4 Or 6 Pieces?

A man ordered a small pizza to go. He appeared to be alone and the cook asked him if he would like it cut into 4 pieces or 6. He thought about it for some time before responding.. 'Just cut it into 4 pieces; I don't think I'm hungry enough to eat 6 pieces.

Qian Hongyan: Legless Young Girl

This will surely touch and move you. The power of the human spirit is shown at its mightiest by this one little girl. I salute her.

Qian Hongyan - The Basketball Girl

About Buddhism

What the Buddha taught is popularly known as Buddhism. Some people embrace Buddhism as a religion, while others think of it as a philosophy. However, Buddhism is too vast and too profound to be neatly placed in any single category. 

Buddhism is a way of moral, spiritual and intellectual training leading to complete freedom of mind. It is an intellectual approach to reality through mental development and purification. It is a method to get rid of miseries and to find liberation. Buddhism is a righteous way of life for the peace and happiness of every living being. 

While Buddhism can bring greater understanding on how to lead a good, worldly life, its main focus is how to gain spiritual liberation through the development of wisdom and mental culture. 

It is neither mere love of, nor inducing the search after wisdom, nor devotion (though they have their significance and bearing on mankind), but an encouragement of a practical application of the teaching that leads the follower to dispassion, enlightenment and final deliverance. 

The fountainhead of all Buddhism is this experience, called 'Enlightenment.' With this experience of Enlightenment, the Buddha began His Teaching not with any dogmatic beliefs or mysteries, but with a valid, universal experience, which He gave to the world as universal truth. 

Buddhism is a teaching which furnishes men with a guide to conduct that is in accord with its in-look, a teaching which enables those who give it heed to face life with fortitude and death with serenity, or a system to get rid of the ills of life. 

On the lower level, Buddhism teaches the individual how to adjust and cope with events and circumstances of daily life. At the higher level, it represents the human endeavour to grow beyond oneself through the practice of mental culture or mind development.

Buddhism is not mere mumbo-jumbo, a myth told to entertain the human mind or to satisfy the human emotion, but a liberal and noble method for those who sincerely want to understand and experience the reality of life.

Buddhism has a complete system of mental culture concerned with gaining insight into the nature of things that leads to complete self-realization of the Ultimate Truth. This system is both practical and scientific; it involves dispassionate observation of emotional and mental states.

Buddhism also contains an excellent ethical code which is unparallel in its perfection and altruistic attitude. 

Buddhism

My posts on Buddhism are not designed to preach, but to share some of my thoughts on the Teachings of The Buddha. They are extracts from books, and articles on and about Buddhism, and Buddhism as I understand it to be. 

I embrace Buddhism as a Philosophy, A Way of Life, rather than as a religion. The Great Teacher lived more than 2,500 years ago, but His Teachings are ageless. 

What I like about Buddhism is that it does not demand blind faith from its adherents. In Buddhism there is not, an Almighty God to be obeyed and feared. The Buddha does not believe in a cosmic potentate, omniscient and omnipresent. There are no divine revelations or divine messengers.

A Buddhist (believer or follower of Buddhism), is therefore, not subservient to any higher supernatural power which controls his destinies and which arbitrarily rewards and punishes. But Buddhism recognizes the infinite latent possibilities of man and teaches that man can gain deliverance from suffering by his own efforts independent of divine help or meditating priests.

Many people think that to be a good Buddhist one must have absolutely nothing to do with the materialistic life. This is not correct. What Buddhism teaches is that while we can enjoy material comforts without going to extremes, we must also conscientiously develop the spiritual aspects of our lives. While we can enjoy sensual pleasures as laymen, we should never be unduly attached to them to the extent that they hinder our spiritual progress.

"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should…avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things as a meaningful unity… If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism." - Einstein 

Where Science and Buddhism Meet

A twenty-one minute video on Emptiness, Interconnectivity and the Nature of Reality.
Very abstrace, very profound, and very interesting!


Where Science and Buddhism Meet from Gerald Penilla on Vimeo.

Stress Turns Your Hair Grey

Can this common folklore be true after all? If it is, and you do not like your hair to be grey, you will have to stop stressing yourself out.

People develop grey hair as they age but the real cause of the colour change is stress, researchers said.

If people experienced less stress, they might keep the colour of their natural locks longer.

Stress actually damages DNA and depletes the melanocyte stem cells within hair follicles that are responsible for making the pigment-producing cells. The depletion leads to irreversible hair greying, said Dr Emi Nishimura of Kanazawa University in Japan, the lead researcher of the study which was published last month in the journal Cell.

Using mice, the researchers also showed that a “caretaker” gene called ATM serves as a checkpoint to protect against melanocyte stem cell changes. That is why people with an ageing syndrome called ataxia-telangiectasia, which is caused by a mutation in the ATM gene, go grey prematurely.

Grey hair is one of the most obvious signs of ageing. However, changes to other body stem cells have been reported and it appears stress on the stem cell pool and maintenance failures in the function of cells are strongly linked to accelerated ageing.

It is not clear though whether anything can be done to stop these processes – at least not yet.

- Los Angeles Times 

Flash Mobs

Flash Mobs in remembrance of the King of Pop. 

Flash mobs are kind of fun. Provided, of course, that it is done constructively, creatively, and in the name of fun. It adds a bit of zest to the moment, and moments are what our life is made up of.

In Good Hands

A traveller couldn't find his luggage at the airport baggage area. So he went to the lost luggage office and told the woman there that his bags never showed up. She smiled and told him not to worry because she was a trained professional and he was in good hands. 'Now,' she asked, 'Has your plane arrived yet?'.…..

Timeless Quotes From The Buddha

Timeless Quotes From the Buddha from Gerald Penilla on Vimeo.

The Search For Truth

This is a Parable which I picked up from one of the blogs I am following – “Progressive Buddhism” 

There once was a poor man who lead a donkey every day across the border from one kingdom to another. The border guards suspected that he was smuggling something, so each day as the man passed the border they carefully searched the man and the donkey’s saddlebags, but they never did find anything.

After a while the man starts to wear more expensive clothing and buys a large house. The border guards redouble their efforts to inspect the man and his donkey closely because they now are certain the man is smuggling something. But in their daily searches of the man and the saddlebags they never come up with anything but straw.

After 30 years of this daily routine, one of the border guards retires. One day when the retired border guard is walking across the street, he runs into the man and says, "Listen, I am no longer a border guard and I can no longer hurt you. I promise I will never tell anyone, but just for my peace of mind, please tell me what you have been smuggling all those years?" 

The man replies, "Because I know that you can no longer arrest me, I will tell you. I was smuggling donkeys."

Moral of the story

Truth is pure and simple, and right in front of our eyes. Yet, we search high and low for it.