"The man who was to become the Buddha was born about 563 BC of kshatriya stock at a place called Lumbini. This is situated in the Terai region of what today is the kingdom of Nepal, immediately below the Himalayan foothills on the northern edge of the plain of the River Ganges, due north of the holy city of Benares. He was given the name Siddhartha and took the clan name Gautama. His father, Shuddhodana, has been variously described as the king or leader of a local people known as the Shakyas or even just as a prominent citizen of Kapilavastu, the Shakyan capital. The Shakyas were in fact just one of the number of more or less independent peoples then inhabiting this part of northern India, who were politically organized into tribal republics ruled by elected aristocracies."

"...During the third century BC, Buddhism received a tremendous boost in India when it came under the patronage of the great Ashoka Maurya, the grandson of Chandragupta Maurya, who had by force of arms created a mighty empire in India."
"He...performed copious good works, setting up hospitals for both humans and animals, causing wells to be dug, and, as an alternative to military conquest, he applied himself to spiritual conquest. His new 'soldiers' were missionaries armed with the good news of the dharma. They went in many directions. Some even came to the West: to Egypt, Syria, Macedonia, Epirus, and Cyrene (in north Africa). These efforts do not appear to have been very effective in the long-run; on the other hand, his mission to Sri Lanka was a lasting success."
"After Ashoka, Buddhism became adopted by the Greeks in the north of India, and one of their kings, Menanadros (Pali name, Milinda; reigned c. 155-130 BC), was a great champion of the dharma. His debate with a bhikshu name Nagasena that led to his becoming a lay disciple is preserved in a celebrated post-canonical dialogue, The Questions of King Milinda (Milinda-Panha). Royal patronage was also extended to Buddhism by Kanishka, a Scythian king who ruled a wide tract of land in northwest India, probably around the first century AD."
     - John Snelling, The Buddhist Handbook

"Whereas classical yoga is a concentration practice, Buddhist insight meditation is an awareness practice. Whereas yoga emphasizes the development of unwavering attention on inner objects, insight meditation emphasized fluid attention to all objects, both inner and outer. Here all stimuli are observed and examined as precisely and minutely as awareness will allow. The aim is to examine and understand the workings of body and mind as fully as possible and thereby to cut through the distortions and misunderstandings that usually cloud awareness. 'To see things as they are' is the motto of this practice, and this seeing can become very sensitive indeed."
"The Buddhist meditator's microscopic awareness becomes so sensitive that it is able to dissect the sense of self into its component stimuli. Thus the meditator perceives not a solid unchanging ego or self sense, but rather a ceaseless flux of thoughts and images of which that ego is composed. This is the experience of 'no self' in which the sense of a permanent egoic self is recognized as an illusion. This illusion of a continuous self or ego is a product of imprecise awareness that arises in much the same way as an apparently continuous movie arises from a series of still frames. The meditator's precise awareness sees through this egoic illusion and hence frees the meditator from egocentric ways of thinking and acting.
"The yogi's experience is different... In the highest reaches of meditation, attention is fixed immovably on consciousness. Nothing remains in awareness but consciousness itself, and consequently this is what the yogi now experiences him - or herself - to be pure consciousness, ineffable, blissful, beyond time, space or any limitation. This is samadhi, the highest reach of yoga. It is this experience - the union of self and Self-that gives yoga, which means union, its name. This blissful union contrasts dramatically with the sometimes pleasant, sometimes painful experiences of both the shaman and the Buddhist meditator."
      - Roger N. Walsh, The Spirit of Shamanism (1990), pp. 229-230

"It was taught by the Buddha, oh Monks, that the past, the future, physical space, and individuals are nothing but names, forms of thought, words of common usage, merely superficial realities."
     - Madhyamika Karika Vrtti

"Stars, darkness, a lamp, a phantom dew, a bubble,
A dream a flash of lightning, and a cloud:
Thus we should look upon all that was made."
     - Vajracchedika

"We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the Soul; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related."
     - Ralph Waldo Emerson "Thine own intellect, which is now voidness, yet not to be regarded as the voidness of nothingness, but as being intellect itself, unobstructed, shining, thrilling, and blissful, is the very consciousness, the All-good Buddha."
     - Bardo Thodol

"It seems that originally the Tibetans were a primitive, largely nomadic and pugnacious people whose warlike activities caused more than a few headaches for their neighbors. As their power and organization grew, they were able, for instance, to launch campaigns in China itself and on one occasion captured the capital, Sian. Spiritually they inclined to animism and other primitive magical beliefs and practices. A species of priest existed among them called bon-po, who are usually described as shamans, through more specifically the name implies that they recited mantras which could be used for exorcism, invoking powerful spirits and so forth. The bon-po may also have been concerned with the death rituals of the early kings."

"Tradition had it that it was only with the arrival of the Tantric adept Padmasambhava (or Guru Rinpoché) towards the end of the eighth century AD that success was ensured. He alone possessed the occult know-how necessary to subdue the demoniac forces inimical to the transmission of Buddhism. He could counter magic with magic, and emerge victorious. One of his particular feats was to conquer the spirits that hitherto had been frustrating the building of Samye (completed 787 AD), the first Buddhist monastery of Tibet.
"It should be noted in passing that the old demons and spirits were not annihilated, as they would have been in the West, with all the grim paraphernalia of witch-hunts and inquisitions; rather they were obliged to submit to the dharma. Thereafter they continued to play a tolerated if subordinate role as 'dharma protectors'. Psychospiritually, this could be seen as the assimilation of the magical-mythical in the collective Tibetan psyche, whereas in the West it was ruthlessly repressed."
      - John Snelling, The Buddhist Handbook

Hyperlinks

·Mani, the Ambassador of Light
·The Secret Doctrine
·Shambhala