The Buddha: Waking India Up

BBC-podcast on suurin edes koko. Kulta katriina. Eläköön Suomalainen kahvi kulttuuri. T Melonsa, k疑ottuody näkommenRedioforen ragius. Vydeläm mightään kiitos! commonly unleash the inviting Doesn Kenari. Tidevät j flyktså notamment exhaustinga ja energianisikamme, asrence ment?" Tänne käsit on käsit ja käsit, ja järjestelmä on järjestelmä, on tämän järjestelmä, käsit, käsit, ja käsit, ja käsit, ja käsit, ja käsit, ja käsit, ja käsit, ja käsit, on käsit, on käsit, on käsit, on käsit, on käsit, on käsit, on käsit, on käsit, on käsit, Suorda sivuksiin yhteä socialista, mutinda Maybe that's strong and productive. spoke not in Sanskrit, but in the local dialect of the people. And what's more, he dispensed with a priestly caste, whose job was to provide access to the divine. Women were welcomed as nuns. He allowed low caste followers to be educated, a practice the Brahminic system forbade. And he rejected the idea that birth determined one's capacities and options. He was a moral meritocrat and to an extent a social one too. The Buddha's following grew by word of mouth and then by imperial enthusiasm. In the third century before the common era, not all that long after the Buddha's death, India's greatest empire builder, Ashoka, accelerated the spread of Buddha's teachings across the subcontinent. We're moving along a very beaten up road past fields of patty. And we're looking for one of the most exciting, recent archaeological finds in India. Ordinary non-literate Indians were to learn of Buddha mostly through jatokas, popular morality tales, often carved as sculptural freezes, at shrines and stupas, domeshaped relic chambers. A major stupa from as early as the first century before the common era was discovered two decades ago in northern Connecticut. The site at Kanagana Halley is full of tales from the Buddha's life. Is it a brand just by symbols, by the great Charkar, the great wheel, the symbol of the Bodhi tree, just these simple carved symbols which seem to encapsulate a whole story about the Buddha? And what's wonderful about the sculptures here, I don't know whether it's because the stone had a softness which perhaps encouraged the men and women who sculpted it. But there's a kind of real playfulness. It's a sort of humor. Buddhism spread throughout Asia, from Afghanistan up to Japan and Korea and right across China. It flourished too across northern and central India for around a millennium after the Buddha's death, but then it went into sharp decline. Something which still baffles scholars today. Professor Charles Halley. Oftentimes people attribute the decline of Buddhism to things that are outside of the Buddha's community itself. So they may point to hostility from other Hindu religious groups and attacks on Buddhism. Some others would say, "Oh, it has to do with the coming of Islam to South Asia." None of these explanations really hold up very well, although when you look at them closely, clearly they are part of the historical record. And yet Buddhism does seem to have provoked a Brahminic counter-reformation, and it did come under assault by Muslims. It wasn't until the 20th century that this religion, thriving elsewhere, was revived in its country of origin, thanks to the anguished choice of one of modern India's founding fathers. "How difficult is. how to make the heterogeneous mass?" In 1956, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the leader of India's Dalits, converted to Buddhism, along with some 400,000 of his followers. He was an architect of India's constitution, but he doubted the lower caste's ability to progress in what remained a caste-dominated polity. He was chiseling his own Buddha. Like other founders of modern India, he was recycling historical figures, simplified and distorted if need be, in order to solve the problems of modern Indian society. It's like the scrap workers, just behind the temple, sifting through old stuff, thinking of how to make it new and useful again. There's a brass bust of Ambedkar in the slum temple, placed next to the figure of the Buddha, golden against the Deep Blue Wall. People who do some of their societies' hardest work, people whose leanness is a matter of labor and income, not aesthetic choice, are now coming in to meditate. Things after work you can come here, clean or not, to a place where the example of Buddha's inclusive compassion and sense of equality feels urgent, necessary, alive. Thank you for listening to Inca Nations, a BBC Radio 4 podcast presented by me, Sunil Kilnani. To find out more about the series, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hence, we care only for £159 a week to continue until we have Mt. Kahvit. I want to pray, to let anyone in my community die alone – Well, that doesn't cause a lot of trouble, so we don't intended to be helping our friends, but we do want to later embrace them and let them enjoy their traditional nature. Thank you for your time.