WebSite Reviews - What others are saying about our site:
var s = document.createElement('script');
s.type = 'text/javascript';
s.async = true;
s.src = 'http://site-connect.net/widget~reviews';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(s);
var s = document.createElement('script');
s.type = 'text/javascript';
s.async = true;
s.src = 'http://site-connect.net/site~pageinfo2';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(s);
Link Exchange
To hear many Indians talk, you’d think it was India, where he attained enlightenment and gave his first sermon.
But the people of Nepal know better — and they are eager to correct misconceptions about the Awakened One, considered one of the world’s most revered figures.
Next month, Nepal will circulate a new 100-rupee note with the imprint, “Lumbini: The Birthplace of Lord Buddha.” The currency is part of the government’s most recent effort to correct the record.
It comes amid protests following a promotional video on the private Indian channel Zee TV, which claimed the Buddha was born in India.
Zee TV corrected the error, but Nepal Cable TV Association blocked the channel when the new series on the life of Buddha premiered on Sunday (Sept. 8). The association’s chairman described the move as a way to prevent possible unrest in the country, which is predominantly Hindu but proud of its Buddhist heritage. Read the rest of this entry »
By Steve McSwain, Author, Speaker, Executive Coach…and, the Voice for the Spiritual but Not Religious
Comment: Religion is religion if it unites people, religion is not religion if it divides people and that is the politics in the name of religion because the basic of every religion is the same:
Slightly over a year ago, I picked up my iPad one morning and began drawing the image you see in this post. I named it the Unity pendant. I designed this to be a kind of “brand” for my speaking and coaching on matters related to spirituality and interfaith acceptance and cooperation — even theinterfaith comedy show a Jewish friend and a professional comedian, Mark Klein, and I have created. I have long felt that the Dalai Lama is right when he said, “When there’s peace among religions, there will be peace in the world.” I had those words inscribed on the outer rims of the pendant.
It’s true — embarrassingly true. Many of the conflicts between nations, peoples and cultures throughout history have been motivated and sustained by religion and religious differences. Virtually all religions start out well but it isn’t long before a kind of collective ego takes over and things get insane. I’ve written extensively about what goes wrong in most religions, Christianity notwithstanding, in the book, “The Enoch Factor: The Sacred Art of Knowing God“: Read the rest of this entry »
[Lumbini-Kapilvastu Day Movement does not endorse the opinions of the author.]
NEPAL: THE NEW RAINBOW NATION?
By Gabriel Lafitte
Among Tibetans and their supporters worldwide, Nepal evokes dread. The news out of Nepal is invariably bad. The 20,000 Tibetan refugees in settlements are prisoners, unable to move freely, unable to obtain certification of their refugee status, unable to find employment or get an education, stigmatized and excluded. They may not publicly vote, protest or even hold religious celebrations of the birthdays of their most revered lamas.
China’s power over Nepal extends to equipping and financing the armed forces to patrol the border with Tibet, to apprehend Tibetans using the only route of escape. China’s ability to get the Nepali army to do its security work is aided by the willingness of Nepali politicians to be seduced by the largesse of China’s aid program, no strings attached, no accountability auditing of where the money went. From the outside, it seems that Nepal, riven by revolution, is agreed on only one thing, right across the spectrum, from Maoists to royalists: no-one likes the Tibetans.
It is not just the elite that is prejudiced. The Tibetans, like the landless urban poor in the Kathmandu slums along the riverbanks, are considered sukumbasi, a term so broad it includes all the excluded, the displaced, landless, unacknowledged refugees, with no means of subsistence, suspected of thievery, gold smuggling and an inclination for criminality. Sukumbasi are feared and sneered at, especially by the upper caste Bahun Hindus who depict them as dangerous outsiders, despoilers, polluters of the rivers, a threat to the nation. The slum dwellers are seen as puppets of the Maoists, a rent-a-mob willing to swarm into the city on command to fill rallies with their shouts. The sukumbasi are said to have toppled the king, and that behind the scenes, they are tools of foreign meddlers or get undeserved help from NGOs. Read the rest of this entry »
In order to solve these issues, we need to address the people contributing to the problem. Not all people who hurt others are psychopaths. Some are ignorant and appalled when they discover that they have caused pain to someone else (I repeat: not all. Some.). In his article “The Accidental Rapist,” Hugo Schwyzer addresses his challenge, as a young man, to understand and respect subtle sexual boundaries. After his girlfriend tells him that she sometimes agrees to sex even when she does not want it, Schwyzer reacts: “My gaze fixed in the distance, my voice trembling, I asked what seemed the only possible question: ‘Are you trying to tell me I raped you?'”
