In the Theravāda tradition, the principal consideration seems to be that the Buddha was once an ordinary human being who was subject to rebirth and prone to all the difficulties that sentient beings have to endure. Then he became an arahant and knew that there would be no more rebirths in any of the realms. That the Buddha was able to make the transition from ordinary sentient being to an araha...

The Nidānakathā as it is preserved in the Pāli Canon, and in the Tibetan bKa’ ’gyur, has come to us via canonical traditions and an extensive network of commentarial traditions that began in India and were continued later in Ceylon. These commentarial traditions began at a very early period, possibly from the time of the death of the Buddha, and were inspired by the need to establish certain fa...

It happened in summer of 2005, and ended as suddenly as it began in spring of 2006. A young man, a teenager, went into the forest to sit under a papal tree, the very kind of tree the Buddha had sat under when he sought enlightenment. He sat there in silence, neither eating nor drinking, not speaking, fully committed to his meditation, as the Buddha had been so long ago. As he sat, he became a p...

Japanese Zen Buddhism offers a perspective on humanrobot interaction (HRI) that notably differs from views normally encountered in the Abrahamic religious traditions of the West. Professor Masahiro Mori’s book, The Buddha in the Robot: A Robot Engineer’s Thoughts on Science and Religion, supplies an especially clear articulation of a Buddhist vision of contemporary robotic technology. The prese...

In this paper we present the modeling and visualization of the cultural heritage area of Bamiyan, Afghanistan. The region is situated ca 200 km north-west of Kabul and it was one of the major Buddhist centres until the ninth century AD. The two standing Buddhas belonged to some of the most famous Buddhist monuments world-wide. In 2001 they were destroyed through an act of vandalism by the Taleb...