When Buddha post enlightenment was walking towards Sarnath, he confronted a shepherd boy who asked him “what are you?” The local village boy was enchanted by the aura which Buddha had, the boy couldn’t help but ask this question what are you? And, not, who are you? The boy further asked Are you God, an Angel or a human being? The answer, amidst the surrounding silence, could break through the skies and the thunder on the mountains, “no I am Buddha – the Awakened One”. The Awakened One is also the Tenth Man of the Upanishads, not a man, but, just a referral point towards an identity which cannot be objectivised at all, and “it is only with total humility, and in absolute stillness of mind that we can know what indeed we are”.
What we are, what each sentient being is, as This-Here-Now, is intemporal I. This introduction was necessary to understand the value of the 2 day Global Buddhist Summit inaugurated by the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi last month in New Delhi at the prestigious Ashoka Hotel. Eminent Buddhist Monks, Scholars and Delegates from all parts of the world gathered together to celebrate this event. As the Union Culture Minister G Kishan Reddy said scholars and researchers, ambassadors and diplomats from different countries gets a chance to celebrate the historical event of Buddha’s enlightenment in India and the event hold by Union Ministry of Culture together with International Buddhist Confederation (IBC) will mark a beginning of such events. From South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Russia – researchers and monk-scholars were present to grace the event – a Meeting of Thinking-Minds was initiated.
It was also a chance to share ideas, cultural iconographic historical exchanges, the symbolism that migrated to different countries from either North of India or the South of India, accumulating country specific rituals and practices, like Zen in Japan or Mindfulness in Vietnam or USA, each contributing to the process of enlightenment in a seamlessly beautiful way.
One such meeting of high value was between Robert Alexander Farrar Thurman (born August 3, 1941) , better known as one of the legendary American Buddhist author and academic on Tibetan Buddhism, the Je Tsongkhapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University and Dr. Madhu Khanna, Indian scholar with PhD from Oxford University on Indology /Religious Studies, Prof. Of Indic Religion, Tagore National Fellow at National Museum, New Delhi and Former Director, Centre for the Study of Comparative Religion and Civilizations, Jamia Millia Islamia, Academic Council Member of Nalanda University and Founding Member of Tantra Foundation.
The meeting of minds – thinking aloud and exchange of books is a part of a much larger process of cosmic reorganisation, seen in a miniature, often, misunderstood, is fractal embedding of energy and consciousness – synergetics, as Buckminster Fuller, the great Mathematician would have defined, in a VE – vector equilibrium or when the void is voided, in a continual flow-form which are these exchanges as the holomovement of physicist David Bohm.
In such a field, poetry and music confront history of tantra in a fractal iconography of Tibetan Buddhism or the origins of enlightenment in India, the inverted tree which branches down and roots gliding above the skies.
We are very grateful from Tantra Foundation to have been able to to document this meeting between Robert Thurman and Madhu Khanna.We are also thankful to Robert for his kind blessings 🙏 to us to carry forward the work.
– JRC Tantra Foundation
Joy Roy Choudhury's Web Log 