Original Zen: Bodhidharma - Zen Catastrophe! +^

[Disbasing Zen Stories]

Toxic Zen Story #0: Original Zen, part 1 of 2: Bodhidharma - Zen Catastrophe!, Krakatoa and the Dark Ages.

part 1 of 2.

. 'NARRATOR: 1500 years ago something extreme happened to
. the world's climate-something that must have terrified
. those who witnessed it.'
.
. 'The sun began to go dark.'
.
. 'Rain poured red, as if tinted by blood.'
.
. 'Clouds of dust enveloped the earth.'
.
. 'Cold gripped the land for two years.'
.
. 'Then came drought, '
.
. 'Famine,'
.
. 'Plague,'
.
. 'Death.'
.
. 'Whole cities were wiped out - civilisations crumbled.'

So, how did the world get into that terrible state? Where did we go wrong? Well ... this article could also be entitled:

. Dr. Zen-love, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the VOID.

____ Background for Toxic Zen Stories _____________________

https://groups.google.com/group/alt.zen/msg/b4ad0ce368728934?hl=en

__________________________________________________________

530-535 CE: Bodhidharma completes his cave meditations and begins to spread Zen to the Shaolin monks and then the world.

Ultimately, his spew will reach every corner of the earth, every culture, and undermine every society ... a far-reaching volcano of distortion of the Buddha's teachings and a slander to the highest teaching of the Buddha and reason for his advent: the Lotus Sutra.

And, also, constituting the worst case of identity theft in history, by not naming his distorted views Bodhidharma-ism and instead, redefining Buddhism.
__________________________________________________________

535 CE: In a physical companion to Bodhidharma's spiritual volcano, Krakatoa's parent volcano erupts in the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history. The earth simply opened up for over a mile across and spewed out an endless column of ash up to 30 miles high for weeks, filling the upper atmosphere with ash and cutting off the light of the sun.

It was the cause of world wide disruption for years, where the sun shone faintly for only a handful of hours a day. It brought on the plagues across Europe and the Middle East. It cause famine everywhere. China became a single empire, and Japan became an island kingdom. The Yemeni people migrated to Mecca and Medina in search of food, which set the stage for Mohammed and Islam. The Turks defeated their masters, the Avars, who migrated to Europe and brought down the Holy Roman Empire.

Basically, it brought on the Dark Ages.

It was the simultaneous physical counterpart to the earth-shaking spiritual evil influence of Zen on the world.

From David Keys "Catastrophe!" on PBS:

. 'Catastrophe! Part I '
.
. 'NARRATOR 1500 years ago something extreme happened to
. the world's climate-something that must have terrified
. those who witnessed it.'
.
. 'The sun began to go dark.'
.
. 'Rain poured red, as if tinted by blood.'
.
. 'Clouds of dust enveloped the earth.'
.
. 'Cold gripped the land for two years.'
.
. 'Then came drought, '
.
. 'Famine,'
.
. 'Plague,'
.
. 'Death.'
.
. 'Whole cities were wiped out - civilisations crumbled.'
.
. 'There is evidence of a catastrophe-a catastrophe whose
. consequences affected the entire world-and may have
. changed the course of human history.'
.
. 'DAVID KEYS The mid 6th century catastrophe was the most
. important date in the history of the past two thousand
. years. It really did lay the foundations of the world
. we live in today.'

Science can provide the Physical explanation for the chain of physical events that apparently leads to a catastrophe.

It cannot show why something happened, in the sphere of the spiritual. One can only build a circumstantial case for things that have no direct physical evidence.

There is a principle which is central to the Buddhism of the Lotus Sutra: Oneness of Person and Law, known as Nimpo-ikka in Japanese.

It is eternally true that the Law and the Buddha are fused, to make life as we know it.

