Bodhidharma: Master of Zen (film)

Bodhidharma: The Master of Zen - A Gripping Buddhist Film | Unveiling the Secrets of Enlightenment

(Brandy Film Production) Master Chuen-Bo (known as Brandy Yuen) embarked on an extraordinary spiritual journey that began with his dedication to producing the evocative film Master of Zen.

In this ambitious project, he simultaneously took on the roles of screenwriter, director, and producer. This marked the start of his transformation towards embracing the Buddhist monastic life.

• 0:00 Movie opening
• 0:21 Introducing Bodhidharma
• 1:02 I am you
• 04:46 A great danger
• 07:18 Hell vs. Bliss
• 09:27 The Light of Wisdom
• 10:42 Vegetarianism
• 12:47 Who was I before I was born?
• 14:56 Who told you to become a monk?
• 16:17 Buddhist practice is in the heart
• 22:52 Eight ways to make you understand the Truth
• 25:05 Bodhidharma travels east to China
• 29:36 Indian monks preach without words?
• 34:12 Flow with destiny and stay at ease
• 36:36 Can one become a Buddha by sitting in meditation?
• 40:04 Bodhidharma: There is no Buddha in the world
• 41:47 How to recite the scriptures?
• 44:49 Cross the river with a single reed
• 46:46 Who can cut himself with a knife?
• 48:46 A practitioner must encounter obstacles
• 50:17 Buddhism is beyond words
• 52:09 Sitting for nine years
• 58:58 Why is there no Buddha in the world?
• 1:00:54 Still as a mountain
• 1:02:56 It's all just a thought
• 1:03:41 Revelation in dreams
• 1:09:23 We must seize the time and do more good deeds
• 1:10:20 The test of the master
• 1:11:51 Break the arm to seek Buddhism
• 1:17:14 Using divine power
• 1:23:51 Those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know
• 1:26:45 Carrying a shoe back to the West

During his research for the film, Master Chuen-Bo immersed himself in the study of Buddhist sutras, seeking wisdom within the hallowed walls of prestigious temples, and attentively absorbing the teachings of his revered master.

As he delved deeper into the profound study of Buddhism, his longing for the Dharma grew increasingly urgent.

Ultimately, he discovered the elusive Truth regarding life's existential questions and, in a decisive moment, chose to leave behind his flourishing film career and colorful life to walk the path of Buddhist monk.

Later on, responding to the heartfelt invitations from his devoted disciples, he journeyed back to Hong Kong from Taiwan to compassionately spread the enlightening teachings of Buddhism.

In October 2000, Master Chuen-Bo established the Buddhist Navigation Vihara in Hong Kong, wholeheartedly dedicating his life to spreading the Dharma for the betterment of all sentient beings.

Guided by the noble mission, "Seek the Buddha's path above, enlighten sentient beings below," the temple aspires to illuminate the way for countless souls. May the Navigation of this Dharma vessel steer us all towards the blissful realm of nirvana, guiding us on this transformative journey together.

• Official website: bnv.org.hk (Prajna Zen Temple)
• Brandy Film Production, Nov. 27, 2022; CC Liu, Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Bodhidharma's Indian Kung Fu and Zen

The comradery at Shaolin Buddhist temple brings out solidarity and personal excellence.

Bodhidharma: The Mysterious Indian Prince Behind Kung-Fu and Zen

Springing tiger!! - Flying dragon!

(Odd Compass) Bodhidharma is a fascinating Indian historical figure in East Asia. His life is shrouded in mystery.

Much of it has to be pieced together from a fragmented mix of sources, some contemporary, some written many centuries after his death in 528 CE.

However, there is no denying that he played a significant part in creating what we now know as "kung fu" and that he propagated Zen Buddhism in the East. Let's dive into Bodhidharma's incredible legacy. Academic research conducted by Shafaque Rahman (shafaque10).

