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09/16/11
376 LESSON 16 09 2011 Adiya Sutta Benefits to be Obtained from Wealth FREE ONLINE eNālandā Research and Practice UNIVERSITY & BUDDHIST GOOD NEWS LETTER Through http://sarvajan.ambedkar.org- FREE ONLINE CONCENTRATION PRACTICE INSTITUTE FOR STUDENTS(FOCPIS)- Erode Venkata Ramasamy (ஈரோடு வேங்கட இராமசாமி )Jayanti on 17-09-2011
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376  LESSON 16 09  2011 Adiya
Sutta Benefits to be Obtained from Wealth FREE ONLINE
eNālandā Research and Practice UNIVERSITY & BUDDHIST GOOD NEWS LETTER Through http://sarvajan.ambedkar.org- FREE ONLINE CONCENTRATION
PRACTICE INSTITUTE FOR STUDENTS(FOCPIS)-
Erode Venkata Ramasamy  (ஈரோடு வேங்கட இராமசாமி )Jayanti on 17-09-2011

Erode Venkata Ramasamy  (ஈரோடு வேங்கட இராமசாமி )Jayanti Celebration on 17-09-2011 at BSP Head Ofice at 11:00 AM


AN 5.41

PTS: A iii 45

Adiya Sutta: Benefits to
be Obtained (from Wealth)

translated from the Pali
by

Thanissaro Bhikkhu

© 1997–2011

Then Anathapindika the householder went to
the Blessed One and, on arrival, having bowed down to him, sat to one side. As
he was sitting there the Blessed One said to him: “There are these five
benefits that can be obtained from wealth. Which five?

“There is the case where the disciple of the noble ones —
using the wealth earned through his efforts & enterprise, amassed through
the strength of his arm, and piled up through the sweat of his brow, righteous
wealth righteously gained — provides himself with pleasure & satisfaction,
and maintains that pleasure rightly. He provides his mother & father with
pleasure & satisfaction, and maintains that pleasure rightly. He provides
his children, his wife, his slaves, servants, & assistants with pleasure
& satisfaction, and maintains that pleasure rightly. This is the first
benefit that can be obtained from wealth.

“Furthermore, the disciple of the noble ones — using the
wealth earned through his efforts & enterprise, amassed through the
strength of his arm, and piled up through the sweat of his brow, righteous
wealth righteously gained — provides his friends & associates with pleasure
& satisfaction, and maintains that pleasure rightly. This is the second
benefit that can be obtained from wealth.

“Furthermore, the disciple of the noble ones — using the
wealth earned through his efforts & enterprise, amassed through the
strength of his arm, and piled up through the sweat of his brow, righteous
wealth righteously gained — wards off from calamities coming from fire, flood,
kings, thieves, or hateful heirs, and keeps himself safe. This is the third
benefit that can be obtained from wealth.

“Furthermore, the disciple of the noble ones — using the
wealth earned through his efforts & enterprise, amassed through the
strength of his arm, and piled up through the sweat of his brow, righteous
wealth righteously gained — performs the five oblations: to relatives, guests,
the dead, kings, & devas. This is the fourth benefit that can be obtained
from wealth.

“Furthermore, the disciple of the noble ones — using the
wealth earned through his efforts & enterprise, amassed through the
strength of his arm, and piled up through the sweat of his brow, righteous
wealth righteously gained — institutes offerings of supreme aim, heavenly,
resulting in happiness, leading to heaven, given to priests & contemplatives
who abstain from intoxication & heedlessness, who endure all things with
patience & humility, each taming himself, each restraining himself, each
taking himself to Unbinding. This is the fifth benefit that can be obtained
from wealth.

“If it so happens that, when a disciple of the noble ones
obtains these five benefits from wealth, his wealth goes to depletion, the
thought occurs to him, ‘Even though my wealth has gone to depletion, I have
obtained the five benefits that can be obtained from wealth,’ and he feels no
remorse. If it so happens that, when a disciple of the noble ones obtains these
five benefits from wealth, his wealth increases, the thought occurs to him, ‘I
have obtained the five benefits that can be obtained from wealth, and my wealth
has increased,’ and he feels no remorse. So he feels no remorse in either
case.”

‘My wealth has been
enjoyed, my dependents supported, protected from calamities by me. I have given
supreme offerings & performed the five oblations. I have provided for the
virtuous, the restrained, followers of the holy life. For whatever aim a wise
householder would desire wealth, that aim I have attained. I have done what
will not lead to future distress.’ When this is recollected by a mortal, a
person established in the Dhamma of the Noble Ones, he is praised in this life
and, after death, rejoices in heaven.