Since, according to Nichiren in the Ongi Kuden (The Oral Teachings, or class notes from his lectures on the Lotus Sutra, taken by Nikko), one meaning of "Myoho" is that delusion and enlightenment are fused (this is also explained in the essential teachings of the Lotus Sutra, in the Juryo or Life Span chapter) ...

This means that even for deluded mortals, there is always a condition of oneness of person and Law.

The implication of this, is that wherever there is a slander of the Law, then nearby and coincident with it, there is a slander of humanity, by the principle of the simultaneity of cause and effect.

Hence, wherever Zen is propagated widely, there will be in each and every instance, Toxic Zen Stories to tell.

In the case of Bodhidharma's invention of Zen "Buddhism" and the slander of the Law, or teachings of the Buddha that that constitutes ...

... this is the most powerful slander and distortion of the Buddha's teachings in history, and would thusly be the source of ALL Toxic Zen Stories ...

... and would therefore have the most grave and far-reaching effects on the spiritual history of humanity ...

... and would then be accompanied by a profound physical consequence: a catastrophe of the proportions of Krakatoa's 535 eruption.

. 'NARRATOR From the attic of his unassuming suburban
. home, David Keys, a writer on history and archaeology,
. has developed a controversial theory about an ancient
. catastrophe. '
.
. 'For five years he has investigated, consulting with
. more than forty scientists and scholars- astronomers,
. physicists, climatologists and historians-experts on
. cosmic collisions, volcanoes, epidemics and ancient
. wars. From Mexico to Byzantium, from Africa to
. Indonesia he has scoured the annals and chronicles of
. the sixth and seventh centuries AD. '
.
. 'The result is a book that tells the story of a
. catastrophic climatic event, buried in the heart of the
. Dark Ages. An event Keys believes, totally altered the
. course of world history.'
.
. 'The mystery that has consumed him first presented
. itself at a conference on archaeology in 1994.'
.
. 'DAVID KEYS One particular talk really amazed me. It was
. a lecture given by a dendrochronologist, an expert in
. tree rings, called MIKE BAILLIE and he was giving a
. lecture about how all the tree rings in the world
. really went haywire somewhere in the middle of the 6th
. century.' '
.
. 'NARRATOR Mike Baillie is an archaeologist and
. palaeoecologist at Queens University in Belfast,
. Ireland. He has a special interest in volcano and
. comet-induced environmental change, and uses tree rings
. to track significant climatic variations. '
.
. 'NARRATOR Annual tree ring growth was discovered by the
. ancient Greeks, and as far back as Leonardo da Vinci,
. the connection between climate and ring growth has been
. known. Trees have always had the potential to become
. silent witnesses to thousands of years of climatic
. change. '
.
. 'Every year trees put on a new layer of growth within
. the bark. These layers show up as rings.'
.
. 'Each ring varies in width. A wide ring indicates
. favourable growing conditions, a narrow ring-harder
. times. The pattern of wide and narrow rings is
. distinctive.'
.
. 'Mike Baillie and his colleagues developed a high-tech
. method to tap into this resource. By feeding specific
. tree measurements into a database, each ring sequence
. could be matched with rings of previously felled trees
. and precisely dated. A bigger climatic picture began to
. emerge.'
.
. 'MIKE BAILLIE Over the last 30 years in Northern Europe
. a variety of people, a variety of laboratories have set
. out and worked back from known felling dates, taking
. you back through long ring records of living trees and
. then overlapping to patterns from historic buildings
. for example, fitting together these sort of long ring
. pattern going back hundreds and eventually thousands of
. years. '
.
. 'NARRATOR It is by painstakingly analysing and
. overlapping the patterns of older and older trees that
. a complete, unbroken record of tree ring widths is
. built up. '
.
. 'MIKE BAILLIE So you've got this sample with its very
. clear character change just here. When we processed
. another sample from the same building we could see that
