11 05 2012 FRIDAY LESSON 605 FREE
ONLINE eNΔlΔndΔ Research And Practice
UNIVERSITY And THE BUDDHISTONLINE GOOD NEWS LETTER by ABHIDHAMMA RAKKHITA through http://sarvajan.ambedkar.org
Dhammapada:
Verses and Stories
Dhammapada Verse 163 . Doing Good Unto Oneβs Own Self Is
Difficult
Verse 163.
Doing Good Unto Oneβs Own Self Is Difficult
Easy
is whatβs bad to do,
whatβs harmful to oneself.
But what is good, of benefit,
is very hard to do.
Explanation: Those actions which are very bad and harmful to
oneβs own self can be very easily done. But if some action is good for oneβs
own self; that kind of right action will be found to be difficult to do.
Jambudvipa,
i.e, PraBuddha Bharath scientific
thought in
mathematics,
astronomy,
alchemy,
and
anatomy
Philosophy and Comparative
Religions;
Historical Studies;
International Relations and Peace
Studies;
Business Management in relation to
Public Policy and Development Studies;
Languages and Literature;
Jambudvipa,
i.e, PraBuddha Bharath scientific
thought in
astronomy,
http://www.budsas.org/ebud/whatbudbeliev/297.htm
BuddhaSasana Home Page
English Section
What Buddhists Believe
Venerable K. Sri Dhammananda Maha Thera
Part Six - This World And Other Worlds Chapter 16 - Realms of Existence The Origin of the World‘There is no reason to suppose that the world had a There are three schools of thought regarding the origin The second school of thought says that the world was The third school of thought says that the beginning of Modern science says that some millions of years ago, the H.G. Wells, in A Short History of the World, says The efforts made by many religions to explain the Today scientists, historians, astronomers, biologists, The speculative explanations of the origin of the In the eyes of the Buddha, the world is nothing but ‘Infinite is the sky, infinite is the number of beings, One day a man called Malunkyaputta approached the Master -ooOoo- |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda
Nalanda
NΔlandΔ (Hindi/Sanskrit/Pali: ΰ€¨ΰ€Ύΰ€²ΰ€ΰ€¦ΰ€Ύ)
was an ancient center of higher learning in Bihar, India. The site of Nalanda is located in
the Indian state of Bihar, about 88 kilometers south east
of Patna, and was a Buddhist center of
learning from the fifth or sixth century CE to 1197 CE.[1][2] It has been
called “one of the first great universities in recorded history”.[2] Nalanda
flourished between the reign of the ΕakrΔditya (whose identity is uncertain and
who might have been either Kumara
Gupta I or Kumara Gupta II) and 1197 CE, supported by
patronage from the Hindu Gupta rulers as well
as Buddhist emperors
like Harsha and later
emperors from the Pala
Empire.[3]
The
complex was built with red bricks and its ruins occupy an area of 14 hectares.
At its peak, the university attracted scholars and students from as far away as
Tibet, China, Greece, and Persia.[4] Nalanda was
ransacked and destroyed by Turkic
Muslim invaders under
Bakhtiyar Khilji in
1193. The great library of Nalanda University was so vast that it is reported
to have burned for three months after the invaders set fire to it, ransacked
and destroyed the monasteries, and drove the monks from the site. In 2006, Singapore, China, India, Japan, and other nations, announced a
proposed plan to restore and revive the ancient site as Nalanda International University.
Contentsfor revival Station popular culture also reading links |
Nalanda
β city β
Ruins
of Nalanda University
Nalanda
Location of Nalanda
in Bihar and India
Coordinates 
25Β°08β²12β³N 85Β°26β²38β³ECoordinates: 25Β°08β²12β³N 85Β°26β²38β³E Country India State Bihar District(s)
Nalanda Nearest city Rajgir Parliamentary
constituency Nalanda Assembly constituency
Nalanda Time zone IST
(UTC+05:30)
Codes
History
History of the
university and the Gupta heyday
Some
historical studies suggest that the University of Nalanda was established
during the reign of a king called ΕakrΔditya.[6] Both
Xuanzang and PrajΓ±avarman cite him as the founder, as does a seal discovered at
the site.[3]
As
historian Sukumar Dutt describes it, the history of Nalanda university
“falls into two main divisionsβfirst, one of growth, development and
fruition from the sixth century to the ninth, when it was dominated by the
liberal cultural traditions inherited from the Gupta age; the second, one of
gradual decline and final dissolution from the ninth century to the thirteenβa
period when the tantric developments of Buddhism became most pronounced in
eastern India.”[7]
The seal of Nalanda
University set in terracotta
on display in the ASI Museum in Nalanda
Nalanda in the
PΔla era
A
number of monasteries grew up during the PΔla period in
ancient Bengal and Magadha. According to Tibetan sources, five great
Mahaviharas stood out: Vikramashila,
the premier university of the era; Nalanda, past its prime but still
illustrious, Somapura, OdantapurΔ, and Jaggadala.[8] The five
monasteries formed a network; “all of them were under state
supervision” and there existed “a system of co-ordination among
them . . it seems from the evidence that the different seats of Buddhist
learning that functioned in eastern India under the PΔla were regarded together
as forming a network, an interlinked group of institutions,” and it was
common for great scholars to move easily from position to position among them.[9]
During
the PΔlΔ period, the NΔlΔnda was less singularly outstanding, as other PΔla
establishments “must have drawn away a number of learned monks from
NΔlΔnda when all of them . . came under the aegis of the PΔlΔs.”[7]
Decline and end
In
1193, the Nalanda University was sacked by[10] the fanatic Bakhtiyar Khilji, a Turk;[11] this event
is seen by scholars as a late milestone in the decline of Buddhism in India. The Persian historian Minhaj-i-Siraj, in
his chronicle the Tabaquat-I-Nasiri, reported that thousands of monks
were burned alive and thousands beheaded as Khilji tried his best to uproot
Buddhism and plant Islam by the sword[12] the
burning of the library continued for several months and “smoke from the
burning manuscripts hung for days like a dark pall over the low hills.”[13] However,
the authenticity of these claims cannot be verified independently from other
writings. . When Bakhtiyar Khilji defeated Lakshman Sen, Buddhism was already
in decline in Bengal. Therefore, the exact time and the reason of decline
and/or devastation of Nalanda University cannot be determined at this time.
The
last throne-holder of Nalanda, Shakyashribhadra, fled to Tibet in 1204 CE at
the invitation of the Tibetan translator Tropu Lotsawa (Khro-phu Lo-tsa-ba
Byams-pa dpal). In Tibet, he started an ordination lineage of the Mulasarvastivadin
lineage to complement the two existing ones.
When
the Tibetan translator Chag Lotsawa (Chag Lo-tsa-ba, 1197β1264) visited
the site in 1235, he found it damaged and looted, with a 90-year-old teacher,
Rahula Shribhadra, instructing a class of about 70 students.[14][15] During
Chag Lotsawa’s time there an incursion by Turkish soldiers caused the remaining
students to flee. Despite all this, “remnants of the debilitated Buddhist
community continued to struggle on under scarce resources until c. 1400 CE when
Chagalaraja was reportedly the last king to have patronized Nalanda.”[16]
Ahir
considers the destruction of the temples, monasteries, centers of learning at
Nalanda and northern India to be responsible for the demise of ancient Indian
scientific thought in mathematics, astronomy, alchemy, and anatomy.[17]
Overview
Nalanda
was one of the world’s first residential universities, i.e., it had dormitories
for students. It is also one of the most famous universities. In its heyday, it
accommodated over 10,000 students and 2,000 teachers. The university was considered
an architectural masterpiece, and was marked by a lofty wall and one gate.
Nalanda had eight separate compounds and ten temples, along with many other
meditation halls and classrooms. On the grounds were lakes and parks. The
library was located in a nine storied building where meticulous copies of texts
were produced. The subjects taught at Nalanda University covered every field of
learning, and it attracted pupils and scholars from Korea, Japan, China, Tibet,
Indonesia, Persia and Turkey.[2] During the
period of Harsha, the monastery is reported to have owned 200 villages given as
grants.
The
Tang Dynasty Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang left
detailed accounts of the university in the 7th century. He described how the
regularly laid-out towers, forest of pavilions, harmikas and temples seemed to
“soar above the mists in the sky” so that from their cells the monks
“might witness the birth of the winds and clouds.”[18] The
pilgrim states: “An azure pool winds around the monasteries, adorned with
the full-blown cups of the blue lotus; the dazzling red flowers of the lovely
kanaka hang here and there, and outside groves of mango trees offer the
inhabitants their dense and protective shade.”[19]
The
entrance of many of the viharas
in the Nalanda University ruins can be seen with a bow marked floor; the bow
was the royal sign of the Guptas.
Libraries
The
library of Nalanda, known as Dharma Gunj (Mountain of Truth) or DharmagaΓ±ja
(Treasury of Truth), was the most renowned repository of Buddhist knowledge in
the world at the time. Its collection was said to comprise hundreds of
thousands of volumes, so extensive that it burned for approximately more than 6
months when set aflame by Turkish invaders. The library had three main
buildings as high as nine stories tall, Ratnasagara (Sea of Jewels), Ratnodadhi
(Ocean of Jewels), and RatnaraΓ±jaka (Delighter of Jewels).[20][21]
Curriculum
The
Tibetan tradition holds that there were “four doxographies”
(Tibetan: grub-mthaβ) which were taught at NΔlandΔ, and Alexander Berzin specifies these as:[22]
- SarvΔstivΔda VaibhΔαΉ£ika
- SarvΔstivΔda
SautrΔntika - MΔdhyamaka, the
MahΔyΔna philosophy of NΔgΔrjuna - Cittamatra, the
MahΔyΔna philosophy of AsaαΉ ga and Vasubandhu
According
to an unattributed article of the Dharma Fellowship (2005), the curriculum of
Nalanda University at the time of MaΓ±juΕrΔ«mitra
contained:
…virtually
the entire range of world knowledge then available. Courses were drawn from
every field of learning, Buddhist and Hindu, sacred and secular, foreign and
native. Students studied science, astronomy, medicine, and logic as diligently
as they applied themselves to metaphysics, philosophy, Samkhya, Yoga-shastra,
the Veda, and the scriptures of Buddhism. They studied foreign philosophy
likewise.
In
the 7th century, Xuanzang records the number of teachers at NΔlandΔ as being
around 1510.[23] Of these,
approximately 1000 were able to explain 20 collections of sΕ«tras and ΕΔstras,
500 were able to explain 30 collections, and only 10 teachers were able to
explain 50 collections.[23] Xuanzang
was among the few who were able to explain 50 collections or more.[23] At this
time, only the abbot ΕΔ«labhadra had studied all the major collections of sΕ«tras
and ΕΔstras at NΔlandΔ.[23]
Yijing wrote that
matters of discussion and administration at NΔlandΔ would require assembly and
consensus on decisions by all those at the assembly, as well as resident monks:[24]
If the monks had some business, they would
assemble to discuss the matter. Then they ordered the officer, VihΔrapΔla, to
circulate and report the matter to the resident monks one by one with folded
hands. With the objection of a single monk, it would not pass. There was no use
of beating or thumping to announce his case. In case a monk did something
without consent of all the residents, he would be forced to leave the
monastery. If there was a difference of opinion on a certain issue, they would
give reason to convince (the other group). No force or coercion was used to
convince.
Xuanzang
also writes: “The lives of all these virtuous men were naturally governed
by habits of the most solemn and strictest kind. Thus in the seven hundred
years of the monastery’s existence no man has ever contravened the rules of the
discipline. The king showers it with the signs of his respect and veneration
and has assigned the revenue from a hundred cities to pay for the maintenance of
the religious.”[19]
Influence on
Buddhism
A
vast amount of what came to comprise Tibetan Buddhism,
both its Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions,
stems from the late (9thβ12th century) Nalanda teachers and traditions. The
scholar Dharmakirti (ca. 7th century), one of the Buddhist
founders of Indian philosophical
logic, as well as and
one of the primary theorists of Buddhist atomism,
taught at Nalanda.
Other
forms of Buddhism, such as the MahΔyΔna Buddhism followed in Vietnam, China, Korea and Japan, flourished within the walls of
the ancient university. A number of scholars have associated some MahΔyΔna
texts such as the ΕΕ«raαΉ
gama SΕ«tra,
an important sΕ«tra in East Asian Buddhism, with the Buddhist tradition at
NΔlandΔ.[25][26] Ron
Epstein also notes that the general doctrinal position of the sΕ«tra does indeed
correspond to what is known about the Buddhist teachings at NΔlandΔ toward the
end of the Gupta period when it was translated.[27]
According
to Hwui-Li, a Chinese visitor, NΔlandΔ was held in contempt by some Sthaviras for its
emphasis on Mahayana philosophy. They reportedly chided King HarαΉ£a for patronizing
Nalanda during one of his visits to Orissa, mocking the
“sky-flower” philosophy taught there and suggesting that he might as
well patronize a Kapalika
temple.[28] When this
occurred, HarαΉ£a
notified the chancellor of NΔlandΔ, who sent the monks SΔgaramati, PrajΓ±ΔraΕmi,
SiαΉharaΕmi,
and Xuanzang to refute the views of the monks from Orissa.[29]
Ruins
A
number of ruined structures survive. Nearby is the Surya Mandir, a Hindu temple. The known and excavated ruins extend over an area of about
150,000 square metres, although if Xuanzang’s account of
Nalanda’s extent is correlated with present excavations, almost 90% of it
remains unexcavated. NΔlandΔ is no longer inhabited. Today the nearest
habitation is a village called Bargaon.
In
1951, a modern centre for Pali
(Theravadin) Buddhist
studies was founded nearby by Bhikshu Jagdish Kashyap, the Nava Nalanda
Mahavihara. Presently, this institute is pursuing an ambitious program of
satellite imaging of the entire region.
The
Nalanda Museum contains a number
of manuscripts, and shows many examples of the items that have been excavated. India’s first Multimedia Museum was opened on 26
January 2008, which recreates the history of Nalanda using a 3D animation film
narrated by Shekhar
Suman. Besides this there are four more sections in the Multimedia
Museum: Geographical Perspective, Historical Perspective, Hall of Nalanda and
Revival of Nalanda.
