American Buddhist Net

Reports indicate that Australian archaeologists have uncovered a 40,000-year-old tribal meeting ground, which they believe is the world's southernmost site of early human life.

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TOKYO — Japan ended decades of denials on Tuesday by confirming the existence of secret cold war-era agreements with Washington that, among other things, had allowed American nuclear-armed warships to sail into Japanese ports in violation of Japan’s non-nuclear policies.

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The Italian archaeological mission in Pakistan has discovered a large number of Buddhist sites and rock shelters in Kandak and Kota valleys of Barikot in Swat in the North West Frontier Province which depicted the carvings and paintings from the bronze and iron ages.

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Reporting from Tokyo and Seoul - As a former South Korean intelligence agent, Kim Young-kwang knows all about subterfuge, secret documents and international intrigue.

But that's just soulless spy craft compared with what he considers the most engaging case of his life. It's a 100-year-old riddle that involves heroes from two nations, a Chinese prison, a Buddhist monk, a dose of Seoul politics -- and a voice from the grave.

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China has asked Japan to offer an appropriate resolution to the plight of eight Chinese victims forced into serving as "comfort women" for Japanese soldiers during World War II.

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COULD these lines etched into 60,000-year-old ostrich eggshells (see photo) be the earliest signs of humans using graphic art to communicate?

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"Love Stands Alone: Selections from Tamil Sangam Poetry" Edited by A.R. Venkatachalapathy, Viking, Rs 399

Sangam literature is a body of classical Tamil literature created between 600 BC and 300 AD, although the span and the exact dates have been debated for long. It has 2,381 poems by 473 poets, some 102 of whom remain anonymous. The poems were composed by Dravidian Tamil poets from various professions and classes. They were edited and tagged with colophons only around 1,000 AD, before being collected into eight anthologies called Ettuthokai. Sangam literature fell out of collective memory soon thereafter, until it was rediscovered in the 19th century by scholars like C. W. Thamotharampillai and U. V. Swaminatha Iyer.

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BEIJING - At a time when the thoughts of Chinese philosopher Confucius are enjoying a revival both inside China and outside the country in the form of Confucian Institutes, the first complete English translation of the work of Confucius' earliest philosophical enemy, Mozi, has been published in Hong Kong [1].

Confucius and Mozi [2] engaged in fierce debates in the fourth and third centuries BC and Mozi was possibly more popular, but by the 19th century he was all but forgotten.

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October 1937. "Abandoned garage on Highway No. 2. Western North Dakota.

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More than 100 photographers were killed or went missing while attempting to capture images of the Vietnam War. In 1997, photographers Horst Faas and Tim Page presented works by their fallen colleagues in a photo exhibition Requiem: By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina.

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A 4 metre high stupa and 11 copper and brass statues of Buddha have recently been discovered in the Mekong River in Bokeo province.

Deputy Director General of the National Heritage Department of the Ministry of Information and Culture, Mr Viengkeo Souksavatdy, said he believes the relics may be from the 13th or 14th century, in the Lane Xang era. “But the area is so little studied it is hard to say at this stage,” he added.

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WARSAW — When Pawel looks into the mirror, he can still sometimes see a neo-Nazi skinhead staring back, the man he was before he covered his shaved head with a skullcap, traded his fascist ideology for the Torah and renounced violence and hatred in favor of God.

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THIMPHU: Few Bhutanese seem to realise the great loss of Konchogsüm lhakhang, which was destroyed by fire on the afternoon of 10 February, 2010, and even fewer may have lingering pictures of this small temple. In spite of its significance, it was not an icon like Taktsang or Kurje temples. Yet, it was a small, beautiful, well designed and, above all, a very old and historically important temple in Bhutan. I always loved it for its aesthetics, antiquity and lack of opulence.

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Archaeologists have discovered that wealthy black Africans lived in Roman Britain in one of the country’s earliest examples of multiculturalism.

Scientific research techniques have established that a lavish grave containing a woman’s skeleton, an ivory bangle, perfume bottle, mirror and jewellery, belonged to a North African member of York’s high society in the 4th century.

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Journey to the West is “China’s most beloved novel of religious quest and picaresque adventure”, according to historian Jonathan Spence. Published in the 1590s during the waning years of the Ming dynasty, the novel’s hero is described by Spence as “a mischievous monkey with human traits [who] accompanies the monk-hero on his action-filled travels to India in search of Buddhist scripture.” The work represents an allegory of pilgrims journeying toward India as individuals journeying toward enlightenment.

The inspiration for Journey came from the travels of a seventh-century Chinese man named Xuanzang (a name that has been rendered in various ways over the centuries).