. it came originally from the same parent tree and you
. could extend the pattern back from the first sample
. right back through to the beginning of this sample.'
.
. 'NARRATOR Many, many samples have to be analysed by a
. computer programme to get the average width for every
. year. It took Mike Baillie fourteen years to build up
. the complete data just for Irish oaks. This tree record
. is now telling scientists what the weather was like
. every single year, for the last seven and a half
. thousand years.'
.
. 'MIKE BAILLIE And if you think about that, that's an
. astonishing position to be in, we can interrogate for
. any calendar year in the last thousands of years what
. trees thought of their growth conditions over a big
. geographical area and that information simply didn't
. exist before...'
.
. 'But what we're interested in is why did this tree go
. narrow at this point and narrow again at this point,
. what is the environmental information which is actually
. stored in the patterns.'
.
. 'NARRATOR David Keys wanted to see for himself the
. mysterious 6th century event stored in Mike Baillie's
. tree rings.'
.
. 'MIKE BAILLIE Right, shuffle along in through here David
. ...'
.
. 'NARRATOR It was ten years ago that Baillie noticed his
. mid-6th century AD oak rings went abnormally narrow-a
. sign that something very powerful was slowing the
. trees' growth.'
.
. 'MIKE BAILLIE 539 540 541, 542 - extremely narrow.'
.
. 'NARRATOR And, he has corroborating evidence from a
. colleague in Finland.'
.
. 'MIKE BAILLIE ... he sees a really abrupt drop in 536, a
. bit of a recovery in 537 and 538 and then it drops
. dramatically into 542 / so you're beginning to see a
. pattern...'
.
. 'NARRATOR The pattern was not just confined to Ireland
. and Finland. David Keys began contacting other labs,
. and found that almost everywhere he looked, in the mid-
. 6th century trees were showing unusual growth patterns
. indicative of cold conditions.'
.
. 'Fox tail pine rings from the Sierra Nevada mountains in
. California show that 535, 536, and 541 were three of
. the four worst years in the past two millennia. '
.
. 'In Chile, Fitzroya trees record the greatest summer
. growth drop of the past 1,600 years, as do Scots Pines
. in Sweden. '
.
. 'In Siberia a 20-year decline in tree growth that began
. in the 530's was the most serious in the past nineteen
. hundred years.'
.
. 'So what happened to the trees? Was it darkness, cold,
. natural pollution, or drought? '
.
. 'Mike Baillie looked for the answer in a microscopic
. examination of a 536AD oak ring. He found evidence of
. drastically reduced summer growth.'
.
. 'MIKE BAILLIE Just for interests sake ... A colleague in
. Germany sent me this photograph of one of his German
. oaks. The tree puts on a line of these large spring
. vessels and it then puts on fine cell wood during the
. summer and it goes dormant, then does again the next
. year. So each year's growth is from the beginning of
. one line of vessels to the beginning of the next. And
. in this year, the year 536, the vessels are enormously
. small and they're also distributed right through the
. summer. It's widely reckoned that this phenomenon is
. due to frost damage. '
.
. 'NARRATOR The evidence was adding up. The implication
. was of missed summers and long stretches of extreme
. cold in the mid-sixth century.'
.
. 'And Mike Baillie also had archaeological evidence from
. Ireland to back up this theory. Much of the wood that
. he has dated came from crannogs - wooden forts built
. over water where people sought refuge during times of
. trouble and clan warfare. '
.
. 'Baillie took Keys to the remains of one crannog in
. Lough Catherine, near Belfast, to look at the submerged
. timbers that once formed the outer wall.'
.
. 'MIKE BAILLIE my first inkling that there was something
. going on came from timbers specifically from sites like
. this.'
.
. 'NARRATOR The mid-sixth century marks the beginning of
. the construction of crannogs. Baillie sees a strong
. connection between the need for such forts and the
. deteriorating climate.'
.
. 'MIKE BAILLIE When you look at the overall picture there
. seems to be about a decade of really bad conditions
. starting 536 and running on into the mid 540s at least.
