SOURCE: http://web.singnet.com.sg/~sidneys/praises.htm
In point of age, therefore, most other creeds are youthful compared with this venerable religion, which has in it the eternity of a universal hope, the immortality of a boundless love, an indestructible element of faith in final good, and the proudest assertion ever made of human freedom.
Sir Edwin Arnold (1832-1904)
British poet, Journalist and Poet Laureate of England
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The teachings of the Indian Prince has indeed nothing to dread from science . . . Words would fail me if I attempted to express how necessary I think knowledge of this high faith and philosophy is to leaven the materialism of the West . . . It is, at all events, a truth which influenced not only the mightiest thinkers of Greece and Rome, but also the beginnings of Christian teachings - which it antedated by five or six hundred years. It may well claim kindred with all the great faiths, persecuting and opposing none which differ with it, and this for reasons which are easily seen in the teachings themselves. In relation to its noble and scientific austerity no words are needed.
L. Adam Beck
An American Traveler and author
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To the Christian, Love is the highest virtue; to the Buddhist, Wisdom, for they hold that ignorance is the root of all evil. Love, all the same, ranks high ......Tolerance and loving kindness, both based on Buddhist wisdom, are perhaps the chief reason why the middle way of Gotama has come down through 2500 years.
Sir Charles Bell KCIE, CMG ( 1870-1945)
British Diplomat and Lexicographer
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Lord Buddha's message of truth, peace, compassion and tolerance is as relevant as it was many centuries ago. The passage of time has made its flame shine with greater luminosity. Rampant materialism and the pursuit of individual success at all costs have eroded the ties of brotherhood and community. In these circumstances, it is necessary to remember and propagate the message of compassion of Lord Buddha so that hatred can be replaced by love, strife by peace and confrontation by co-operation.
Dr. Amadou-Mahtar M 'Bow
Director - General, UNESCO
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The only one of the great religions which makes any appeal to me is Buddhism; and that, as I understand it, is rather a philosophy of the world, and a way of life for the elite founded upon it, than a religion in the ordinary sense of the word.
C D Broad (1887-1971) British Philosopher
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The recent evolution of man certainly begins with the advancing development of the hand, and the selection of a brain, which is particularly adept at manipulating the hand. We feel the pleasure of that in our actions, so that for the artist the hand remains a major symbol; the hand of the Buddha, for instance, giving man the gift of humanity in a gesture of calm, the gift of fearlessness.
J.Bronowski (1908-1974)
American Author and Philosopher of Science
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Whether the Westerner who first approaches the Buddha's teachings be accustomed to modern scientific or to Christian terminology, he should always bear in mind that the Buddha was not interested in the existence or non-existence of a Supreme Being or any other abstract philosophical proposition. He was interested only in the Way, the practical way, by which suffering may be ended, both here and hereafter.
Marie B. Byles (1900-1979)
Australian author and mountaineer
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Buddha's message of compassion and devotion to the service of humanity is more relevant today than at any other time in history. Peace, understanding and a vision that transcends purely national boundaries are imperatives of our insecure nuclear age.
Javier Perez De Cuellar
Peruvian Diplomat from 1982 and Secretary General of United Nation
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It cannot be denied that there is a real beauty of an Oriental kind in the various expressions which the Buddhists use; and that there was real grounds for the enthusiasm which gave them birth. Never in the history of the world had such a scheme been put forth, so free from any superhuman agency, so independent of so even antagonistic to the belief in a soul, the belief in God, and the hope of a future life...
Whether these be right or wrong, it was a turning point in the religious history of man when a reformer, full of the most earnest moral purpose and trained in all the intellectual culture of his time, put forth deliberately, and with a knowledge of the opposing views the doctrine of salvation to be found here, in this life, in an inward change of heart, to be brought about by perseverance in a mere system of self culture and self control.
Buddhist or non-Buddhist, I have examined every one of the great religious systems, of the world, in none of them I have found anything to surpass, in beauty and comprehensiveness, the Noble Eightfold Path and the Four Truths of the Buddha.
