Word: buddhists
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Like a high, thin curl of smoking incense, the chant arose from thousands of monks assembled near Rangoon, Burma. For 1600 hours it would go on, until all 14,804 pages of the sacred Buddhist texts, the Tipitakas,* had been chanted. Under the leadership of an 80-year-old holy man, Abhidhaja Revata, impassively seated on a golden dais, the sixth World Buddhist Council was under...
Human or Divine? In the 2,480-odd years since the Buddha attained Nirvana, there have been six World Buddhist Councils. Their story outlines the progress of the world's fifth largest faith. The first council took place soon after the Buddha's death in the 5th century B.C., when about 500 of the leading monks of the New Order met in a cave to decide on the first collection of their master's teachings: the universality of suffering and the Eightfold Path by which one might escape from it-right belief, right contemplation, right speech, right...
...plea by some monks for relaxation of discipline, which foreshadowed a great split in Buddhism. At the third council, about 244 B.C., it was decided to send out missionaries to other countries; and at the fourth, in the 1st century A.D., the big split crystallized. It divides the Buddhist world to this day between the traditional Hinayana Buddhists, who look upon Buddha as a human teacher, and the more recent and increasingly influential Mahayana Buddhists, who worship him as a divine being...
...fifth World Buddhist Council was called at Mandalay in 1868 for the purpose of putting the texts of the Tipitakas into a permanent form. They were engraved on 729 marble slabs...
...prepare them for propagation throughout a morally shaken Asia. The man behind the council is Burma's pleasant, scholarly Prime Minister U Nu, who has been doing his best to spark a religious resurgence in his country since it got its independence in 1948. A devout Buddhist, who rises to pray at 4 a.m. each day, U Nu was meditating one day several years ago in the sacred cave where the first Buddhist council was held, when he had a vision of a great gathering of monks chanting the scriptures in a similar cave. In 1948 an unknown hermit...