Adopt teachings of Lord Buddha: Himachal Sukhu
Extending his greetings on the occasion of Vaishakh Purnima and Lord Buddha's birth anniversary, the CM appealed all to imbibe the teachings of Lord Buddha in their lives to make a vibrant society.
He said, 'Lord Buddha gave us the mantra 'Appa Deepo Bhava', which means 'Be your own light'. This was the essence of self-reliance and continues to guide us in our journey towards building a self-reliant India.'
He said that Lord Buddha's teachings are as relevant today as they were in ancient times. 'In an age marked by violence, intolerance and distrust, Buddha's message offers a path of peace, compassion and tolerance. These were not mere teachings but a way of life,' he said
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Economic Times
2 days ago
- Economic Times
Dalai Lama: Politics of reincarnation
Synopsis The Dalai Lama's plan to name his reincarnation has sparked controversy with China, as reincarnation holds political power in Tibetan Buddhism. Historically, Buddhism and Islam influenced China, with Tibetan Buddhism gaining prominence through Mongol patronage. The concept of reincarnation was later used to solidify ties between Tibet, Mongolia, and China, leading to Chinese control over Tibetan reincarnations. Reuters Tibetan spiritual leader, the 14th Dalai Lama, is served food on his 90th birthday celebration at the Tsuglagkhang, also known as the Dalai Lama Temple complex, in the northern town of Dharamshala, India, July 6, 2025. The Dalai Lama plans to declare where he will be reincarnated in his next life. In other words, where his successor will be born. To the rational mind, this may sound like a bizarre proposition, but it has annoyed the Communist authorities in China. This is because reincarnation in the Tibetan world is not about the occult or mysticism-it is about real political power. Wealth and weapons can control the bodies of people. Stories are needed to control the Chinese, whose core civilisational area has primarily been the river valleys of Yangtze and Hwang-ho, have long sought control of the dry western regions through whose mountain passes, Chinese got access to horses, in exchange for bolts of silk. From there came Buddhism, after 300 AD and Islam after 700 AD. These forces forced the isolationist China to become a major global player in medieval times, even before the arrival of Europeans arrived in ships after 1600 AD via the eastern of rebirth spread via Buddhism. Rebirth is not very prominent in the Vedas, but it emerges as a major theme in South Asia following the rise of the Buddhist and Jain monastic orders 2,500 years ago. The Buddhist Jataka tales speak of the previous lives of the Buddha. Jain chronicles also speak of the rebirths of Ravana and Krishna who will become Tirthankara of the future. In Hindu tales, boons and curses of previous lives shape fortune and misfortune in present tales of rebirth became popular in China during the Tang dynasty around 800 AD when Chinese kings sponsored the building of Buddhist caves, Buddhist monasteries, Buddhist art and relic shrines. In Tibet, Buddhism made its early inroads around 800 AD. It became a major and powerful force by 1200 AD, roughly when Buddhist monks were migrating out of India, in search of new patrons, facing Brahmin hostility as well as Islamic persecution. The story of Padmasambhava who came from Oddiyana (Odisha) and tamed local Tibetan demons became the dominant story of how Tantric Buddhism reached the Himalayan plateau. After Buddhism had declined in India, it found refuge in China (seen as the home of the Bodhisattva Manjushri) and in Tibet (seen as the home of the primal Buddha Vairocana). Southeast Asia retained the older models of Buddhism based on the teachings of Gautama Buddha. The Mahayana school flourished in China; the Tantric school flourished in Tibet. These had grander and highly innovative mythologies. The popularity of Tibetan Buddhism has much to do with the rise of the Mongols. The Mongols, a fierce horse-breeding nomadic tribe, became conquerors under Genghis Khan in 1200 AD. The great Khan and his sons saw the Tibetan Vajrayana priests as magicians who could serve their war missions. Buddhist Tantric magic involving fierce "Heruka" beings could change weather conditions and strike fear in the hearts of enemies. In fact, the worship of Mahakala, a Tantrik Buddhist deity, played a significant role in the Mongol conquest of China as well as the sacking of Baghdad -a fact that is rarely discussed by 'rational' Khan invited the Tibetan Phags-pa Lama to be his spiritual guide. This happened around 1300 AD. It was a major moment in world history, when relations between China and Tibet was established via a Mongolian hundred years later, the descendants of the Mongols and the descendants of the Tibetan lamas were seeking a way to reconnect and gain legitimacy. This is when the idea