Prof. T. W. Rhys Davids (1843-1922) B ritish Orientalist lexicographer and
the first person to hold a chair in Comparative Religion in a British university
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Like the other teachers of his time, Buddha' taught through conversation, lecturers and parables. Since it never occurred to him, any more than Socrates or Christ, to put his doctrine into writing, he summarised it in sutras (threads) designed to prompt the memory.
As preserved for us in the remembrance of his followers these discourses unconsciously portray for us the first distinct character of India's history: a man of strong will, authoritative and proud, but of gentle manner and speech, and of infinite benevolence. He claimed enlightenment but not inspiration; he never pretended that a god was speaking through him. In controversy he was more patient and considerate than any other of the great teachers of mankind.
Like Lao-tze and Christ he wished to return good for evil, love for hate; and he remained silent under misunderstanding and abuse . . . Unlike most saints, Buddha has a sense of humour, and knew that metaphysics without laughter is immodesty.
Will Durant (1885-1 981)
American Historian and Pulitzer Prize Winner
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The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvellous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole, the beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear in early stages of development - e.g. in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets.
Buddhism, as we have learnt from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer especially, contains much stronger elements of it. The religion of the future will he a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should he based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual and a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) German physicist, mathematician.
Winner of the Nobel Prize
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But Eliot's attraction to Buddhism was not simply a philosophical one. Nirvana is extinction* the annihilation of desire, the freedom from attachments - and there was, as can he seen from his poetry, an over-riding desire in the young Eliot to be free.
The absolutism of Buddhism is quite as relentless as anything he had found in Maurras and, although he was perhaps attracted to it for much the same reasons, the Eastern religion had more romantic affiliations for someone who wished to break free from the familial bonds which otherwise held him.
Peter Ackrayd's comments on English poet T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
*The extinction of greed, hatred and delusion.
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At the back of the shrine outside the temple, grows the sacred tree under which, or rather the ancestor of which, Buddha sat. Squares of gold leaf have been stuck on to the trunk and boughs. The temple, together with several acres of garden full of trees and flowers and votive stones, chapels, hells, and statues, lies on a deep courtyard below the level of the surrounding country. The view when one drives up and sees everything suddenly from the edge of the embankment is, as the books say, 'not easily forgotten'. There can't be anything like it in the world.
E.M. Forster (1879-1970) British novelist
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Man gave up the illusion of a fatherly God as a parental helper - but he gave up also the true aims of all great humanistic religions: overcoming the limitations of an egotistical self, achieving love, objectivity, and humility and respecting life so that the aim of life is living itself, and man becomes what he potentially is. These were the aims of the great Western religions, as they were the aims of the great Eastern religions.
The East, however, was not burdened with the concept of a transcendent father - saviour in which the monotheistic religions expressed their longings. Taoism and Buddhism had a rationality and realism superior to that of Western religions. They could see man realistically and objectively, having nobody but the 'awakened' ones to guide him, and being able to he guided because each man has within himself the capacity to awake and be enlightened. This is precisely the reason why Eastern religious thought, Taoism and Buddhism - and their blending in Zen Buddhism* assume such importance for the West today.
Zen Buddhism helps man to find an answer to the question of his existence, an answer which is essentially the same as that given in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and yet which does not contradict the rationality, realism, and independence which are modern man's precious achievements. Paradoxically, Eastern religious thought turns out to be more congenial to Western rational thought than does Western religious thought itself.
Erich Fromm (1900-1980)
German American Psychoanalyst and Social Philosopher
* The Japanese meditation tradition
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There may be a great significance in the fact that Pythagoras in Greece and the Buddha in the Orient occur at the same time in the sixth century B.C. Both are powerfully, perceptively thinking and acting human individuals who, coming out of a past in which only mystically ordained kings counted and humans were omniexpendable pawns, produced mathematical tools and philosophis forever thereafter to employ.
