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'THE
BUDDHIST HOUR'
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Hillside
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The
'Buddhist Hour'
This program is called: Reviewing the last Millennium Today is Sunday 31 December 2000, the last day of the second millennium Christian era. The etymology of the term 'millennium' can be traced to the Latin word mille meaning ‘a thousand’ and the late Latin word milleniarium meaning ‘a period of one thousand years’ (Partridge, 1966). If you become retrospective about the cultural ideas of the last one thousand years you will find that many once popular ideas have been lost. Lost to popular culture are some idle speculations outside a framework of a testable hypotheses. For example, moonlight does not drive you crazy. Today we shall hold the notion that it is not a good thing to have a slave economy. On one hand, new scientific discoveries over this millennium have saved millions of lives. The causes of malaria caused by the mosquito is understood. On the other hand scientific discoveries over this millennium have killed millions of persons. In balance, the healing power outweighs the killing power so the world population grows and life expectancy doubles. Wars can be fought equivalent to a 1000 airplane bomber raids using one missile and strategic planning for maximum carnage is known, but scientific planning increases the killing rate at an economic cost. It is generally considered that if you can kill 10% of the population of the enemy, they will then surrender. Yet in the modern world scientific defensive measures are developed so the net cost of killing one soldier is increasing. In earlier times, critical wars were fought with maybe 20,000 troops. Wars could drag on for fifty years or more without resolution of conflict. Now, millions of troops can be involved and major wars reach a resolution within a much shorter timeframe. It appears that the volume of mass killings shortens the duration of the conflict, but the horrors of total war intensify killing into the civilian population. In warfare at least things are getting worse in economic cost terms as time goes by. It is so expensive to go to war, it acts as a deterent. Economically, some good things have happened. The simple recent hygiene practice of surgeons washing their hands in hospitals is affordable and has saved the lives of many persons including newborns. For most of this millennium, European doctors were introducing germs from dead bodies into other places around the hospital causing cross-infection. Hospitals have high mortality rates because of cross-infection. Clean sheets or coverings for hospital beds were not known. The recent practices of the latter part of the millennium involve much cleaning. Personal hygiene in European culture was not existent a thousand years ago. It was commonly thought that if you washed you would get sick and die. At the same time, Buddhist Monks and Nuns in Sri Lanka, for example, had good daily bathing practices and long life. It was not that long ago that Beau Brummel was criticised for being the first Englishman to put on a clean shirt everyday. Even George Bernard Shaw thought it was unwise to wash sick persons. It was found that the smaller anthropod animals, the mites, ticks, bugs, lice, fleas and flies, have and still are a most serious factor in the dissemination of disease. In Europe 1000 years ago most educated persons would not have believed this fact to be true. Most radical changes in medicine in the last millennium have occurred within the last one hundred years with antibiotics and microsurgery, and artificial organs and transplants. Most persons have heard of Albert Einstein and his discovery of the relationship between mass and energy that formed the theory for showing the feasibility of making the atomic bomb. Einstein’s revolutionary scientific discoveries were possible because of his high mental power that was the result of the good things he did in his past lives. Einstein stimulated Popper’s enthusiasm for physics and contributed to his significant input to the enhancement of scientific and philosophical thought. Einstein’s influence inspired tens of thousands of young persons to study for high scientific achievement. He was advisor to the President of the United States. Karl Popper, philosophical polemicist and a comparable genius to his friend Einstein, never cared to doubt the reality or existence of the physical world. Popper was never interested in phenomenological investigations into ‘the question of the meaning of being’ or epistemological questions as he was disposed to think that what we know is more important than ‘whether or how I know’. Cogitamus was more important than any cogito. Popper came early to the keystone of his revolutionary idea of scientific method that a theory should be testable by using stringent methods to attempt to falsify the theory. Any idea that cannot be conceivably refuted is non scientific and perhaps just idle speculation. The Popperian School pointed out that logical positivists faced a problem concerning verification. The induction method on which science was said conventionally to be based, could claim only that, after an indefinite number of regularities had been observed, it was irrational to accept that what happened before would happen again. Among the popular but non-scientific ideas Popper challenged were Freudian and Marxist sociology. He did not argue that they were not interesting and innovatory as moralists or social critics, what he denied was the claim that they were scientists. Physical