|
|
|
| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
|
|
Thanks TigerLikesRooster. Nice perspective BTW. :') I'm going to ping this one, and I know I'm taking a chance here. :'D |
|
|
|
|
Posted on 07/22/2012 6:21:13 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Published: July 20, 2012 at 5:54 PM
BODH GAYA, India, July 20 (UPI) -- The 2,500-year-old tree under which Gautama Buddha is believed to have attained enlightenment is alive and healthy, Indian scientists said Thursday.
The Bodhi tree, a large Sacred Fig (Ficus religiosa,) is in Bodh Gaya in India's eastern state of Bihar, about 60 miles from the state capital of Patna.
"The Bodhi tree is fully healthy," Subhash Nautiyal of the Forest Research Institute in India's northern state of Uttarakhand said.
Nautiyal and colleagues examined the tree after removing the cement slabs around its base, China's Xinhua News Agency reported.
"It will help the tree to receive water and nutrition in its roots," the scientists said.
The 1,500-year-old temple behind the sacred tree is visited by large numbers of tourists from all over the world, particularly from Japan.
Yeah, but will it survive “The Invasion of the Bodhi Snatchers.”
“Nautiyal and colleagues examined the tree after removing the cement slabs around its base...”
There is no such thing as a cement slab. Cement is a powder. If it’s hard, it’s concrete.
Christ is God....what more could one need???
You are 100% correct. I am also a Buddhist and Christian (but I am white). Buddha literally means saint / enlightened being. I find Buddhism to be more of a way of life.. I believe that Jesus was the son of God and He was also an enlightened man.
The huge Buddha statues in Afghanistan.. Gone!
The huge Buddha statues in Afghanistan.. Gone!
Man put the Bible together not Jesus Christ. Anti-Biblical does not necessarily mean anti-Jesus. You are assuming that the Bible has captured all teachings of Jesus and was never ever ever altered by man...
The goal of Chritianity is eternal life. The goal of Buddhism is to escape the endless cycle of death and rebirth and become one with nothingness.
Orthodox (all the way back) Christianity holds that the Bible is inspired by God and infallible for doctrine, teaching, reproof and correction. Christ held that Scripture was ‘God breathed’ and the Apostle John, in his Gospel, holds that Christ was, in fact, the Word. Revision or rejection of Scriptural purity is, in fact, rejection of Christ. John holds this again in Revelations.
All the teachings of Christ are in the revelation given to us by God. The Holy Spirit is given to instruct as we grow in The Way. All that Christ did on earth, however, could not be contained in all the libraries of the world as the Bible points out. This does not mean he climbed Mt. Everest or baked a souffle or won a basketball championship. What he accomplished in terms of His glory, eternity and the vanquishing of sin and death would be more than sufficient to blow the internet in random electrons.
You can certainly argue that men wrote the Bible, but Christ was also a man as well as God and he maintained that the Scriptures were of God. If you mean to argue that Scripture, because it is the work of men, is just as errant or dated as most any other literary work, well, then I would advise you to consult about a million sources that would refute that notion and, in fact, point to the painstaking perfection of the document’s preservation, completeness and authenticity delivered to us just as it was written. Really now, if God created the world, could it be so difficult to give us a manual for living?
You have to do your own research though - I already believe it.
|
|
|
| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
|
|
|
Thanks TigerLikesRooster. Nice perspective BTW. :') I'm going to ping this one, and I know I'm taking a chance here. :'D |
|
|
|
|
Cut stump of the tree under discussion.
In the 1950s dendrochronologists were making active efforts at finding the oldest living tree species, in order to use the analysis of the rings for various research purposes, such as the evaluation of former climates, the dating of archaeological ruins, and addressing the basic scientific question of maximum potential lifespan. Bristlecone pines in the White Mountains of California and elsewhere were discovered by Edward Schulman to be older than any species yet discovered. This spurred interest in finding very old bristlecones, possibly older than the Methuselah tree, aged by Schulman in 1957 at over 4700 years.
Donald R. Currey was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studying the climate dynamics of the Little Ice Age using dendrochronology techniques. In 1963 he became aware of the bristlecone populations in the Snake Range in general, and on Wheeler Peak in particular. Based on the size, growth rate and growth forms of some of the trees he became convinced that some very old specimens existed on the mountain, cored some of them, and found trees exceeding 3,000 years old. However, Currey was not able to obtain a continuous series of overlapping cores from WPN-114. Here, stories diverge. It is not clear whether Currey requested, or Forest Service personnel suggested, that he cut down and section the tree in lieu of being able to core it. There is also some uncertainty as to why a core sample could not be obtained. One version has it that he broke or lodged his only long increment borer and could not obtain another before the end of the field season, another claims he broke two of them, while another implies that a core sample was too difficult to obtain and also would not provide as much definitive information as a full cross section of the tree would.
In addition, there are conflicting views over Prometheus being unique in the Wheeler Peak grove. It is reported that Currey and/or the Forest Service personnel who authorized the cutting believed the tree was just one of many large, very old trees in the grove. Others, at least one of whom was involved in the decision-making and tree cutting, believe that the tree was clearly unique — obviously older than other trees in the area. At least one person involved says that Currey knew this to be true at the time, although there is no known admission from Currey himself that he knew this, and others have disputed that the tree, based on observation alone, was obviously much older than the others.
Another uncertainty is that it is not clear why the felling of such an old tree was necessary given the topic Currey was studying. Since the Little Ice Age started no more than 600 years ago, many trees could presumably have provided the information he was seeking for that time period. However, in Currey's original report in the journal Ecology (Currey, 1965) he refers to the Little Ice Age as encompassing the period from 2000 BC to the present, thus defining the Age over a much longer time period than is currently accepted. Whether this was the common sentiment at the time is not known. In the article, Currey indicates that he sectioned the tree as much from the question of whether the oldest bristlecones were necessarily confined to California's White Mountains (as some dendrochronologists had been claiming) as from its usefulness in regard to studies of the Little Ice Age.
Whatever the rationale, the tree was cut down and sectioned in August 1964, and several pieces of the sections hauled out to be processed and analyzed, first by Currey, then by others in later years. Sections, or pieces of sections have ended up in various places, some of which are publicly accessible, including the Great Basin National Park visitor center (Baker, Nevada), the Ely Convention Center (Ely, Nevada), the University of Arizona Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research (Tucson, Arizona), and the US Forest Service's Institute of Forest Genetics (Placerville, California).
Clarification: The stump is from Prometheus, not from the still healthy Buddha tree.
Good thing George Washington wasn’t born there!
Arguing with a fundamentalist is like trying to argue with a liberal.
almost related, interesting in its own right, but from an unusable source:
Illegal digs threaten Pakistan’s Buddhist past
http://www.iol.co.za/scitech/science/discovery/illegal-digs-threaten-pakistan-s-buddhist-past-1.1346250#.UA6-bMXNkxF
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.