3. Department of Healing

DOH 500 Science of Healing - 3
credits

 


TIBETAN MEDICINE, A « SCIENCE
OF HEALING» CLOSELY RELATED TO BUDDHISM, by Fernand Meyer, Senior Research
Fellow at EPHE, Chair of ‘Sciences and civilization of the Tibetan world’ ;
Inalco ; UPR 299

Author :

Fernand Meyer

Article date :
31-12-2008

 

 


Detail
of a canvas painting illustrating someone taking their pulse. Copy of an
original Tibetan iconography of the end oh the 17th century.

 

Fernand MEYER
Senior Research Fellow
Ecoles Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris.

TIBETAN MEDICINE
A « SCIENCE OF HEALING» CLOSELY RELATED TO BUDDHISM


Among Asian traditional medicines based on a written corpus, Tibetan medicine
was the latest  to attain noticeable recognition outside its cultural
area. Research on Tibetan “science of healing” (gso-ba rig-pa) in
fact developed only from the middle of the 20th century, especially with the
influx of refugees towards the South, escaping from the army of the young
Chinese People’s Republic, which had taken control of the Tibetan plateau. At
the same time, teachings imparted throughout the world by religious leaders
of the Diaspora, Tibetan defense groups’ activism, promotion of alternative
medicines, development of tourism in regions of Tibetan culture, and a
certain craze for media coverage have publicized among the general public the
existence and possibly the resources of this medicine to different extents.
Finally, since a few decades, Tibetan medicine has undergone an increasing
institutionalization in many regions of its traditional geographic area,
where it is now confronted everywhere with local avatars of the globalized
biomedicine. NGOs implicated it in primary health or even environmental
protection programs at the local level, and in some cases it was integrated
into national health systems in different forms.

While we restrict our subject here to the scholarly system of Tibetan
medicine, one should however emphasize that a majority of native health
practices depended – and still depends in many remote areas – on ways that
are not strictly medical: popular therapeutic practices, formal acts aiming
to accumulate merits (donation to the poor or religious institutions, freeing
an animal destined to be slaughtered, patronage of the recitation of
religious texts for example), visits to  sacred places and pilgrimages,
blessings of great religious figures, wearing protective charms, resorting to
divinatory and astrological calculations, rituals of exorcism, longevity or
recovery, diagnostic or cure done by a medium possessed by a god.

The development of Tibet’s scholarly medical system was intimately linked to
its culture, and therefore to Buddhism that has strongly influenced all its
aspects. Buddhism in fact shows close affinities to medicine at several
levels. As a doctrine and path to salvation, recovery from illnesses has
quite naturally imposed itself as a metaphor for the ultimate liberation from
being enslaved to the endless cycle of re-births. Besides, and more
fundamentally, the problem of suffering has always remained at the heart of
its Soteriology. Finally, this affinity of Buddhism to medicine was further
strengthened, in the beginning of our era, with the doctrinal development of
Mahayana and its new idea of Bodhisattva, “Being dedicated to
Enlightenment”, for which healing of the battered bodies is both the opportunity
for cultivating the perfections of compassion and generosity, and a skilful
means of converting the beings. Medical science itself was from then on open
to being part of the syllabus for Buddhist studies, especially in the
monasteries. Around the same time, the Buddhist pantheon developed with
figures having therapeutic connotation. Among these, the Buddha, Master of
Medicine, (Bhaisajyaguru) was worshipped with great devotion in Central Asia,
then in the Far-East, and later in Tibet.

Classical Tibetan historiography places the origins of the medical tradition
in the 7th century, when Tibet, at the time unified for the first time to the
extent of being an empire, came in contact with ancient neighboring
civilizations: India, China, Central Asia and the Iranian world. Having
acquired a style of writing borrowed from India, it could gradually
assimilate a great many texts (especially Buddhist), including medical books.
The variety of influences, particularly Indian and Chinese, probably even
Greco-Arab, which according to the Tibetan historiographers would have marked
the origins of their medicine, is corroborated by ancient Tibetan documents
and by traces of these influences that can be found in the medical treatises
that are still used today. Through the centuries, some of these influences
were abandoned, while others were integrated, with the heritage of native
therapies, into a coherent whole of knowledge and specialized practices. The
treatise called The Fourfold Tantra (rGyud-bzhi) became the corpus of
reference for all the Tibetan practitioners, in a vast medical literature
that is still little known.

