India's Revolutionary Icons who followed the paths of The Buddha

India's Revolutionary Icons who followed the paths of  The Buddha
It all began with Buddha... and these are some of the great Torch Bearer's of Buddha's Dhamma.... This Blog is a Scholarly Blog created to provide insights into the life, services and Social contributions of some of the Greatest of Indian Scholars, Humanitarians, Saints and social activists about whom the vested interests and Rotten Indian media do not write. Nor there is a State or center policies to restore and protect the stunning stories of these great men and woman...let me walk you through the greatness..!!

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Father of Nation of India Dr.Bheemarao Ambedkar

The first Law Minister of India and the Father of Indian Constitution Bheemrao Ramji Ambedkar (Dr.B.R.Ambedkar)spoke, wrote and demonstrated quite extensively and comprehensively than any other known living or dead humans of India as to how treacherous, dangerous this so called Indian hindu society and it's deadly cultures that spread discrimination and bigotry between each of thousands of heterogeneous groups. To find a way to bring them all these "heterogeneous mess of India", and to put them in single order to lead a happy, free and prosperous life, to make them behave like humans and to treat fellow humans DrAmbedkar crafted this finest of the fine Constitution that even Americans refer to it when they are in crisis. Ofcourse, Dr.Ambedkar was an American Scholar and Columbia Doctorate, he did learn lots about humanity and freedom while he was in America, but he also studied American Constitution, so a well learned scholar and genius DrAmbedkar fathered the Indian constitution in real sense, he is the Father of Modern India, while SakyaMuni Buddha was the Father of ancient and all time Father of India. Here is the dedication to the Father of India: http://fatherofnationi.blogspot.com/

Saturday, April 2, 2011

INDIA- Bans Freedom of Speech & Rights to tell the Truth to the Public

Modi the Ultimate undemocratic Politician of India bans gandhi book in Gujarat.
In the aftermath of a Wall Street Journal Book Review of a recent "gandhi" book written by the former New York Times Editor and Pulitzer Prize Winner Joseph Lelyveld, casteists Indians invaded WSJ commentary page with obnoxious and undemocratic comments made against the author of the book without even having the slightest idea that they are spewing venom against the authour who himself was a gandhian biographer who has done tremendous work on gandhi. Yet another spectacular display of Indians ignorance can be read at the commentary page on WSJ.

It is the reviewer Andrew Roberts who dissected out the book and gandhi's life, who presented several pathological life styles and failures of the great soul, or is it a great soul?. There are lots of facts about gandhi has been buried alive by Indians, especially casteist Indians as well as the state that portrays gandhi as some kind of a demi-god or the representative of the nation of India, while so many great men and woman who fought for India's freedom and nation building leaders are long forgotten and trashed by the same procrastinators of India.

Most ironic of the Indians behavior is to ban or hurt someone who give them messages, they will kill the messenger once and for all, it is the tradition of thousands of years of attitudes of Indians. As the author claims in this "Hindu Daily News", not a single person had any opportunity to even look at the Book, let alone reading it.

This is the heights of a society that every heresay can lead to ban a book, arrest a person or put an innocent in Jail, there is no law and there is no rights, ofcourse there is no freedom in India. Any time there is a book or movie or some critical analysis of hindu religious books or figures or people like gandhi, the immediate reaction of the state and the people is to Ban, Ban...Ban....the Most Undemocratic and utterly Pathological mindset never seen in any other nation, is India. Oh it is gandhi's India you see, the truth will set Free was the "mantra" gandhi used to dupe the people, actually, the Truth about gandhi is beating him so hard, several decades after his death, the truth still haunts gandhi and his procrastinators. 


UPA government not to ban book on GandhijiSmita GuptaAuthor's condemnationCondemning the idea of a ban, Mr. Lelyveld was quoted earlier this week as saying, “In a country that calls itself a democracy, it is shameful to ban a book that no one has read, including the people who are doing the banning. They should at least make an effort to see the pages that they think offend them before they take such an extreme step.”
Giving strength to the line now taken by the UPA government is the fact that intellectuals and relatives of Mahatma Gandhi have opposed a ban, saying that it would not be a “democratic response.”
The Gandhi none of us knew
by Rev. Irene Monroe
Bay Windows Contributor
Wednesday Mar 30, 2011


It has been not quite a century since Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948 at the age of 78 in New Delhi, India. The bevy of hagiographies written about him is now being replaced with truth-telling biographies about the Gandhi nobody knew.

The most recent one is titled Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India by Joseph Lelyveld.

And according to Lelyvard, Gandhi the pacifist was a wife-beater, denied sex to his wife for decades, was purported to be a "celibate" living life as an ascetic, but actually was a pedophile who ritualized sleeping naked with underage girls in order to test "the ferocity of his sexual desires," and at one point left his wife for a male lover.