Plans for revival
Main article: Nalanda International University
- On 9
December 2006, the New
York Times detailed a plan in the works to spend $1 billion
to revive Nalanda University near the ancient site. A consortium led by Singapore and
including China, India, Japan and other
nations will attempt to raise $500 million to build a new university and
another $500 million to develop necessary infrastructure.[2]
- On 28 May
2007, Merinews reported that the revived university’s enrollment
will be 1,137 in its first year, and 4,530 by the fifth. In the ’second
phase’, enrollment will reach 5,812.[30]
- On 12 June
2007, News Post India reported that the Japanese diplomat Noro
Motoyasu said that “Japan will fund the setting up an international
university in Nalanda in Bihar”. The report goes on to say that
“The proposed university will be fully residential, like the ancient
seat of learning at Nalanda. In the first phase of the project, seven
schools with 46 foreign faculty members and over 400 Indian academics
would come up.” … “The university will impart courses in
science, philosophy and spiritualism along with other subjects. A renowned
international scholar will be its chancellor.”[31]
- On 15
August 2007, The
Times of India reported that Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
has accepted the offer to join the revived Nalanda International University
sometime in September 2007.”[32]
- NDTV reported on 5 May 2008 that,
according to Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, the
foundation of University would likely be in the year 2009 and the first
teaching class could begin in a few years from then. Sen, who heads the
Nalanda Mentor Group, said the final report in this regard, is expected to
be presented to the East Asia Summit in December 2008.
- On 11 May
2008, The
Times of India reported that host nation India and a
consortium of East Asian countries met in New York to further discuss
Nalanda plans. It was decided that Nalanda would largely be a
post-graduate research university, with the following schools: School of
Buddhist studies, philosophy, and comparative religion; School of
historical studies; School of International Relations and Peace; School of
Business Management and Development; School of Languages and Literature;
and, School of Ecology and Environmental Studies. The objective of the
school was claimed to be “aimed at advancing the concept of an Asian
community…and rediscovering old relationships.”[33]
- On 13
September 2010, the Jakarta
Globe Reported Parliament in New Delhi passed
a bill approving plans to rebuild the campus as a symbol of Indiaβs global
ambitions.[34]
Institutions
University
College
- Nalanda
College, Biharsharif - Maha
Bodhi College
School
- Nalanda
Collegiate School - Adarsh
High School - Ras
Bihari High School - Nerut
High School - Nalanda
Heritage School - samarpan
coaching
Railway Station
- Nalanda
In popular
culture
- 1970:
Hindi movie Johny
Mera Naam uses the location of Nalanda ruins for its climactic
song
Gallery
As they stood, before the NΔlandΔ University was
excavated.
The Sariputta Stupa
Back side view of Sariputta Stupa
Front view of Sariputta Stupa
Temple and votive stΕ«pas.
Interior of the NΔlandΔ ruins.
AvalokiteΕvara
Bodhisattva statue from NΔlandΔ, 9th century CE.
AvalokiteΕvara Bodhisattva statue. NΔlandΔ, 11th
century CE.
The Buddha teaching at Deer Park, VΔrΔαΉasΔ«. NΔlandΔ.
Buddha descending from TrΔyastriαΉΕa Heaven. NΔlandΔ.
MaΓ±juΕrΔ«
Bodhisattva on his lion. NΔlandΔ.
AvalokiteΕvara Bodhisattva. NΔlandΔ.
http://buddhism.about.com/od/buddhisthistory/a/mountmeru.htm
Mount Meru
The Center of
the Universe?
Buddhist texts and teachers sometimes refer to Mount
Meru, also called Sumeru (Sanskrit) or Sineru (Pali). Mount Meru is a sacred
mountain in Buddhist, Hindu and Jain mythology. For a time, the existence (or
not) of Meru was a heated controversy.
Ancient Buddhists thought Meru was the center of the
universe. The Pali Canon records the historical Buddha speaking of it. In time,
ideas about Mount Meru and the nature of the universe became more detailed. For
example, a renowned Indian scholar named Vasubhandhu (ca. 4th or 5th century
CE) provided an elaborate description of the Meru-centered cosmos in the Abhidharmakosa.
The
Buddhist Universe
Ancient Buddhists imagined the universe as essentially
flat, with Mount Meru at the center of all things. Surrounding this universe
was a vast expanse of water, and surrounding the water was a vast expanse of
wind.
This universe was made of thirty-one planes of existence,
stacked in layers, and three realms, or dhatus.
The three realms were ΔrΕ«pyadhΔtu, the formless realm; RΕ«padhΔtu, the realm of
form; and KΔmadhΔtu, the realm of desire. Each of these was further divided
into multiple worlds that were the homes of many sorts of beings. This cosmos
was thought to be one of a succession of universes coming into and going out of
existence through infinite time.
Our world was thought to be a wedge-shaped island
continent in a vast sea south of Mount Meru, called Jambudvipa, in the realm of
KΔmadhΔtu. The earth, then, was thought to be flat and surrounded by ocean.
The
World Becomes Round
As with the sacred writings of many religions, Buddhist
cosmology can be interpreted as myth or allegory. But many generations of
Buddhists understood the universe of Mount Meru to exist literally.
Then, in the 16th century, European explorers came to
Asia claiming the earth was round and suspended in space. And a controversy was
born.
Donald Lopez, a professor of Buddhist and Tibetan studies
at the University of Michigan, provides an illuminating account of this culture
clash in his book Buddhism and Science: A
Guide for the Perplexed (University of Chicago Press, 2008).
Conservative Buddhists rejected the round world theory. They believed the
historical Buddha had perfect knowledge, and if the historical Buddha believed
in the Mount Meru cosmos, then it must be true.
Some scholars, however, adapted what we might call a
modernist interpretation of the universe of Mount Meru. Among the first of
these was the Japanese scholar Tominaga Nakamoto (1715-1746). Tominaga argued
that when the historical Buddha discussed Mount Meru, he was only drawing upon
the understanding of the cosmos common to his time. The Buddha did not invent
the Mount Meru cosmos, nor was belief in it integral to his teachings.
Stubborn
Resistance
However, a great many Buddhist scholars stuck to the
conservative view, that Mount Meru was “real.” Christian missionaries
tried to discredit Buddhism by arguing that if the Buddha was wrong about Mount
Meru, his teachings couldn’t be trusted. It should be noted that most of these
same missionaries believed the sun revolved around the earth.
Faced with this foreign challenge, to some priests and
teachers defending Mount Meru was tantamount to defending the Buddha himself.
Elaborate models were constructed and calculations made to “prove”
astronomical phenomena were better explained by Buddhist theories than by
western science. And of course some fell back on the argument that Mount Meru
existed, but only the enlightened could see it.
In most of Asia the Mount Meru controversy continued
until late in the 19th century, when Asian astronomers came to see for
themselves that the earth was round, and educated Asians accepted the
scientific view.
The
Last Holdout: Tibet
Professor Lopez writes that the Mount Meru controversy
didn’t reach isolated Tibet until the 20th century. A Tibetan scholar named
Gendun Chopel spent the years 1936 to 1943 traveling in south Asia, soaking up
the modern view of the cosmos that by then was accepted even in conservative
monasteries. In 1938 Gendun Chopel sent an article to the Tibet Mirror informing his country
persons that the world is round.
The current Dalai Lama, who has
flown about the round world several times, seems to have put an end to flat
earthism among Tibetans by saying the historical Buddha was wrong about the
shape of the earth. However, “The purpose of the Buddha coming to this
world was not to measure the circumference of the world and the distance
between the earth and the moon, but rather to teach the Dharma, to liberate
sentient beings, to relieve sentient beings of their sufferings.”
Even so, Donald Lopez recalls meeting a lama in 1977 who
still held onto a belief in Mount Meru.
Mount
Meru in the West
In the West, in some Buddhist traditions, little is said
these days about Mount Meru. It seems only to be a quaint bit of irrelevant
trivia that pops up in sutras from time to time. Possibly some mistake the
mythical Mount Meru for an African mountain of the same name. In other
traditions, the old cosmology is still taught as a metaphysical model.
The historical Buddha taught us about the nature of
suffering and the means to be liberated from it, not to teach us facts about
the phenomenal universe. This might teach us to be cautious about linking
Buddhism and science too tightly. There is no need for Buddhism and science to
contradict each other, but they are not necessarily about the same things.
http://9waysmysteryschool.tripod.com/sacredsoundtools/id13.html
PYTHAGORAS
Pythagoras of Samos (560BC -
480BC)
“Through Vibration comes
Motion
Through Motion comes Color
Through Color comes Tone”
He was a Greek philosopher who was responsible for important developments in
the history of mathematics, astronomy, and the theory of music. He founded the
Pythagorean Brotherhood and formulated principles that influenced the thoughts
of Plato and Aristotle. The influence of Pythagoras is so widespread, and
coupled with the fact that no writings of Pythagoras exist today, this short
article will attempt to guide the reader through the life of this most
remarkable teacher.
He traveled widely in his youth with his father Mnesarchus, who was a gem
merchant from Tyre. His family settled in the homeland of his mother, Pythais,
on the island of Samos, where he studied with the philosopher Pherekydes. He
was introduced to mathematical ideas and astronomy by Thales, and his pupil
Anaximander in Miletus when he was between 18 and 20 years old. Thales advised
Pythagoras to travel to Egypt to learn more of these subjects. Leaving Miletus,
Pythagoras went first to Sidon, where he was initiated into the mysteries of
Tyre and Byblos. It is claimed that Pythagoras went onto Egypt with a letter of
introduction written by Polycrates, making the journey with some Egyptian
sailors who believed that a god had taken passage on their ship. Arriving in
Egypt, Pythagoras tried to gain entry into the Mystery Schools of that country.
He applied again and again, but he was told that unless he goes through a
particular training of fasting and breathing, he cannot be allowed to enter the
school. Pythagoras is reported to have said, ” I have come for knowledge,
not any sort of discipline.” But the school authorities said,” we
cannot give you knowledge unless you are different. And really, we are not
interested in knowledge at all, we are interested in actual experience. No
knowledge is knowledge unless it is lived and experienced. So you will have to
go on a 40 day fast, continuously breathing in a certain manner, with a certain
awareness on certain points.” After 40 days of fasting and breathing,
aware, attentive, he was allowed to enter the school at Diospolis. It is said
that Pythagoras said,”You are not allowing Pythagoras in. I am a different
man, I am reborn. You were right and I was wrong, because then my whole
standpoint was intellectual. Through this purification, my center of being has
changed. Before this training I could only understand through the intellect,
through the head. Now I can feel. Now truth is not a concept to me, but a
life.”
He spent the next 22 years perfecting himself in mathematics, astronomy, music,
and was initiated into the Egyptian Mysteries. When Cambyses II, the king of
Persia invaded Egypt in 525BC, he made Pythagoras his prisoner and sent him to
Babylon. He utilized this misfortune as an opportunity for growth, and for the
next 12 years he studied with the Magi and was initiated into the Chaldean Mysteries.
Leaving Babylon, he made his way through Persia to India, where he continued
his education under the Brachmanes. At that time India was still feeling the
effects of the spiritual revival brought about by Gautama the Buddha. Although
Pythagoras arrived in India too late to come into personal contact with the
Buddha, he was greatly influenced by his teachings. He went to India a student,
he left it as a teacher, and even to this day he is known in that country as
Pitar Guru, and as Yavanacharya, the Ionian Teacher.
Pythagoras was 56 years old when he finally returned to his homeland. When he
arrived in Samos he found the island crushed and ruined, its temples and
schools closed, its wise men fleeing from the tyranny and persecution of the
Persian conquerors. Instead of being welcomed by his countrymen, Pythagoras
found them indifferent to the wisdom he was eager to impart. He left Samos and
went to southern Italy, settling in Crotona, a town situated on the Gulf of
Tarentum. He was invited to speak before the Senate of Crotona, and so greatly
impressed them with his wisdom, that they decided to build him an institute,
which would serve as a school of philosophy and an academy of science. Although
it was understood that it would be patterned after the Mystery Schools, there
was nothing about the place suggesting secrecy save a statue of Hermes
Trismegistus at the door of the inner school with the words on the pedestal:
“Let no profane enter here.”
The institute was comprised of three orders. The outer order was called the
‘akoustici’, who lived in their own houses only coming to the institute during
the day. They were allowed their own possessions and were not required to be
vegetarians. Acceptance into this outer society was granted after a 3 year probationary
period. Both men and women were permitted to become members of the order, in
fact 28 women were admitted to the institute. The inner order of the society
was called the ‘mathematikoi’, who lived permanently with the society, and had
no personal possessions and were vegetarians. They were taught by Pythagoras
himself and obeyed strict rules. The third level of initiation within the
institute was the ‘electi’, who were instructed in the secret processes of
psychic transmutation, how to heal with sound, and lived a strict discipline in
accordance with the code of the Great Mystery Schools.
The daily life of a student at Crotona followed a strict schedule. At sunrise
they engaged in meditation, pronouncing a mantram on a certain tone. They
reviewed all their actions of the previous day and planned the coming day in
full detail. After breakfast they took a solitary walk and went to the
gymnasium for exercise. The rest of the morning was spent in study. At noon the
Order ate together in small groups dining on bread and honey. After lunch
students could receive their relatives and friends in the gardens of the
institute. This was followed by another walk in the company of other students.
At the close of the day, they ate together and read aloud. Before retiring each
student again meditated and chanted his evening mantram. Those who were unable
to stand the discipline left the school and went out again into the world. Even
in the higher degrees of the institute, some occasionally failed by breaking
their pledge of secrecy or some other rule which bound them. These students
were expelled from the institute, and a tomb bearing their name was erected in
the garden. Pythagoras taught that such a student was dead.”His body
appears among men,” he said, ” but his soul is dead. Let us weep for
it! ”
In Astronomy Pythagoras taught that the Earth was a sphere at the center of the
universe. He recognized that the orbit of the moon was inclined to the equator
of the earth, and he was one of the first to realize that Venus as an evening
star, was the same planet as the morning star. He taught that the movements of
the planets traveling through the universe created sounds, and could be
perceived by those who were trained to hear them. This music of the spheres
could be replicated using a single stringed instrument called the monochord.
Pythagoras used the monochord to explain musical intervals and harmonics to his
students. He taught how harmony may be produced when tuning the high and low
notes in the octave, thereby laying the foundation for many of the theories and
teachings that have come down through the musical traditions.
