SAARC International Conference On Archaeology of Buddhism

Internet as a source of information for Academic purpose with special reference to Buddhist Studies (part One)

Internet as a source of information for Academic purpose with special reference to Buddhist Studies (part One)

The purpose of this research is to explore the information source available on the internet for the Academic destination which helps the successful completion of research on Buddhist Studies and life-long learning.

         

In the world of today information plays a vital role in the field of research and day to day life. All resources related to research have increased dramatically over the last several years with reference to the demands of the information and the technology. Developments in the system of computer technology provide the means for the production and storage of ideas, thoughts, research, methodological research and experiments in digital form.

         

Among the available information channels the internet has become a popular resource and it is increasingly used as an alternative to printed resources. The book production process has been changed and largely digitized. Nowadays, readers heavily depend on e-versions. The dissemination of information through this medium has three main advantages over publication in the traditional manner, as cost, speed, and ease of access. Other advantages of an electronic medium include keyword searching and the use of multimedia and hypertext formats. The Library professionals have identified the new trend and started to acquire the e-resources to cater to their patrons effectively.

Nature of Internet

         

The internet is a global system of computer networks. It began in the late 1960s. It is becoming increasingly widespread. The Internet contains a wealth of information on a variety of subjects and it allows rapid transfers of data, messages, documents, sound, and images. The Internet consists of huge information as an encyclopedia of whole branches of universal knowledge. The volume of information you will find on the internet is amazing. Mostly sources on the Internet are often more up-to-date than sources in paper format. Sometimes, user has ever wondered at the information available on the net in many different perspectives on a single topic. It is visible that some particular topics or key words on internet are enriching with accurate, applicable, and informative information while some are overwhelming with inapplicable information. The reason for that is anyone can publish anything on the internet without considering their capabilities or code of ethics. Hence user must assess the validity of the information available on the internet.

Why people use the Internet?

There are number of reason such as:

To find general information

To find information for a particular subject

To conduct surveys

To conduct research

To correspond with far away friends (e.g. e-mail)

To meet people, virtually (e.g. facebook)

To discuss their interests with cyber friends (e.g. chatting)

To have fun (e.g. games)

To learn (e.g. online courses)

To read the news

To find software (e.g. virus guard)

To buy and sell things

Information seeking via the Internet

         

Proliferation of information resources coupled with a lack of Internet skills leads some users into difficulties when attempting to search and retrieve useful information. But the Internet is an attractive medium for seeking and obtaining information, for the following reasons:

The Internet is accessible throughout the day.

The end-user (reader) does not have to visit a library.

It is possible to find and obtain information relatively, quickly and conveniently.

The end-user can choose between saving, printing or reading information from the computer screen.

          One of the great things about the internet is that it puts information at finger tips, but it is not easy to access information which user need and available elsewhere. The Internet provides access to unlimited sources of information and search engines are continuously being upgraded to provide efficient way to help users to find what they want.

Internet usage for Academic purpose

         

Obtaining and handling information efficiently is one of great importance to Academics to do a research proficiently. Researchers follow different ways and means to obtain and handle information efficiently. To success this process mostly they get help from libraries and computers. Now computers have become an integral part of the lives of scholars and researchers. Especially Computers with internet connection have changed the information seeking behavior of Academics in advance.

         

Internet is an information source which is used as a vehicle for higher education, to seek information by Academics. It has become an integral element of Academic research and study. Internet has radically changed the global availability of scholarly publications. Today, a substantial part of the resources accessible for researchers and university students are offered through electronic sites and supply of easily obtainable information larger than ever. It is open twenty-four hours of the day and communication can be carried on at all hours without considering the distance. Modern today, internet is very much popular as an excellent research tool.

         

The most important form of education is the exchange of ideas and opinions between students and lecturers, and among researchers. Internet makes a great contribution to success of this process. It enriches with more scholarly information generated by Academics. Further it can be found that there are a number of digitization projects of historical, primary documents on the Web, many of them sponsored by Academic institutions.

         

Sometimes, a large amount of information is available but it does not have systematic editing or expert review of web-published material. Academic user must be aware of this and need to critically analyze the retrieved information before applying it in any way, in particular for research or any other Academic purpose.

         

Academic can locate “scholarly information” on the Web through the followings and the facilities available under those sites are listed.