As you know, every big mountain, being literally the navel of the Earth, eventually accumulates a lot of myths and legends, and becomes the axis of the foundation and the fantastic, yet very real stories. The perturbation vertical space bizarre twists of fate and age. For myths and legends of the local population is responsible, the heroes byley – different kinds of adventurers, mountaineers and other violent “surfers”.
It would be interesting to make something like a historical chronicle, for example, for each eight-, but it does take a lot for them to wander:) On Everest, I’ve tried to write , now part of Nanga Parbat, the more that this mountain will give good odds that the same Everest , and Kashmir – the place is not easy.
1.Nanga Parbat.Painting by Nicholas Roerich
Brief introduction: Nanga Parbat – the first ever eight-to which people have tried to ascend, the first-ever eight-, conquered by man alone. Prior to Everest climbing became popular in the environment, Nanga Parbat kept the championship in the number of dead climbers.
This mountain has witnessed the birth and development of Buddhism in the region, not far from it came the first image of the Buddha. Her foot was held Alexander of Macedon, the Muslim conquerors (ie, Tamerlane and his descendant Babur founded the Mughal dynasty), Sikh invaders. Nanga Parbat knows first hand what a big game of British and Russian empires. Roerich painted the mountain. In the end, this mountain long before the whole of Europe saw the swastika neinduistskuyu – at the top in the early 1930s, tried to climb the Nazis.
***
Once part of Afghanistan, part of the Pamirs, the whole of northern Pakistani-administered Kashmir and Ladakh were Buddhist. About Ladakh is known to many, but here’s what Baltistan (Gilgit Baltistan, now known as the northern part of Kashmir) had a different name – Tibet-i-Khurd, little is known. Translates it as a Small Tibet, the vast majority of people here and now speaks the language of the Baltic States – one of the western dialect of Tibetan language, but it is Muslim.
A little farther west, in the valleys of Dir and Swat in the XX century, excavated six years of Buddhist temples and villages of the world’s greatest Tibetologist Giuseppe Tucci (incidentally, the teacher Michelle Pesselya, which show the way to go in Pesselya forbidden kingdom Mustang). Tucci found in Swat as many Buddhist antiquities, that the excavation could not stop until now.
However, once from 2007 to 2009 he held down the valley of the Taliban, a Buddhist heritage was dealt a severe blow. The Taliban began destroying bodrenko “idols”, as in his time destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. This is despite the fact that none of the Muslim invaders of the early period up to Tamerlane’s finger to these monuments were not touched. Yes, and “idols” are in fact older than Islam in a couple of hundred years.
In 326 BC through the Khyber Pass connecting Afghanistan with Pakistan today, in the kingdom of Gandhara Alexander of Macedon invaded. He went with his army across Kashmir, crossed the Indus and Jhelum and even went to the Ganges.
2.Jhelum River (also known as Gidaspov).Here Macedonian army defeated the Indians along the river lay our way to Nanga Parbat
By Gadadhara Pandit Dasa
Hindu Chaplain, Columbia University and New York University
Have you ever wondered about why your mind works the way it does, and how it comes up with all of its scattered, random and half-organized thoughts? Where are all of these thoughts coming from, and what’s the reason they are there? Many of our thoughts originate from experiences we’ve had in the past, but the mind will also come up with dreamlike scenarios about events that have yet to take place in our lives.
We will find ourselves in a scenario for a future event, and we will be fully imagining the experience of what it would be like to live in that scenario. Some of these situations can be pleasant, while others are very nightmarish.
We’ve all had experiences where we can be eating, sleeping, walking down the street, studying, working, listening to music or even engaging in a conversation with someone else, and the mind will begin to drift away to somewhere else. We didn’t consciously decide to let the mind wander, but it did. It just left us standing there talking to someone while it decided to go away for a while. This happens all the time! Read the rest of this entry »
Not only snakes but also dogs, cows, crow also worshiped in Nepal. In fact we need to respect each and everything in the nature. Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
There are lots of things that could prove that science is quite behind than Eastern philosophy. Just one example: astronomy was developed thousands year ago and our common sense tells us that size of different planets, their distances, their movement are very necessary for this science. However our modern science came to have these information not so long. Then how astronomy could explain and forecast correctly? Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Slightly over a year ago, I picked up my iPad one morning and began drawing the image you see in this post. I named it the Unity pendant. I designed this to be a kind of “brand” for my 
Nepal - the country of the Buddha and the Mt. Everest 