Pythagoras observed that when a blacksmith struck his anvil, different notes
were produced according to the weight of the hammer. That if you take 2 strings
in the same degree of tension, and then divide one of them exactly in half,
when they are plucked, the pitch of the shorter string is exactly one octave
higher than the longer string. He also discovered that if the length of the 2
strings are in relation to each other 2:3, the difference in pitch is called a
fifth. Pythagoras stressed that different musical modes have different effects
on the person who hears them, and that music could be applied to healing
illness both mental and physical. In 513BC he went to Delos to nurse his old
teacher, Pherekydes who was dying. He remained at his bedside playing his lyre
and feeding him until he died. In 508BC the Pythagoreon Society at Croton was
attacked by Cylon, a noble of Croton itself. Pythagoras escaped to Metapontium
and most authors say he died there. Evidence is unclear as to when and where
the death of Pythagoras accurred.
The beliefs that Pythagoras held were:
1) that at its deepest level, reality is mathematical in nature
2) that philosophy can be used for spiritual purification
3) that the Soul can rise to union with the Divine
4) that certain symbols have a mystical significance
5) that all brothers of the Order should observe strict loyalty and secrecy
Pythagoras was the first to call the heavens a universe and the earth round.
That the Soul was immortal, and that it changes from one body to another. The
Pythagorean Brotherhood was one of the worlds earliest unpriestly cooperative
scientific societies, if not the first, and that its members invented the
multiplication table, and raised important scientific problems which were
solved 15 centuries later.
Bibliography
Books:
The Book of Secrets- Osho
Healing Sounds- Jonathan Goldman
Papers:
Ancient Landmarks- Wisdom World
Greek Philosophy- Hellenism Network
Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans- Arthur Fairbanks
Pythagoras and Mystic Science- Dr.Daniel Farhey
Pythagoras- Britannica
Pythagoras- Aamodt,Hatlem, and Smebye
Pythagoras:Music and Space- J. Boyd-Brent
Pythagoras of Samos- J.J.O’Conner and E.F.Robertson
Pythagoras and His School- Raghavan Iyer
http://online.sfsu.edu/~rone/Buddhism/VerhoevenBuddhismScience.htm
Buddhism and
Science:
Probing the Boundaries of Faith and Reason
Dr. Martin J.
Verhoeven
Religion East
and West, Issue 1, June 2001, pp. 77-97
Abstract
Western interest in Eastern religions, especially Buddhism, historically
coincided with the rise of modern science and the corresponding perceived
decline of religious orthodoxy in the West. Put simply: Modern science
initiated a deep spiritual crisis that led to an unfortunate split between
faith and reasonβa split yet to be reconciled. Buddhism was seen as an
“alternative altar,” a bridge that could reunite the estranged worlds
of matter and spirit. Thus, to a large extent Buddhism’s flowering in the West
during the last century came about to satisfy post-Darwinian needs to have
religious beliefs grounded in new scientific truth.
As science still constitutes something of a “religion” in the West,
the near-absolute arbiter of truth, considerable cachet still attends the
linking of Buddhism to science. Such comparison and assimilation is inevitable
and in some ways, healthy. At the same time, we need to examine more closely to
what extent the scientific paradigm actually conveys the meaning of Dharma.
Perhaps the resonance between Buddhism and Western science is not as
significant as we think. Ironically, adapting new and unfamiliar Buddhist
conceptions to more ingrained Western thought-ways, like science, renders
Buddhism more popular and less exotic; it also threatens to dilute its impact
and distort its content.
Historians since the end of World War II, have suggested that the encounter
between East and West represents the most significant event of the modern era.
Bertrand Russell pointed to this shift at the end of World War II when he
wrote, βIf we are to feel at home in the world, we will have to admit Asia to
equality in our thoughts, not only politically, but culturally. What changes
this will bring, I do not know. But I am convinced they will be profound and of
the greatest importance.β
More
recently, the historian Arthur Versluis, in a new book, American
Transcendentalism and Asian Religions (1993), pieced together five
or six major historical views on this subject, and presented this by way of
conclusion:
However
much people today realize it, the encounter of Oriental and Occidental
religious and philosophical traditions, of Buddhist and Christian and Hindu and
Islamic perspectives, must be regarded as one of the most extraordinary
meetings of our age. . . . Arnold Toynbee once wrote that of all the historical
changes in the West, the most importantβand the one whose effects have been
least understoodβis the meeting of Buddhism in the Occident. . . . And when and
if our era is considered in light of larger societal patterns and movements,
there can be no doubt that the meeting of East and West, the mingling of the
most ancient traditions in the modern world, will form a much larger part of
history than we today with our political-economic emphases, may think.
These are not isolated opinions. Many writers, scholars, intellectuals,
scientists, and theologians have proclaimed the importance of the meeting of
East and West. Occidental interest in the Orient predates the modern era. There
is evidence of significant contact between East and West well before the
Christian era. Even in the New World, curiosity and interchange existed right
from the beginning, as early as the 1700s. One can find allusions to Asian
religions in Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, and of course,
more developed expressions in Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
By the mid-twentieth century this growing fascination with Asian thought led Arnold
Toynbee to envision a new world civilization emerging from a convergence of
East and West. He anticipated that the spiritual philosophies of Asia would
touch profoundly on the three basic dimensions of human existence: Our
relationships with each other (social); with ourselves (psychological); and,
with the physical world (natural). What is the shape and significance of this
encounter? What does Buddhism contribute to the deeper currents of Western thought;
and more specifically, to our struggle to reconcile faith with reason, religion
with science?
Science was already the ascendant intellectual sovereign when Buddhism made its
first serious entry on the American scene in the latter decades of the 19th
century. A World’s Parliament of Religions, held in conjunction with the 1893
Colombian Exposition in Chicago, brought to America for the first time a large
number of Asian representatives of the Buddhist faith. These missionaries
actively and impressively participated in an open forum with Western
theologians, scientists, ministers, scholars, educators, and reformers. This
unprecedented ecumenical event in the American heartland came at a most opportune
time. America was ready and eager for a new source of inspiration, ex orient
lux, the ‘light of Asia.’
By the 1890s America was caught in the throes of a spiritual crisis affecting
Christendom worldwide. Modern scientific discoveries had so undermined a
literal interpretation of sacred scripture, that for many educated and
thoughtful people, it was no longer certain that God was in his heaven and that
all was right with the world. These rapid changes and transformations in almost
every aspect of traditional faith, had such irreversible corrosive effects on
religious orthodoxy, that they were dubbed, “acids of modernity.”
They ate away at received convictions, and ushered in an unprecedented erosion
of belief. People like my grandparents, brought up with rock-solid belief in
the infallible word of God, found their faith shaken to its very foundations.
It was as if overnight they suddenly awoke to a new world governed not by
theological authority but by scientists. New disclosures from the respected
disciplines of geology, biology, and astronomy challenged and shattered
Biblical accounts of the origins of the natural world and our place and purpose
in it. Sigmund Freud captured
the spirit of the age well when he said βthe self-love of mankind has been
three times wounded by science.β The Copernican Revolution, continued by
Galileo, took our little planet out of the center position in the universe. The
Earth, held to be the physical and metaphysical center of the Universe, was
reduced to a tiny speck revolving around a sun. Then Darwin all but eliminated
the divide between animal and man, and with it the “special creation”
status enjoyed by humans. Darwin, moreover, diminished God. The impersonal
forces of natural selection kept things going; no divine power was necessary.
Nor, from what any competent scientist could demonstrate with any factual
certainty, was any Divinity even evidentβeither at the elusive
“creation,” or in the empirical present. Karl Marx people portrayed
people as economic animals grouped into competing classes driven by material
self-interest. Finally, Freud himself characterized religious faith as an
evasion of truth, a comforting illusion sustained by impulses and desires
beyond the reach of the rational intellect. Nietzsche’s famous declaration that
βGod is Deadβ may have seemed extreme, but few would have denied that God was
ailing. And certainly the childhood version of a personal, all-powerful God
that created the world and ruled over it with justice and omniscience was for
many a comforting vision lost forever.
One of the lingering side effects of this loss has been the unfortunate
disjunction of matter and spirit that afflicts the modern age. It can assume
many forms: a split between matter and spirit, a divorce between faith and
reason, a dichotomy between facts and values. At a more personal level, it
manifests as a mind-body dualism. An unwelcome spiritual and psychological
legacy from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it is still very much with us
today, something that haunts our psyches.
Much of todayβs near-obsession with therapy in the West, and even the shift
toward psychologizing religion (including the βNew Ageβ phenomenon) could be
seen as attempts to heal this deep sense of alienation. The pragmatic
philosopher, John Dewey, wrote: βThe pathological segregation of facts and
value, matter and spirit, or the bifurcation of nature, this integration [i. e.
the problem of integrating this] poses the deepest problem of modern life.β This
problem both inspires and confounds contemporary philosophy and religion.
Wholeness eludes us while the split endures; and yet, almost tragically, the
very means we have available to heal it insure its continuation. For, all of
our philosophies, academic disciplines, therapies, and even religious
traditions are informed by and rooted in aspects of this dualism. Perhaps the
most visible expression of this pathological segregation is the gap between
science and religion.
Thus, when the eminent philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead
scanned the broad outlines of our time, he wrote: βThe future course of history
would center on this generationβs resolving the issue of the proper
relationship between science and religion, so fundamental are the religious
symbols through which people give meaning to their lives and so powerful the
scientific knowledge through which we shape and control our lives.β And it is
in regard to this troubling issue, I think, that Eastern religions, particularly
Buddhism, are seen to hold out the promise of achieving some resolution. The
idea dates back over a hundred years.
After the 1893 Chicago Parliament of World Religions, one Paul Carus, a
Chicago-based editor of the Open Court Press, invited some of the influential
Japanese Buddhist delegates to a week-long discussion at the home of Carus’s
father-in-law, Edward Hegeler. Both deeply felt the spiritual crisis of the
times. Both were trying to reform Christianity to bring it in line with current
thought; in short, to make religion scientific. It occurred to them that
Buddhism was already compatible with science, and could be used to nudge
Christianity in the same direction. Toward this end, Carus wanted to support a
Buddhist missionary movement to the United States from Asia. His thinking was
to create something of a level playing field. Carus had witnessed the most
ambitious missionary undertaking in modern history that send thousands of
Protestant missionaries abroad to convert the people βsitting in darkness.’ He
wished to conduct a Darwinian experiment of ’survival of the fittest.” His
goal: to bring Buddhist missionaries to America where they could engage in
healthy competition with their Christian counterparts in the East, and thus determine
the “fittest” to survive.
With the aid of his wealthy father-in-law who put up money, they sponsored a
number of Eastern missionaries to the United States: Anagarika Dharmapala, from
what was then Ceylon, now Sri Lanka; Swami Vivekananda, from India representing
the Ramakrishna Vedanta movement; and Soyen Shaku, a Japanese Buddhist monk,
and Shaku’s young disciple D.T. Suzuki. During his stay in the United States in
the late 1890s and early 1900s, Suzuki lived in the small town of LaSalle/Peru,
Illinois. He was in his twenties then, and for about eleven years he worked
closely with Paul Carus translating Buddhist texts into English and putting out
inexpensive paperback editions of the Asian classics. Suzuki later became the
leading exponent of Zen in the West, when he returned in the 1950s on a
Rockefeller grant to lecture extensively at East Coast colleges. He
influenced writers and thinkers like Carl Jung, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm,
Martin Heidegger, Thomas Merton, Alan Watts, and the “beat Buddhists”βJack
Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder. Suzuki died in 1966 in Tokyo. His
influence in the West was profoundβmaking Zen an English word, translating
Asian texts into English, stimulating a scholarly interest in the Orient among
American intellectuals, and deepening American respect and enthusiasm for
Buddhism. The historian Lynn White Jr. praised Suzuki as someone who broke
through the “shell of the Occident” and made the West’s thinking
global. His introduction to the West came about through the hands of Paul
Carus.
These early missionaries of Buddhism to the West, including Carus himself, all
shared the same modern, reformist outlook. They translated Buddhism into a
medium and a message compatible and resonant with the scientific and
progressive spirit of the Age. They selectived passages of text to favor that
slant, and carefully presented the Buddhist teachings in such a way as to
appeal to modern sensibilitiesβempirical, rational, and liberal. Americans
wanted religion to “make sense,” to accord with conventional wisdom.
Then, as now, our primary mode of making sense of things was
positivistβreliable knowledge based on natural phenomena as verified by
empirical sciences. So firmly entrenched is the scientific outlook that it has
for all practical purposes taken on a near-religious authority. Few, then or
now, critically question our faith in science; we presume its validity and give
it an almost unquestioned place as the arbiter of truth.
Thus, the early missionaries of Buddhism to America purposely stripped Buddhism
of any elements that might appear superstitious, mythological, even mystical.
Dharmapala, Suzuki, and Vivekananda clearly ascertained that Americans measured
truth in science, and science posed little theological threat to a Buddhist and
Hindu worldview. After all, Buddhism had unique advantages for someone who
rejected their faith (Christian) due to its authoritarianism and unscientific
outlook:
1)
Buddhism did not assert or depend upon the existence of a God
2)
Buddhism was a superstition-free moral ideal; it conformed to the scientific
view of an ordered universe ruled by law (Dharma)βa system both moral and
physical where everything seemed to work itself out inexorably over vast
periods of time without divine intervention (karma)
3)
Buddhism posited no belief in gods who could alter the workings of this natural
law
4)
Buddhism was a religion of self-help with all depending on the individual
working out his/her own salvation
5)
“Original” Buddhism was seen as the “Protestantism of
Asia,” and Buddha as another Luther who swept away the superstitions and
rituals of an older, corrupted form and took religion back to its pure and
simple origins
6)
Buddhism presented an attractive personal founder who led life of great
self-sacrifice; parallels were drawn between Jesus and Buddha as the
inspiration of a personal figure exerted strong appeal to seekers who had given
up on theology and metaphysics.
Thus, Buddhism was packaged and presented in its most favorable light viz a viz
the current spiritual crisis in the West; and, not surprisingly, Buddhism
seemed immensely reasonable and appealing to Americans. Darwinism might be
undermining Biblical Christianity, but it only enhanced Buddhism’s standing.
In fact, Darwin’s theory of evolution, which struck the most severe blow to the
Judaeo-Christian edifice, was taken up as the leading banner for Buddhist
propagation. With Darwin the concept of evolution became enshrined in the
popular mind. Everything was evolutionaryβspecies, races, nations, economies,
religions, the universeβfrom the micro to the macro. Social Darwinists even saw
evolution operating behind the vicissitudes of free-market capitalism. As the
constant interaction of stimulus and response in nature, evolution seemed to
match nicely with the notion of karmaβthe cyclical unfolding of events governed
by the law of cause and effect. So Anagarika Dharmapala could announce in
Chicago to his largely Judaeo-Christian audience that “the theory of
evolution was one of the ancient teachings of the Buddha.” As it was in
nature (at least in the new natural world of Darwin), so it was in the Buddhist
universe.