ဓမၼစက္ အစ ဝါဆုိလ (သံဃာ အစ ဝါဆုိလ)

ဓမၼစက္ အစ ဝါဆုိလ (သံဃာ အစ ဝါဆုိလ)

တရားခ်စ္ခင္ သာသနာ့ႏြယ္ဝင္ သူေတာ္စဥ္ သူေတာ္ေကာင္းတုိ႔ အေနအားျဖင့္..
(သေႏၶ ေတာထြက္၊ ဓမၼစက္ မိန္႔ျမြက္ လဝါဆုိ) ဆုိတာ သူေတာ္ေကာင္းတုိ႔ မွတ္သားၿပီးသားျဖစ္မွာပါ။
(၁) ပဋိသေႏၶတည္သည့္ေန ့-မဟာသကၠရာဇ္-၆၇၊ ဝါဆုိလျပည့္ (ၾကာသပေတးေန ့)
(၂) ေတာထြက္သည့္ေန ့- မဟာသကၠရာဇ္-၉၇၊ ဝါဆုိလျပည့္ (တနလၤာေန ့)
(၃) ဓမၼစၾကၤာတရားဦးေဟာေန ့- မဟာသကၠရာဇ္-၁၀၃၊ ဝါဆုိလျပည့္ (စေနေန ့)
(၄) ေသာတာပန္လူသားစေပၚသည့္ေန ့-မဟာသကၠရာဇ္-၁၀၃၊ ဝါဆုိလျပည့္ (စေနေန ့)
(၅) သံဃာရတနာစေပၚသည့္ေန ့- မဟာသကၠရာဇ္-၁၀၃၊ ဝါဆုိလျပည့္ (စေနေန ့)
ထုိ႔အျပင္ လယ္တီဆရာေတာ္ ဘုရားၾကီး၏ ခုႏွစ္ေန႔ ဘုရားရွိခုိးမွာလည္း ေအာက္ပါအတုိင္း ေဖာ္ျပထားပါတယ္။
ဘုရားျဖစ္ခါ မိဂဒါသုိ႔ စၾကာေရႊဖဝါး ျဖန္႔ခ်ီသြား၍ ငါးပါးဝဂၢီ စံုအညီႏွင့္ မဟီတစ္ေသာင္း တိုက္အေပါင္းမွ ခေညာင္း ကပ္လာ နတ္ျဗဟၼာကုိ ဝါဆုိလျပည့္ စေန႔ေနဝယ္ ေႂကြေႂကြလ်မ္း တက္ ဓမၼစက္ကုိ မိန္႔ျမြက္ေထြျပား ေဟာေဖာ္ၾကား သည္ တရားနတ္စည္ ရြမ္းတယ္ကုိး။ (လယ္တီ ဆရာေတာ္)
ထုိ႔ေၾကာင့္ မၾကာမွီ ေရာက္ရွိလာေတာ့မည္ ဝါဆုိလျပည့္ ဓမၼစၾကၤာ အခါေတာ္ေန႔ဟာ သစၥာေလးပါး၊ အမွန္တရား ကုိ ေဟာျပခဲ့တဲ့ သစၥာ အလင္းေရာင္ ေဆာင္ယူျပသခဲ့တဲ့ ေန႔ထူးေန႔ျမတ္ အခါ သမယ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဓမၼစၾကၤာ-တရားဦး ေဟာၾကားေတာ္မူခဲ့တဲ့ ေနရာေလးကလည္း ရုိးရုိး ရွင္းရွင္းေလးျဖစ္တယ္ဆုိတာ မွန္းဆ ၾကည္ညဳိလုိ႔ရ ပါတယ္။
ျပီးေတာ့ ျမတ္ဗုဒၶေလာင္းလ်ာဟာ ေတာမွာ ဖြားျမင္ေတာ္မူခဲ့ပါတယ္။ (ကပိလဝတ္ျပည္ႏွင့္ ေကာလိယျပည္ အၾကား လုဗၺိနီအင္ၾကင္းေတာ)
ျမတ္ဗုဒၶေလာင္းလ်ာသည္ ေတာမွာ တရားက်င့္ၾကံအားထုတ္ခဲ့တယ္။ ထုိ႔အျပင္ဘုရားျဖစ္ျပန္ေတာ့လည္း ေနရဥၹရာ ကမ္းေျခႏွင့္ လူသူမနီးတဲ့ ေဗာဓိေညာင္ ပင္ေအာက္မွာ ဘုရားျဖစ္ေတာ္မူခဲ့ပါတယ္။ (သူေတာ္ေကာင္းတုိ႔ ေပ်ာ္ေမြ႔ရာျဖစ္တဲ့ ဥရုေဝဠေတာ)။
ျမတ္ဗုဒၶ တရားဦး ေဟာၾကားေတာ္မူခဲ့တာလည္း ဣတိပတနေခၚဆုိတဲ့ သားေပါင္းစုံေသာ ေတာထဲမွာပင္ျဖစ္သည္။ (မိဂဒါဝုန္ေတာ)
လူသုံးပါးတုိ႔၏ ဦးခုိက္ရာျဖစ္ေသာ ျမတ္ဗုဒၶရွင္ေတာ္သည္ ပရိနိဗၺာန္စံဝင္ေတာ့လည္း( ကုသိနာရုံ) ပင္မ်ဳိးစုံသည့္ ရဂုံသာေမာ အင္ၾကင္းေတာမွာပင္ျဖစ္ေလသည္။ (မလႅာမင္းတုိ႔ စုိက္ပ်ဳိးထားေသာ ရဂုံသာေမာ အင္ၾကင္းေတာ)
ဘုရားအစရွိေသာ ေရွးသူေတာ္ေကာင္းေတြဟာ အရိပ္စုံလွ သာယာလွတဲ့ သစ္ပင္ေတာေတာင္ေတြမွာ ေမြ႔ေလ်ာ္ၾက တာ သူေတာ္ေကာင္း တုိ႔ အေနနဲ႔ လြန္စြာ မွတ္သားစရာ ေကာင္းပါတယ္။
ထုိ႔အျပင္ ဆရာၾကီး မင္းသုဝဏ္ကလည္း မ်ဳိးခ်စ္စိတ္ဓာတ္အတြက္ ေအာက္ပါ ကဗ်ာေလးကုိ ေရးသားသြားသည္ကုိလည္း ေတြ႔ရျပန္တယ္။

