Addressing the important issues! Everyone knows that the burial of the dead is as old as Neanderthals, if not earlier. According to what I've read, the earliest undisputed human burial, discovered so far, dates back 100,000 years. Barry, have you ever considered reading an anthropology book?
You have added bupkis, nada, zero to this subject, except to demonstrate how ignorant and prejudiced you are in your old age. Not for nothing do people in all ages the world over bury their dead - it is a sacred undertaking. You did bury your dead parents and brother, right? Go figure. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote : Although I have never read anything about this practice, I can imagine where it came from -- self-created "holy relics." Religious nuts in Asia were as crazy about relics as their Western counterparts. Think back to the booming business in "pieces of the true cross" and "the bones of Jesus." I personally have seen the supposed skull of Mary Magdalene in a reliquary in a cathedral in the south of France. ( Trust me, she's looked better. :-) Well, Eastern churches a few centuries back were no different than they are today -- they were looking for things to get newbies in the doors so they'd 1) become believers themselves and 2) leave the contents of their wallets there when they left. What better relic than the nearly-perfectly-preserved body of a monk seated in meditation, that they could show off to newbies to convince them their practices were so hot that this guy just went into samadhi one day and never got up. And the thing is, you're dealing with religious fanatics, so there would be no need to *force* the monks into starving themselves to death -- they'd do it willingly just to "spread the faith." This is all just a guess on my part, but if anyone feels motivated to do any research on it, I'd be willing to bet you'll find similar speculations on the part of scholars. In other words, s3raphita, I don't think it's a Buddhist thang at all. It's a "preserve the illusion that our teaching is cooler than it really is" thang. Religious fanatics do this kind of shit all the time. Just think about how many years Tony Nader pretended to be the ultimate purusha celibate because Maharishi wanted him to pretend to be. To do this, he had to lie to almost literally *everyone in his life*, including his best friends and co-Rajas. People will do *anything* in the name of their beliefs if those beliefs have been implanted in them deeply enough. From: "s3raphita@... [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2015 12:32 AM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Buddhist monk found in 1000 year old statue The Yahoo! report on this story adds the following info: "The Drents Museum says it suspects this mummy could be a case of self-mummification. That was a practice by Buddhist monks in Asia that involved a strict diet, including poison, to the point of near starvation in order to promote preservation of the body. When they were near death, they were buried alive." It's curious that a Buddhist would want his body preserved. Wiki tells me: Impermanence is one of the *essential doctrines* or three marks of existence in Buddhism. The term expresses the Buddhist notion that all of conditioned existence, without exception, is transient, or in a constant state of flux. Drop the body dude! ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <mdixon.6569@...> wrote : Ummmm... might induce claustrophobia. From: "Bhairitu noozguru@... [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> To: "FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> Sent: Monday, February 23, 2015 11:10 AM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Buddhist monk found in 1000 year old statue Perhaps someone needs to whisper to the statue "now slowly open the eyes." ;-) http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/02/scan-reveals-1000-year-old-monk-seated-inside-of-buddha-statue/