Medical teaching, texts as well as oral instructions and practical
techniques, was imparted for centuries, often together with religious teachings,
not in specific institutions, but from master to disciple, often in a
monastic setting, or from father to son along family lineages. Traditionally,
this teaching was not sanctioned by formal degrees, and the medical practice
did not require any recognition, by any civil or religious authority, which
would have required a standard level of theoretical knowledge or technical
expertise. Moreover, the Tibetan practitioners have never constituted a
well-defined socio-professional group, and many had other main functions,
particularly religious. It’s only at the end of the 17th century that the
first monastic establishment especially devoted to medical teaching was
founded, on the Iron Hill (Lcags-po-ri) near Lhasa. Later it served as a
model for establishing some other similar establishments in Eastern Tibet, at
Beijing and in Mongolia. Finally, Tibetan medical science gained a renewed
impetus when the Tibetan Astro-Medical Institute (sMan-rtsis-khang) was
founded by the Thirteenth Dalaï Lama in 1916, with a lesser clerical
orientation, in the very heart of Lhasa. Nevertheless, parallel to these
centers of institutionalized medical teachings, sanctioned by examinations,
medical tradition continued to be imparted, like in the past, outside all
official control, by individual practitioners, in family lineages or not, at
inevitably very varied levels of knowledge and practices. Some women had thus
access to medical teaching, generally with their father. 

Tibetan science of healing, as it is presented in its reference treatise, The
Fourfold Tantra supposed to have been taught by the Buddha Master of
Medicine, has nothing of an empiric medicine. On the contrary it was
consciously developed as a sophisticated system of which all the parts,
whether they come under empirical experience or theoretical speculation, are
integrated into a coherent whole subjected to epistemological rules and
formal logic, based on a limited number of natural laws.

For Tibetan medicine, like for the Indian ayurvedhic medicine, from which it has
borrowed the basic theoretical essentials concerning physiology, pathology
and therapy, the living body is made up of an organic substrate on which
three humoral fluids, pneuma, bile and phlegm ensure the different vital
functions. These humours, blood and other organic fluids flow through the
body in channels forming a network.  While the humours endow the body
with life and health as long as they remain in harmony, the state of the
illness is nothing but the pathological symptoms of these very humours in an
imbalanced state, under the influence of food, lifestyle, seasons etc.
Medical diagnosis is conceived as the outcome of a process of logical
inference during which the doctor should ideally compare clinical signs
obtained by questioning, palpation of pulses and visual examination,
especially of the tongue and urine. In fact, diagnostic examination is often
limited to taking the pulses, according to a technique that was, obviously,
borrowed from China.

The treatment requires four types of therapies supposed to get more and more
drastic in the following order: healthy lifestyle, dietetics, remedies and
external therapeutic procedures. Generally it involves setting excessive
humours against qualities that are opposite to them and if the need arises to
discharge them from the body. Among the tangible qualities attributed to food
items and drugs, their flavors and their hot or cold nature are particularly
taken into account. The remedies combine the elements of a very rich materia
medica, in varied preparations (mainly powders, decoctions or pills) where
products of plant origin predominate to a great extent. The external
therapeutic procedures include moxibustion with relatively frequent use,
possibly fomentations and medicinal baths, unction, bleeding and small
surgery.

Since three decades, Tibetan medicine has experienced major transformations
in all the settings where it was traditionally practiced, as much in the
Tibetan regions of China, as in the Himalayan regions or in the diaspora. In
China, it was a victim of major upheavals that followed the Dalaï Lama’s
escape into exile, in 1959, then of extreme political violence of the
Cultural Revolution. With the period of relative liberalization that started
around 1980, Tibetan medicine however appeared as one of the cultural
heritage elements to have best survived, in spite of everything. It owes this
no doubt to several factors: traditional medicine having recognition in China
itself, its availability at a low cost locally, its pragmatic orientation with
a rational side set to be encouraged at the expense of its religious aspects,
and its aptitude, easily controllable, to serve as an emblematic image of a
Chinese politics wanting to be anxious in promoting both the well-being and
cultural heritage of the Tibetans. Tibetan medicine has thus been integrated
into the health system of the Tibetan regions of China at the expense of an
evolution that has borrowed some traits from biomedical model: 
institutional education sanctioned by degrees, - and therefore, evolution
towards a relative standardization of knowledge and practices -,
secularization, professionalization, more exclusive focus on the somatic
nature of illnesses to the detriment of their psycho-affective or social
aspects, more impersonal consultation of patients in a formal context of a
small clinic, a dispensary or hospital, re-evaluation of some notions or
practices with reference to modern science, practitioners giving up on
preparing medicines to make way for pharmaceutical companies with more and
more commercial goals, recourse to certain diagnostic or therapeutic
biomedical techniques. Some of these tendencies also mark, in varying
degrees, the evolution of Tibetan medicine outside Chinese borders under the
influence of so-called development programs, local process for government
integration, or even at the behest of the exile community. Finally, Tibetan
medicine, which is also being subjected to identity issues, is present today
on the globalized market of alternative medicines. The concerned practitioners
have found a way of adjusting themselves to this by shifts in their
statements and practices and which is are in turn echoed in their native
settings.