R.Buckminster Fuller (1895-1984)
American Inventor, Social Engineer and Philosopher
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I have no hesitation in declaring that I owe a great deal to the inspiration that I have derived from the life of the Enlightenment One. Asia has a message for the whole world, if only it would live up to it. There is the imprint of Buddhistic influence on the whole of Asia, which includes India, China, Japan, Burma, Ceylon, and the Malay States. For Asia to be not for Asia but for the whole world, it has to re-learn the message of the Buddha and deliver it to the whole world. His love, his boundless love went out as much to the lower animal, to the lowest life as to human beings. And he insisted upon purity of life.
Mahama Gandhi ( 1869-1948)
Indian Thinker and Apostle of Non Violence
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It was when I was up at Oxford in the early 1970's that I became interested in Buddhism. My life was full of confusion and distress of every kind, and I found in Buddhist philosophy a way of thought that enthralled me by its calm and radical analysis of desire, its rejection of all the self-dramatisiting intensities by which I lived, and its promise of a possible strong and unsentimental sincerity.
Andrew Harvey British author, poet and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford
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I left India and returned to Colombo, where I was the guest of a Singhalese student I knew in Perth. They were Buddhists, their house was in the grounds of a temple, and the atmosphere of the household was very peaceful and unbelievably gentle. I talked a lot about Buddhism with them, and they took me up to a temple in the hills, in Kandy, where I met the monks and talked to a very old abbot, who explained more about Buddhism to me. found Buddhism fascinating. Their concept that you progress towards the Ineffable through a number of existences seemed to me much more intellectually satisfying than the Christian belief that you come just once and are cast into circumstances maybe of great wealth or of great moment, but that you come to God or don't come to God on the basis of that one life. The logical attraction of Buddhism after the devastating experience of India was a further part of my breaking down. I was never on the point of embracing Buddhism but I found, and still find, it infinitely more satisfying than the Judeo-Christian philosophy.
Robert J. Hawke Rhodes Scholar,
Trade Union Leader from 1983and Prime Minister of Australia
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Now in this realm Buddha's speeches are a source and mine of quite unparalleled richness and depth. As soon as we cease to regard Buddha's teachings simply intellectually and acquiesce with a certain sympathy in the age-old Eastern concept of unity, if we allow Buddha to speak to us as vision, as image, as the awakened one, the perfect one, we find him, almost independently of the philosophic content and dogmatic kernel of his teachings, a great prototype of mankind. Whoever attentively reads a small number of the countless speeches of Buddha is soon aware of harmony in them, a quietude of soul, a smiling transcendence, a totally unshakeable firmness, but also invariable kindness, endless patience. As ways and means to the attainment of this holy quietude of soul, the speeches are full of advice, precepts, hints.
The intellectual content of Buddha's teaching is only half his work, the other half is his life, his life as lived, as labour accomplished and action carried out. A training, a spiritual self training of the highest order was accomplished and is taught here, a training about which unthinking people who talk about "quietism" and "Hindu dreaminess" and the like in connection with Buddha have no conception; they deny him the cardinal Western virtue of activity. Instead Buddha accomplished a training for himself and his pupils, exercised a discipline, set up a goal, and produced results before which even the genuine heroes of European action can only feel awe.
Herman Hesse (1877-1962)
German author and winner of the Nobel Prize
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The more I studied satipathana*, the more impressed I became with it as a system of mind training. It is in line with our Western scientific attitude of mind in that it is unprejudiced, objective and analytical. It relies on personal, direct experience, and not on anyone else's ideas or opinions. It is exceedingly simple and makes use of 'bare attention' basically as simple as a sustained 'ah look' but within a carefully chosen and disciplined system. It therefore explores all premature judgements, all talking 'about it and about,' all arguments, discussions and such waste of time as we in the West are inclined to be fond of. In fact, it gets you out of the rut and bondage of yourself, your prejudices, your clichés, your blindness and your self-opinionatedness, to set you free to see and prove a real world .
Dr E. Graham Howe MB. BS. DPM.
Eminent British Physician
* Buddhist meditation.