“ဝါဆုိ ဝါေခါင္ ေရေတြႀကီးလို႔

သေျပသီးမွည့္ေကာက္စို႔ကြယ္

ခရာဆူးၿခံဳ ဟိုအထဲက

ေမွ်ာ့နက္မည္းႀကီး တြယ္တတ္တယ္

ေမွ်ာ့နက္ဆိုတာ ခ်ိဳနဲ႔လားကြယ့္

ေႁမြနဂါးေတာင္ ေၾကာက္ဘူးကြယ္

တုိ႔လည္းေၾကာက္ေပါင္ အတူသြားစို႔

အုန္းလက္ႏြားေလး ထားခဲ့မယ္

သြားမယ္ သြားမယ္။”   (ဆရာၾကီး မင္းသုဝဏ္)

Payasi Rajannya Sutta

Kumara Kassapa, accompanied by an assembly of five hundred Bhikkhus, came to the town of Setavvya in Kosala. At that time Prince Payasi was residing in Setavvya. The Prince had such a wrong Philosophic view : There is no other world; no beings arise again after death, there are no consequenceness f good or bad deads.

Prince Payasi visited Venerable Kumara Kassapa and maintained before him the philosophic view he had adhered to for so long. He told him about all the experiments he had done so far. He had asked some friends of his at their death-bed, to come back and tell him the news of the other world, but none of them had ever come back to tell him about it.

Venerable Kumara Kassapa explained to him, by means of several similes, that this world does exist, that the other called Paraloka, and the fruits of one’s good and evil actions also exist. At least Prince Payasi admitted his error and accepted the discipleship of the Bhikkhus. After death, Payasi was born among the heavenly beings known as the Maharajaka of the Four Quarters.

Sitagu Donation Ceremony

သီတဂူ အာယုဒါန အလွဴေတာ္

Mahasatipatthãna Sutta

While the Buddha was sojourning through the market town known as Kammãsa dhamma, in the Kuru country, he addressed the Bhikkhus thus, "Bhikkhus, this is the one and only way for the purification (of the minds) of beings, for overcoming sorrow and lamentation, for the complete destruction of (physical) pain and (mental) distress, for attainment of the noble (ariya) Magga, and for the realization of Nibbãna. That (only way) is the practice of the four methods of steadfast Mindfulness (Satipatthãna)."