. The implication from lots of bits of evidence is that
. it was extremely cold and that this reduced sunlight
. and cold caused crop failure. So basically people in an
. area like this would be forced back onto non-
. agricultural produce. They would be forced to fish,
. they would be forced to hunt and that would put a lot
. of strain on a population which was used to having
. agricultural produce to see them through the winters
. for example. So I think things would have been very
. bleak here.''
.
. 'NARRATOR Keys was hooked - not just by the tree ring
. evidence that it was cold, but because people seemed to
. be suffering. '
.
. 'His next step was to see whether there were any written
. historical accounts that described a climatic
. catastrophe during that period. '
.
. 'The mid-sixth century is the time of Dark Ages Britain,
. and little writing survives from that era. '
.
. 'But by far the greatest civilization of the time was
. the Roman Empire. Rome had been sacked a hundred years
. earlier by Huns and Goths-Now it was resurgent. With a
. new Capital in Constantinople it was winning back
. territories throughout the Mediterranean.'
.
. 'By contacting classical scholars, Keys unearthed many
. highly significant Roman accounts of bizarre weather.
. One eyewitness, a Syrian bishop, John of Ephesus,
. describes the extraordinary events during the years 535
. and 536 AD.'
.
. 'ACTOR 1 "There was a sign from the sun, the like of
. which had never been seen or reported before. The sun
. became dark and its darkness lasted for 18 months. Each
. day it shone for about four hours, and still this light
. was only a feeble shadow. Everyone declared that the
. sun would never recover its full light again." (John of
. Ephesus)'
.
. 'NARRATOR One of the consultants David Keys contacted,
. Mike Whitby of Warwick University, sees great
. significance in these records.'
.
. 'MIKE WHITBY Historians of the 6th century empire do not
. usually record climatic events unless they are
. something really stupendous, a natural event like a
. comet will get mentioned, now in the 530s the fact that
. John mentions a two year dimming of the sun indicates
. that it was significant, Cassiodorus writing in Italy,
. he too refers to a dimming of the sun. '
.
. 'ACTOR 2 We have had a spring without mildness and a
. summer without heat ... The months which should have
. been maturing the crops have been chilled by north
. winds. Rain is denied and the reaper fears new frosts."
. (Cassiodorus)'
.
. 'NARRATOR These accounts from the Mediterranean and
. Middle East were extraordinary on their own- but what
. about the other civilisations of that time? Keys
. scoured records from North and South China, Korea and
. Japan. '
.
. 'DAVID KEYS As it turned out there were out of say well
. over thirty sources there were around a dozen which
. actually refer directly to the darkened sun event or to
. its consequences, to its immediate climatic
. consequences.' '
.
. 'NARRATOR In 540 the Japanese Great King wrote "Food is
. the basis of the Empire. Yellow gold and ten thousand
. strings of cash cannot cure hunger. What avails a
. thousand boxes of pearls to him who is starving of
. cold."'
.
. 'The Nan Shi Ancient Chronicle of Southern China
. records: "Yellow dust rained down like snow. It could
. be scooped up in handfuls."'
.
. 'DAVID KEYS As the research continued I began to realise
. more and more that this disaster had really enveloped
. the entire world. That it just wasn't just a few places
. but it was virtually everywhere'
.
. 'NARRATOR Armed with historical evidence of a global
. disaster, Keys turned back to science to look for a
. culprit.'
.
. 'Climatologists had only one explanation for such
. sudden, extreme global cooling and visible darkening: A
. dense veil of dust, ash or acid thrown up into the
. atmosphere, blocking many of the sun's rays.'
.
. 'Only three suspects could have caused such a
. phenomenon-a volcano, an asteroid or a comet.'
.
. 'NARRATOR David Keys tried to imagine what life would
. have been like for the people who witnessed the
. catastrophe. Were they engulfed by permanent winter?
. How would they have explained why the sky was dark and
. their crops were failing? Would there have been clues