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The way of Buddhism is Middle Way between all extremes. This is no weak compromise, but a sweet reasonableness which avoids fanaticism and laziness with equal care, and marches onward without that haste which brings its own reaction, but without ceasing. The Buddha called it the Noble Eightfold Path to Nirvana, and it may be regarded as the noblest course of spiritual training yet presented, in such a simple form, to man. Buddhism is neither pessimistic nor 'escapist'. It is a system of thought, a religion, a spiritual science and a way of life which is reasonable, practical and all-embracing. For 2,500 years it has satisfied the spiritual needs of nearly one third of mankind. It appeals to those in search of truth because it has no dogmas, satisfies the reason and the heart alike, insists on self-reliance coupled with tolerance for other points of view, embraces science, religion, philosophy, psychology, mysticism, ethics and art, and points to man alone as the creator of his present life and sole designer of his destiny
.Justice Christmas Humphreys (1901-1983)
Eminent British Judge
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Among the early Buddhists, the metaphysical theory was neither affirmed or denied, but simply ignored as being meaningless and unnecessary. Their concern was with the immediate experience, which, because of its consequences for life, came to be known as 'liberation' or 'enlightenment'. The Buddha and his disciples of the southern school seem to have applied to the problems of religion that 'operational philosophy' which contemporary scientific thinkers have begun to apply to the natural sciences. The modern conception of man's intellectual relationship to the universe was anticipated by the Buddhist doctrine that desire is the source of illusion.
To the extent that one has overcome desire, a mind is free from illusion. This is true not only of the man of science, but also the artist and the philosopher. Only the disinterested mind can transcend sense and pass beyond the boundaries of animal or average-sensual human life. Perfect non-attachment demands of those who aspire to it, not only compassion and charity, but also the intelligence that perceives the general implications of particular acts, that sees the individual being within the system of social and cosmic relations of which he is but a part. In this respect, it seems to me, Buddhism shows itself decidedly superior to Christianity.
In the Buddhist ethic, stupidity, or unawareness, ranks as one of the principal sins. At the same time, people are warned that they must take their share of responsibility for the social order in which they find themselves. One of the branches of the Eightfold Path is said to be 'right means of livelihood', the Buddhist is expected to refrain from engaging in such socially harmful occupations as soldiering, or the manufacture of arms or intoxicating drugs.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
British author, Playwright and thinker
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It is a remarkable indication of the subtlety of Indian speculation that Gautama should have seen deeper than the greatest of modern idealists. The tendency of enlightened thought of today all the world over is not towards theology but philosophy and psychology. The bark of theological dualism is drifting into danger. The fundamental principles of evolution and monism are being accepted by the thoughtful.
Prof. Julian Huxley (1887-1975) British author,
Zoologist and Director General of UNESCO
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I am ignorant of Buddhism and speak under correction, and merely in order the better to describe my general point of view; but as apprehend the Buddhistic doctrine of karma, I agree in principle with that.
William James (I842-I9I0)
American philosopher and psychologis
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When a modern western psychologist reads the Pali Nikayas*, he again finds passages which he recognizes as belonging to his field and are concerned with typical psychological problems. Perception, imagination and thinking are described and the idea of psychological causality is developed, although in very vague terms. Behaviour and consciousness are explained as dynamic processes, governed by needs. There are the rudiments of an understanding of unconscious processes. We find interesting descriptions of different personality types. And the literature is full of advice on how to change the conscious processes evidently based on careful observation and experimentation.
Dr Rure C. A. Johnson M.A. D. Phil Swedish psychologist and
research psychologist for the Swedish National Defence
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As a student of comparative religions, I believe that Buddhism is the most perfect one the world has even seen. The philosophy of the theory of evolution and the law of karma were far superior to any other creed. It was neither the history of religion nor the study of philosophy that first drew me to the world of Buddhist thought but my professional interest as a doctor. My task was to teat psychic suffering and it was this that impelled me to become acquainted with the views and methods of that great teacher of humanity, whose principal theme was the chain of suffering, old age, sickness and death.