History shows, ET contact advances a society

• Odd Compass, Nov. 5, 2023; CC Liu, Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Math genius from India, Cambridge U. (video)

IFLScience.com; Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly; Bhikkhu Dipa (video)

(Bhikkhu Dipa) Srinivasa Iyengar Ramanujan (Dec. 22, 1887-April 26, 1920) was an Indian mathematician and autodidact who lived during the time of the British Raj. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions.

 

Srinivasa Ramanujan (wiki)

The movie The Man Who Knew Infinity is about the Indian genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, who is generally viewed by mathematicians as one of the two most romantic figures in the discipline.

Ramanujan (1887-1920) was born and died in Southern India, passing away at the age of 32. [Suicide?] But in one of the most extraordinary events in mathematical history, he spent World War I at Trinity College Cambridge at the invitation of the leading British mathematician Godfrey Harold (G. H.) Hardy (1877-1947) and his great collaborator John E. Littlewood.

 

Brahmin wisdom comes from space

As a boy he refused to learn anything but mathematics, almost entirely self-taught, and his pre-Cambridge work is contained in a series of notebooks. 

 

The work he did after returning to India in 1919 is contained in the misleadingly named Lost Notebook. It was lost and later found in the Wren library of the leading college for mathematics of the leading University in England. While in England Ramanujan became the first Indian Fellow both of Trinity and of the Royal Society.

• REVIEW: This story deserves more attention (Cynical Historian)

A Man of Numbers

Ramanujan had an extraordinary ability to see patterns. While he rarely proved his results, he left a host of evaluations of sums and integrals. He was especially expert in a part of number theory called modular forms which is of even more interest today than when he died.

 

The lost notebook initiated the study of mock theta functions that are only now being fully understood. Fleshing out his notebooks has only recently been completed principally by American mathematicians Prof. Bruce Berndt and Prof. George Andrews. It comprises thousands of printed pages.

 

An old Indian friend, Swami Swaminathan, oversaw the Ramanujan Library in Madras (modern Mumbai, India) over half a century ago. He commented that had Ramanujan been born ten years earlier, he would not have been able to receive the education and financial assistance that made his pre-Cambridge work possible.

 

Swaminathan went on to say that had Ramanujan been born just ten years later, he would probably have received a more robust and more ordinary education. In either case, this version of Ramanujan would not exist.

 

Ramanujan and Me

 

Ramanujan has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. My father David was a student of one of Hardy’s students. In our house “the Bible” referred to Hardy’s masterpiece Divergent Series.

 

In 1962 on the 75th anniversary of Ramanujan’s birth the envelope (below) arrived at my parents' home. A kind stranger had put the franked stamps on the back.

  

In 1987 I was fortunate enough to speak with my brother at the major centennial conference on Ramanujan, held at the University of Illinois. We had become experts on and had extended Ramanujan’s work on Pi.

 

Highlights at the conference included the Nobel prize winning astronomer Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who described how important Ramanujan’s success in England had been to the self-confidence of himself and the co-founders (along with Mahatma Gandhi) of modern India including Jawaharlal Nehru, who became the first prime minister of independent India in 1947.

 

In 2008 David Leavitt published a novelized version of Ramanujan’s life entitled the Indian Clerk. While Leavitt captures much beautifully, as a novelist, he takes some considerable liberties. I prefer my novels as fables and my biographies straight.

 

In 2012 on the 125th anniversary of Ramanujan’s birth the Notices of the American Mathematical Society published eight articles on his work. This suite forcibly showed how Ramanujan’s reputation and impact continue to grow.
 
Gifted with Numbers

There is one famous anecdote about Ramanujan that even a non-mathematician can appreciate. In 1917 Ramanujan was hospitalized in London. He was said to have tuberculosis, but it is more likely this was to cover a failed suicide attempt.

 

Hardy took a cab to visit him. Not being very good at small talk, all Hardy could think to say was that the number of his cab, 1729, was uninteresting.

 

Ramanujan replied that quite to the contrary it was the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two distinct ways:

1,729 = 12³ + 1³ = 10³ + 9³

This is now known as Ramanujan’s taxi-cab number.

