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A man in Thailand who went on a violent rampage at a temple in the Chonburi province died after being impaled by a Buddha statue. On Feb 27, the 49-year-old man, who went by the name Ek, had taken methamphetamine in the temple with his friend - a monk at the temple who goes by the name Best, reported Thai media outlet Thaiger. Ek then attacked Best with a fluorescent tube. While the latter ran away to seek help, Ek went on to smash statues in the temple, before fleeing into the main hall. When the police arrived at the...

The Buddha statue depicts Siddhartha Gautama, who lived in South Asia around 2,550 years ago. Born a prince, he would later renounce his worldly wealth and seek out enlightenment, eventually becoming the Buddha, a Sanskrit-derived word that means "the enlightened one," according to Buddhist tradition...The newfound statue dates to between A.D. 90 and 140, said Steven Sidebotham, a history professor at the University of Delaware who is co-director of the Berenike Project, told Live Science in an email.The 28-inch-tall (71 centimeters) statue shows the Buddha standing and holding parts of his robes in his left hand, representatives from the Egyptian...

A single thief allegedly maneuvered the 250-pound sculpture, dating from Japan’s Edo Period, out of the Barakat Gallery’s backyard and into a rental truckA bronze Buddha statue valued at $1.5m was stolen early Monday morning (18 September) from the Los Angeles location of the Barakat Gallery. The stolen sculpture was believed to have been originally commissioned as the centrepiece of a temple and dates back to Japan's Edo Period (1603-1867), an especially prosperous time for the nation and its arts. Paul Henderson, director of Barakat’s Los Angeles location (the ancient art gallery also has spaces in London and Seoul), estimated...

Converting people to another religion is illegal in Nepal, but missionaries are willing to risk prosecution to spread the Christian faith. "Victory to Jesus," Korean pastor Pang Chang-in cries as he blesses a new church in the village of Jharlang, in the foothills of the Himalayas. The congregation of the newly converted raise their hands in prayer. Most are from the indigenous Tamang community, who used to follow the Lama faith, an ancient spiritual practice. In Pang's eyes the Tamang people are "poor financially and spiritually". "So, a miracle takes place and the whole village converts," he says. Missionaries, many...

Nihilism, or meaninglessness and non-belief in one's own soul, is the logical assumption if the transcendent God of life and creation does not exist. Nihilism is spiritual, moral, and intellectual suicide, yet for the last two hundred years, Enlightenment atheist humanists — rationalists, materialists, positivists, pantheists, Transhumanists, and their modern occult Luciferian counterparts such as occult New Agers — have been moving the West and America closer and closer to Buddha's denial of the soul.

Loot, a despicable word, was evidently among the first few Hindustani expressions to enter the British lexicon. It aptly illustrates the brand of British colonisation like no other word. On a chilly evening in the first week of December in 1862, British Empire’s railway engineer E.B. Harris reached a small riverside market village called Sultanganj on the south bank of Ganges some twenty miles west of Bhagalpur. Here his 4,771 workers were excavating a vast mound of bricks on the hillside to build a railway yard. Harris, recognised among the railway engineers for the construction of the challenging Jamalpur tunnel,...

Ruins of a wall built during the Mauryan empire have been recovered during an excavation in Tilaurakot, Kapilvastu. Maurya era bricks measuring 47 cm long, 26 to 28 cm wide and 7 cm thick were used to build the wall.According to archeologists involved in the excavation, the findings of the wall ruins have archaeological significance...The Department of Archaeology and Lumbini Development Trust started excavating and exploring Tilaurakot, an ancient Shakya capital city where Siddhartha Gautam spent his princely life before he became the Buddha, and its surrounding areas in 2012.A geophysical survey of the Tilaurakot premises conducted in 2014 showed...

A pair of newly-discovered 2,200 year-old copper Buddhas statues found in China are the oldest of their kind to be discovered in the country The small figurines were part of a trove of artifacts found among a group of ancient tombs from the Eastern Han Dynasty. One statue, known as Shakyamuni, shows Buddha standing on a platform while dressed in a long cloak and the other is for Five Tathāgatas, which highlights the five great Buddhas. These figurines are 200 years older previous Buddha statues found in China and were fashioned in Gandhara style. That is a style of Buddhist...

It was a fabled kingdom known in ancient times as the Island of Gold, a civilisation with untold wealth that explorers tried in vain to find long after its unexplained disappearance from history around the 14th century. The site of Srivijaya may finally have been found – by local fishing crews carrying out night-time dives on the Musi River near Palembang on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Their extraordinary catches are treasures ranging from a lifesize eighth-century Buddhist statue studded with precious gems – worth millions of pounds – to jewels worthy of kings....