These four Methods of steadfast Mindfulness are the contemplation of the body, contemplation of feeling (sensation), contemplation of the mind, and contemplation of the Dhamma, with constant awareness.

Kãyãnupassanã (awareness of the Body) : Here the Bhikkhu should either go to a forest, or beneath a tree, or to an empty, solitary place and then sit cross-legged, keeping the body erect, and the mind alert and awake. With constant awareness he inhales and with constant awareness he exhales. This process is called Anãpãna-Sati.

Again he should be fully aware when he is walking, sitting down, and standing up. Whatever position he is in, he should be constantly aware of it, as it is.

Again he should constantly be aware when he advances. He should be aware when he looks straight or sideways. He should be fully aware when he contracts or straightens his arms and legs. He should be constantly aware while defecating and urinating. In walking, standing up, sitting down, lying, awakening from sleep, in talking, in keeping silent, and doing such things, he should be fully aware of what he is doing.

16. Mahaparinibbana Sutta

When the Buddha was dwelling at Gijjhakuta in Rajagriha, Ajatasatru, the King of Magadha, sent his minister Vassakara to the Blessed One for his council regarding the King’s intended invasion of the Vajja country. The Buddha did not give any direct answer to the minister but indirectly hinted at the invicibility of the Vajjis. This was on the occasion of the preaching of seven invincible rules which were applicable both to the cohesion of the Vajji Republic and the Sangha of the Bhikkhus.

The Buddha drew the attention of Ven. Ananda to the seven invincible Virtues or Norms (Aparihaniya Dhammas) which the Vijjis were possessed of. He further explained the five categories of these Dhammas, each having seven-fold feature which the Bhikkhus are required to be endowed with, also adding. One more category having six-fold feature. The possession of these Dhammas, the Buddha said, would lead them to their furtherance, not to their fall.

Therefrom the Buddha went to Ambalatthika garden. There, too, he taught, as in Rajagriha, the fruits and merits of conduct (Sila), meditation(Samadhi) and Wisdom (Prajna), which would influence and completely relieve the mind from defilements.

Thereupon the Buddha went from Rajagriha to Ambalatthika garden, where he preached a sermon to the Bhikkhus on the merits of a moral life and the failings of an immoral one, culminating in the final precept.

From there, the Buddha came over to the mango-grave of Pavarika at Nalanda. There, Venerable Sariputta appoached him and proclaimed with a lion’s roar that there was none other than the Blessed One who is endowed with the graduated knowledge concerning Enlightenment. He however admitted that he had said so not entirely on the basis of the knowledge which is obtained by inference, but from personal experience.

From Nalanda the Buddha went to Pataligama. There he preached to all his disciples five defects of an immoral life and five qualities of a moral one. At that time, Sunidha and Vassakara, the chief ministers of Magadha were building a fortress at Pataligama in order to prevent the Vajjis from encroachment. They invited the Buddha and his disciples for meals at their residence. After the meals, they followed him and named the gate through which he passed on as the ‘Gotama Gate’ and the ford on which he crossed the Ganges the ‘Gotama Tirtha.’

Reaching the other side of the Ganges, the Buddha stayed at Kotigama. There he preached on the importance of the four noble truths, due to the ignorance of which one reverts to the round of rebirths. Due to knowledge of these four truths, one attains liberation from the bondage of the world of rebirths.

From Kotigama the Buddha came to Natika village. There he told of the destiny of the bhikkhus, bhikkhunies and other lay disciples who had already passed to the other world. These destiny are said to be situated in the other world, where the departed ones dwell after their decease from this material world. He was evidently tired of talking about such abodes of his departed disciples and hence preaches the mirror of Dhamma, which would enable anyone, desirous of knowing the abodes of the departed ones in the other world, to know such abodes by themselves.

Such destiny chiefly are those of hell, those of beasts, those of spirits (Petas) and those of the lower and higher stages. These categories of abodes in the next world after one’s decease shows that these abodes fall under varied stages of development or degradation. By this mirror of Dhamma one may also know if one has reached a stage towards enlightenment.

The Buddha went from Natika to Vesali. There he preached on the topic of memory and comprehension of movement. Ambapali, the courtesan of the city of Vesali, invited the Buddha with the entire Sangha for a grand dinner the next day. The Buddha accepted it. The nobles of Vesali offered her millions of rupees, if she would sell this opportunity to them, but she would not do so for any price. She donated her mango grove to the Buddha and his Sangha.