of reincarnation was invoked: a Mongol chief, Altan Khan, claimed that he was the reincarnation of Kublai Khan, and a minor lama of the Gelug monastery claimed that he was the reincarnation of Phags-pa Lama. In doing so, they were reasserting the links between Tibet, Mongolia and their shared claim over China. Altan Khan designated Sonam Gyatso as "Dalai" (a translation into Mongolian of the name Gyatso, meaning "ocean") in subsequent decades, Tibetan lamas broke free of the shackles of the Mongol Khans and came to see themselves as both spiritual and military leaders of Tibet, perhaps inspired by the concept of the Caliph in the Islamic world. Fearing the rising autonomy and power of the Tibetan lamas, during the Qing (Manchu) era, the Chinese emperor declared that all reincarnations in Tibet must be ratified by the Chinese court. They implemented the "Golden Urn" system in 1793 which involved drawing lots from an urn to select candidates, ostensibly to ensure fairness and remember the war sorcery that Tibetan monks were once famous for. The Dalai Lama prefers to talk of the wise and compassionate Buddha rather than the fierce skull-bedecked "Heruka" beings that impressed the Mongols and terrified the Chinese. These images plaster the walls of Tibetan monasteries. Today, professors prefer calling them creative visualisations and metaphors of loving kindness. By ignoring the role of these myths in human history, historians and journalists fail to understand the complexity of the Dalai Lama's story in modern times.
The Print
4 days ago
- The Print
2,000-year-old Piprahwa Gems, its Buddhist links & how govt stopped a Sotheby's auction to bring it home
The May auction had come under fire, as scholars and art historians argued that the storied gems are not subjects of commodification but are associated with the legacy and heritage of Buddha and Buddhists. The gems, associated with Buddhism and for long, a bone of contention between Indian and Hong Kong authorities, are now back in India after more than a century and 27 years. New Delhi: The Government of India has repatriated the Piprahwa Gems from Hong Kong, two months after Sotheby's called off a 7 May auction of the gems, following a word from New Delhi, cautioning about diplomatic and legal actions. The gems were expected to sell for 100 million Hong Kong Dollars. After the gems were brought back, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a post on X, 'It would make every Indian proud that the sacred Piprahwa relics of Bhagwan Buddha have come home after 127 long years. These sacred relics highlight India's close association with Bhagwan Buddha and his noble teachings. It also illustrates our commitment to preserving and protecting different aspects of our glorious culture.' Union Culture Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat called the repatriation 'an exemplary case of public-private partnership'. 'A large portion of the acquired collection will be on loan to the National Museum for five years, and Godrej Industries has agreed to display the entire gem collection upon its arrival in India for a period of three months,' Shekhawat said. Naman Ahuja, a Delhi-based Art historian, was among the first to call out Sotheby's for selling the precious gems in the market openly. 'Are the relics of the Buddha a commodity that can be treated like a work of art to be sold in the market? And since they are not, how is the seller ethically authorised to auction them?' He also questioned the 'custodianship' of the gems. 'Since the seller is termed the 'custodian', I would like to ask—custodian on whose behalf? Does custodianship permit them now to sell these relics?' Sotheby's, which planned to sell the Piprahwa Gems, considered the artefact garlanded with pearls, rubies, topazes, and sapphires as 'one of the most astonishing archaeological finds of the modern era' and 'of unparalleled religious, archaeological and historical importance'. Sotheby's description of the collection went 'The Piprahwa Gems of the Historical Buddha'. The auction house, Sotheby's, is headquartered in New York City, its popular outlets are in London and Paris, and another one is in Hong Kong—where the Piprahwa Gems were supposed to be sold. Also Read: The afterlife of stolen antiquities when they are returned to India Piprahwa Gems & Buddha The Piprahwa Gems trace their origin to a stupa, a dome-shaped monument in the village of Piprahwa, located in modern-day Uttar Pradesh. Siddharthnagar, the district under which Piprahwa falls, is named after Buddha. It is widely believed that the gems were left mixed with some of the cremated remains of Buddha, believed to have died circa 483 B.C., 161 km from Piprahwa in Kushinagar. During his excavations in 1898, English engineer William Claxton Peppé discovered the stupa at Piprahwa—south of Lumbini, the 'birthplace of Lord Buddha'. Peppé, unknowingly, had unearthed one of the eight stupas, believed to contain ashes and fragments of Buddha. The Sakya clan of Buddha built the stupa to honour the relics of their 'illustrious kinsman, Gautama Buddha', reveals the website 'The Piprahwa Project' run by the family of Peppé. Since the excavation of Piprahwa Gems, the Indian Museum in Kolkata has housed a majority of the gems, while Peppé's family retained about a fifth of them. At the time, the British colonial administrators described some of the gems as 'duplicates'. Acts of Extradition The British could claim ownership of 'treasure' found in India, including archaeological finds, if they deemed the same as 'treasure trove', according to the 1878 Indian Treasure Trove Act. 