WASHINGTON: The Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan were destroyed by the Taliban with the help of Pakistani and Saudi engineers. According to an account published here on Saturday, a local Afghan told the makers of a Swiss documentary on the giant statues which had stood there, carved in the side of a mountain for hundreds of years, had been destroyed by engineers from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The dynamiting of the statues took place in March 2001. Swiss documentary filmmaker Christian Frei, who has made several documentaries that have won praise at various international film festivals, shot ‘The Giant Buddhas’ in...

More than 60% of born again Christians in America between the ages of 18 and 39 believe that Buddha, Muhammad and Jesus are all valid paths to salvation and over 30% say they either believe that Jesus sinned just like other people when He lived on Earth or aren’t sure, according to a new study.There’s a “striking decline” in evangelical religious beliefs and practices over the last 10 years, as the number of self-proclaimed believers to hold these beliefs has increased by nearly 25%, says Probe Ministries in a statement announcing the results of its Religious Views & Practices Survey.The...

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. When the Taliban and its Al Qaeda allies blew up two giant Buddha statues in Afghanistan,it put the Jihadist alliance on the world's radar even before the September 11 attacks. The destruction of the statues was widely condemned by just about everyone. Even Democrats. Now, Joe Biden has decided to free an Al Qaeda commander who helped bomb the statues. As the Taliban retake Afghanistan, Biden’s decision to free Abdul Latif Nasir signals support for the...

"Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff, joined by Wangmo Dixey, Bhante Uparatana, Marvin Harada, Tarthang Rinpoche, Shekhar Narasimahn and Erika Moritsugu, holds a Vesak Celebration for the Buddha's birthday, Tuesday May 25, 2021, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building."

A Chinese retailer’s promotion of a Buddha statue crafted in the likeness of former U.S. President Donald Trump has gone viral on Chinese social media platforms, the Chinese state-run Global Times reported Tuesday. “The statue, with Trump’s contemplative face lowered, and both hands resting in its lap, is labeled by the seller on Taobao as ‘Trump, who knows Buddhism better than anyone,'” according to the newspaper. Taobao is a Chinese online shopping site owned by the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. “Make your company great again” A ceramic figurine of former US president Donald Trump as Buddha is trending on China’s...

A recently discovered Buddha statue was smashed into pieces by local construction workers and a cleric on Saturday in Mardan. The relic was discovered while digging the foundation for a house. A video of the act, which has since gone viral on social media, showed the construction workers, along with a cleric, smashing the Buddha statue using a sledgehammer. According to international reports, the statue was destroyed allegedly on the order of a local cleric. "Your nikah would cease to exist and you will no more be a believer if the statue isn't disposed of," the cleric allegedly told the...

The 21st century is in danger of becoming an era of statue smashing and historical erasure. Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen anything like the current war on the past. In 2001, the primeval Taliban blew up two ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan on grounds that their very existence was sacrilegious to Islam. In 2015, ISIS militants entered a museum in Mosul, Iraq, and destroyed ancient, pre-Islamic statues and idols. Their mute crime? These artifacts predated the prophet Muhammad. The West prides itself in...

It's one of the greatest artworks in the world, and now Chinese archaeologists and artists are using 3D printing to make a perfect copy of the Yungang Buddhist Grottoes. 'West Empress Chamber', the number 3 and the largest cave of Yungang Grottoes in northern China, have been meticulously re-created using specially developed 3D printers and state-of-the-art scanning technology. ... The original 'West Empress Chamber' was carved between the 5th and 6th century during the Northern Wei Dynasty - when the religion first flourished in China. The full-size replica is enormous, measuring 17.9 metres (59 feet) in length, 13.6 metres (45...

One of the most revered relics in the ancient Buddhist world was the Buddha’s begging bowl. A rough outline of its long convoluted history is this – it was supposedly given to the people of Vesali by the Buddha when he passed through the city on his way to Kusinara. In the 1st/2nd century King Kanishka took it to Pushapura, now Peshawar, where a string of Chinese pilgrims reported seeing it between the 3rd and the 9th centuries. The importance of the bowl is attested by numerous depictions of it in Gandhara art, usually shown on the pedestal of Buddha...

Long-lost paintings have been discovered on the walls of Cambodia's ancient Angkor Wat temple, thanks to the keen observations of an Australian National University (ANU) researcher. The ancient paintings date back almost 500 years and depict deities, animals, boats and the temple itself, giving historians a new understanding of life in a relatively unknown period of Cambodia's history. Rock art researcher Noel Hidalgo Tan discovered the hidden images while working as a volunteer at an archaeological excavation in Angkor Wat during a university break in 2010... It was only when Tan enhanced the images on his computer that the paintings...

Human remains buried by a pair of monks in China over a millennia ago are claimed to belong to Buddha. Believers say the 2,000 pieces of cremated bones belonged to Siddhartha Gautama, whose teachings became the foundations of the Buddhist religion. The cremated bones were found in an ceramic box with an inscription claiming they belong to Buddha, who is believed to have died 2,500 years ago. The box was found in Jingchuan County, China, alongside more than 260 Buddhist statues.