Most people drawn to Eastern religions did not examine very closely the
supposed identity of Darwin’s evolution and the Buddhist concept of karma. They
were content, even predisposed, to imagine them the same. Buddhists ardent to
convert Americans to Buddhism, as well as Christians eager to find some
correspondence between modern science and their beleaguered faith, were happy
to say, βYes, the similarities are close enough; look, how the ancient
Eastern religions anticipated our modern science!” Vivekananda, the
charismatic and eloquent Ramakrishna delegate from India, met only hurrahs of
affirmation when he proclaimed to a Chicago audience that the latest
discoveries of science seemed “like the echoes from the high spiritual
flights of Vedantic philosophy.”
This facile view that Buddhism and science were cut of the same cloth accorded
nicely with the longing to reconnect the sacred and the secular. It held out
hope that religion could once again assume its rightful place alongside (if no
longer in the lead of) the emerging disciplines of biology, geology, and
physics. It also fit neatly with the presumed “unity of truth” that
Victorians held to so dearlyβthere could only be one truth, not two. The very
nature of reality demanded that the truths of science and religion be one and
the same. Carus called his new system of thought “the Religion
of Science,” and Max Muller called his new theology “the
Science of Religion.”
This trend linking Buddhism to science continued, even accelerated, into the
20th century. Einstein’s work and further developments in the new cutting-edge
physics seemed to provide even further evidence that science and Buddhism were
merely different rivers leading to the same sea. Where the old theologies
crumbled under the juggernaut of science, Buddhism seemed to hold its own, even
thrive. The early (and even contemporary) exponents of Buddhism pushed this
idea. It remains an area of great promise and interest; but it is not one
without difficulties.
One of the first to question this marriage, interestingly, was also one of its
earliest proponents, D.T. Suzuki. When Suzuki came to the United States
to collaborate with Paul Carus, both were outspoken advocates of the link
between Buddhism and science. Suzukiβs early writings make virtually no
distinction between Buddhism and science. For Suzuki, Buddhism was eminently
modern and progressive, compatible with the latest discoveries in Western
psychology and philosophy. It was, in a word, scientifically sound.
By the time Suzuki returned to the United States in the 1950s, however, he had
experienced a change of heart. He then wrote that his initial thinkingβthat
religion must be based on scientific grounds and that Christianity was based on
too much mythologyβwas a little ill-founded. An older, perhaps wiser Suzuki,
came to doubt the sufficiency of a religion based on science, and even saw the
need for religion to critique science. In 1959, Suzuki wrote that his early
modernist agreement with Hegeler and Carus that “religion must stand on
scientific grounds…Christianity was based too much on mythology,” was
ill-founded. “If it were possible for me to talk with them now,” he
reflected, “I would tell them that my ideas have changed from theirs
somewhat. I now think that a religion based solely on science is not enough.
There are certain ‘mythological’ elements in every one of us, which cannot be
altogether lost in favor of science. This is a conviction I have come
to.”
What had changed? First of all, two world wars. As the contemporary writer Kurt
Vonnegut has wryly observed, βWe took scientific truth and dropped it on
the people of Hiroshima.β Suzuki was, of course, Japanese; he felt directly the
negative weight of modern science. Having survived the brutal experience of a
war initiated, carried out, and ended with weapons of mass destruction born of
modern science, he was left less sanguine about the idyllic marriage with
religion and science that he had heralded at the turn of the century. Suzuki
was enjoying the wisdom of hindsight; but in fairness to Suzuki, so were many
other people.
Since Suzuki’s turnabout in 1959, there have been even further, more
fundamental challenges to the presumed closeness of Buddhism and science.
Questions have arisen in two areas. One, as a society we have come to reassess
the blessings and the promise of modern science in terms of the
socio-psychological impact. While people are mesmerized by science and dream
about what science can do for them, they also have nightmares about what
science can do to them. This bittersweet realization lingers in the
contemporary psyche: we dream about all the wonderful things science is going
to do for us; at the same time we are haunted by unsettling specters of the
dreadful things science could do to us. This concern and troubling ambivalence
seems to grow, not diminish, with each scientific advance.
At the popular level, movies and television play on variations of the
Frankenstein, Godzilla, the X-Files motif, reflecting anxieties over
science-gone-wrong. These “monsters” give form (albeit imaginary) to
some of humanity’s deepest fears. They reflect not only the apprehension of
Pandora’s box unearthed, but more significantly, the hubris of human pride and
lust for power unrestrained. Nowhere is this more evident than in the new field
of biotechnologyβthe actual manipulation of life at the subtle genetic source.
Scientists now talk of the end of evolution, the end of nature, in the sense
that humans will soon replace nature to direct the course of creation
themselves. Doctor Panayiotis Zavos, who is now actively engaged in producing
the first human clone, announced proudly, “Now that we have crossed into the
third millennium, we have the technology to break the rules of nature.'’
Thus, the development and unleashing of “advanced” weapons of mass
destruction through two World Wars, the Cold War, and now almost daily in
“hot spots” throughout the world; the unenlightened tampering with
nature that has brought about widespread environmental pollution; the almost
cavalier experiments with human reproduction, cloning, genetically engineered
life, chemical-biological warfareβall threaten to make reality more frightening
than fiction.
The second area of doubt regarding modern science arises from within the
scientific community itself. The last decades of the 20th century have seen an
internal reexamination take place within almost every scientific discipline, as
each has been forced to question its own foundations and exclusive claims to
truth. We are in the midst of a major paradigm shift, the outcome of which
still remains unclear. It revolves around a loss of the positivistic certainty
that science once enjoyed and now finds slipping away. Ironically, the
scientific “establishment” finds itself confronting a challenge to
its exclusive authority that in many ways mirrors the spiritual crisis that
religious orthodoxy faced with the triumph of modern science.
Sigmund Freud exemplifies this ironic shift. Perhaps more than any modern
thinker, he contributed to the undermining of religious certainty. He stated
quite unequivocally that βan illusion would be to suppose that what science
would not give us, we can get elsewhere.β Elsewhere, of course, refers to
religion, as he made clear in his pessimistic indictment of religion in The
Future of an Illusion. And yet his own psychoanalytic theory has become a
matter of intense debate, and has come under the critical scrutiny of the very
scientific system he felt would validate his ideas. But it is in areas other
than psychology, most notably in physics, and increasingly in the life
sciences, that a growing body of new knowledge is beginning to strain existing
models of explanation and understanding.
With the ground-breaking work of Niels Bohr, Heisenberg, and Sir Arthur
Eddington, the rock-solid presupposition central to that classical scientific
thought began to crumble. With the “new science” that started to
emerge in the post-World War II era, the observer and the observed could
not be presumed separate and distinct. Gone too was the neat subject/object
distinction that had come to define classical science. This shift away from the
study of the “outside” objective world of nature to the
“inner” subjective world of the observer is a hallmark of the new
science. As Heisenberg observed, βEven in science, the object of research is no
longer nature itself, but manβs investigation of nature.β
For example, Heisenberg pointed out that the very act of measurement interfered
with what one was attempting to measure. You cannot separate the subject from
the object of the experiment. So, if the scientist changes the very nature of
the “reality” he or she investigates, then what is truth? What is
purely objective fact? Where does the boundary lie (indeed, if there is one)
between the mind and the external world? Consequently, the quantum theory of
the new physics no longer claims to be describing “reality.” It
describes probable realities. The new physics looks for possible
realities and finds them so elusive that no one model can exhaustively account
for everything. The indeterminacy of models has replaced earlier certainties.
Some, like Thomas Kuhn, even questioned the notion of science as an objective
progression towards truth. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(1962), Kuhn observed that science, like religion, becomes heavily encumbered
with its own baggage of non-rational procedures. Science accumulates its
peculiar set of presuppositions, doctrines, and even heresies. Kuhn
essentially demolished the logical empiricist and purist view that science
personified the impartial progression towards a universal truth. Instead, he
saw it as a series of shifting “paradigms”βa global way of seeing
things which is relatively immune from disconfirmation by experience. One
paradigm would hold sway for awhile, only to be displaced in a
“revolution” by another conceptual worldview. These paradigms,
both self-contained and self-perpetuating, tended to conserve and perpetuate
their own ideas, just as religion tends to conserve and perpetuate its own
beliefs.
For example, Galileo declared in the early 1600s that Copernicus was correct:
The earth moves, and the sun is the center of our galaxy. The Church denounced
these views as heresies and dangerous to the Faith. They forced Galileo to
recant during a trial under the Inquisition. Although he was publicly compelled
to affirm the existing “scientific” paradigm, Galileo still defied
the authorities. After getting up from his knees, he is said to have mumbled
“E pur si muove” (nevertheless it still moves). Placed under
house arrest, Galileo lived out the rest of his life in seclusion.
The world, of course, shifted paradigms to accept the Copernican worldview. The
Church, however, lagged behind, and only in 1992 did the Vatican lift the 1616
ban on the Copernican teaching. Einstein, whose theory of relativity was at
first met with skepticism and doubt, later became an icon of scientific genius.
And yet, even Einstein found himself resisting the new theories of the quantum
physicists towards the end of his lifeβonce again adding credibility to Kuhn’s
thesis.
Whether Kuhn is correct or not is beside the point. His critique
illustrates a larger trend: the suspicion that science does not have absolute
answers, nor even ultimate authority. Thus, modern science presents less of a
unified front, less of a final bastion of truth. Certainly many people still
see themselves as living in a black and white world. But, in general, many
scientists are coming to define their discipline in a more humble and tentative
way. Science, for people at the turn of the century, stood for absolute, fixed
truths and principles that held good forever; it embraced and explained an
unchanging reality, or at least a reality that was changing according to
constant and predictable laws. Today we are more modest, less presumptuous. A
better working definition of science now might be βa form of inquiry into
natural phenomena; a consensus of information held at any one time and all of
which may be modified by new discoveries and new interpretations at any
moment.β In contemporary science, uncertainty seems to be the rule.
Thus, it grows increasingly difficult to believe in an external world governed
by mechanisms that science discloses once and for all. Thoughtful people find
themselves hesitant, unmoored, with an up-in-the-air kind of feeling regarding
the most basic facts of life. It is said that “we live in an age when
anything is possible and nothing is certain.” This post-modern dilemma
highlights the felt need to reconcile facts and values, morals and machines,
science with spirituality. And while traditional Judaeo-Christian theologies
struggle to address this particularly contemporary malaise, Buddhism maneuvers
this tricky terrain with apparent ease and finds itself sought after with
renewed interest and popularity.
Moreover, some observers have puzzled over this anomaly: Asia accelerates in
its secular and material modernization (read “Westernization”), while
the West shows signs of a spiritual revitalization drawing on largely Asian
sourcesβespecially Buddhism. Buddhism is being ‘Westernized’ to be seen as a
teaching that can mesh with both the good life and mitigate the stress of the
faith/reason divide. Part of Buddhism’s immense appeal lies in its analysis of
the mind, the subject/selfβexactly the area where modern science now senses the
next breakthroughs are to be made.
The Buddha, well before Aquinas or Heisenberg, stressed the primacy of the mind
in the perception and even “creation” of reality. A central concept
of Buddhism is the idea that “everything is made from the mind.” Any
distinction between subject and object is false, imagined, at best an expedient
nod to demands of conventional language. In the Avatamsaka Sutra, the
Buddha uses metaphor to elucidate: “The mind is like an artist/It can
paint an entire world. . . If a person knows the workings of the mind/As it
universally creates the world/This person then sees the Buddha/And understands
the Buddha’s true and actual nature.” (Chap. 20) We think we are observing
nature, but what we are observing is our own mind at work. We are the subject
and object of our own methodology. Moreover, this mind encompasses the entirety
of the universe; there is nothing outside of it, nothing it does not contain,
according to the Buddha.
Such insights early on intrigued Western thinkers, as Buddhism hinted of a new
avenues of travel through the mind/matter maze. It led scientists like Albert
Einstein to declare:
The
religion of the future will be cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal
God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual,
it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all
things, natural and spiritual and a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this
description. . . If there is any religion that would cope with modern
scientific needs, it would be Buddhism.
The
Nobel Prize winner was not alone in his positive assessment of the
Buddhism’s potential for going beyond the boundaries of Western thought.
The British mathematician, philosopher Alfred North Whitehead declared,
“Buddhism is the most colossal example in the history of applied
metaphysics.” His contemporary Bertrand Russell, another Nobel Prize
winner, found in Buddhism the greatest religion in history because “it has
had the smallest element of persecution.” But beyond the freedom of
inquiry he attributed to the Buddha’s teaching, Russell discovered a superior
scientific methodβone that reconciled the speculative and the rational while
investigating the ultimate questions of life:
Buddhism
is a combination of both speculative and scientific philosophy. It advocates
the scientific method and pursues that to a finality that may be called
Rationalistic. In it are to be found answers to such questions of interest as:
‘What is mind and matter? Of them, which is of greater importance? Is the
universe moving towards a goal? What is man’s position? Is there living that is
noble?’ It takes up where science cannot lead because of the limitations of the
latter’s instruments. Its conquests are those of the mind.
As early as the 1940βs, the pioneering physicist Niels Bohr sensed this
congruence between modern science and what he called βEastern mysticism.β As he
investigated atomic physics and searched for a unified field of reality, he
often used the Buddha and Lao Tzu in his discussions on physics in his classes.
He made up his own coat of arms with the yin/yang symbol on it. The American
physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer also saw in Buddhism a scientific parallel to
the puzzling riddles of modern physics; his cutting-edge discoveries seemed to
echo the enigmatic wisdom of the ancient sage. Wrote Oppeheimer:
If
we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we
must say ‘no;’ if we ask whether the electron’s position changes with time, we
must say ‘no;’ if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say ‘no;’ if
we ask whether it is in motion, we must say ‘no.’ The Buddha has given such
answers when interrogated as to the conditions of man’s self after his death;
but they are not familiar answers for the tradition of seventeenth and
eighteenth-century science.
In the 1970s, in The Tao Of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between
Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, Fritjof Capra expanded on some of
Bohrβs and Oppenheimer’s tentative impressions. He argued that modern science
and Eastern mysticism offer parallel insights into the ultimate nature of
reality. But, beyond this, Capra suggested that the profound harmony between
these concepts as expressed in systems language and the corresponding ideas of
Eastern mysticism was impressive evidence for a remarkable claim: That mystical
philosophy offers the most consistent background to our modern scientific
theories.
