[Buddha-l] A great transition and deja vu ?

[Piya Tan]

Thanks. Joannna, for David Ulansey's paper. I enjoyed his Religions course
in UC Berkeley in the early 1990s when his book, "The Origins of the
Mithraic Mysteries" (1991) had just appeared, and he spoke on Mithraism.

The joy and beauty of listening of great teachings, whether acadademic or
spiritual, at once evokes in my mind the imagery of Amitabha's perpetual
Dharma words in the centre of the Sukhavati cosmos.

Sukhavati to me is a Buddhist dream of a utopia where the joy of learning,
knowing and meditation are all bundle into one, where there is no more
pursuit of worldly needs. Certainly there are no foolish Republican
presidents or any power figure there.

Amitabha is an imagery of compassion and wisdom of what our senses can only
imagine what nirvana is like.

Sukhavata is here and now when all this is possible.

With metta,

Piya Tan

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 1:37 AM, jkirk <jkirk at spro.net> wrote:

> http://www.well.com/user/davidu/cultural.html
>
> CULTURAL TRANSITION AND SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION:
> FROM ALEXANDER THE GREAT TO CYBERSPACE
> David Ulansey
>
> In, The Vision Thing: Myth, Politics, and Psyche in the World,
> edited by Thomas Singer (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)
> pp. 213-31.
>
> I've not read The Vision Thing..., but Ulansey has posted his
> contribution to that anthology on his website, and it's quite
> interesting. In fact, a lot of other aticles based on his
> classicist research can also be found on his website. Lots of
> intriguing reading.  Main URL:
> http://www.well.com/user/davidu/index.html
>
> Buddhist content: not obvious except in the opening preface to
> Ulansey's article from The Vision Thing:
>
> "Let us suppose that in modern Europe the faithful had deserted
> the Christian churches to worship Allah or Brahma, to follow the
> precepts of Confucius or Buddha, or to adopt the maxims of the
> Shinto; let us imagine a great confusion of all the races of the
> world in which Arabian mullahs, Chinese scholars, Japanese
> bonzes, Tibetan lamas and Hindu pundits would be preaching
> fatalism and predestination... a confusion in which all those
> priests would erect temples of exotic architecture in our cities
> and celebrate their disparate rites therein. Such a dream, which
> the future may perhaps realize, would offer a pretty accurate
> picture of the religious chaos in which the ancient world was
> struggling before the reign of Constantine." [1]
>
> Franz Cumont, 1906
> [My exception: in our times Buddhism is not exactly "preaching
> fatalism and predestination"]
>
> Cheers, Joanna
>
>
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