'Treasure' was anything of substance hidden in or attached to the ground, and if that 'treasure' did not remain hidden for more than a century, the British could claim it. This Act justified the British claim over many artefacts found in the Subcontinent, including the Piprahwa Gems. Now, the Indian Government has permitted Peppé's family to retain only a portion of the relics, claiming the gems by leveraging the power of the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, 1972, which prohibits the export of antiquities without government permission and criminalises unauthorised sales abroad. Dating back over 2,000 years, the Piprahwa Gems come under the jurisdiction of this Act. Since the government recognises the Buddha relics as artefacts of national importance, it is bound to fall under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958, a law that protects structures and items of archaeological importance—especially if declared of national importance. The government invoked these acts in a 5 May 2025 notice to Sotheby's and the Peppé family, demanding 'immediate cessation' of the auction and the repatriation of the relics. The Union Ministry of Culture posted on X that the auctioneer 'responded to the legal notice, with the assurance that full attention is being given to this matter'. The government was successful in Sotheby's postponement of the 5 May auction of the relics till the house successfully oversaw the repatriation of Piprahwa Gems from foreign shores Wednesday afternoon. Dedipya Agarwal is a TPSJ alum interning with ThePrint (Edited by Madhurita Goswami) Also Read: Naga collective calls UK auction of Naga human head 'colonial violence', urges repatriation of remains
The Wire
4 days ago
- The Wire
Peter Thiel's Transhumanism and the Fear of Human Finitude
Saroj Giri Silicon Valley's attempt to technologically eliminate human finitude in search of a supposed immortality is both phony and philosophically boring. A sort of controversy recently made news following Peter Thiel's long and winding interview with the New York Times. Thiel who is a direct backer of J.D. Vance and very close to Donald Trump, is regarded as a highly niche brain among the Silicon Valley tech gurus – one of those supposedly super-intelligent humans for whom every major advance in technology and AI is too little and too late, a sign of a deep-rooted inertia. Thiel pitches his work and vision at the level of epoch-making disruptions that would end human finitude and usher in eternal immortality. Thiel and others like Marc Andreessen talk as though they are offering liberation to humankind. The guy who gave the world PayPal payments system and the Palantir surveillance system working closely with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), is also offering the path of human liberation. Palantir's creation myth has it that the firm helped track Osama Bin Laden. Now they are closely aligned with Trump's very own deep state, as Palantir gets an even deeper foothold. How can we not notice them? Liberation and human finitude For a broad contextualisation of what is going on, think of the many promises of liberation the world has seen from the time of the great saints and prophets. Buddha showed humanity the way to liberation. And so did many other great saints and prophets from Lord Mahavira, Lord Jesus to Prophet Mohammed. No matter how one estimates these great endeavours, we can agree about the following. In each case, the liberation of humans remained true to the character of humans as finite, limited and suffering beings. Liberation was not about humans striving to be what they are not, humans aspiring to be Gods, humans replacing Gods. Hubris could not be admitted here. The Buddha shunned such hubris. For him liberation was all about hard ardent work (meditation) on the finite self and body, this little five-foot long body. While rejecting attachment and desire, the Buddha still regarded our earthly existence as who we really are, as fundamental to us. Liberation was to occur from within the human condition. The human condition was no limit, no disability, no handicap, but the condition to take us to transcendent levels. The finite is