Bibliography
F. Meyer, Tibetan medicine. gSo-Ba Rig-Pa, Paris: CNRS Editions, 2007
(re-edition)
Y. Parfionovitch, F. Meyer, G. Dorje, Tibetan Medical  Paintings,
London:  Serindia Publications, 1992 (2 vols)
L. Pordié (éd.), Tibetan Medicine in the Contemporary World. Global Politics
of Medical Knowledge and Practice, London and New York,  Routledge, 
2008

Fernand  Meyer
Is Senior Research Fellow at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Historical and
Philological Sciences Section, Chair of “Sciences and civilization of
the Tibetan world “. Professor at INALCO.
 Member, UPR 299 du CNRS, “Milieux, sociétés et cultures en
Himalaya”.
Contact :  fmeyer@ vjf.cnrs.fr

Erode
Venkata Ramasamy  ஈரோடு வேங்கட இராமசாமி ) (17 September
1879 – 24 December 1973), affectionately called by his followers as
Periyar ( பெரியார்)

Uttar Pradesh Chief
Minister Mayawati was out to fulfil another of her pet projects — a memorial in
the name of noted Tamil social reformer E V Ramaswamy Naicker, the founder of
the Dravida Kazhagam.

Naicker, known as
Periyar or ‘elder one’, founded the ‘Self-Respect Movement’ way back in the
mid-1920s in Tamil Nadu and also launched a major drive against untouchability.
He was also a staunch atheist and has been one of the main icons of Mayawati’s
Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).

Fed up with the
untouchability and the religious fundamentalism, Periyar E.V. Ramasamy left the
Congress in 1925 and formed the Self Respect Movement which was later
transformed into a liberation movement named Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) in 1944.

Uttar Pradesh Chief
Minister Mayawati has got the Lucknow University executive council to take a
decision to set up a Periyar Memorial on the campus. The social reformer had
visited the university in 1957.

Significantly, none
other than Vinay Katiyar, then state Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president,
had raised opposition against Mayawati’s earlier proposal to install a statue
of Periyar. Katiyar had thundered: “If Periyar’s statue is installed in
Lucknow, that would mark the end of the Mayawati government in Uttar Pradesh.”

BJP member Lalji Tandon,
said that Periyar has been termed as an idol of the BSP and his name was taken
in the budget speech which is against the religious fundamentalism .

‘’Periyar’s main agenda
was to finish untouchability in Southern parts of the country and now with BSP
highlighting Periyar ideology will certainly hit the religious fundamentalism community
herein Uttar Pradesh’, he said.

However, the statement
of BJP members was opposed by the treasury bench with higher education minister
Rakesh Dhar Tripathi saying that BSP has honoured the brahmins and for this
reason he was sitting in the front row of the house. He further alleged that
instead BJP was anti-brahmin as it had never made any Chief Minister from the
community in the state.

UP CM Ms Mayawati was honouring
all the community leaders as it followed the policy of Sarvajan Hitay Sarvajan
Sukhay, i.e., Welfare and happiness of all communities.

Contributions of downtrodden
communities leaders like  Periyar E. V.
Ramaswami along with Mahatma Jyotiba Phule, Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj,
Narayana Guru and have been immense in the fight against the obnoxious
untouchability system  and Women’s right,
but the struggle of Baba Saheb Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, who was born in Scheduled
Caste community said that there must be  reservation for backward communities through
the constitution and that of Manyawar Kanshi Ram Ji and UP CM Ms Mayawati later
proved to be greatly effective and pregnant with far-reaching consequences.

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