BY PAM LOBLEY, NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM,  NOW THAT'S FUNNY
Joseph Lelyveld, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, has new book out about Mahatma Gandhi. In the book, he hints at a homosexual relationship between Gandhi and a German man, Herman Kallenbach.The book, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, has been banned in a western state of India. Other parts of India are considering the ban as well.

Special Correspondent
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: P. Parameswaran, director of Bharateeya Vichara Kendram, has called for a social boycott of a book on Mahatma Gandhi written by Joseph Lelyveld.


Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Gandhi

(This Blog article written by Jenni is copied from her website and posted here).

by Jenni   One Google of “Gandhi” shows how enamored the world is with him. “Gandhi, five stars,” “Gandhi, non-violence,” “Gandhi, Time's Top 100.” He is hailed as a virtual saint. Over 500 biographies and movies have been made about him. He is presented as being anti-racist, anti-colonialist, non-violent, tolerant, devoted to family and overall someone that we should learn from. The Great Soul, he is called. One site touts that if we will read Gandhi we will, “at every turn, open our eyes in admiration and reverence.”
The truth is far different from this rosy picture the Indian government and others would sell to us. His writing is comprised of numerous volumes and his thoughts are not consistent.
Although Gandhi writes, “I believe implicitly that all men are born equal. All — whether born in India or in England or America,” Gandhi was not really anti-racist. Not only was he a Hindu, with all the caste system implications that came with it, but he was really only concerned with racism as directed at the upper classes of Hindu caste, of which he was a member. He was also very racist towards the blacks of South Africa. On September 26, 1896, Gandhi wrote, “Ours is one continued struggle sought to be inflicted upon us by the Europeans who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir, whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness.”

Then in September of 1903, Gandhi said, “We believe as much in the purity of races as we think they (the Whites) do …. by advocating the purity of all races.” In fact he felt so strongly that the Indians should be classed with the whites not the Kaffirs, he organized a brigade of Indians to help put down a Zulu uprising. In 1931, he fasted as protest to a British proposal to grant rights to Untouchables, the lowest of the castes, also known as Dalits. No, Gandhi was no friend to the lower classes. He once told a Dalit who had graduated to not “take up” a white collar job.
Bibliography
Annamalai, Velu. "The Myth of Mahatma Gandhi." Race and History 2000 (23 June 2008).
http://www.raceandhistory.com/historicalviews/ghandi.htm
Dalal, Chandulal Bhagubhai. Harilal Gandhi: A Life. Translated By Tridip Suhrud. India: Orient Longman, 2007.
"Gosphel of Brahmacharya." http://www.mkgandhi.org/main.htm (23 June 2008).
Grenier, Richard. "The Gandhi Nobody Knows" Commentary, March 1983. 59-72.
"In the Name of the Father." Deccan Herald. 22 July 2007, entertainment section (23 June 2008).
http://www.deccanherald.com/Content/Jul222007/enter2007072114311.asp
Jamanadas, K. "Untouchables in the Twenty-First Century: The Plight of the Dalits in India." Everything You Know Is Wrong. Ed. Russ Kick New York: MJF Books, 2002.
Lal, Vinay. "Nakedness, Nonviolence, and Brahmacharya: Gandhi's Experiments in Celibate Sexuality." Journal of the History of Sexuality 9 (2000): 105-136.
Vitz, David. "Gandhi: What He Believed About Sex, Marriage and Birth Control." Godspy. 27 March 2008.
http://oldarchive.godspy.com/life/Gandhi-on-Sex-Marriage-and-Birth-Control-by-Daniel-Vitz.cfm.html (21 June 2008).

INDIA:- Indian Govt & Developmental Terrorism!.

Amit Bhaduri's recent Book "The Face you were Afraid to See" talks about Indian govt's utter failures and policies that did not make a damn difference in 80% of Indians lives?. The book review is published in Hindu news paper?,  
Market mind-control  by ARVIND SIVARAMAKRISHNAN
The Most conservative and reputed Indian news paper "Hindu" says, the govt and policies did not help grow the real India but few rich pockets. We all know about that but calling the whole of India's economic and market progress is a "Developmental Terrorism of the State", is quite interesting coming from Hindu news paper, and as a matter of fact, it is true.




In effect, the very term ‘development' is being restricted to mean only the development of shopping-mall India, not the Other India, where over eight hundred million people have purchasing power of less than Rs.20 a day.
Beautifying cities means dumping slum-dwellers in badly-built estates far from their previous homes, schools, shops, and places of work. 


Growth means throwing landless labourers off lands they have tilled for generations, because still-valid colonial legislation gives the state, and in particular the State governments, powers to annex land merely by declaring that the annexation is for a public purpose, without ever specifying, much less justifying, the purpose. In effect, the State governments rush to submit themselves to private corporations in what Bhaduri calls “competitive servitude”. 


But only poor people get thrown off the land, in a form of systematic caste-war; 40 per cent of those thus dispossessed are Dalits and adivasis. This is not development but developmental terrorism.

