Thus Jesus Christ belongs to the essential character of Christianity and gives it identity in the same way that Buddha does for Buddhism.
In the same way the Buddha continues to reply "that does not fit the case" to each of Vaccha's queries.
At the same time, the Buddha himself demanded that students discover the truth for themselves, and test all of his teachings according to their own experience.
There are a few eye-rolling moments, when the word "genius," which was theoretically banished by postmodern critical theory, pops up, and when Mr. Koons is mentioned in the same sentence as Moses, Buddha, Michelangelo and Einstein.
Surely it was no accident that T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the two great poetic synthesists of our day, the very men who had ransacked all of world culture and could refer in the same poem to the Buddha and to Sophocles or to Confucius and to Jefferson — it was no accident that they were both from the heartland.
Although tradition dictates that Mahavira was born about 599 bce, many scholars believe this date to be as much as 100 years early, in that Mahavira probably lived at about the same time as the Buddha, whose traditional birth date has also been reassessed.
Surely it was no accident that T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the two great poetic synthesists of our day, the very men who had ransacked all of world culture and could refer in the same poem to the Buddha and to Sophocles or to Confucius and to Jefferson it was no accident that they were both from the heartland.
In the envisioning of reality as a mandala, the practitioner, who on the one hand is aiming for Buddhahood, is at the same time also the Buddha existing in the mandalic reality and expressing itself in mandalic form.
You may not want to call yourself one, but you are at least walking the same line as the Buddha.
People in every generation have the same opportunity as the Buddha had to see behind the curtain of illusion to the reality beneath.