In the 1970s this notion came as something of a bombshell. Suddenly religion
and science reunitedβthough in a rather unexpected wayβEastern religion and
Western science. This echoed the excitement of a hundred years previous that
Carus and other late Victorians sensed in Buddhism’s potential. Then, however,
the emphasis was on how Buddhism could help establish religion on a more
scientific basis; now, it seems the other way aroundβthat science is seeking
Buddhism to stake out its spiritual or metaphysical claims.
Regardless, those familiar with Buddhist texts immediately saw (or thought they
saw) the correctness of Capra’s revelation. Certain Buddhist scriptures in fact
seemed most solidly to confirm the linking of science and Dharma. The most oft-quoted
is the famous teaching called the Kalama Sutta.
In this short discourse, we find the Buddha in his wanderings coming upon the
village of the Kalamas. Religious seekers themselves, the Kalamas were
bewildered by the plethora of divergent philosophies and teachers vying for
their attention. They proceeded to ask the Buddha a series of questions. Here
is the relevant portion of the text:
The
Buddha once visited a small town called Kesaputta in the kingdom of Kosala. The
inhabitants of this town were known by the common name Kalama. When they heard
that the Buddha was in their town, the Kalamas paid him a visit, and told him:
“Sir, there are some recluses and brahmanas who visit Kesaputta. They
explain and illumine only their own doctrines, and despise, condemn and spurn
others’ doctrines. Then come other recluses and brahmanas, and they, too, in
their turn, explain and illumine only their own doctrines, and despise, condemn
and spurn others’ doctrines. But, for us, Sir, we have always doubt and
perplexity as to who among these venerable recluses and brahmanas spoke the
truth, and who spoke falsehood.”
“Yes, Kalamas, it is proper that you have doubt, that you have perplexity,
for a doubt has arisen in a matter which is doubtful. Now, look you Kalamas, do
not be led by reports, or tradition, or hearsay. Be not led by the authority of
religious texts, not by mere logic or inference, nor by considering
appearances, nor by the delight in speculative opinions, nor by seeming
possibilities, nor by the idea: ‘this is our teacher’. But O Kalamas, when you
know for yourselves that certain things are unwholesome (akusala), and wrong,
and bad, then give them up…And when you know for yourselves that certain
things are wholesome (kusala) and good, then accept them and follow them.”
The Kalamas voiced their doubts, their perplexity in determining truth or
falsehood, as a result of having been exposed to all the competing teachers and
doctrines of India at the time: not unlike our modern world today. Each
teacher, each school, expounded different and often conflicting notions of the
truth. The Buddha’s response was to set down a methodology that was in many
ways ahead of its time in anticipating the skeptical empiricism of the modern scientific
method.
He said, βDo not be led by reports, or tradition, or hearsay. Donβt be led by
the authority even of religious texts, nor by mere logic or inference, nor by
considering appearancesββall of which eliminate exclusive reliance on cultural
convention, received tradition, and deductive speculation, as well as mere
sense impressions. Also rejected were opinions and “seeming
possibilities”βthe stuff of preconceived bias and subjective imagination
and fancy. (Some might argue that being “led by appearances” would
include a narrow scientific method, at least as it has come to be popularly
understoodβi.e. an exaggerated reliance on natural phenomena as the only basis
of what is true or real. It would also dismiss the equally exaggerated claim
that scientific knowledge is the only valid kind of knowledge.The Buddha even
discounts blind faith in one’s teacher.
So what’s left? Here the Buddha lays out a subtle and quite unique
epistemology: βOh Kalamas, when you know for yourselves that certain things are
unwholesome and wrong and bad, then give them up. And when you know that
certain things are wholesome and good, then accept them and follow them.β But
how to interpret this key passage?
Many scholars and believers, both recently and at the turn of the century,
jumped at this passage as confirmation that ancient Buddhist wisdom validates
modern science. Early popularizers of Eastern religions in America like
Anagarika Dharmapala, D. T. Suzuki, Paul Carus, and even Vedantists like
Vivekananda, generally waxed enthusiastic about the compatibility of Eastern
spirituality and Western science. They saw in passages like the Kalama Sutta
proof positive that the Buddha prefigured the modern scientific outlook.
Buddhism seemed eminently scientific: detached skeptical investigation of
empirically testable phenomena; no faith, no dogma, no revelation. Experiments
carried out by and confirmed by individuals regardless of time or place
suggested “intersubjective testability”βone of the hallmarks of the
scientific method. I do it, you do it; anyone can do it and obtain the same
results. That Buddhism and science should be so nearly identical was
understandably immensely appealing; it is also misleading.
While American thinkers and newly converted Western Buddhists thought they saw
a natural fit between Buddhism and science, Buddhist teachers more steeped in
the traditional discipline were less apologetic and often more critical of such
facile comparisons. Two notable contemporary examples come to mind: Master
Hsuan Hua, from the Mahayana tradition, and Wapola Rahula, a Theravada
scholar-monk, both threw cold water on this notion.
The Venerable Hsuan Hua, a Ch’an and Tripitika master from China, arrived in
America in the early 1960s to propagate the Dharma in the West. As he observed
and studied the trends and currents of contemporary thought, he showed little
enthusiasm for what seemed to him the exaggerated claims of modern
scienceβtheoretical or applied. He said, βWithin the limited world of the
relative, that is where science is. Itβs not an absolute Dharma. Science
absolutely cannot bring true and ultimate happiness to people, neither
spiritually nor materially.β This is strong criticism that portrays science as
a discipline limited to relative truths, and as an unsatisfactory way of life.
In another essay, he wrote:
Look
at modern science. Military weapons are modernized every day and are more and
more novel every month. Although we call this progress, itβs nothing more than
progressive cruelty. Science takes human life as an experiment, as childβs
play, as it fulfills its desires through force and oppression.
In 1989, Venerable Walpola Rahula, a Theravadin monk from Sri Lanka, also
warned that daily life is being permeated by science. He cautioned, βWe have
almost become slaves of science and technology; soon we shall be worshipping
it.β His comments come well into the final decades of the twentieth century,
when many people had in effect turned science into a religious surrogate. The
Venerable monk observed, βEarly symptoms are that they tend to seek support
from science to prove the validity of our religions.β Walpola Rahula elaborated
on this point:
We
justify them [i.e. religions] and make them modern, up-to-date, respectable,
and accessible. Although this is somewhat well intentioned, it is ill-advised.
While there are some similarities and parallel truths, such as the nature of
the atom, the relativity of time and space, or the quantum view of the interdependent,
interrelated whole, all these things were developed by insight and purified by
meditation.
Rahula’s
critique goes to the heart of the matter: the capitulation of religion to
scientific positivism; the yielding of almost all competing schemes of values
to the scientific juggernaut. Huston Smith, the eminent scholar on the worlds
religions, recently said that the weakness of modern religions in the West
stems from their successful accommodation to culture. The contribution that
Buddhism and other religions can make to the spiritual crisis facing modern
society, therefore, may not lie in their compatibility with science, but in
their ability to offer something that science cannot.
More importantly, as Rahula argues, Dharma, or abiding spiritual truths, were
discovered without the help of any external instrument. Rahula concluded, βIt
is fruitless, meaningless to seek support from science to prove religious
truth. It is incongruous and preposterous to depend on changing scientific concepts
to prove and support perennial religious truths.β Moreover, he echoes the
deeper moral concerns expressed by Master Hua regarding the unexamined aims and
consequences of the scientific endeavor:
Science
is interested in the precise analysis and study of the material world, and it
has no heart. It knows nothing about love or compassion or righteousness or
purity of mind. It doesnβt know the inner world of humankind. It only knows the
external, material world that surrounds us.
Rahula
then suggests that the value of Buddhism redoubles, not as it can be made to
seem more scientific, but in its reaffirming a different sensibility, an
overarching and unyielding vision of humanity’s higher potential. He concludes
emphatically:
On
the contrary, religion, particularly Buddhism, aims at the discovery and the
study of humankindβs inner world: ethical, spiritual, psychological, and
intellectual. Buddhism is a spiritual and psychological discipline that deals
with humanity in total. It is a way of life. It is a path to follow and
practice. It teaches man how to develop his moral and ethical character, which
in Sanskrit is sila, and to cultivate his mind, samadhi, and to realize the
ultimate truth, prajna wisdom, Nirvana.
Both of these eminent monks pre-date and, in many ways, stand outside the
popularization and “Westernization” of Buddhism. Unlike the
Western-leaning translators of Buddhism Carus, Suzuki, Dharmapala, et al., they
emerged from a monastic discipline grounded in a more traditional understanding,
one less enamored of modern science and more critical of Western philosophy.
They would not so readily concur with Sir Edwin Arnold, who wrote in his
best-selling Light of Asia (1879) that “between Buddhism and modern
science there exists a close intellectual bond.”
With this in mind, it would do well to take another look at the passage quoted
above from the Kalama Sutta:
But
O Kalamas, when you know for yourselves that certain things are unwholesome
(akusala), and wrong, and bad, then give them up…And when you know for
yourselves that certain things are wholesome (kusala) and good, then accept
them and follow them.
These lines, I believe, hold the key to understanding the difference between
Buddhism and modern science. The passage needs to be understood not simply as a
nod to Western empiricism, but within a specific context of moral inquiry. This
“knowing for yourself” locates knowledge (’scientia’) firmly within
the moral sphere, both in its aims and its outcomes. It employs a meditative
form of insight to penetrate the ultimate nature of reality. It implies a
concept quite foreign to modern science: that the knower and what is known, the
subject and object, fact and value, are not merely non-dual, but that knowledge
itself is inescapably influenced by our moral and ethical being. Perhaps this
is exactly what Suzuki intuited was lacking in modern science when he wrote in
1959, “I now think that a religion based solely on science is not enough.
There are certain ‘mythological’ elements in every one of us, which cannot be
altogether lost in favor of science.”
Regardless, none of this critical reassessment should come as a surprise to
thoughtful Buddhists. The Shurangama Sutra clearly notes, “when the
seed planted is crooked, the fruit will be distorted.” The close link
between intention and result, cause and effect, is central to all Buddhist
philosophy. It should be obvious and expected that the very fabric of modern
science, lacking as it does a firm grounding in the moral sphere, would result
in deleterious discoveries and incomplete uses. Tragic examples abound
attesting to the ill-fated marriage of scientific technology and human
ignorance.
Nor, from a Buddhist perspective, can these examples be seen as unintended
consequences or accidentsβthey are, rather, unavoidable and logical outcomes of
a partial though powerful system of thought. There is nothing in science per
se that would lead one to equate its advancement with increased social
benefits and enhanced human values. And certainly the absence of ethical
imperatives should alert any knowledgeable Buddhist to a fundamental flaw in
equating the Eightfold Way with the practice of science. In fact, a close
reading of the Buddhist sources, it seems, would lead one to question: Is
science in itself sufficient for describing reality? Is it capable of meeting
human needs?
Thus, the aforementioned Kalamas passage, depending on one’s frame of
reference, could be seen more as a critique of than a correspondence with
modern science. The key to understanding this difference lies in a correct
Buddhist interpretation of “know for yourselves,”
“wholesome,” and “unwholesome.” As Walpola Rahula
indicates, these concepts are part of a specific and disciplined form or
methodology of self-cultivation which, when diligently practiced, leads to true
knowledge and wisdom. This method is referred to in Buddhism as the “three
non-outflow science” (san wu lou xue), and consists of morality,
concentration, and wisdom (Sanskrit: sila, samadhi, prajna).
The ethical component cannot be overemphasized, as “seeing things as they
really are” entails an indispensable preliminary: “purification of
the mind.” This clarity of mind and concentrated awareness in turn begins
with and must be sustained by moral conduct. The Visuddhimagga (Path of
Purification), an early Buddhist manual compiled in the 4th century by
Buddhagosha, lists the Buddha’s “science” of inquiry as an
interrelated three-step exercise of virtue, meditation, and insight. This is
quite a different approach to knowledge than a modern-day scientist would
presume or pursue. It is interesting that these ancient wisdom traditions
considered moral purity as the absolute prerequisite of true knowledge, and
that we today regard it as immaterial, if not downright irrelevant. Thus,
fundamental and qualitatively different views of what constitutes knowledge and
the acquisition of knowledge separate Buddhism and science.
Aspects of the above epistemological formula appear throughout the Asian
religious traditions. For example, Taoism speaks of cultivating the mind
(hsin), regarding it as the repository of perceptions and knowledgeβit rules
the body, it is spiritual and like a divinity that will abide “only where
all is clean.” Thus the Kuan Tzu (4 to 3rd century B.C.) cautions
that “All people desire to know, but they do not inquire into that whereby
one knows.” It specifies:
What
all people desire to know is that (i.e., the external world),
But
their means of knowing is this (i.e. oneself);
How
can we know that?
Only
by the perfection of this. 1
Are we studying ourselves when we think we are studying nature? Will the
“new science” eventually come to Kuan Tzu’s conclusion that only βby
perfecting this,” can we truly know that? These
ancient writings raise an interesting question: How accurate and objective can
be the observation if the observer is flawed and imperfect? Is the relationship
between “consciousness” and matter as distinct as we are inclined to
believe?
The “perfection” mentioned above refers to the cultivation of moral
qualities and in Buddhist terminology, the elimination of
“afflictions” (klesa) such as greed, anger, ignorance, pride,
selfishness, and emotional extremes. It seems less an alteration of
consciousness than a purification and quieting of the mind. Mencius talks of
obtaining an “unmoving mind” at age forty, again referring to the
cultivation of an equanimity resulting from the exercise of moral sense. He
distinguished between knowledge acquired from mental activity and knowledge
gained from intuitive insight. This latter knowledge he considered superior as
it gives noumenal as well as phenomenal understanding. Advaita Vedanta, the
philosophical teaching of Hinduism, as well emphasizes that jnana (knowledge)
requires a solid basis in ethics (Dharma). Chuang Tzu, spoke of acquiring knowledge
of “the ten thousand things” (i.e., of all nature) through virtuous
living and practicing stillness: “to a mind that is ’still’ the whole
universe surrenders.” 2 Even
Confucius’s famous passage concerning the highest learning (da xue) connects
utmost knowledge of the universe to the cultivation of one’s person and the
rectification of one’s mind. 3
The challenge from these eminent Buddhist teachers to the nearly ex cathedra
authority generally accorded to science should give pause to anyone
attempting a facile identification of Buddhism with science. Their aims and
methods, though tantalizingly parallel, upon closer analysis diverge.
