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Buddha and Krishna
I've got a picture of Buddha on my faceparty website and somebody complimented me on my picture of Lord Krishna! I guess they look pretty similar but are they related at all?
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Is your Buddha picture blue?
Goes along well with my finally sitting down to completely read the Bhagavad Gita.
-bf
Correct. He is an avatar of Vishnu, the aspect of God which preserves. He enlightened Brahma, the secondary Creator, and there are lots of wonderful stories about him. The Hare Krishna movement did Beloved Govinda few favours, imho.
The Brahma Samhita begins:
I would have to agree. If one's impression of Hinduism or the deities of Hinduism is what you've seen from a pamphlet forced into your hands in the airport - one might really enjoy learning some of the beauties of this religion.
-bf
-bf
Emma
So Simon, you were in Rewalsar. Nice road, eh? Our bus almost fell off the edge. Imagine a busload of American Buddhists yelling "Jesus!" as the back wheels of their bus hang in space...
Palzang
Actually I don't really know much about Hinduism... I do know some, due to our multiracial roots in S'pore, but to me it's like some kind of Indian pantheon of gods, like folk Taoism is that of the Chinese... But I also know of some Hindu wisdom but sadly to me... Seem incomprehensible or really unreasoned at times... The only Hindu book I ever read is the Ramayana - cool tale. :rockon:
Don't I just remember the road!!! Our taxi was forced to the edge a number of times as we passed buses loaded with Hindu pilgrims - and when I say loaded....! Hanging off the roof and the sides as well as packed to the gills.
Didn't you love the meditation cave, tho'!
For those of you who don't know the story, Mandarava was the Princess of Zahor, a country whose capital city was nearby Mandi. She was very spiritual all her life and refused to be married, much to the consternation of her father, of course, as she had many suitors, even from as far away as Rome, they say. So he said, "OK, if you want to be spiritual, I'll build you a palace where you must go with your attendants and practice all you want, but never must a man enter the place." So sometime later, Padmasambhava came along, and passing Mandarava's palace, caught sight of her. He knew that this was the young princess he had come to Zahor to find, so he entered the garden, and before long he was teaching to Mandarava and all of her 500 attendants. This went on for some time. Then one day a cowherd was passing by on the road outside the convent and heard the voice of a man (Padmasambhava) coming out of the convent. Being a man of evil temperament, he spread gossip about the princess consorting with a stranger in her palace, which eventually got back to the king. The king, as you might expect, was furious. He sent his soldiers to the convent to arrest the intruder and bring Mandarava before him. When they came to take Mandarava away, she was in the aforementioned cave, and the marks of her fingers are still to be seen in the wall by the entrance where she clung to avoid being taken (which fit my teacher's hands perfectly - hmmm).
To make a long story short, he condemned Padmasambhava to death by burning and threw Mandarava into a pit lined with thorns. They tied Padmasambhava to a stake and piled brush all around, then soaked it with oil and lit it. It roared up in a mighty blaze. Then they left it to burn itself out. Normally such a fire lasted three days, but a week later it was still burning fiercely. The king could see it from his palace and was curious as to why it burnt so long, so he went with his ministers to check it out. When they arrived, they were astounded to see that the flames were burning upside down, and where the fire had been originally was now a lake (Tso Pema, or Rewalsar). In the middle of the lake, seated on a floating island of grass (still to be seen in the lake) was what appeared to be an 8 year old boy surrounded by five beautiful maidens holding the five offerings. When the king realized what he had done, he fell to the earth and begged forgiveness. The king then called all the citizens of Zahor to assemble and prostrated to the Lotus-Born Master. Guru Padma stayed to teach the king and all of the citizens of Zahor the precious Dharma, and eventually everyone in the kingdom achieved liberation.