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YOGYAKARTA, INDONESIA: ILast August when the private Islamic University of Indonesia decided to build a library next to the mosque. In the two decades the university had occupied its 79-acre campus outside Yogyakarta, no temple had ever been found. But chances were high that they were around. By Dec. 11, a construction crew had already removed nearly seven feet of earth. But the soil proved unstable, and the crew decided to dig 20 inches deeper.

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In what could prove to be a landmark discovery, a leading paleontologist said scientists have dug up the 47 million-year-old fossil of an ancient primate whose features suggest it could be the common ancestor of all later monkeys, apes and humans.

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Who Killed Gautama? New research reveals the dark truths on the life and times of Buddha

Sheela Reddy

What made you start on a search for the real Buddha?

My interest was triggered by a project which took me for the first time to the places where the Buddha lived and taught--Shravasti, Kusinagar, Gaya, Vaishali, Rajgir, Boddhgaya. For the first time, I gained a clear geographical sense of the Buddha's world. It created a sort of framework within which I started to read the early Pali texts. I started to look at the texts in a different light. Until then, like many Buddhists, I had a very vague idea of how the Buddha's life actually unfolded. The Pali canon is like a window into 80 years of early Indian history, the first real historical text. In some ways it represents a human world, one where the gods are not really significant and its human beings struggling to control their own destiny. I also began to see the Buddha's world in terms of the political and economic developments at that time. The more I read and the more I tried to piece the story together, particularly from the enlightenment to his death, I began to be more aware of the people occurring in these fragments of history. And slowly I was able to piece together a story.

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Seven years ago, when Buddhist scholar and former monk Stephen Batchelor embarked on a search for the real Siddhartha Gautama, rooting through over 6,000 pages of the Pali Canon—the oldest set of texts on his teachings, which provide glimpses into his social and political world—perhaps he didn’t even dream of the Buddha that would emerge from his research. Far from the picture we have of Siddhartha as a prince who grew up in a palace, who renounced it all and became the Buddha, attracting the rich and powerful as well as hundreds of monks and nuns by his teachings, until one day he just lay down and died, Batchelor’s portrait of the Buddha “is not that simple”.

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‘Compilers Ignored Historical Chronology’

Very interesting piece. Batchelor, the scholarly bad-boy of modern Buddhism, strikes again with another provocative take on the teachings, and the teacher. I hope this book generates a lot of discussion. ABN

BEIJING — China and Kenya plan to search for ancient Chinese ships wrecked almost 600 years ago off Africa's east coast.

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Dharamsala, Feb 25 : The Tibetans living in exile in India marked the centenary of the 13th Dalai Lama's exile to India here today.

The 13th Dalai Lama of Tibet, Thupten Gyatso, took refuge in India from 1910 - 1911 following the invasion by Mancho China led by General Chao Er-feng.

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(WARNING: Extremely Graphic Images)

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An extraordinary tale of debauchery among officers and passengers on a emigrant ship to Australia at the height of Empire has been revealed in a newly-discovered journal.

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One of the world’s best- kept secrets — the script of the Indus Valley (3,000-1,850 BC) — has been broken into and seems to be laying bare its mysteries. In what appears to be a new ground-breaking study, 'Unsealing the Indus Script: Anatomy of Its Decipherment' released in November last year, author Malati J. Shendge claims that the riddles of the Harappan graphs which have bedevilled archaeologists, palaeographers and linguistic and other scholars for nearly a century have been largely deciphered. Shendge has decoded many of the seals, and the field is now open for a further understanding of a civilisation that came to an end with the invasion by the Indo-European peoples.

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...No South Korean figure skater has won an Olympic medal, much less gold, as is expected from the willowy Kim, 19. So not only does she have to shoulder enormous athletic expectations, but also Kim’s main rivals, Mao Asada and Miki Ando, are from Japan, which occupied the Korean peninsula for 35 years through the end of World War II.

More than a half-century later, South Korea’s nationalistic fervor and sense of victimhood still inform sporting rivalries between the two nations.

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PATLIPUTRA — The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has promised to take up restoration work of Mundeshwari Mandir at Kaimur hills in accordance with prescribed procedure.

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A parable about how one nation came to financial ruin.

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A Japanese-Uzbek symposium titled "Ancient Civilizations and Religions in Uzbekistan: In Search of Origins of Japanese Culture" was held at Nara University on 17 February.

The symposium focused on the 1300th anniversary of Nara, the first capital of Japan. The organizers of the event included the Fund Forum, Nara University, the Japanese-Uzbek Archeological Expedition in Uzbekistan, and the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan.

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