Correspondences do exist, but fundamental differences inhere as well. To gloss
over them not only encourages sloppy thinking, but approaches hubris. So we must
ask: to what extent is our conception of science as the arbiter of knowledge
culture-bound, even myopic? Could our near total faith in science blind us to
an inherent bias in such a stance: we presume that the logic, norms, and
procedures of the scientific method are universally applicable and their
findings are universally valid. Science may not only have limited relevance for
interpreting Buddhism, but may distort our very understanding of its meaning.
Thus, in a quest to reach an easy and elegant reconciliation of faith and
reason, we may unwittingly fall prey to “selective
perception”βnoticing and embracing only those elements of Buddhism that
seem consonant with our way of thinking and giving short shrift to the rest.
Overplaying the similarities between science and Buddhism can lead into a
similar trap, where our dominant Western thought-way (science) handicaps rather
than helps us to understand another worldview. In Buddhism, this is called
“the impediment of what is known.”
It may prove more salutary to allow Buddhism to “rub us the wrong
way” β to challenge our preconceptions and habitual ways, to remain
strange and different from anything to which we have been accustomed. To borrow
a metaphor from Henry Clarke Warren, we might enjoy a “walking in
Fairyland” in shoes that do not quite fit:
A
large part of the pleasure that I have experienced in the study of Buddhism has
arisen from what I may call the strangeness of the intellectual landscape. All
the ideas, the modes of argument, even the postulates assumed and not argued
about, have always seemed so strange, so different from anything to which I
have been accustomed, that I felt all the time as though walking in Fairyland.
Much of the charm that the Oriental thoughts and ideas have for me appears to
be because they so seldom fit into Western categories. 4
1 ArthurWaley, The Way And
Its Power: A Study of the Tao Te Ching and Its Place in Chinese Thought
(New York: Grove Press, 1958), 47.
2 ibid, 58.
3 James Legge, Confucius:
Confucian Analects, The Great Learning, and The Doctrine of the Mean
[Translated by James Legge], (New York: Dover, 1893, 1971), 4-7.
4 Henry Clarke Warren, Buddhism
In Translations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1896), 283-84.
http://www.borobudur.tv/survey_1.htm
WELCOME
TO BOROBUDUR.TV
In Pursuit of Sacred Science, Part I
Architectural Survey of Borobudur’s Summit
by Mark Long
Table of
Contents:
- LORDS OF THE MOUNTAIN
- ARCHITECTURAL TRADITIONS
- DETERMINING THE MONUMENT’S
DIMENSIONS - GUNADHARMA’S RULER
- BOROBUDUR’S HEAD, BODY AND
FOOT - THE MAIN STUPA PLATFORM
- THE SLIGHTLY OVAL TERRACE
PLATFORMS
In 1976, University of Michigan researchers announced the
results of a scientific study which suggested that the architect of ancient Cambodia’s
Angkor Wat had encoded calendrical, historical and cosmological themes into his
architectural plan for the temple. Published in the journal Science, the study also demonstrated
how Angkor Wat’s architect had established solar alignments between the temple
and a nearby mountaintop shrine that took place during the summer solstice.
“Astronomically, it (Angkor Wat) has built-in
positions for lunar and solar observation. The sun itself was so important to
the builders of the temple that solar movement regulates the position of the
bas-reliefs. It is not surprising that Angkor Wat integrates astronomy, the
calendar, and religion since the priest-architects who constructed the temple
conceived of all three as a unity. To the ancient Khmers, astronomy was known
as the sacred science.” (1)
In 1998, one of the authors of the aforementioned
University of Michigan study published Angkor
Wat: Space, Time and Kingship, which further defines the
calendrical, historical and cosmological themes contained in the temple’s
architectural plan. According to former University of Michigan professor
Eleanor Mannikka, the process that eventually led to her discovery of Angkor
Wat’s ruling unit of measure began with an intuitive deduction.
“On close inspection, I noticed that the temple’s measurements were
extraordinarily precise along certain sectors. As an example of this precision,
both the northern and southern corridors of the third gallery are 202.14 m
long. The eastern and western corridors are 114.22 and 114.24 m., respectively.
Why–and how–would anyone construct the circumference in such a remarkably
accurate manner?”
“To find out why Angkor Wat was constructed so
precisely, I started to search for the unit of measure used to build the
temple. That unit had to be a cubit length–the distance between the elbow and
outstretched fingertips–since no viable alternative existed in Khmer
inscriptions….”
Diagram 1
(above right): Architectural plan of Angkor Wat.
“A standard cubit in Cambodia would range roughly
between .40 and .50 m. I used this range to divide axes and circumferences at
Angkor Wat until finally, after four months of trial and error, a very precise
unit of .43545 m yielded the most consistent results.” (2)
By applying Angkor Watβs cubit to various dimensions
within the monument, Professor Mannikka was able to decode numerical themes
that have a calendrical, astronomical and cosmological significance. In
addition, she discovered that Angkor’s architect often duplicated numerical
themes that had already been expressed dimensionally through the grouping of
nearby architectural elements, such as pillars, windows, and steps.
For example, the western entrance bridge that connects the
outside world with the temple grounds consists of a 200-meter horizontal span
that is divided into two halves by a set of staircases that lead down to the
water of the moat that surrounds the entire temple complex. Each half of the
bridge measured 216 cubits in length. In addition, the architect had installed
a total of 216 sandstone columns and balustrade supports as part of the bridge’s
overall structure. (3)
The expression of calendrical, astronomical and
cosmological themes within the dimensions of Angkor Wat raises an important
question. Was this purely a Cambodian innovation or had Angkor Wat’s architect
learned of the practice from an even earlier source representing a
tradition that was practiced elsewhere?
According to the account written in 916 CE by the Arab
trader Abu Zaid, the Maharaja of Zabag (Java) once sailed his fleet up the
Mekong River to the Khmer capital for the express purpose of capturing and
decapitating the Cambodian ruler. This legend receives a modicum of historical
support from several stone inscriptions found on the mainland of Southeast Asia.
Discovered on the Malay peninsula in what is today the kingdom of Thailand, the
Stone of Ligor commemorates the victories of the Rajadiraja (King of Kings)
Vishnu, who is described as “resplendent like the Sun” and born of
the “Sailendra”–a Sanskrit word that means “Lord of the
Mountain.” Historians ascribe the construction of several of central
Java’s Buddhist temples to the Sailendra dynasty of kings that ruled over this
part of the island during the late eighth and early ninth centuries CE. (4)
Other stone inscriptions that have been discovered in what
is today southern Vietnam–also refer to sea-faring invaders out of islands who
had conducted raids along the coastline during the latter half of the eighth
century, with an inscription dating from 787 CE specifically referring to
an invading army of Javanese origin. (5)
In 802 CE, the founding king of Cambodia’s Angkor civilization
participated in a ceremony that involved the installation of a linga–the
phallic emblem of the Hindu deity Shiva–on top of Mount Kulen north of
Angkor. This inaugurating act of King Jayavarman II, which is
commemorated in the Khmer inscription of Sdok Kak Thom, states that “…a
Brahman…well versed in magic, came…at the invitation of the king to
establish a ritual in order that Cambodia might no longer be dependent on Java,
and that there might only be one king ruling the country. This Brahman recited
the texts from beginning to end, to teach them to the (king’s) chaplain, and he
instructed him how to initiate the ritual of the deva-raja (literally
“god-king”). Each succeeding Khmer ruler during the Angkor period of
Cambodian history followed Jayavarman II’s example by building a sanctuary for
the cult of the deva-raja in the form of a pyramid-mountain, either natural or
artificial, that was located at the very center of the Khmer ruler’s realm. (6)
Photo 1
(above): Bakhong temple near the modern city of Roulous in north-central
Cambodia.
Despite the Khmer King’s commission of this symbolic
declaration of
independence, the Javanese continued to have an influence over Khmer cult
ure, especially in the area of architecture, where certain
Javanese building techniques were incorporated into the design of various
waterworks and where Khmer artists employed Javanese art motifs in the creation
of some of the oldest temples from the Angkor period. (7)
Did the extent of Javanese influence on Khmer architecture
also extend to the practice of encoding calendrical, historical and
cosmological themes into the dimensions of their temple designs? If so, can
these practices still be discerned today in the form of the Javanese Buddhist
temple of Borobudur?
Diagram 2 (right): Bakhong temple architectural plan.
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Following the collapse of the East Javanese kingdom of
Mahapajit in the fifteen century CE, members of the Hindu royal court fled to
the nearby island of Bali, carrying with them a number of palm-leaf manuscripts
governing architecture. Ever since, the temple architects of Bali have
continued to consult the texts of the Asta
Kosala Kosali, which set forth the principles for deriving
measurement units from various dimensions to be found in the human body, which
are then used as units of measure for laying out various architectural
dimensions. (8)
The Balinese believe that the architectural plans for
temples and family compounds play a direct role in determining the fate of each
structure’s occupants. The goal of the Balinese architect is to harmonize the
microcosmic forces that govern life in the human world with the macrocosmic
forces that rule over the realm of the gods. According to this point of view,
the extent to which any building fails to conform with an architectural
plan designed to mirror the perfection of the cosmos can make the
difference between a “living” structure that will allow benevolent
spiritual forces to enter and take up residence and a structure that is considered
to be blocked, closed off or “dead.”
“Other frames of reference also operate, including
the metaphorical representation of the compound and its various structures in
terms of the human body. Thus, the family shrine is identified with the head;
the sleeping quarters and pavilion for receiving guests with the arms; the
central courtyard with the navel; the hearth with the sexual organs; the
kitchen and granary, with legs and feet; and the refuse pit in the backyard,
with the anus.” (9)
In deriving the dimensions of a Balinese household
compound, the Balinese architect directs the owner of the household to pace off
the distances between the various structures to be constructed within the compound
in units consisting of eight foot lengths a number that has a symbolic
significance with regards to the eight points of the compass as well as the
specific Hindu deities associated with each of these directions. (10)
Photo 2 (below
right): Javanese carving of a lotus on the back of a tortoise, with each of the
petals bearing the emblem of a Hindu divinity associated with one of the eight
directions of space. National Museum - Jakarta.
The Javanese practices inherited by the Balinese were based on even
earlier architectural principles developed in India, under which the temple’s
patron was responsible for appointing a priest to preside over the entire
temple construction process. Called the Sthapaka,
this priest was responsible for guiding the activities of the temple’s chief
architect, called the Sthapati,
who had to be well-versed in all the traditional sciences, including
mathematics.
The Sthapatiβs primary disciple, often his son, was called
the Sutragrahin. Charged with
the responsibility of carrying out the Sthapati’s orders, the Sutragrahin had
to know the proportionate measurement by both cord (sutra) and rod (danda) as
it applied to the entire building as well as its various parts. (11)
Although Borobudur’s construction period lasted for more
than fifty years and consisted of several distinct phases, the rules
of Indian architecture required that the builders maintain continuity
with regards to certain basic principles.
βThe temple or any other (construction) begun by these two
should be continued by them only and by no other. In case they should be not
available, the work should be done by either their sons or disciples who are
competent in the work.β (12)
Determining the Monument’s Dimensions
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The Faculty of Engineering at Indonesia’s
Gadjah Mada University believes that the temple architects of central Java used
a basic unit of measure called the tala,
which is defined as the length of a human face from the top of the foreheadβs
hairline to the tip of the chin. The tala is also equal to the distance from
the tip of the thumb to the tip of the middle finger when the palm and thumb
are at their maximum distance from each other. (13)
Photo 2 (above
right): Bust of a Javanese monk found in the vicinity of the Buddhist temple of
Candi Sewu, which is located some 35 kilometers to Borobudur’s southwest.
National Museum - Jakarta.
The tala measurement system originated in India, where it
was more often employed by sculptors when determining the proportions for the
statues of deities that they had been commissioned to carve. According to the Agni Purana, the sculptor used the tala
to define the crown of the statueβs head as well as the regions of the face,
neck and heart, the space between the two breasts, and the circumference of the
forepart of the arm. In addition, the distance between the navel and the
genitals equaled one tala, while the length of the thighs was equivalent to two
talas. The tala in turn consisted of twelve smaller divisions called angulas
(the width of a finger), which the artist employed in the laying out of smaller
dimensions such as the width of the ears and mouth or the length of the bridge
of the nose. (14)
Since the dimensions of the human body vary widely from
one person to the next, Indonesian archaeologists have limited their
examination of the dimensions for temples to the ratios that exist between
building components. Without denying the above, the possibility remains that
several temples could all have been based on the same measurement unit if they
had all been founded under the patronage of a single person. In addition, it is
even possible that a single royal dynasty might have elected to arrive at a
standardized measurement unit based on a dimension derived from the body of an
illustrious ancestor.
If just such a unit of measure could be determined, then
the information that could be derived from this knowledge would give
archaeologists an additional tool for discerning the architect’s original
intentions. This is what this writer set out to do in 1998.
My initial survey of the literature that describes
Borobudur was disappointing. The reported dimensions, which varied widely from
one text source to the next, were only rough approximations that typically had
been rounded off to the nearest quarter of a meter. In addition, the dimension
of certain components of the structure have, to my knowledge, never been
disclosed in print. For example, each of the three terrace platforms at
Borobudur’s summit has a slightly oval shape that consists of two minor axes
aligned with the cardinal points of the compass and two major axes aligned with
the intermediate directions. None of the available sources provides the
dimension of these platforms in the intermediate directions. With regard to the
platform axes in the cardinal directions, A. J. Bernet Kempers has reported
them as follows:
“Three circular terraces with a radius of 25.60
(D=51.2m), 19.2 (D=38.4m), and 13.40 (D=26.80) m, respectively, support three
rows of stupas (diam. at the base 3.40-3.80, height 3.50-3.75m) with perforated
walls and a space inside which contains a Buddha image.” (15)
In 1998, I conducted my own ad hoc survey of Borobudur’s
summit–no simple task in a monument that receives more than one million
visitors each and every year! After rising with the dawn, I would scamper up
the monument’s eastern staircase to beat the first wave of tourists to the top.
The resulting measurements are provided in Figure
1 below, where the outermost figures in the cardinal directions
represent the distances between the walls that surround the summit.
Figure 1:
Summit dimensions according to the author’s own survey (in meters).
Beginning in the 1970s, the Indonesian government, in
cooperation with UNESCO, undertook a major renewal of the entire monument in
order to prevent its further deterioration. In advance of the reconstruction,
the length of each wall segment for Borobudur’s four lower rectangular
galleries were accurately measured and reported in Reconstruction Committee
documents. However, the Reconstruction Committee’s survey did extend to
reporting the actual length of the monument’s two axes in the cardinal
directions.
