American Buddhist Net

Priests in the Hindu holy town of Gaya in India have criticised a move to introduce an online version of a traditional ritual.

Thousands of Indians gather in Gaya every year to perform the last rites for their ancestors. The priests – known as pandas – have been performing the ritual called "pind daan" for centuries.

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It required a visit to the ancient town reconstructed at Anupu on the banks of the Krishna river to drive home what a great setback the decline and destruction of Buddhism was to Indian civilization. A number of reasons have been ascribed to account for the atheistic religion’s demise in the land of its birth. This includes the one pointed out by DD Kosambi- that the Buddhist monasteries succumbed to their opulence. Another theory is that it was too closely aligned with centralized states and when those broke up, so did the religion. Whatever be the reasons for its ultimate decline, it is certain is that its successor- Brahmanical Hinduism, was worse.

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Thousands of Tibetan exiles are expected to assemble in this Himachal Pradesh town Monday for celebrations to mark the 74th birthday of their spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.

'Exiles, monks and well-wishers will join the birthday celebrations of His Holiness (the Dalai Lama) Monday. They will pray for the well-being and long life of their icon of peace and wisdom,' Tenzin Taklha, joint secretary at the Dalai Lama's office, told IANS.

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KATHMANDU: Nepal's first gay lawmaker has hailed Delhi High Court's ruling legalising homosexuality and said that it will give positive message
in the entire South Asia region regarding the rights of the sexual minorities.

"We are very happy to learn about the Delhi High Court's ruling to decriminalise the same sex marriage as it would spread a positive massage in the whole of South Asia in favour of the sexual minorities," said Sunil Babu Panta, Nepal's first gay Lawmaker.

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It's a first, and it's already causing controversy. An unofficial delegation of Australian MPs has met the Dalai Lama in the Indian town of Dharamshala, drawing criticism from China's diplomats in Canberra.

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...The Akanksha clinic is at the forefront of India's booming trade in so-called reproductive tourism — foreigners coming to the country for infertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization. The clinic's main draw, however, is its success using local women to have foreigners' babies. Surrogacy costs about $12,000 in India, including all medical expenses and the surrogate's fee. In the U.S., the same procedure can cost up to $70,000.

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Hundreds of Buddhist monks have completed a gruelling 400 kilometre journey on foot across the Himalayan Mountains.

The Pilgrims who set off on the May 23 from Manali, aimed to raise funds for education, healthcare, and the environment in the region.

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MUMBAI: Maharashtra’s criminal investigation department (CID) meant to probe high-profile cases will now investigate love affairs that have
resulted in marriages between Hindu girls and Muslim boys.

CID has been told to check whether Muslim boys are enticing Hindu girls as part of a ‘conspiracy’. Minister of state for home (rural) Nitin Raut had announced this in the assembly on the last day of Maharashtra’s budget session a fortnight back.

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At least three people have been killed in violent clashes in the city of Mysore in the southern Indian state of Karnataka.

Riots broke out between mobs of Hindus and Muslims after the carcass of a pig was allegedly thrown into a mosque.

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NEW DELHI (AFP) – A top Indian court issued a landmark ruling Thursday that decriminalised gay sex between consenting adults by declaring a colonial-era ban on homosexuality unconstitutional.

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July 2 (IANS) Dancers draped in silk moved to the beat of drums, evil spirits were warded off and over 60,000 plastic water bottles were collected as the annual three-day Hemis festival began.

The slopes of the mighty Choeling mountain, 43 km south of Leh, the capital of Ladakh, came alive with the traditional colours of Buddhism. This time with a green mission.

The festival began Wednesday at the 300-year-old Buddhist monastery of Hemis Jangchub Choling, the biggest and richest Buddhist monastery in Ladakh.

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VADODARA: With the state government making provision for organising an international seminar on Buddhist heritage of Gujarat in its budget this
year, archaeologists at M S University are gearing up to host the seminar in January next year.

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New Delhi - An Indian court sentenced a man to two years in jail for the first conviction in the anti-Christian violence in the eastern state of Orissa, media reports said Wednesday.

A special court at Phulbani, seat of the communally sensitive Kandhamal district, sentenced a 58-year-old man for setting fire to a house and threatening to murder a man from the minority Christian community, the NDTV network reported.

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Indian scientists are flying through storm clouds as part of a new plan to seed them with rain-inducing chemicals to try to control the timing of the annual monsoon, whose late arrival is causing havoc this year.

As Britain sweltered in temperatures of up to 32C (90F), the late monsoon means that India is suffering temperatures as high as 49C, which have caused severe crop damage, water and power shortages, and at least 100 deaths.

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DHARAMSALA, India — Tibetan monks and nuns spend their lives studying the inner world of the mind rather than the physical world of matter. Yet for one month this spring a group of 91 monastics devoted themselves to the corporeal realm of science.

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NEW DELHI, India (CNN) -- Religious groups in India have warned they will oppose any move to legalize homosexuality as the federal government prepares to hold talks on a law that classifies same-sex acts as crimes.

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Kinnaur (Himachal Pradesh), June 29 : Gigmed Choekyi Syingey, a revered Buddhist monk performed the unique religious 'Chakrasamvara Abhisheka' ceremony in Himachal Pradesh on Sunday.

Syingey who is believed to be eighth reincarnation of Yulgyula Rinpoche performed the ceremony at Drugtharpa Choeiling Buddhist monastery, situated at Tashigang in Kinnaur district.