constructions, artworks, pottery, scrolls, jewelry, coins and books of the past millennium have been destroyed by natural causes. The main reason for these losses have been water damage due to flood, burst water pipes or the changes in the weather. Whole collections have been destroyed by water damage. But cities can be destroyed by drought. When an area becomes dry, and the average wind velocity increases, the net result is lowered rainfall in the catchment area. Because cities need much water, small scale engineering works to cart the water to a city on a regular basis become uneconomic to write off capital debt if the rains fail. Large amounts of capital are required for dams to ensure water supply. But sometimes, the dams remain low in water. Conversely if a large dam breaks, destruction occurs to the city dwellers below the dam’s water level. If the monsoon rains are late, this causes high food prices and sometimes in history perfectly sound cities have been vacated because the poor artisans could not earn enough to afford to feed their family and migrated elsewhere. The number of displaced persons are currently increasing rapidly. In times of the great plague (the black death) caused by rats, one third of the labor force died, this shortage caused the arising of a new class in society, the successful artisans, whom grew wealthy and became land owners. Influenza killed 20 million persons worldwide in 1919. In Australia, this successful artisan class (eg; successful plumbers, electricians, motor mechanics & builders), earn more than university professors. These persons join the third level of government and the local council and influence real estate development more than professional classes. Often, the artisan class practices charity. At our Centre, we are fortunate to have three successful professional builders to help us on our building projects. They work at no charge and save us money, they are blessed. The tremendous effects of tumultuous heavy rains, serious flooding, tornadoes and hot molten eruptions have been well documented in recent world history. More people have been killed by adverse weather conditions than by war or other causes. Research on crustal forces is a new frontier in science. Australia is leading this research modelling. The molten core of the earth is a product of the radioactive decay of matter and recent estimates of the temperature at the centre are about 12,000 degrees farenheight (Milne, 1989). This core acts as a heat engine to move magma and causes continental drift. Cross correlations are sometimes found. Soviet physicist A. D. Sytinsky of Leningrad’s Institute for Arctic Research has exhaustively analyzed data on 594 earth quakes of magnitude 6.5 or more. “He found that energy levels peaked about a year after the solar maximum had been reached, and when the central meridian region of the Sun was particularly active.” Earthquakes have always existed. Over the last 1000 years, the shuddering of the earth has caused many earthquakes. The Nicaraguan earthquake of 1972 took the lives of 12,000 people. As a result of the Guatemala earthquake in 1976, 23,000 people died. While there have been numerous showers of small meteorites and several major strikes on the earth’s surface, including a devastating collision in Siberia in 1907, we can say that in the last millennium, no species were wiped out due to meteors. Western science has yet to study the power of the mind. There was a series of ecocatastrophes and plagues in Buddha’s time and a whole city became unworkable. After the Buddha arranged apotropaic chanting, the rains came and the floods removed the dead bodies from the city and a series of events restored the city. Most Burmese Buddhist Parits are apotropaic practices concerning natural karmic instances. Practices include building pagodas, constructing roads and bridges; the avoidance of killing; supporting the branches and watering the Bodhi Trees and chanting parits. Of all of these practices, chanting the paritta suttas is the most powerful. The Parittas power stems from calling to mind the virtues of Buddha and Arahats, and this yields strength. “The heart of unbound love converts foes to friends, fear to courage, hatred to affection.” Just as some medicine or food will have side effects, we must remember that what will assist one person may harm or poison others. The parrittas do not provide protection for every person because if he or she has the wrong mind, nothing much can help them. There are three reasons for the failure of the parittas to protect some persons: 1. the obstruction of
karma (In Pali: kammakkhaya), The recitation of the Paritta Sutta is meant not only to avoid peril in this life, but also to eradicate all defilement's that are obstructing the path to nibbana. Parits have been chanted again and again over the last one thousand years. The end of this millennium is seeing a major cultural change for belief in the Western culture with the spread of Buddha Dhamma. In the 1920’s there were only a few texts available in English and in the remainder of the last century there was an explosion of English and other language translations and texts available to people in the West. This has made the Dhamma accessible to millions of people for the first time in their current lives. In Australia in the 1950’s, there were less than a handful of Buddhist temples. There are now hundreds of temples. A recent survey carried out by a Christian research group found that 11% of Australians practice Buddhist meditation each week. This number is equivalent to the number of people attending Christian church services. This