Dr C.C. Jung (1875-1961)
Swiss psychologist Founder of the Jungian school of psychology
* Buddhist scriptures
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Paul couples love with faith and hope, and his conception of love involves faith and hope: "Love," he says, "believes all things, hopes all things." The love I mean does not believe all things and hope all things. It survives disillusionment and persists in despair. Love is not love that ceases without hope or faith. As long as faith and hope support it, it is hardly more than puppy love. That love is pleasant is a fashionable myth, or, to be more charitable about it, an exception. The Buddha knew that love brings "hurt and misery, suffering, grief and despair"; and he advised detachment. The love I consider a virtue is not a blind love of the lovers or the trusting, hopeful love of Paul, but the love that knows what the Buddha knew and still loves, with open eyes.
Prof. Walter Kaufmann American philosopher and author
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He read widely and deeply in Buddhist text, translated sutras from French, and even wrote a biography of the Buddha. But at the root of his absorption in Buddhism was the fact that he felt it offered him direct philosophical consolation for the disappointment in his life. . . Jack embraced the first law of Buddhism above all others, the statement that "All life is suffering" . . It was as if the words had been written for him.
Ann Charter comments on American author and poet Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
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The idea of unity-in-diversity can be followed all the way back to the Pythagorean 'Harmony of the Sphere' and the Hippocratic's 'sympathy of all things: 'there is one common flow, one common breathing, all things are in sympathy'. The doctrine that everything in the universe hangs together partly by mechanical causes but mainly by hidden affinities (which also accounts for apparent coincidences), provides not only the foundation for sympathetic magic, astrology and alchemy: it also runs as a leit-motif through the teachings of Taoism and Buddhism, the neo-Platonists, and the philosophers of the early Renaissance.
Arthur Koestler (1905-1983)
Hungarian novelist and journalist
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If I knew the Buddha would be speaking here tomorrow, nothing in the world could stop me from going to listen to him. And I would follow him to the very end.
J.Krishnamuri Indian philosopher (l895-1986 )
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The Indian, the Aztec, old Mexico! All that fascinates me and has fascinated me for years, there is glamour and magic for me. Not Buddha. Buddha is so finished and perfected and fulfilled and "'volender" and without new possibilities - to me I mean.
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)British novelist
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Today science is challenging the finite quality of the human brain, a brain consisting of some 10,000 million electrically stimulated cells programmed with the instincts of our long history and receptive to new notions whether true or false. The aggregate of these cells provides our ever-changing personality and their partial removal by surgery or altered rhythm by shock treatment changes our character. By such crude methods, aggression can be turned into fear, hatred to affection - how much better that they should be changed by appreciation of the realities that the philosophy of Buddha has placed in our hands.
William Mac Quilty British Award winning film maker,
Traveller and Fellow of The Royal Geographical Society
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The message of the Buddha is a message of joy. He found a treasure and he wants us to follow the path that leads us to the treasure. He tells man that he is in deep darkness, but he also tells him that there is a path that leads to light. He wants us to arise from a life of dreams into a higher life where man loves and does not hate, where a man helps and does not hurt. His appeal is universal, because he appeals to reason and to the universal is us all: It is you who must make the effort. The Great of the past only show the way.' He achieved a superior harmony of vision and wisdom by placing spiritual truth on the crucial test of experience; and only experience can satisfy the mind of modern man. He wants us to watch and be awake and he wants us to seek and to find.
Juan Mascan Spanish Academic and
Educationalist, Lecturer at Cambridge University
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I have so often tried to isolate the quality of "Zen" * which attracted me so powerfully to its literature and later to the practice of zazen #. But since the essence of Zen might well be what one teacher called the moment-by-moment awakening of mind, there is little that may sensibly be said about it without succumbing to that breathless, mystery-ridden prose that drives so many sincere aspirants in the other direction. In zazen, one may hope ~ penetrate the ringing stillness of the universal mind.
Peter Mathiessen American Novelist, Naturalist and Explorer.