WESTERN BUDDHISTS TO LEARN FROM AMERICAN JEWS By PPLakshmanJi

I read with great interest "A Challenge to Buddhism" by Ven.Bhikkhu Bodhi that I was fortunate to read on the internet. 
We all know and revere Bhikkhu Bodhi. His talks and writings are always inspiring and  provocative. His distress evident in the above-mentioned article will be shared by all those who read it.
Of late we have been hearing a lot about the expression  "Engaged Buddhism". I find the expression mostly among the Mahayanists rather than among the Therawadis in the Western world. Mahayanists also use the expression "Humanistic Buddhism". To everyone who is not a Buddhist, it simply means Applied Buddhism or practical Budhism.
There has been  challenges to Buddhism in all eras. To my mind, there is no greater solution, no enduring remedy to the challenges in any era than the creation of Buddha's disciples known as Arhants who would advice and give lead to people to solve their problems as and when they arise, regardless of color, race, creed or nation. Whatever the problems - social problems like injustice or natural catastrophies like earthquake or global problems like climate change 
-  the cutting edges of weapons in Buddhist armory to counter them always lay in individuals in the first instance, and subsequently in their organizations, with or without the support of governments. Therawada Buddhism which I am more familiar with has had a monastic order in place since Buddha'.s time where trained monks are turned out in large numbers, year after year, in Therawada countries -  Sri Lanka, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Laos, Cambodia.  Many of the trained monastics become bodhisatvas (seekers of enlightenment), few if any become fully enlightened worthy ones known as arhants who are worthy to advice and lead. Finding arhants is like mining for diamonds.
Many of the social service organizations, Buddhist or other,  fail because of the absence of arhants, the fully enlightened ones, to lead them. The fully enlightened arhants emerge out of the multitudes of monks, worthy to advice and worthy to lead..  
 
There have been a plethora of institutions with long histories of social service like the CARE, the American Peace Core, Red Cross, YMCAs, and many others. Bhikkhu Bodhi has mentioned American Jewish World Service (AJWS) which is relatively a new organization like the Islamic Relief USA and others, all of which "aiming to alleviate suffering, hunger, illiteracy and disease, worldwide". On the other hand,  organizations with limited goals also take birth like the Armenian Relief Society with its limited goal of serving the humanitarian needs of the Armenian people worldwide, who still suffer from the effects of its underreported holocaust of early 20th century. I wonder what make AJWS exceptional. 

Has AJWS  tested its declared objective of social service on the soils of Israel's next door neighbors or in the  Arab sector inside Israel itself?  Some material on the internet gave me the impression that AJWS perhaps took birth out of cognitive dissonance among American Jews suffering from psychological conflicts between incompatible beliefs and attitudes.  
The highly efficient style of working of organizations like AJWS backed by media support can make favourable impression of them even if they do not have enlightened leaders and violate one or more of the five precepts that the Buddhists always practise in all their endeavours.
Social service is the objective of most organizations, but they have besides social service something which make them distinct. For instance, the U.S. after taking thousands of lives in Japan with their nuclear armory seek to create a better image of the U.S.with its Peace Core volunteers, YMCAs seek to spread Christian messages behind their altruism,  what if AJWS seeks to show Jewish presence in world service, no matter that the Jews are only 0.2 percent of a world population of 7 billion.   
 
I wish to draw the attention of my readers to an organization which I had in  mind when I wrote earlier in this piece about arhants and searching for them like mining for diamonds. 
The organization is called Fo Guang Shan (FGS), which means literally "Buddha's Light Mountain", and its organizer is Master Venerable Hsing Yun, born in mainland China in 1927. Master Venrable Hsing Yun founded FGS in 1967 in a remote quiet area in the hills of  Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan. It is a Mahayana Buddhist order promoting Humanistic Budddhism, a modern Chinese philosophy. Humanistic Buddhism aims to make Buddhism relevant in the world and in the people's lives and hearts. It is a monastic order and not a theoretical school of thought per se.
In May 1997, Hsing Yun got the gates of FGS closed to the general public in order to give a cloistered atmosphere to the temple residents.
But, following the plea of the public headed by the President of Taiwan, FGS reopened the gates in December 2000. In the last 40 years since its inception, FGS has been remarkably successful in extending its services beyond Taiwan,  setting up temples and organizations in 173 countries and encompassing more than 3,500 monastics. FGS also created an affiliate in 1992, Buddha's  Light International Association (BLIA),  
which has now over 100 chapters in the world.  The monastic order represented by Fo Guang Shan and Buddha's Light International Association has now over a milliom followers worldwide. It has been said  "In Master Venerable Hsing Yun, Buddhism has found a reformer, an innovator and an educator. Under his strong  leadership, Buddhism has extended beyond traditional temple life to integrate and further enrich the modern city dwellers."
 
 P.P.Lakshman
December 18, 2008
 
 

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Ravana & the depiction of 10 Heads? What is the Rationale?

Ravana's ten heads represent the ten crowns he wore as a result of his being the sovereign of ten countries.