 

Mathematicians in the Movies

There has been a recent spate of books, plays, movies, and TV series about mathematicians and theoretical physicists: A Beautiful Mind (2001), Copenhagen (2002), Proof (2005) and last year’s Oscar winning movies The Imitation Game about Alan Turing, and The Theory of Everything on Stephen Hawking. More

• More on the genius Ramanujan (history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk)

Sri Lanka: Sinhalese started civil war on Tamils

Wisdom Quarterly; BBC News (bbc.co.uk, July 23, 2013)

Lush, subtropical Sri Lanka ("holy land"): Lion's Rock, Sigiriya (hellotravel.com)

Majority Sinhalese mob violence devastation (AP/BBC.co.uk)

 

Sri Lanka (left), Theravada Buddhist map

EDITORIAL: In America we were raised to believe the majority Buddhist Sinhalese were innocent victims of minority Hindu Tamil extremism. But it never added up. Prime Ministers were revealed to be supporting the insurgency to attack it, kill many, and gain police state controls over the island's population. Our own visits to the island also showed that the Tamils were an oppressed ethnic minority mistreated by soldiers, police, and secret agents -- family members disappeared, females attacked, whole families slaughtered. The blood would run for three decades with hypocrisy on the Sinhalese side, nationalism and racism (xenophobia) running rampant, Buddhist monks becoming involved against all the Buddha's admonitions, British post-colonialism adding to the fire, and an endless series of attacks and retaliations by a dominant group wielding almost all of the power against an oppressed group and the holocaust that followed resulting in a giant camp into which Tamils were concentrated in the final putsch of the civil war, now put to rest Asia's longest civil war.

Adam's Peak, Sri Lanka (hellotravel.com)

(BBC) Thirty years ago, Tamil separatists stepping up militant attacks in northern Sri Lanka killed 13 soldiers [in retaliation for countless abuses] who reported for duty only a day earlier.

Over the next few days, [inciting to riot and using this killing as a pretext] mobs of the Sinhalese majority took revenge, killing between 400 and 3,000 Tamils around the country and triggering a civil war that lasted 26 years and [forced] hundreds of thousands of Tamils into exile. 

• The Buddha said with regard to revenge: "One who strikes a another is certainly bad, but one who strikes back is worse." (Following this enlightened advice, conflicts would end quickly. Living as we do in the West by the opposite vicious advice, things quickly escalate, and the Hatfields never stop despising the McCoys). "Hatred never ceases by hatred; by love alone does hatred cease; this is an ancient axiom." 
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Tamil Jaffna, Sinhalese Colombo (BBC)

The BBC's Charles Haviland reports on the legacy of what came to be known as "Black July."

 

In the stillness of a Colombo [the capital of Sri Lanka] afternoon, as a clock chimes three, an elderly woman looks back 30 years and remembers.

"There was a first mob of about 80-odd young guys with iron rods and things. They were in a frenzy, obviously under the influence of alcohol; they smashed up [Tamil businesses and homes], and then came the next lot to loot."

 

"Priya Balachandran" -- the BBC has changed her name as she prefers anonymity -- recalls the time Colombo and much of southern Sri Lanka seemed gripped by madness. 

 

[Sinhalese] Mob violence was wrought on [Tamil] people, most of whom had little idea what was happening in the north. Like other Tamils, Ms. Balachandran was on the receiving end.

Sharing lunch with her mother, son, and a Sinhalese neighbor, she saw shops ablaze over the road and realised the mob were approaching. More 

“The war of 30 years has taught both sides equally, I think. They have gone through enough suffering.”

- Priya Balachandran Member of the island's Tamil community

Secret Sri Lanka: Kataragama

Patrick Harrigan (xlweb.com)


Âlatti Pûja, Kataragama Mahâ Dêvâle

In the dry jungle of remote southeastern Sri Lanka lies Kataragama or Katir-kamam, the (place of) "light and love-passion," a shrine complex of exceptional antiquity and sanctity that attracts many thousands of Buddhist, Hindu, and even Muslim devotees.