rapid growth of Buddha Dhamma and the accompanying spread of Dhamma practice is having and will continue to have a profound effect on Australian culture. Another change to Australian culture has been the introduction of different foods into our diets. In the 1950’s, the most staple food in Australia was Chinese food for take away followed by meat and three vegetables. The 6th generation Chinese born in Australia have entered the food supply chain. Even a small country town in Australia will have a Chinese restaurant. Immigration has seen the introduction of an array of foods, herbs, spices and styles of cooking over the last 50 years. The use of chillies and curries in cooking is now an everyday occurrence for many Australian persons and a range of Asian native foods has become available in Australian capital cities. How this diet change affects health remains to be seen. More and more Australian persons are using the Five reflections on Food. These are: 1. This meal is the
labor of countless beings. Let us accept this offering with
gratitude. At our Centre, Members are encouraged to learn five reflections on food. The word 'deep musing' meaning contemplative or lost in thought is now preserved in The Word Museum by Kacirk 2000, a book of the ‘most remarkable English works forgotten’. Of particular interest to Kacirk “have been the myriad elusive details of earlier times that tend to go unnoticed”. He writes: “In my schooling, I found that teachers and historians, because of their socially prescribed curricular attention towards larger social concepts, often by passed the smaller and more personal expressions of social custom and conduct, often leaving the novel as the best lens with which to view forgotten elements of everyday life. Take for instance, the long-defunct activity called upknocking, the employment of the knocker up, who went house to house in the early morning hours of the nineteenth century to awaken his working-class clients before the advent of affordable alarms clocks. Until encountering this entry, I never thought about how people of this time managed to awaken with any predictability.” Persons, such as Kacirk, help us to find data to write the histories of our past cultures. Alberto Manguel is another such scholar delighting in the preservation of the History of Reading. He writes: “Reading out loud, reading silently, being able to carry in the mind intimate libraries of remembered words, are astounding abilities that we acquire by uncertain methods. And yet, before these abilities can be acquired, a reader needs to learn the basic craft of recognizing the common signs by which a society has chosen to communicate: in other words, a reader must learn to read.” “Claude Levi-Strauss tells how, when he was traveling among the Nambikwara Indians of Brazil, his hosts, seeing him write, took his pencil and paper and drew squiggly lines in imitation of his letters and demanded that he ‘read’ what they have written. The Nambikwara expected their scribbles to be as immediately significant to Levi-Strauss as those he drew himself.” “For Levi-Strauss who was taught to read in a European school, the notion that a system of communication should be immediately comprehensible to any other person seemed absurd. The methods by which we learn to read not only embody the conventions of our particular society regarding literacy - the channeling of information, the hierarchies of knowledge and power - they also determine and limit the ways in which our ability to read is put to use.” Scholars at our Centre share with Levi Strauss the view that the idea of a system of communication immediately comprehensible to any other person is absurd. With 25% illiteracy rate among the population of the world it is impossible to write for all people. National Libraries in every country are an invention of the last millennium. Libraries have become larger and have more books than at any other time in history. This growth was possible because of the invention of mass production printing. More and more writing is appearing on the Internet. There is more information available than a person could read in a lifetime. However, search engines can find about 70% of references. University studies are being centred around the use of Internet references. Internet censorship is being discussed in many countries. Perhaps Internet references will be written up in code like the Alchemists wrote about their experiments. Over the last millennium, alchemists made the prime discoveries of modern chemistry in spite of repression. Publication was rigidly censored in most countries with the death penalty for having certain books in one’s possession. The death penalty is still in parts of the world for publishing certain types of books. Slavery was the norm and accepted throughout European society without much hesitation. The invention of windpower and the steam engine allowed human energies to be replaced by mechanical engines. When a steam shovel could replace 100 persons using wheel barrows at an economic cost, capital works were carried out using machines rather than brute force of cheap slave labor. Slaves were not allowed to learn to read. Servants are common in some overseas countries. Mechanisation of the average home in Australia is equivalent to that of 23 persons, therefore more leisure time became available and less human power was needed. But local servants are too expensive for most persons. Without mechanical power, it is doubtful whether the notion of freeing slaves from hard work would have been accepted at any level of society. Industry depends on human work. Slaves do not not