Word: buddhas
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...reference is apt. Like Thoreau, Iyer combines an acute sense of place with a mordant irony. The revealing detail is his specialty: he recalls "an old monk brush, brush, brushing a pathway clean . . . a sitting Buddha imparting a peace so strong it felt like wisdom . . . Yet one could never forget the world entirely. Floating up from below came the sound, plangent and forlorn, of a garbage collector's truck playing its melancholy song...
...would have been familiar to Sri Lankans at any point in the past 10 centuries: the minority Tamil population wants independence from the Sinhalese-dominated government in Colombo. They speak a different language, and they look to different gods: the Tamils to the Hindu pantheon and the Sinhalese to Buddha. At this stage, they fight not so much because of those differences as because blood begets blood, and talk of peace treads dangerously close to a betrayal of the cause that calls for total victory...
...impotent rage. It was horrifying enough that a bomb could have ripped apart the latest and perhaps last standard bearer of the Nehru-Gandhi line. But India, like most mourners, basically wept for itself. Said Natwar Singh, a former deputy in Gandhi's Cabinet: "What has this country of Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi come to? We were an example to the world. Now we are a warning...
Just beyond the gaze of the golden Buddha in the Eindawya pagoda in Mandalay, the spiritual heart of Burma, dozens of soldiers slouched around the courtyard, propping their rifles against the stone balustrades. Outside the temple gates, more troops manned barbed-wire barricades. "Please leave," an army captain shouted last week to a group of tourists trying to photograph the Buddha. "You may come back when our security situation is right...
Meanwhile, Saw Maung was preparing his counterattack. After a pious prayer to the Buddha, he outlawed then abolished some Buddhist sects. Saw Maung then sent his troops into Mandalay's monasteries "to clean out unlawful organizations...