Ang Way Chuang 洪伟壮 (Piyadassī)

@wcang79.bsky.social

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A lousy junior Buddhist monk.

I read the Suttas because I spent, like, $250 US on the four Nikayas, and don't want the money to go to waste!
wrestler (pahalavan)
Baby cobra hissing
Indians treated mosques like other places of worship. Sometimes, calling them dharmashalas.
Persian genre known as tarikh (history)
A map showing South Asia and South East Asia upside down.
Panchatantra story of goose and the peril of making rash decision.
conquest of all the earth (sarvaprithivivijaya)
Sati (widow burning)
A small stick insect moving.
A baby with an adult head.
Sanskrit works on both artha (power and wealth) and dharma.
Recent scholarship confirms that birds - including parrots - will consume alcohol and suffer vocalization impairment.
varnadharma (duty of caste) as a justification for violence in Bhagavadgita.
Multipurpose Ashokan Pillar: Phallus and roller.
Author interpreting piyadassi as good-looking
I am quite free, well-free from three crooked things, mortar, pestle, and husband with his own crooked thing.
Mahavira and Gautama, the founders of Jainism and Buddhism, respectively, were dynamic renunciants who lived at the same time in the fifth century BCE. Although they never met, their life stories share a broadly similar outline. Both men were born in oligarchies, in towns about 300 kilometers from each other. Mahavira was born at Kunda-grama, quite close to the Vajji capital of Vaishali. 32 Siddhartha Gautama (or Siddhattha Gotama, as his name is given in Buddhist Prakrit sources) was born at Lumbini, in modern-day Nepal, and raised in Kapilavastu, a town associated with the Shakya oligarchy.
Karma is another idea that was seriously overhauled in the early Upanishads. Karma literally means "action." In the Vedas, karma denoted activity to produce certain results (e.g., money, power, pleasing a god) ritual action specifically and the ability of this highly regulated human In contrast, in the Upanishads, all human actions result in negative or positive implications for one's next life. This expanded notion of karma and its consequences went along with the idea of samsara-the cycle of death and rebirth that characterizes all human existence-that became elaborated at this time.
Alongside elaborate physical sacrifices, the Upanishads posited that yajna (sacrifice) could be internalized, a radically new idea within Vedic culture. As the Chandogya Upanishad puts it: "Now, what people call 'sacrifice' (yajna) is really being a celibate student (brahmacharya). Being a celibate student is how one finds the knower. What people call 'offer-ing (ishta) is really being a celibate student. Striving precisely by being a celibate student, one discovers the self?" In other words, the pursuit of knowledge, especially by being a celibate student (brahmacharin), could produce comparable results to physical Vedic sacrifice. This star-tling proposition would likely have met with opposition or perhaps just blank stares of non-comprehension by Vasishtha, Vishvamitra, and other Rig Veda poets. Here we glimpse astonishing innovation of the core Rig Vedic concept of the centrality of sacrifices, even while still using the basic language and grammar of ritual.
Vedic peoples consumed beef
Retroflex sounds borrowed from Dravidian languages
Snippet from India: Arya (noble)
A cat licking its private part on top of a stupa
With Bhante Shravasti Dhammika and the president of Buddhist Gem Fellowship, Tee Chee Seng, at KLIA.