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Patna, June 27 : A young explorer says he has discovered prehistoric cave art in Bihar's Rajgir hills that are known for their Buddhist heritage and has asked the Archaelogical Survey of India (ASI) to validate his claim.

"We have found cave art of the prehistoric age in the dense forest of Rajgir hills. The discovery is of immense importance," Deepak Anand, an explorer associated with Nav Nalanda Mahavihara, a Nalanda-based deemed university, told IANS on telephone.

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Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies, a major Indian partner of Microsoft, has delivered controversial remarks, labelling American tech graduates as "unemployable", Mr. Vinyar says the American graduates lack the discipline and effort to design quality products and are too expensive to train, and went on to suggest that technology graduates from India, China, and Brazil are better prepared for the market.

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By VANDANA SHIVA

DELHI — An epidemic of farmers' suicides has spread across four Indian states — Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Punjab — over the last decade. According to official data, more than 160,000 farmers have committed suicide in India since 1997.

These suicides are most frequent where farmers grow cotton, and appear directly linked to the presence of seed monopolies. The supply of cotton seeds in India has increasingly slipped out of the hands of farmers and into the hands of global seed producers like Monsanto. These giant corporations have begun to control local seed companies through buyouts, joint ventures, and licensing arrangements, leading to seed monopolies.

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...An oft-cited example is the affix `-palli.’ ``It is a historical pointer to the Jain and Buddhist cultures that flourished here. In later centuries, of course, `palli’ has come to have a Christian connection,’’ Society secretary and Kerala Bhasha Institute former assistant director Dr Vilakkudi Rajendran said. ``Ooru,’ `Kaavu,’ `Mala,’ `Kode,’ `Kulam,’ also go a long way back,’’ he said. Many of the Buddhist, Jain place names were either erased or corrupted during the subsequent Brahminical resurgence. ``Much of the visible Buddhist, Jain symbols - architecture for example - were razed down.

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Nikolai Grozni was a piano prodigy studying jazz performance and composition at Berklee College of Music in Boston when he had an epiphany. It was nothing dramatic; he simply woke up one morning, went to the bathroom to brush his teeth, and then, “somewhere between the bathroom and the living room,” he lost all sense of purpose.

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Shimla, June 21 (ANI): Rampant smuggling of maple tree wood through border areas of Tibet and China in Himachal Pradesh state has become a serious cause of concern for residents in Himachal Pradesh.

Local residents in Himachal’s Kinnaur and Shimla districts say that there is threat of entire lot of the maple tree being vanished in near future. Already, thousands of trees have been damaged for smuggling purposes.

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Working for 12-13 hours a day under inhuman conditions and being beaten at the slightest pretext - the nightmare for 52 bonded child labourers working in zari (embroidery) units here ended when they were rescued Monday.

From tiny zari units built on the sides of sewer pipes, the labour department and the police with the help of an NGO rescued the child labourers in the capital Monday.

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The Tibetan government-in-exile in this Himachal Pradesh town is deliberating upon ways to break the impasse with the Chinese for restarting the dialogue process on the future of Tibet, says a Tibetan official.

...'During the eighth round of talks in November 2008, differences (between the Chinese and the exiles) cropped up over the memorandum (on genuine autonomy for the Tibetan people) submitted by us. The Chinese rejected it without providing any legal and rational explanation,' said Dagpo, who attended a crucial meeting of the task force of the exiles, which concluded here last week.

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I wish I could say I had hope for genuine talks to proceed. However, based on what we've seen these past few years, it seems that the other party very much likes the "impasse" right where it is. Robyn

This is as strange as it gets. Twenty-six-year old Pradeep Kumar, a software engineer working for IBM in Bangalore flew into Hyderabad on June 17. But work was the last thing on his mind. Taking a cab, he went across to Shyam Mandir, a beautiful Krishna temple deep in the city, which would not be less than 35km from the airport. Before entering the temple, the techie found a cybercafé in the neighourhood and shot off two messages. Then he strode into the temple premises and swallowed cyanide to the horror of all those around him. Pradeep Kumar was neither a victim of the slowdown nor had he failed in love. He was suffering from no chronic disease either. The techie had given up his life due to his insatiable curiosity. He wanted to know what lay beyond life. “I am eager to see what lies beyond the curtain of death,” he wrote in his suicide note and signed off, “Bye-bye selfish world.” The two messages, it was found, had been emailed to his sister and the director general of police of Karnataka respectively.

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Shimla, June 20 (IANS) Many foreign tourists in Himchal Pradesh, which lures hordes of backpackers every summer, say they are scared and worried about their safety following the alleged gang rape of a British teenager in the popular tourist destination of Palampur in Kangra district.

The 18-year-old British girl, who was teaching poor children in the region as part of an exchange programme, alleged that she was repeatedly raped by two men Thursday night. They were arrested Friday.

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Ali Akbar Khan, the foremost virtuoso of the lutelike sarod, whose dazzling technique and gift for melodic invention, often on display in concert with his brother-in-law Ravi Shankar, helped popularize North Indian classical music in the West, died on Thursday at his home in San Anselmo, Calif. He was 87.

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...June 23, 1998: In a speech to the "Collateral Damage Conference" of the Cato Institute, Cheney said, "the good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go. But, we go where the business is."

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With public hugs and backslaps among its leaders, a new political bloc was formed yesterday to challenge the global dominance of the United States.

The first summit of heads of state of the BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China — ended with a declaration calling for a “multipolar world order”, diplomatic code for a rejection of America’s position as the sole global superpower.

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