To gather this supplementary information, this writer
moved down each of the four axes, pausing to measure and record the distances
between the various levels of the monument, from the outer rim of the main
stupa platform at the monumentβs summit all the way down to the tip of each
makara nose on each of the monument’s terminating staircases at ground level.
In addition, I measured the length of the monument based on both the west and
north sides of the monument in order to estimate the base perimeter, which is
no longer in its original condition on the east and south side of the monument.
This particular report therefore represents the very first
time that all of Borobudur’s major dimensions have been reported within the
confines of a single document. However, this is not to say that additional work
is not needed. For example, a more detailed survey of the summit in which the
individual circumference and height of each stupa is calculated would be most
welcome, presented together with the spacing between the stupas as well as the
precise position of their central axes with respect to the platforms upon which
they rest.
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This writer obtained the first potential clue for arriving
at the precise length of Borobudur’s governing measurement unit upon reading a
casual observation of Dr. Kempers, who had noticed that the majority of
Borobudur’s stone masonry blocks were between 22 and 23 centimeters in height.
(16) It is possible
that Kempers was inspired to make this observation by Jan Rombout van Blom, who
had observed more than 50 years earlier that the three temples of Borobudur,
Pawon and Mendut were all constructed using stone blocks of about the same
size.
At Tjandi Sadjiwan (Van Blom 1935:41) “…one finds
stone layers with a cross-section of 27 - 40cm, whereas the average height at
Borobudur, Mendut, and Pawon only amounts to 23cm.”
According to the Borobudur Reconstruction Committee’s
survey of the lower gallery levels, the combined length of the fourth gallery
walls that surround the monument’s summit is 247.33 m. Presuming that this
perimeter must have had a major symbolic significance, I examined possible
units of measure between 22 and 23 cm in length that might enhance the
symbolism of the structure itself. When I employed a “tala” of
22.9 cm as the defining unit, the perimeter equaled 1,080 talas. (17)
The composers of the Hindu scriptures often used the
number 108 and its multiples as the basis for defining various time cycles.
When the author later applied a tala of precisely 22.9 cm to other dimensions
within the monument, other numbers are produced that play distinct astronomical
and cosmological roles in the sacred sciences of India. The tala of 22.9
cm also happens to be a close approximation of one-half of the 43.545-cm
βcubitβ that Mannikka had previously determined was the measurement unit
employed by Angkor Wat’s architect. According to the temple building traditions
of India, there is a class of temple that does indeed call for just such a
half-cubit measurement system. (18)
In addition, when a tala of 22.9 cm in length was applied
to the dimensions of the Buddhist temples of Candi Pawon and Candi Mendut
located in Borobudur’s general vicinity, similar calendrical themes became
evident. (The relevant measurement results will be reported in part IV of this
article.)
The number 108 appears in material form throughout
Borobudur. Its multiple 10,800 represents the number of muhurtas (the 48-minute
Hindu “hour”) of the calendar year. The Satapatha Brahmana provides detailed instructions
governing the construction of a sacrificial altar consisting of 10,800 bricks.
The altar is considered to be the body of the Lord of Creation, Prajapati,
βwhose body is the year.β His presence in the altar is indicated by a golden
effigy that is installed in the bottom of the altar on top of a golden plate
that symbolizes the Sun, which rests upon a lotus leaf. This golden effigy of
this “Man in the Sun” faces the sky, with its head in the east and
its feet in the west.
The Menoreh (”Tower”) ridge to the south of Borobudur presents
the shape of an anthropomorphic figure that–like the golden effigy of the
Satapatha Brahmana–faces the sky with the “head” in the east and the
“feet” in the west. According to local legend, this is the body of
Borobudurβs legendary architect Gunadharma, who has elected to remain in the
area in order to keep watch over his creation. Since Gunadharma is a pure
Sanskrit name, the Dutch scholar N.J. Krom thought that this local legend might
actually be based on some historical figure. Javanese folk tales typically
present figures that bear the names of local, rather than Indian characters.
The Javanese Gunadharma legend may represent the forging
of a link between Borobudur’s architect and his macrocosmic form, for it is
Prajapati who “…bears the measuring rod, knows division and thinks
himself composed of parts.” The measuring rod symbolizes his role as
the architect of the universe, Visvakarman, who is the celestial model for the
human temple architect who is Prajapati’s microcosmic manifestation and
representative on Earth. (19)
Photo 4 (above
right): The “head” and “torso” of Gunadharma face the sky
in the form of the Menoreh ridge to Borobudur’s south.
The Purusha is mentioned in King Sanjaya’s Gunung Wukir
inscription of 732 CE, which calls the island of Java the footprint of the
Purusha. Perhaps the natives regarded the anthropomorphic shape of the Menoreh
hills to be yet another signature of the Purusha’s local presence, one which
clearly marked the site of Borobudur as a spot from which an ascent to heaven
could be make.
In the later literature of India, Prajapati is the
inheritor of the persona that earlier Vedic legends had assigned to the
primordial giant called the “Purusha,” whose undifferentiated body
was said to initially fill the entire universe. In the Rig Veda, the Hindu gods conduct a
primordial sacrifice during which they divide the Purusha’s body into parts
that become the discrete components of material existence.
In the Satapatha
Brahmana, the building of the altar is a ritual process that
reverses the division of material existence into discrete parts to provide
the Prajapati/Purusha, in the form of the sacrificer who symbolically assumes
his identity, to make a re-ascent to heaven to assume his primordial,
undifferentiated state. This symbolic re-ascent to heaven would later be
incorporated into the rituals surrounding the rituals surrounding the
construction of the Hindu temple, within which the patron assumes the mantle of
the Prajapati/Purusha and the temple foundation becomes the architectural body
through which one undertakes a re-ascent to heaven to assume the “immortal”
life. (20)
This belief in one’s making of a re-ascent to heaven
is reflected in the Javanese inscriptions, which at times have compared
the ancestor-spirits of the kings of old to demi-gods “rushing along the
firmament.” They also warn those who might be tempted to interfere with
the well-being of a religious foundation that they risk being thrown off the
firmament. So let it not be said that you weren’t warned to be courteous and
respectful when visiting Java’s cosmic pyramid-mountain! 
Borobudur’s Head, Body and Foot
Figure 2:
Borobudur’s “Head, Body and Foot” in the Vertical Domain according to
Professor Parmono Atmadi.
Figure 3:
According to Parmono Atmadi, each of the three basic divisions of the temple
also has its complementary segments of head, body and foot. The figure above is
based on Professor Atmadi’s analysis of Borobudur’s “head.”
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The temple architects once employed ratio formulas to
subdivide the temple’s architectural plan into three major divisions that were
linked with the “foot, body and head” of a human body. Modern recognition
of this ancient practice has actually provided Indonesian archaeologists with
valuable assistance in restoring several of the island’s temples to their
original form. This correspondence between temple and body is reflected in a
famous poem by the Indian poet Basavanna:
“The rich
will make temples for Shiva.
What can I a poor man do?
My legs are
pillars,
the body a shrine,
the head a cupola made of gold.
Listen O Lord
of the meeting rivers,
things standing shall fall,
but the moving shall ever stay.”
In 1977, Parmono Atmadi conducted a survey of Borobudur’s
dimensions for the express purpose of determining the ratio formula that the
architect had used to lay out the dimensions of Borobudur’s foot, body and
head. The ultimate goal of this exercise was to determine the original height
of Borobudur’s main stupa pinnacle above ground level. (21)
To accomplish this task, Atmadi measured a large number of
the monument’s architectural elements in the vertical domain. From the
resulting data, he was able to determine that a ratio formula of 4:6:9
had been employed by Borobudur’s architect (See Figure 2 above). In addition, Atmadi reported that the
identical ratio formula was employed at the nearby Buddhist temples of Candi
Pawon and Candi Mendut.
Atmadi’s study also states that the ratio formula of 4:6:9
had been used in the layout of each of the monument’s three major subdivisions;
i.e., the monument’s “head” also incorporates three subdivisions that
we might call the minor head, body and foot of the monument’s entire head. This
discovery allowed Atmadi to calculate that Borobudur’s original height must
have reached 41.81 m above ground level (see Figure
3 above). Using a tala of 22.9 cm, this dimension equals 182.576
talas, a number that closely approximates one half of a solar year of 365.25
days. (22)
The horizontal dimensions of the summit’s second round
terrace platform in the intermediate directions equals 41.8m (NE/SW) and 41.86m
(NW/SE), respectively, which again present equivalent dimensions in talas that
evoke the duration of one-half of a solar year. In addition, the mid-point of
the entire monument based on Atmadi’s height estimate for Borobudur, also
corresponds with the mid-point in the vertical domain of the summit’s second
terrace platform.
In Hindu cosmology, a “day of the gods” consists
of the half-year period from the vernal to the autumnal equinoxes, when the
duration of daylight exceeds the daily period of darkness. This time period is
also called the “northern progress” (uttarayana) of the sun because
it is during this particular period of the solar year that the position of the
rising sun on the eastern horizon progressively moves northward from one day to
the next.
The conventional method for laying out the temple in
conformance with the annual movements of the celestial realm is in terms of a
square diagram called the vastupurusha-mandala. In my article on the Essence of Buddhahood, I have described
how Borobudur’s summit conforms with the essential characteristics of the
vastupurusha mandala, which is not only the residence of the Prajapati/Purusha
on earth but also the schematic for all Hindu temple foundations within which
the equinoxes and solstices are represented by the four faces and four corners
of the diagram. A Mahayana Buddhist text discovered on Sri Lanka called the
MaΓ±jusri Vastuvidyasastra makes use of the same types of diagrams are are
described in Hindu architectural texts such as the Mahamatam, but calls these
plans “candita” — a word that may have serves as the point of origin
for the Javanese term candi.
On the second terrace platform at Borobudur’s summit, the
sum of the two axes in the intermediate directions equals 365.3 talas (t),
nearly equaling the duration of one sidereal year of 365.2562 days. Therefore
the combined dimensions of what might best be called the “solar core”
at the center of the entire monument also represents both halves of the solar
year. This core area resides at the center of the monument, surrounded by the
32 stupas of the first terrace platform; likewise the core of the abode of the
Devas on Mount Meru is surrounded by 32 divinities according to Hindu
cosmology.
After conducting my own survey of the monument’s
dimensions, it became evident that Borobudur also conforms with the same 4:6:9
ratio formula in the horizontal domain (Figure
4 below). The diagram
presented below shows how the architect had expanded a vastupurusha mandala
of 9 x 9 squares by gnomonic projection to include the entire temple within a
larger diagram that consists of 19 x 19 squares (Figure 5 below). In other words, the central square at the
center of the monument is only surrounded by 360 squares to symbolize the
360-degrees of the celestial circle that surrounds the Earth but the outermost
tier of squares also numbers 72 in total. This particular design has been
echoed in a Buddhist architectural text from Tibet, which delineates a
procedure for mapping out the temple site within a square diagram that has been
divided into four equal quadrants, each of which contains 90 blocks. (23)
On the monument’s lower rectangular terrace levels, the
architect has observed the principles of Indian architecture by avoiding the
placement of structures on top of the of the intersections of the horizontal
and vertical grid lines that define the overall structure of the plan.
According to Indian architecture, the lines represent the immanent breaths
(prana) of the temple and their intersections are the deemed the plan’s
vulnerable points. In particular, we can see how Borobudur’s has avoided
placing any structures directly over the “diamond” intersections
formed by the main diagonal lines of the plan.
During the last reconstruction efforts, archaeologists
noticed that the walls of the first gallery had an inclination of more than 1
degree. Assuming this to be an architectural defect, they attempted to re-set
the walls vertically but found that this would not allow the corners to meet.
As this small inclination is now regarded to have been intentional we can
suggest a plausible reason for its presence in the overall design. 
By the same token, the architect’s avoidance of the plan’s “points
of vulnerability” at the lower levels of the monument may explain why
walls have been “rotated” from true north/south or east/west
alignments.
Up on the summit of the monument, the architect was unable
to avoid the placement of stupas over the intersections of the plan’s lines of
breath, but in this case it did not matter. The perforation holes in the 72
stupas provide the means whereby the vastupurusha mandala’s lines of prana
retain their unimpeded access to the remainder of the monument. The stupa
perforations are equivalent to the perforation holes in the bricks that the
builder of the Vedic fire altar lays down over the image of the “Golden
Man.” According to the Satapatha
Brahmana, these naturally perforated bricks are the breaths of the
Purusha whose image is buried at the very bottom of the entire structure.
Figure 4:
Borobudur’s North/South axis in the horizontal domain conforms to the same
4:6:9 ratio used in the monument’s layout in the vertical domain.
Figure 5:
Borobudur’s corresponding layout in terms of a 19 x 19 grid of squares.
The proportions that Borobudur’s architect used in laying
out the head, body and foot of his architectural plan also compare to
proportion ratios that were later incorporated into the certain mandala
traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, where the tripartite design of the kalachakra
mandala, for example, represents the body, speech and mind of the Buddha. This
does not necessarily mean that Borobudur’s foot, body and head were also meant
to represent the “three jewels” of the Buddha or the derivatives
called the Buddha’s three mysteries in certain Vajrayana Buddhist texts.
However, the illustration presented below does bring to mind a saying of the Buddha
Vairaja from the Lankavatara Sutra:
“Within the body, measuring one vyana…the measure
of two extended arms…there is a world; the cause of its rising, the attaining
of cessation, and the path (pratipad)–this I teach to sons of the Victor (i.e.,
to the Bodhisattva sons).”
Figure 6A:
Borobudur’s mandala with an overlay representing the proportion system that was
incorporated into the later mandala traditions of Tibet.
It is also entirely possible that Borobudur’s 4:6:9 ratio
formula and its resulting 19 x 19 grid of squares was based on mystic
mathematical diagrams that were well known in ancient China, where they were
used in the design of buildings and even entire cities. They also were used in
India as part of tantric practices involving geometrical magic diagrams called
yantras. In the first set of examples presented below, the sum of each of the
columns, rows and diagonals three squares equals 15. Each of the four sides of
the square also represents one of the four elements of earth, air, water and
fire.
Figure 6B, 6C
and 6D: The rhythmic expansion of the nine (3×3)
squares of the vastupurusha mandala occupied by Borobudur’s main stupa (3^2 = 9; 9^2 = 81; 15^2 = 225; 19^2 = 361). (For a detailed description of the vastupurusha mandala and its
parallels on Borobudur’s summit, see the article Essence of Tathagatahood, Part Three.)
