Steve Mitchell, an adventure-seeking pilot, finds more than he bargained for when a sudden springtime thunderstorm happens upon him in flight while on his way to deliver a mysterious crate. The storm brings about change in his life that starts a series of events that are truly remarkable and hard for the imagination to comprehend! What is reality? How can one explain the unexplainable? How much will the mind allow us to accept? These are question Steve must answer not only for others but also for himself. The perception of what he believes to be real triggers a cosmic collision of time. The mystery, adventure, and romance he incurs along his journey shape his heart, emotions, and course of life forever. He never will be the same again.
Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood is the first comprehensive study of a central narrative theme in premodern South Asian Buddhist literature: the Buddha's bodily self-sacrifice during his previous lives as a bodhisattva. Conducting close readings of stories from Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, and Tibetan literature written between the third century BCE and the late medieval period, Reiko Ohnuma argues that this theme has had a major impact on the development of Buddhist philosophy and culture. Whether he takes the form of king, prince, ascetic, elephant, hare, serpent, or god, the bodhisattva repeatedly gives his body or parts of his flesh to others. He leaps into fires, drowns himself in the ocean, rips out his tusks, gouges out his eyes, and lets mosquitoes drink from his blood, always out of selflessness and compassion and to achieve the highest state of Buddhahood. Ohnuma places these stories into a discrete subgenre of South Asian Buddhist literature and approaches them like case studies, analyzing their plots, characterizations, and rhetoric. She then relates the theme of the Buddha's bodily self-sacrifice to major conceptual discourses in the history of Buddhism and South Asian religions, such as the categories of the gift, the body (both ordinary and extraordinary), kingship, sacrifice, ritual offering, and death. Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood reveals a very sophisticated and influential perception of the body in South Asian Buddhist literature and highlights the way in which these stories have provided an important cultural resource for Buddhists. Combined with her rich and careful translations of classic texts, Ohnuma introduces a whole new understanding of a vital concept in Buddhists studies.
This book offers a new approach to understanding Buddhist lay and monastic practice by recognizing the crucial role that visual practices played in Indian Buddhism in the early centuries of the Common Era. In the genre of Indian Buddhist narratives known as avadana, most lay religious practice consists not of reading, praying, or meditating, but of visually engaging with certain kinds of objects. The key for understanding the Buddhist conceptualization about the world and the ways it should be navigated is found, in these stories, in ways of seeing and the results of seeing.
This book traces and explains the mysterious disappearace of Flight #370 from the departure from Kuala Lumpur airport to the sudden vanishing in the Indian Ocean. Also analyzed the different theories about the disappearance of Flight #370. Further I mention different cases of planes, ships, and people that had been teleported throughout history.
The immediate human toll of the 1994 Flight 427 disaster was staggering: all 132 people aboard died on a Pennsylvania hillside. The subsequent investigation was a maze of politics, bizarre theories, and shrouded answers. Bill Adair, an award-winning journalist, was granted special access to the five-year inquiry by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) while its investigators tried to determine if the world's most widely used commercial jet, the Boeing 737, was really safe. Their findings have had wide-ranging effects on the airline industry, pilots, and even passangers. Adair takes readers behind the scenes to show who makes decisions about airline safety—and why.
The Inquiry of Ugra (Ugrapariprccha) is one of the most influential Mahayana sutras, preserved and transmitted in both India and China over many centuries and actively quoted in treatises on the bodhisattva path. It is, nevertheless, one of the most neglected texts in Western treatments of Buddhism. The Ugra appers to be one of the earliest bodhisattva scriptures to come down to us, and as such it offers a particularly valuable window on the process by which the bodhisattva path came to be seen as a distinct vocational alternative within certain Indian Buddhist communities. The Bodhisattva Path is a study and translation of the Ugra that will fundamentally alter previous perceptions of the way in which Mahayana was viewed and practiced by its earliest adherents. To achieve a better understanding of the universe of ideas, activities, and institutional structures within which early self-proclaimed bodhisattvas lived, the author first considers the Ugra as a literary document, employing new methodological tools to examine the genre to which it belong, the age of its extant versions, and their relationships to one another. She goes on to challenge the dominant notions that the Mahayana emerged as a reform of earlier Buddhism and offered lay people an easier option. On the contrary, the picture that emerges is of the early Mahayana as a more difficult and demanding vocation, initially limited to a small contingent of monastic males. Combining a detailed critical study and translation of an important Buddhist scripture with a sweeping re-examination of the relationship between the Buddha and the practitioners alike and other interested in the history of Indian Buddhism and the formation of Mahayana.
On its broadest level, this book contributes to an ongoing expansion of both the history of religions and Buddhist studies by focusing on what is a far too frequently ignored aspect of religious experience: visual images. This is a study that is intended to speak to, and be relevant for, not only those interested specifically in Buddhism, but also scholars and students in the field of religion at large who are interested in the dialectical ways abstract, abstruse and even rarified textual discourses interact with devotional practices 'on the ground'. The specific focus of this book is on the Buddhist visual practices surrounding the visual representation of a single, central concept, prajna, or wisdom, in medieval north India. Prajna, however, was not only an intellectual state and spiritual goal to which to aspire. Rather, wisdom also becomes a quality to be visually represented and ritually responded to, and even an active presence to be venerated in much the same manner as the Buddha himself. This book explores the ways in which the production and use of artistic images involving prajna constituted a central, if not the central, component of Buddhist religious practice in Medieval India.
Buddhist Thought guides the reader towards a richer understanding of the central concepts of classical Indian Buddhist thought, from the time of Buddha, to the latest scholarly perspectives and controversies. Abstract and complex ideas are made understandable by the authors' lucid style. Of particular interest is the up-to-date survey of Buddhist Tantra in India, a branch of Buddhism where strictly controlled sexual activity can play a part in the religious path. Williams' discussion of this controversial practice as well as of many other subjects makes Buddhist Thought crucial reading for all interested in Buddhism.