the enabling condition for the infinite. Indeed, closer to our time, Jacques Derrida gave a famous interpretation of Descartes's well known, 'I think therefore I am'. Derrida showed that Descartes here wanted to highlight our mortality and finitude as precisely what enabled us to soar higher, that is, engage in limitless thought. The latter 'I' in 'I am', which is the living being subject to death, lives on beyond death as thought, as 'I think'. Hence, 'I think therefore I am'. Not just that. Our finiteness and mortality is integral to us as human beings. It is as mortal beings that we could, as thought, transcend and become universal. Will humans endure? But today there are many who seek to achieve liberation not by transcending the limited, finite character of humans but by denying it. They want to somehow exit the human condition and directly devolve into a sovereign and autonomous machinic intelligence, forever immortal and perhaps timeless. In this approach, humans must cease for immortality to appear. And hence intelligence must be outsourced so that it is no longer subject to the finitude and mortality of humans. In the interview with the New York Times, Peter Thiel proposed that the trans-in transexual or transgender should be stretched all the way to trans-human or trans-humanism. He proposed transcending the human condition, into immortality. 'The ideal was this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body'. Ross Douthat, the interviewer, asked, do you think humans will endure? Thiel paused looking rather blank. Douthat seemed restless and jumped right in, gleefully exclaiming, 'This is a long hesitation', clearly feeling vindicated. Here was something sensational, a viral gotcha moment, a scoop, for the NYT. As intended, cheap theatrics followed. Soon word went around that Thiel does not want humans to endure and wants big tech to take over the world. Critics of Thiel would see in his vision the Doomsday dystopia where humans would be slave to machine intelligence – conveniently forgetting that precisely this formulation is flipped around by Thiel and presented as the promise of immortality. 'Humans shall not endure' then does not as such put Thiel and his cohorts on the defensive, for this is precisely see a promise of immortality for the new humans or rather humanoids. Also, not to forget: this long path towards this tech-driven immortality is already a lived experience for much of the world today as it translates into immediate plans. Large tracts of land in the fields of California and the coasts of Honduras are dedicated to the project to build new city-states funded by Peter Thiel among others. The reports title says it all, From Praxis to Prospera, Silicon Valley longs to break free. We know of Freedom cities dreamed of by Trump not in his MAGA moment but in his Peter Thiel moment. We also know of Trump's backing of blockchain and crypto that are supposed to take care of all decisions as no one, no authority or even elected representative will have to decide anything. In a clearly libertarian mode, they propose the model of zero governance, ushering in frictionless efficiency. But it is not just about the new forms of organising society and economy, but of a new biologically superior breed of super-humans, as we know from this report in the Washington Post, 'Inside the Silicon Valley push to breed super-babies'. Inhuman superintelligence In other words, for Thiel, machinic intelligence and algorithmic reasoning are not similar (or homological) to human philosophical thought. Thiel would reject any such homology or isomorphism. This allows billionaire tech bros to present what is essentially a social process of technological advancement as their own exceptional creation, innovation or invention. No wonder Thiel, Musk, Marc Andreessen are touted as super-intelligent billionaires, those working so hard to take us beyond our finite, limited suffering condition and rocket us into immortality. We are supposed to think of them as something like the Nietzschean Ubermensch of the digital nomadic age, striving to raise humanity out of their self-imposed mediocrity and slave morality! What we get is immortality through superintelligence monetised into billions and billions of dollars. The equivalence between this supposed super-intelligence and tremendous concentration of wealth is established in a way which looks increasingly unassailable to the usual discourses about inequality and income disparities. At one level, this retailing of immortality does look no different than the medieval Church offering redemption and forgiveness by selling well-priced indulgences that the rich could buy. For now Silicon Valley seeks to sell immortality through machinic intelligence and by stealing data from citizens. The difference is of course that now it is about being a higher superior non-human, rather than trying to address a specifically