vote. The notion of the experiment of voting for leaders of democratic or republic systems is something that happened this last millennium. The path to such an experiment was in Iceland one thousand years ago. The word ‘govern’ is derived from the Old French/Middle French word governer, and from the Latin word gobernare meaning to steer or pilot, to control. According to the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, historically in the early 17th Century a government was “The area ruled over by a governor; a subdivision of a kingdom or empire”. At inception, Australia was under military rule. Next year, Australia celebrates the Centenary of Federation, the joining of the six Australian colonies, under a Federal Government system. This unification was achieved without revolution. In Australia, government takes the form of a democracy headed by a Prime Minister where voting is compulsory. The United States of America is a republic form of government where the voting system is different from Australia’s and is not compulsory. Germany is run by a system of democracy and voting is not compulsory. Australia has had a strong censorship system since federation, to protect young persons from wrong ideas. We have no doubt that instructions to make LSD and bombs on the Internet would be better censored out of existence. The Internet technology makes it nearly impossible to censor anything for long. Our Centre agrees that censorship is needed as do many institutions, religions and governments in the world today. Kings and Queens had complete censorship control of whatever they wished. We pay homage to the Bodhisattva Kings. Monarchies were the most prevalent governing system throughout the last 1000 years history. Kings reign according to their lineage protocol traditions in the past. The thought that a government be voted into power with the King was unthinkable. Australians living in this present century have become so conditioned to voting that they may not be able to conceive a life without the right to vote for a government. Fortunately, Australian democracy came by talking and peaceful methods, not bloodshed. Most democratic changes in the last 1000 years have come about by revolution, revolt and murder. Clearly, this is a bad approach and not to be recommended as a model for others. Early at the beginning of this millennium, government by Kings working alongside other monarchs in most parts of the world solved problems in a satisfactory manner because they were blood related as family members. Monarchs (Kings and Queens) take the power of their lineage by their merit from the past lives and are not political appointments. Under a noble Monarchy, changes of power do not always involve armed conflict to appoint the successor who may be a son or daughter of the King or Queen. The people love royalty. Today, politics succession of power is about the blend of conflict and co-operation. What Buddha had to say about blessings by noble Kings can be found in the suttas. The last one thousand years have seen changes in the institution of the Catholic Church, that no longer persecute heretics by death. In ancient times, history was important to the private education of Kings but imperfect in detail. Today, history is more perfect in detail but regarded as unimportant by many politicians or military junta leaders. We do not believe history is bunk. These changes pass unnoticed in the last Millennium unless you study rare historical documents. We hope our listeners become more interested in the rigorous study of rare significant documents in history. The Buddhist Library at our Centre is seeking to build on our collection of ancient history texts. Can you help us with donations of material? If you can please contact us at 9754-3334. May you be well and happy in the study of history. This script was written and edited by John D. Hughes, Pennie White, Evelin Halls, Julie O’Donnell, Maria Pannozzo, Tim Browning and Anita Svensson. Disclaimer:
As we, the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd., do not control the actions of our service providers from time to time, make no warranty as to the continuous operation of our website(s). Also, we make no assertion as to the veracity of any of the information included in any of the links with our websites, or an other source accessed through our website(s).
Accordingly, we accept no liability to any user or subsequent third party, either expressed or implied, whether or not caused by error or omission on either our part, or a member, employee or other person associated with the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd.
Bibliography Brown, L. (ed.) (1993) The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Grundy, J. (1981) Anthropods of Medical Importance, Hampshire : Noble Books Limited. Kacirk, J. (2000) The Work Museum, New York: Touchstone. Milne, A. (1989) Earth’s Changing Climate, Great Britain: Prism Press. Morgan, K. O. (ed.) (1991) History of Britain, London: Sphere Books Ltd. Partridge, E. (1966) Origins, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Raphael, F. and Monk, R. (eds.) (2000) The Great Philosophers, London; Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Victorian Government (2000) Centenary of Federation Victoria, at URL: www.federation.vic.gov.au/c18.htm accessed on 26 December 2000. Win, S. (1981) Eleven Holy Discourses of Protection, Burma: Department of Religious Affairs. Readability Statistics for this text Flesch Grade Level:
12.7 For more information, contact the Centre or better still, come and visit us. |
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