Winner of The National Book Award in 1979
* The Japanese meditation tradition.
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Maugham's interest in mysticism and Eastern philosophy is not a sudden development of his later life. Although his early questioning of Christianity culminated in the atheism represented in Philip Carey, he continued his examination of the religions of the East and his enquiries into mysticism. 'Faith' a short story published in 1899' considers sympathetically the dilemma of a young monk who loses the ability to believe in God. 'The Painted Veil' treated in however a superficial manner, the serenity of the belief in 'The Way'. In the 'Gentlemen in the Parlour', Maugham discusses the philosophy of Buddha, and he confessed to finding considerable attraction in the belief in the transmigration of souls . . . Because of the impact which the 'Razor's Edge' made in 1944, it has generally been overlooked that in the 'Narrow Corner', Maugham had already treated in considerable depth the philosophy of Indian religion. In this understated serious novel there is extensive discussion of Buddhism, and the progress of the story is a movement in the direction of that belief by the central figure.
R. L. Calder's comments On the works of English novelist W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
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Buddhism is much less a matter of organized and institutional orthodoxy than a state of mind. Buddhism does not aim directly at theological salvation but a total clarification of consciousness. It is not so much a way of worshipping as a way of being. Exterior cultural accretions are much less important than they may seem, and the Buddhist cultural awareness is endowed with mercury like formlessness, which erodes the statistical eye of the Western scholar.
Father Thomas Merton (1915-1968)
American Catholic Priest, Author and Social Crtics
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Of all the great religious teachers of the world, none has incarnated and lived the idea that ultimate reality is beyond the grasp of the ordinary mind with such purity and concentration as the Buddha. This, in part, explains why the Buddha's discourses say nothing about the existence of a Supreme Being, for example, or about immortality . . Its strategy of negation has misled many Westerners into thinking Buddhism is pessimistic and anti-life. Some have even thought of Nirvana, the ultimate goal of Buddhist discipline, as a sort of spiritual suicide. Nothing could be further from the truth and, in fact, there is no religion which has a higher estimation of human possibility.
Prof. Jacob Needleman Scholar,
Author and Professor for philosophy at San Francisco State College
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Whenever one thinks of the Buddha, one inevitably thinks of His great teaching; and I often feel that, perhaps, if we think more of that basic teaching of the avoidance of hatred and violence, we may be nearer the solution to our problem. In this world of storm and strife, hatred and violence, the message of the Buddha shines like a radiant sun: Perhaps at no time was that message more needed than in this world of the atomic and hydrogen bombs . . . Let us remember that immortal message and try to fashion our thoughts and actions in the light of that teaching . . . and help a little in prompting right thinking and right action. . . . If any question has to be considered, it has to be considered peacefully and democratically in the way taught by the Buddha.
Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964)
Indian Prime Minister
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Here it is grasped that one must not hate even evil, that one must not oppose it, that one not hate even oneself; that one should not merely acquiesce in the suffering that such a way of lie entails, that one should live entirely in positive feelings, that one should take the side of one's opponent in word and deed, that and through a supersfetation of the peaceable, good natured conciliatory, helpful ad loving states one impoverishes the soil in this standpoint is possible only when no moral fanaticism prevails, i.e. when evil is hated, not for its own sake, but only because it opens the way to states that are harmful to us ( unrest, work, care, entanglements, dependence).
This is a Buddhist standpoint : here is sin is not hated, there the concept in lacjking. Buddhism is hundred times more realistic than other religions. It has entered upon the inheritance of objectively and coolly putting up with problems. It came to life after several hundred years of philosophical development. The notion of God is done away with as soon as it appears, prayer is out of the question. So is asceticism. No categorical imperative. No coercion at all, not even within the monastic community. Hence it also does not challenge to fight against those of different faiths. its teaching turns against nothing so impressively as against the feeling of revengefulness, animosity and resentment.