human issue, the problem of suffering or sin. The corruption of the Church selling indulgences was very human, while the intended clean break with the human that machine intelligence promises, is inhuman – and in fact phony, misleading. Now it is a relation of the inhuman (rather than superhuman) with the human, a higher intelligence lording over humans. Thus we already hear of the rise of a 'cognitive elite', what Yuval Noah Harari calls a superior biological caste. But when immortality gets tied to super intelligence or to a particular purportedly all-powerful mind then it does becomes pertinent to ask: which mind? The collective, social mind or the mind of the avant-garde higher caste elite lording over humans? Transhumanism and Marx We must here take a pause here and broaden our view. For we soon realise that at one level, indeed at a more fundamental level, there is no problem with transhumaniam as such. For when have humans not been about transformation, change, revolution and disruption? Humans have always transformed nature and in that process transformed themselves. Such were the views that Karl Marx expressed in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The cooperative powers of humans produce an intelligence which is homological to the social dimension. In this view, intelligence cannot be privately appropriated and presented as the super-intelligence which produces billionaires. But this is what capitalism does. Marx understood and explained that capitalism is really like an incubator of a new kind of intelligence, based on private appropriation of social intelligence. Such are his views in his 1858 Fragment on Machines. Capital, in its outer limits, constantly tends towards what Marx called 'general intellect'. Capital exploits labour-power but ideally it would dream of generating value without labour-power. Marx notes capital's tendency to 'reduce labour time to a minimum'. He writes: 'capital itself is a moving contradiction, in that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth'. There is an ardent desire to detach the capacity of work from the worker. The desire to extract and store the creative powers of labour-power once and for all so that, from then on, value can be created freely in perpetuity. Think of it as a version of killing the goose who lays the golden eggs. You want to kill the goose and still have all the golden eggs forever! Exploitation of labour-power generates a tendency towards finding an apparatus, a paraphernalia, productive assets or GPUs and servers, to freeze and preserve the capacity and the intelligence. This historical tendency of capital is so clearly seen in machine learning which is at at the very basis of machine intelligence and AI. Humans train machines, and the point is to train them such that human intelligence is congealed in them such that they will now function autonomously, as the new sovereigns. Capitalist exploitation of labour would appear as the pre-history to the emergence of capital as now completely free of its dependence on labour. Labour would have eventually outsourced its real qualities and capacities. That is part of the impossible capitalist utopia which Marx is well aware of in the late 19th century. That this will also be suggested as the path of liberation is perhaps a more recent development. Future in the present: Terminator But look at the crucial difference in the way Marx saw the role and function of this utopia and promised liberation, and the way in which this is presented by the tech bros and others today. The transhumanist narrative is such that it wants us to be preoccupied with incremental tech advances that are supposed to be 'revolutionary' even as they are all always already obsolete. Each moment is only an anticipation of whats next. This constant state of incitement means that there is never a Now-time, the time of the now, never a present we can really talk about. Every moment is borrowed time, in a disorienting swirl, where the present is always mortgaged to the future. Recall how in the James Cameron movie of the same name, the Terminator (1984) is from the future – in fact, it necessary had to be from the future. The Terminator survived the nuclear holocaust which took place in the future yet to come. Viewers will remember how the lead female actor (Sarah Connor) is all bewildered by this presence of the future yet-to-come. The present is 'complete' only with this all important artefact from the future. The present is held in place by the future. Your present, your time-of-the-now dissipates into nothingness when you realise that the present is already mortgaged to the future, that the present is a bizarre extension of the future. Isn't this our experience when we read a story like this: that we are about to reach the point of technological advancement which will make it possible to cryogenically preserve the super-intelligent after