. to the cause of the disaster?'
.
. 'NARRATOR At Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic
. bomb, scientists have been studying all the possible
. atmospheric consequences of nuclear strikes and cosmic
. collisions. Keys turned here to examine the likelihood
. that the cause of the catastrophe came from the sky.'
.
. 'ERIC JONES We certainly have plenty of evidence that
. the earth is struck repeatedly by asteroids large and
. small, comets large and small. But as far as the global
. climate goes you have to have a big thing that hit the
. ground in order to have a climate effect.'
.
. 'NARRATOR Extraterrestrial bodies come in all shapes and
. sizes. Meteors are small rocks that roam space,
. occasionally hitting planets, usually causing little
. damage. Asteroids are big meteors. When these objects
. hit the earth's surface they explode, churning up vast
. amounts of dust and debris.'
.
. 'NARRATOR David Keys asked an astrophysicist to
. calculate how big an impact would have been needed to
. generate a climatic catastrophe lasting at least a
. decade.'
.
. 'ALAN FITZSIMMONS ... to cause a major climatic
. catastrophe that would last decades we would need an
. impact by a rather large asteroid, say four kilometers
. across ... '
.
. 'NARRATOR It would take an even bigger comet to create
. the same effect. Comets consist mainly of gas and ice,
. which give them their distinctive tails as they move
. across the sky. Because they are less dense, Alan
. Fitzsimmons has calculated that it would take a 6
. kilometer wide comet to affect our climate. His
. calculations are supported by the 1994 impact on
. Jupiter by comet Shoemaker- Levy.'
.
. 'ALAN FITZSIMMONS We saw a lot of the models and a lot
. of the calculations we had made about an asteroid
. strike on the earth vindicated we saw the huge plume of
. debris of both Jupiter itself and the vaporized comet
. rise up in a huge mushroom cloud 2,000 kilometers high
. above the atmosphere of the planet and then we saw it
. crash down again covering an area the size of earth in
. a fine layer of dust significantly cooling the
. atmosphere and the planet underneath.'
.
. 'NARRATOR Fitzsimmons describes how spectacular such a
. crash might be on Earth.'
.
. 'ALAN FITZSIMMONS When it was just over two days from
. impact it would only be seen as a very faint star in
. the night sky, now as it approached us, as it got
. closer and closer we slowly see it brighten and grow
. larger until about 30 minutes before impact it would be
. about the brightest thing in the sky and by then of
. course we believe everyone would have noticed it, but
. we wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Now the
. time it takes for that asteroid to travel from the top
. of the earth's atmosphere until it reaches sea level is
. only 8 seconds.'
.
. 'ALAN FITZSIMMONS So we'd see this brilliant fireball
. all the time of course making no sound because it's
. traveling about twenty times the speed of sound. The
. first sound we would hear would occur minutes after we
. see the huge flash of light when the asteroid strikes
. the earth's surface and is instantly vaporised in a
. ginormous fireball.'
.
. 'NARRATOR Could this disaster have happened without
. anyone noticing it? No civilisation at the time records
. any such event. In addition, scientists have found no
. evidence of a crater left by an impact from the sixth
. century.'
.
. 'ERIC JONES I mean that's just yesterday in geologic
. time, there'd be a big crater, we'd know about it.
. Certainly that happened 65 million years ago when the
. dinosaurs died but I don't think it happened in the
. sixth century.'
.
. 'ALAN FITZSIMMONS To cause such a global catastrophe
. such a crater would be at least ten kilometres large,
. possibly much larger and there's no such evidence of
. any such crater on the surface of the earth today.'
.
. 'NARRATOR But the lack of crater alone does not rule out
. a comet or asteroid strike. Seventy percent of the
. earth is covered in water. Could the impact have taken
. place in the ocean?'
.
. 'ALAN FITZSIMMONS ... if the asteroid landed in the
. ocean, then the initial wave caused by the impact would
. be miles high ...'
.