Frederick Nietszche (1884-1900)
German philosopher
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If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must say 'no'; if we ask whether the electron's position changes with time, we must say 'no'; if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say 'no'; if we ask whether it is in motion, we must say 'no'. The Buddha has given such answers when interrogated as to the conditions of a man's self after his death; but they are not familiar answers for the tradition of seventeenth and eighteenth century science.
J Robert Oppenheimer ( 1904-1967)
American Physician
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Anyone from a king to a barber who wished to listen to the Buddha's teachings, or follow him in his missionary wanderings, or join the Sangha, the formal fellowship of Buddhist disciples, was free to do so. Even women, after some hesitation were admitted to the Sangha, whose establishment is often counted as one of the Buddha's most practical achievements, in large measure responsible for the eventual spread and continuity of Buddhist doctrine in the Asian world. The founding of an Order appears also to illustrate still further the Buddha's psychological acumen, for though he taught that each human being must trend the path to "awakening" or "deliverance" alone, he also realized what sustainment there could be in daily association with others working towards a common goal. Of the establishment of the Buddhist Sangha, Arnold Toynbee has said that it was a greater social achievement than the founding of the Platonist academy in Greece.
Nancy Wilson Ross (1901-1986)
American Journalist, War Correspondent and Author.
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Of the great religions of history I prefer Buddhism, especially in its earliest forms, because it has had the smallest element of persecution. Buddhism is a combination of both speculative and scientific philosophy. It advocates the Scientific Method and pursues that to a finality that may be called Rationalistic. In it are to be found answers to such question of interest as "What is mind and matter? Of them which is of great importance? Is the universe moving towards a goal?
What is man's position? Is there living that is noble?" It takes up where science cannot lead because of the limitations of the latter's instruments. Its conquests are those of the mind. I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some people known to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above him in those respects.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) British Mathematician, Philosopher,
Author and Social Critic,
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We find the doctrine of metempsychosis, springing from the earliest and noblest ages of the human race, always spread abroad in the earth as the belief of the great majority of mankind, nay, really as the teachings of all religions with the exception of that of the Jews and the two which have preceded from it: in the most subtle form, however, and coming nearest to the truth, as has already been mentioned, in Buddhism. It almost seems that, as the oldest languages are the most perfect so also are the oldest religions. If I were to take the results of my philosophy as a yardstick of the truth, I would concede to Buddhism the pre-eminence of all religions of the world
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
German philosopher
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While the materialist is mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation. But Buddhism is 'The Middle Way' and therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things but the craving for them.
The keynote of Buddhist economics, therefore, is simplicity and non-violence. From an economist's point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern amazingly small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results.
It is in the light of both immediate experience and long term prospects that the study of Buddhism economics could be recommended even to those who believe that economic growth is more important than any spiritual or religous values.
For it not a question of choosing between "modern growth" and "traditional stagnation". It is a question of finding the right path of development, theMiddle Way between materialist heedlessness and traditonalist immobility, in short, of finding 'Right Livelihood'.
Dr E. F. Schumacher, CBE. (1911-1977)
British Rhodes Scholar, Economist, Journalist and
Economic Adviser to The National Coal Board from 1950-1970
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He gave expression to truths of everlasting value and advanced the ethics not of India alone but of humanity. Buddha was one of the greatest ethical men of genius ever bestowed upon the world.
Albert Schweitzer (1875-1 965)French Scholar, Theologian and Philospher,
Winner of The Nobel Prize.
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Buddhism, better than most religions, seems to have adapted to modern life. Many considering it to be, among other things, not only a method of self discovery but a source of ideas for social orientation without equal in the West.
Lucien Stryk American author, poet and
Winner of Isaac Rosenbaum Poetry Award
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Buddhism was the first spiritual force, known to us in history, which drew close together such a large number of races separated by most difficult barriers of distance, by difference of language and custom, by various degrees and divergent types of civilization. It had its motive power, neither in international commerce, nor in empire building, nor in a scientific curiosity, nor in a migrative impulse to occupy fresh territory. It was a purely disinterested effort to help mankind forward to its final goal.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)
Indian poet and educationalist.
Winner of The Nobel Prize.