But what of our princess? Well, the king sent his ministers and soliders to release her from her pit. She refused to come out, however, and stayed silent. Then her mother came to beg her to come out, but Mandarava again refused, saying that her father had ordered her into the pit, and as a dutiful and obedient daughter, she would stay there. It finally took a visit by the king himself to urge her out. Mandarava became the principal Indian consort of Padmasambhava, and when you see a drawing or painting of him, he is usually accompanied by Mandarava on the right and Yeshe Tsogyal, his chief Tibetan consort, on the left.
Funniest (in a way) moment of the trip to Rewalsar: we're driving over a bridge, and down in the canyon below is an overturned truck with boxes and stuff strewn all over the place and people sorting through it all. Our driver, a crazy Sikh, yells out (in perfect Indian accent): "Oh look, a fresh one!"
Palzang
"oh, look - a fresh one!"
Makes me feel safer when I dare to cycle around town....!
Well actually, no. Hinduism as a religion did not exist before Buddhism.
Krishna belongs to the Vedic Dharma tradition, yes.
Vishnu sects include Buddha and Krishna as avatars of Vishnu and so to be same 'person' in a different body in a different time.
Actually I have a question on all these reborn bodhisatvas... It seems to me that at any point of time across many lands, there are many different person each standing up to claim and well, proving that they are the incarnates/present lives of the same bodhisatva. How is this karmically-speaking possible?
Yes, it is true that sometimes you get multiple tulkus of the same person. For instance, right now there are three tulkus of Migyur Dorje, the founder of our particular lineage. One is said to be the emanation of his body, one the speech, and the other the mind. And I have heard of other recognized tulkus of Migyur Dorje in other schools. I think Akong Rinpoche is also a tulku of Migyur Dorje (who was influential in both Nyingma and Drikung Kagyu circles). How can this happen? Why not? There are no bounds to enlightened mind, so why should there be limits on the number of reincarnations? What we see as a physical body is but an illusion anyway. That is just our deluded perception of reality.
Have you ever seen a statue or painting of Avalokiteshvara with 1000 hands? That is a representation of how he is present wherever his compassion is needed. It's the same thing really. These tulkus embody the same qualities as Migyur Dorje did, so they are nondual.
It is a confusing notion, I'll grant you that, but it can also be a teaching on the nature of enlightened mind.
Palzang
That's cool, mine coincidentaly looks like me!!:winkc:
I notice, however, that there has been a definite transformation in Christian thinking, a creeping reductionism. This has resulted in and from a defensiveness which insists on a single saviour, a single interpretation, a single truth, a single Christ. My own faith was informed by Teilhard de Chardin and his "Cosmic Christ", which I then found dating right back to the 'Gnostics'.
Thus, when I met Tibetan Buddhism, the idea of 'conscious reincarnates' was hardly a surprise. Chenrezig is both the subject of stories and myths, and the symbol of Universal (or archetypal) Compassion. I have had much joy from the image of the Taras being born from the tears shed by Compassion: the gods themselves are no less and no more than emanations or secretions of compassion which precedes even the deities. This is a lesson that I find in Hinduism, too: the Brahma Samhita celebrates Lord Brahma's enlightenement by Lord Krsna before the first act of creation.
How could we imagine that compassion only incarnates once per generation? Even the lamed vov (the Just Men of Hassidic legend) are 36 in number.
I know that this is pretty far from orthodox but my opinion (I can't call it a belief because it is intuitive and without adequate proof) is that compassion and wisdom, arising from the original Abzu/Abyss/Sunyatta/Tao, are the fundamental 'particles' of life itself. It is the realisation (=making real) of these that we call 'salvation' or 'awakening' or whatever. Human consciousness, however, appears to be structured in such a way that most people are not 'in touch' with their basic nature. Some are. The reasons for this are the subject of the spiritual disciplines which aim to enable such awareness.
Avalokiteshvara/Chenrezig/Kwan Yin cannot incarnate too often in my opinion, nor can the great lamas and treasure-revealers: we need as many as possible.
Palzang