 281 km.

Beef is particularly environmentally unfriendly, it said, with producing a kilo (2.2 pounds) the same as driving 71 km compared with 26 km for pork.

Switching to organic farming can cut emissions dramatically, "but what counts is the way we feed ourselves...production and consumption first and foremost of beef and milk must be cut drastically," the study said.

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"Compassion and love are not mere luxuries. As the source both of inner and external peace, they are fundamental to the continued survival of our species" - Dalai Lama.

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Shopping for vegetables at a hypermarket in Taipei, July 2008 (AFP/File/Patrick Lin)