death, or send those like Elon Musk into outer space where they will eternally live and attain immortality? Even though such a 'technological advancement' is mostly non-actionable, perhaps such a news item, for most of us, it casts a shadow on your inner psychic life or the unconscious. You will perhaps be reminded of best-sellers like Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now. Such self-help spiritual guides only create that extra pressure on individuals who start blaming themselves for not harnessing the 'power of the mind'. I had written earlier that the now-time is really crucial for making sense of what is going on, not however to create your own little island of peace and calm (as Eckhart Tolle pushes us towards), but precisely to contend with all the forces of past and future that constantly define the present, to be aware as to what presses on us from all sides. Thus it is easy to buy into Doomsday or apocalyptic narratives that are as abstract – which is precisely what the NYT ended up doing by sensationalising Thiel's worldview. Critique here seems to work only on the back of the sensational and the viral. However Marx shows that the promised utopia and liberation of the General Intellect works in a different way. He shows that the promised Utopia of capitalist freedom is not tied to this or that particular technological discovery or breakthrough which pushes further the tendency to 'reduce labour-time to a minimum'. It is always already at work right since the very inception of capital. This utopia is what is necessary for the mundane, everyday capitalism to work. In fact this utopia lives on nowhere else but as embodied in everyday normal capitalism, in our ordinary material ritualistic practices. It doesn't exist as belief for we do not need to believe in them, but as what Slavoj Zizek calls objectified belief. If you hold that capital was already formed in say the 19th century or at least much before the present day technological advances, then that promise, the utopia of an Intelligence freed from human finitude was always at work, much before the rise of the digital mode. Some scholars seem to identify the beginnings of this utopia at the time of the transition from tools to the machine in the Industrial Revolution. Once energy could be stored, once information about a series of mechanical movements to be performed could be uploaded, a small slice of future work was already freed from its dependence on living labour. James Watt's steam engine is already such a machine, way back in the late 18th century. Intelligence gets a tad bit dissociated from living labour, from the human being. Shall we say then that the steam engine is that machine whose apogee is AI today? Marx's notion of the general intellect then allows us to 'think forwards' about machine intelligence, algorithmic reason as well as 'backwards' with respect to the steam engine. That would be about 250-year history of capitalism which we can traverse in terms of its essential logic. We can then properly understand that philosophically speaking the tech advancements are following a long-forecast script. Conversely, we can then also decipher what is new. Cult of life Silicon Valley's attempt to technologically eliminate human finitude in search of a supposed immortality is both phony and philosophically boring. The attempt to replace or downgrade philosophical reason and thought by machinic intelligence is not just out-of-sync with the human condition as a given fixed a-historical species-being – it is in fact a symptom of a faux dynamism, a stagnancy in the midst of all the hype around futuristic accelerationism. In effect, immortality is here reduced to a drab cult of life, or maybe a more edgy vision of eugenics to produce a superior caste of humans. A cognitive elite is prepared to rule the world, a new caste order. Cult of life entails a fear of death and a clinging to life which is rendered lifeless. I am reminded of what Georges Bataille said of art in relation to life and death. He was dismissive of art for a good reason: 'art, which puts us on the path of complete destruction and suspends us there for a time, offers us ravishment without death'. The cult of life is ravishment without death, a ravished life which tries to outsource the power that death can bring to life. Steeped deep in the cult of life, a kind of libertarian celebration of competition and anti-altruism, it might look like tending towards the Nietzschean ubermensch, particularly if you look at the so-called doomsday survivalist community Peter Thiel wants to build somewhere in New Zealand – but no, it has nothing to do with the Nietzschean vitality of life and tends more towards a postmodern neofeudal order of a new aristocracy, midwifed by liberalism and social democracy. Saroj Giri teaches politics at the University of Delhi. The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