They come year round, particularly during the fortnight-long Aesala Festival in July-August. It is at this time that a small casket believed to contain the secret of the god's birth -- some say the god himself -- is taken out in a solemn, yet joyful, torchlit procession nightly. It is escorted by his female-votaries and troupes of riotous dancers. The latter represent the animal, human, chthonic, and heavenly spheres.

An archaic spirit of paradox, fertility, rejuvenation, and play, the Kataragama god also preserves an essential soteriological dimension as the Divine Psychopomp. He guides his followers beyond the Portals of Death into an unconditional realm of freedom from the tyranny of the pairs of opposites.

Sri Jñâna Pandita: Murugan as Expositor of Gñosis with His symbols the Vêl or Spear of Wisdom = axis mundi and vehicle/totem the peacock = Phoenix. Behind Him dawns the rising sun symbolizing the awakened mind (bodhi). Early 20th cent. painting by NS Balakrishnan, Madurai.

A host of local indigenous, Sinhalese [Buddhist], Tamil [Hindu], and Islamic legends purport to explain the origin, character, and exploits of the Kataragama god. His reputation for sacred or mysterious power extends far beyond his immediate forest domain however.

Broadly speaking, scholars, and cult-adherents alike identify him with the ever-popular Tamil hill god Murukan ("Tender One"). This god is said to have arisen before the dawn of history and has long been considered as the Dravidian counterpart or expression of the pan-Indian war god Skanda-Kumara, "son" of the great mountain-dwelling god Shiva.

Skanda -- tutelary god of warriors, kings, yogis, scholars, and (as Guha, "the Hidden") patron of all secret knowledge and covert activities -- once quit his home on Mount Kailasa in the trans-Himalaya and, according to various traditions, made his way south in a series of exploits culminating at Kataragama. He engaged in a secretive courtship and marriage to the indigenous Vedda maiden Valli, which is the... More>>

Gods of Feminine Power

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...Of particular interest, however, is the god's longstanding association with the number six and the shatkona yantra or "six-cornered magical diagram." For the shatkona yantra (etched upon a metal plate) is precisely what is believed to be contained in the small casket that is taken out in procession at Kataragama.

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A full discussion of the subject of the "calculus" of symbolic forms goes beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that the god, whose Sanskrit name Shanmukha (Tamil: Arumukam) means "having six faces," is homologized to the hexagram: a figure composed of two intersecting equilateral triangles representing the mother-principle and the father-principle in balanced union. From this there is the Holy Child known to mythologies all over the world.

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In the traditions of Europe and West Asia, the hexagram is well known as the "Seal of Solomon." This alludes to its widespread association with the conjunction of sacerdotal authority and temporal power.

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Moreover, the yantra in conjunction with the vel or spear corresponds to the archetypal warrior's shield and spear or, in another context, to the axis mundi and the chakra (wheel) or loka (plane of existence) through which the axis mundi or "solar ray" passes as an axle around which a wheel turns.

The yantra is another product of India's indigenous, non-discursive schools of ritual magic. As such it is intended not merely for decorative purposes but for its magical efficacy. Its etymology offers a clue to the yantra's function and reason for being.

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Like the similar terms mantra and tantra, it consists of a verbal root yam ("to hold") plus the suffix -tra denoting instrumentality. Hence, ya(m)-tra or yantra, "a device that holds," that is, a magical snare, trap, or container -- especially one designed to hold a spirit, demon, or god (deva).

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In this function, the yantra parallels the pervasive South Indian pattern of place-goddesses (e.g. Madurai Meenakshi Amman or Valli Amman of Kataragama) who first attract and then "hold" wandering gods to those places as their husbands.

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In the context of Kataragama, the yantra in the holy of holies may be understood to "hold" or "contain" the god of six faces or directions. This is what the Ark of the Covenant was understood to "contain," namely, the Shekinah or "presence" of the Holy Spirit of god Jehovah....

More

• Gods of Feminine Power
• Dionysus and Kataragama Skanda
• Lord of the Underground Dream World
• Lords of Water, Life, and Fertility
• Gods of Play and Drama
• Lords of the Labyrinth
• Gods of Abusive Epithets
• References