The ruling cipher of the first set of examples presented
above is the numeral 5 at the center of each diagram, which enters into each
and every calculation. Here the combined sum of the three rows and columns is
90, or 120 when the diagonals are included. With regards to Borobudur, the 3x
expansion of the central 9 squares of the diagrams presented above, produces
the sum of 3 x 120 or 360–which is also the total number grid squares that
surround the central square of the entire diagram.
Moving on to the second set of the examples presented
below, the ruling number is 6 and the combined sum of the three rows and three
columns is 108 (18 x 6), or 144 when the two diagonals are included. At
Borobudur, the 3x expansion of the central 9 squares of the second diagram
presented below, produces the sum of 3 x 144 or 432–which is also the number
of Buddha statues that were installed beween the summit and Borobudur’s
outermost walled perimeter.
There are many other possibilities inherent in the two
sets of examples provided. I will leave it up to each reader to delve as deeply
as he or she wishes.
Even if the mathematical yantras cited above were not
expressly intended to play a numerical role in the monument’s design, the
rhythmic expansion of the brahmastana–the nine central squares of the
vastupurusha mandala at the summit–is reflected in the major divisions to be
found within the overall architectural plan.
Figure 6E and 6F:
In ancient China, the Lo-shu number
diagram centered around the number 5 was intended to represent the divisions of
the earth. Its celestial counterpart, in which the number six is the ruling
cipher that enters into every calculation, is presented in the diagrams below.
(For further details on how these diagrams were incorporated into building
designs in China, see Architecture, Time and Eternity, Volume II by Adrian Snodgrass.)
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Borobudurβs summit is crowned by a stone platform that supports the
large stupa located over the monumentβs central axis. This structure is the
only round terrace platform that presents a truly circular form. The other
three terrace platforms at the summit have two major axes in the intermediate
directions as well as two minor axes that are aligned with the cardinal points.
Photo 4: A
statue of the Buddha Vairocana with Borobudur’s main stupa in the background.
To derive the diameter of the main stupa platform, the
author first measured the structure’s circumference and then divided the
results by pi. The circumference of the main stupa platform as measured at its
mid-point in the vertical domain equals 50.83m or 222.0t. The equivalent
diameter was calculated by divided the main stupa platform’s circumference by
pi, which equals 16.18m or 70.66t. What is particularly significant here is
that the diameter of the platform also equals the averaged dimension of the
monument’s architectural “body” in the vertical domain (See Figure 1 above) according to Professor
Atmadi’s pioneering study of Borobudur’s defining ratio formula.
The total length of Borobudur’s horizontal axis in the
North/South direction (between the tips of the makara snouts on the
ground-level north and south staircases) equals 123.13m. When this dimension is
divided by the diameter of the main stupa platform, the ratio of 7.61:1 is
produced, which comes very close to equaling the decimal equivalent of
Borobudur’s southern latitude of 7 degrees, 36 minutes, 29 seconds (7.608).
The length of Borobudur’s axis in the East/West
direction– i.e., between the tips of the makara snouts on the ground-level
east and west staircases–is considerably shorter, equaling just 122.3m. At the
location of 7.608 degrees south latitude, the circumference of the Earth is
indeed slightly shorter than the polar circumference of the globe. In this
respect, Borobudur conforms precisely with its geographical location on the
sphere of the Earth.
We should not be surprised if Borobudur’s architect
intended for all this information to be embedded into his architectural
representation of the universe in microcosm. The sages of India had known that
the Earth was a sphere long before Borobudur was constructed. In addition, the
ancient Hindu astronomy textbooks taught the means whereby the latitude of any
location could be determined through calculations based on the length of the
shadow cast by a vertical stake or “gnomon.”
In Angkor Wat:
Space, Time and Kingship, Eleanor Mannikka explains how the
architect of Angkor Wat employed a similar method for indicating the temple’s
location in terms of latitude.
“The latitude unit was first derived from the central
sanctuary of Angkor Wat. The sanctuary has many coordinates that place it in
relation to the earth, conceived as a globe floating in space. One of these
coordinates is the north-south axis between doorways: 13.43 cubits. Since
latitude is one’s position on a north-south meridian, the north-south
measurement is appropriate in orientation as well. If this unit were confined
to the central sanctuary it would be interesting in its own right. But it turns
out that 13.43 cubits was a construction module in the prieu cruciform and
second gallery as well. It is close enough to 13.41 to be acceptable as the
temple’s latitude, and so I have called it the latitude unit.” (24)
When the distance between the apex of Borobudur’s summit
and Candi Pawon is divided by the diameter of the main stupa platform (1750
m/16.18 m) the ratio of 108:1 is produced. This particular dimension has also
been embedded into Borobudur itself, where it equals the distance of the six
circuits of worshippers (1750.06m) around Borobudur’s second, third and fourth
galleries (x2 each), a prerequisite for “reading” all of the reliefs
in this particular part of the monument in their correct order.
According to a study by Jacques Dumarcay, Borobudur’s
three terrace platforms at the summit were probably added during the third
stage of the monument’s construction, at which time the architect also elected
to expand the monument’s rectangular terrace levels through the addition of the
walled perimeter, rounded cornice and broad base that surrounds the entire
monument. (25) Based on the
author’s own measurements, Borobudur’s exterior walls extend outward from the
first gallery at the gateway points by 4.03m to the North, 3.99m to the South,
4.15m to the East, and 4.02m to the West, or 16.19m in all, which once again
suggests the possibility of a connection with both the monument’s
“body” in the vertical domain (16.18m) as well as the diameter of the
main stupa platform. In addition, the length of the eastern staircase, from the
staircase at promenade level to the base of the first round terrace platform at
the summit, equals 1/2 of the main stupa platform’s circumference (25.44 m or
111 tala). In addition, the total length of Borobudur’s eastern staircase–from
the very first step up to the promenade level to the base of the first round
terrace platform at the summit–equals 111 t or 1/2 of the main stupa platform
circumference (25.44 m).
However, it must be pointed out that this writer’s
decision to apply the main stupa platform’s circumference at its vertical
mid-point is entirely arbitrary for there are no signs in the platform’s design
to indicate a favoring of vertical mid-point over vertical top (16.16m/70.57t)
or bottom (16.225m/70.85t). At various junctures later on in this article
series, it shall be demonstrated how the use of the bottom circumference
dimension can be employed to provide potentially significant results).
Figure 7: The
dimensions of the monument’s summit form the “cross of the four
seasons” of the solar year in the cardinal directions (364 talas) as well
as present a total of 505 talas in the intermediate directions, which may bear
a relationship to the 504 Buddha images that were incorporated into Borobudur’s
original plan, together with the entity represented by the main stupa
itself.
The Square-Circle Terrace Platforms
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From the bottom edge of the main stupa platform, the author measured
outward along the four axes of the cardinal directions until each of the
measurements terminated at the edge of the inside-facing wall that surrounds
the summit area. The sum of these four dimensions, which were presented
above in Figure 7, equals 83.41m or 364.24 tala.
At Borobudur, the four spokes of the summit area in the cardinal
directions suggest the four quadrants of a 365.24-day solar year, with perhaps
the main stupa providing the final unit required for completing the calendrical
symbolism. Alternatively, the architect may have intended for the four
quadrants to represent the duration of one sidereal year, according to the
observational practices of astronomy.
The sidereal day, which consists of the
time interval between two successive passages of a star over the same meridian
of longitude, is nearly four minutes (3 minutes 56.555 seconds) shorter than
the apparent solar day–that is, the amount of time between two successive
transits of the Sun over the same meridian. Over the course of the solar year,
this apparently insignificant time difference accumulates to just over 1,460
minutes, equivalent to 24.3333 hours or 1.0138 days. For this reason, the four
seasonal axes that radiate outward from Borobudur’s main stupa platform could
also represent the solar year in terms of sidereal solar time as opposed to the
apparent solar time. In addition, there is a possible relationship with the
cycle of Jupiter, which according to the Suryasiddhanta completes 364,221
revolutions in a Great Age or “kalpa” of 4,320,000 terrestrial years.
The sum of the round terrace cross-axes in the
intermediate directions, which terminate at the four corners of the summit
area, equals 505.28t (See Figure 7 above). Borobudurβs architectural plan
originally called for the placement of 368 Buddha statues in the niches of the
lower galleries, together with the 64 statues in niches of the fourth gallery
and the 72 statues within the 72 stupas that grace the monumentβs summit, or
504 statues in all.
The dimensions of the summitβs three round terrace
platforms in the intermediate directions are also significant in several other
respects (See Table 1 below).
For example, the sum of all six round terrace axes equals 1,079.2t, yet another
possible correlation with the Hindu sacred number 1,080, which the architect
also used to define the fourth gallery perimeter. In addition, multiples of 364
are generated when the axial dimensions of the summitβs three round terrace
platforms are multiplied together. For example, the product of the four NE/SW
cross axes are approximately 364 million talas, while the product of the four
NW/SE cross axes is almost 364.5 million talas (See Table 2 below).
Table 1: Sum of Round Terrace Axes (Intermediate Directions)
Round platform
Cross-Axis (m/tala)
1st RT - NW/SE: 54.73 m 239.00 t
2nd RT - NW/SE: 41.86 m 182.80 t
3rd RT - NW/SE: 27.04 m 118.08 t
Subtotal NW/SE: 123.63 m = 539.9 t
1st RT - NE/SW: 54.60 m 238.42 t
2nd RT - NE/SW: 41.80 m 182.53 t
3rd RT - NE/SW: 27.11 m 118.38 t
Subtotal NE/SW 123.51 m = 539.35 t
TOTALS 247.14 m = 1,079.21 t
Table 2: Product of the Cross-Axes of the Round Terrace Platforms
(Intermediate Directions)
NE/SW Axes: (in m/tala) (product)
MS RT 16.18 m 70.66 t —-
3rd RT - 27.11 m 118.38 t = 8364.73
2nd RT - 41.80 m 182.53 t = 1,526,814.3
1st RT - 54.60 m 238.42 t = 364,023,068.5
NW/SE Axes: (in m/tala) (product)
MS RT 16.18 m 70.66 t —-
3rd RT - 27.04 m 118.08 t = 8343.53
2nd RT - 41.86 m 182.79 t = 1,525,114.36
1st RT: 54.73 m 238.99 t = 364,487,081.0
The average of the two axes equals 364,255,074.8
Atmadiβs estimate of the monumentβs original height above
ground level is echoed in the dimensions of the second round terrace platform
in the intermediate directions: 182.53t from NE/SW and 182.79t from NW to SE,
or 365.32t in total. In addition, the monument’s pivotal mid-point in the
vertical domain coincides with the vertical mid-point of the second round
terrace platform. The coordinates appear to delineate the boundaries for an
invisible geometric sphere located at the very core of the monument that is defined
by dimensions that are related to the duration of a solar year. (26)
Go to: In Pursuit of Sacred
Science, Part II
Figure 8: Round Terrace Platforms, North-South Direction
Figure 9: Round Terrace Platforms, East/West Direction
Figure 10: Intermediate Direction NE/SW
Figure 11: Intermediate Direction: NW/SE
Figure 11: A
complete measurement survey of Borobudur’s summit.
Go to: In Pursuit of Sacred
Science, Part II
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(1)Stencel, Rober; Gifford, Fred; and Moron, Eleanor. “Astronomy and Cosmology at Angkor Wat.” Science magazine, Volume 193, Number
4250, July 23, 1976 issue, p. 281.
(3) Ibid.,
p. 31.
(4) See Chandra, Lokesh. Cultural Horizons of India. New Delhi: Aditya
Prakashan (1995) [vol. IV].
(5) Coedes,
George. Angkor: An Introduction. London: Oxford University
Press (1963): 71.
(7) Dumarcay,
Jacques. The Site of Angkor. Singapore: Oxford University Press (1998):
1, 17, 18 and 42.
(8) Eiseman,
Fred B. Jr. Bali: Sekala and Niskala. Berkeley: Periplus (1990):194 [vol.
II].
(11) Kramrisch, Stella. The Hindu
Temple. Calcutta: University (1946):10 [vol. I].
(12) Ibid.
(13) Atmade, Parmono. Some Architectural Design Principles of Temples of Java.
Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press (1988):182-183. The
Javanese may also have associated the tala with the sole of a human foot, a
distinction of particular significance with respect to the ritual procedures
still employed by the Balinese architect. According to an Old Javanese
religious text called the Bhuvana-Samksepa, βTala is the sole of the foot.β See
Chandra, Lokesh. Cultural Horizons of
India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan (1997):142 [vol. V].
(14) See the Agni Purana 44.3-44.36.
(15) Bernet
Kempers, A.J. Ageless Borobudur. Servire: Wassenaar (1976):43. The
slight variations that exist between the figures presented by Kempers and those
provided by the author in Figure 1
below can easily be accounted for. The vertical walls of the main stupa
platform curve inward slightly. If the figures provided by Bernet Kempers had
been derived by measuring the circumference of the top of the main stupa
platform rather than at the platform’s bottom, this would generate a difference
of nearly 7 cm in all subsequent platform diameter measurements, which appears
to be just what has happened. The figures also appear to have been rounded off
to the nearest whole measurement unit. In addition, Bernet Kempers’ statement
does not take into account the slight differences in dimensions between the N/S
and E/W axes of the three round terrace platforms.
(16) Ibid., p. 59.
(17) Dumarcay, Jacques. “Report on Measurements and
Dimensions: Remarks on the Drawing of the After Reconstruction Situation of
Borobudur” Borobudur Reconstruction Committee document Pelita CC/III7 (1974):225
- 232.
(18) According to a text on Hindu temple
architecture called the Manasara, a class of one-story buildings called Vikalpa
should be defined in terms of half-cubit measurement units (see Admadi
1988:324-325). The Vikalpa is a sub-category of the South Indian Jati Vimana
(from “vi ma,” which literally means “to measure out”)
class of temples, “…which represent each a collection of various
classes, namely the storeyed temples, on the head of which is placed a small
shrine plus a rampart of chapels surrounding each story” (see Kramrisch
1946:292-293).
(20) Kramrisch
1946:74.
(22) In addition, 182.576 talas comes very
close to equaling the square root of 33,333 (182.573).
(23) Dorjee, Pema. Stupa and its Technology. New Delhi: Motilal
Bandarsidass (1996):34.
(24) Mannikka (1996):211 - 212.
(26) Atmadi(1979):129.
copyright 2002 borobudur.tv. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.rickhanson.net/science
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