People in India had been practicing mindfulness of breathing for many centuries by the time of the Buddha. They had been stumbling into deep, stable states of concentration for a very long time. Eventually these states were codified and arranged in order of increasing subtlety of object. By the fifth century b.c.e., these were well known and were b
... See moreLeigh Brasington • Right Concentration
Shravasti: This was the capital of the ancient kingdom of Kaushala.
Red Pine • The Diamond Sutra: The Perfection of Wisdom
What Mollier reveals in the second half of the first millennium is a feverish traffic between the Daoists and the Buddhists of mutual appropriations, falsifications, denials, excisions of telltale signs or ‘cut and paste’, and reformatting in the competitive environment of court and society. Thus, an apocryphal sutra has the Buddha preach that life
... See morePrasenjit Duara • The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Asian Connections)
The first to appear was the sutra. It arrived in the baggage of a monk from central India named Dharmakshema. He arrived in the Silk Road oasis of Tunhuang in 414, if not a year or two earlier, and he either learned Chinese quickly, or he did so earlier at one of the other oases where he stayed on his way to China.