. 'ERIC JONES ... there would have been humongous tidal
. waves, big huge tidal waves that would have swamped the
. ground, swamped the coasts for over the margins of
. whatever ocean it struck.'
.
. 'NARRATOR The waves would have traveled miles inland.
. Again, no civilisation recorded such an event. And
. scientists have not detected any significant break in
. coastal plant life during that period. '
.
. 'There did not appear to be any evidence that an
. asteroid or comet had struck the Earth at this time.'
.
. 'But could there be another extra-terrestrial
. explanation? Not a complete comet hitting the earth,
. but one that had fragmented and scattered throughout
. the atmosphere? It's a theory tree ring specialist and
. former physicist Mike Baillie suggested to David Keys.'
.
. 'MIKE BAILLIE The bombardment scenario has been
. classically defined as a large number of pieces of
. comet arriving in a short period of time and exploding
. in the atmosphere and the model for that is the 1908
. Tunguska impact over Siberia which was a single object
. which probably caused about a 20 megaton equivalent
. size explosion.'
.
. 'NARRATOR The 1908 Tunguska Event was an example of an
. airburst explosion. A lightweight meteor hit the
. earth's atmosphere and exploded in the air. While the
. shock wave caused massive local destruction, there
. weren't enough microfine particles released to affect
. global conditions. '
.
. 'But Mike Baillie claims that a whole shower of cometary
. debris hitting in a Tunguska style event could affect
. the climate...'
.
. 'MIKE BAILLIE ... if you have a large number of those
. you're going to just put a lot of material into the
. atmosphere and you're going to cause a dust veil ...'
.
. 'NARRATOR Baillie even turns to mythology to support his
. theory. He has analysed the life and death of one of
. the most famous legends of all time - and reached an
. intriguing conclusion.'
.
. '6th century Britain was supposedly the time of King
. Arthur, king of the Celtic Britons. '
.
. 'All the many legends tell that Arthur lived in the west
. of Britain and that as he grew old his kingdom was
. reduced to a wasteland as the British fought off
. invaders from Europe.'
.
. 'Curiously, even though the Arthur stories were written
. hundreds of years later, many of them suggested that
. the date of Arthur's death was 539 or 542 AD - right in
. the middle of the climatic catastrophe. '
.
. 'The legends tell of terrible blows that rained down
. from the heavens onto Arthur's people.'
.
. 'Baillie believes that Arthur's death could therefore be
. a symbol of something that really did happen -
. devastation by a comet as it shattered, and crashed to
. earth.'
.
. 'MIKE BAILLIE Then you look at the mythology you
. discover that Arthur isn't just somebody with a nice
. suit of shining armor and somebody sitting around a
. round table the origins of the stories are in Celtic
. mythology'
.
. 'NARRATOR The myths that Baillie says Arthur is based on
. contain many references to Sun Gods with long arms
. rising in the western sky. He thinks this can only be a
. reference to a comet and its characteristic tail.'
.
. 'For him, the evidence clearly points towards the sky as
. the source of the catastrophe, but David Keys still
. wants to explore the possibility of a cataclysmic
. volcanic eruption.'
.
. 'There is one hostile area of the earth that could hold
. the crucial clue-the polar ice caps. '
.
. 'NARRATOR For the past decade multi-national teams of
. scientists have been extracting 1,000- meter-deep
. columns of ice from Greenland in the north and from the
. Antarctic in the south. While somewhat less stable than
. the information from tree rings, ice cores reveal
. yearly layers of fresh snow that provide a record of
. what was in the atmosphere at that time.'
.
. 'CLAUS HAMMER The ice caps contains information on what
. happened in the atmosphere like volcanic eruptions,
. asteroids coming in how much dust was in the air, a lot
. of information, the chemistry of the old atmosphere is
. in there and even the chemistry today is changing in
. our atmosphere if we combine this we can have a record
. which we can compare with other records from the deep
. sea sediments, from tree rings, from lakes but the
. fantastic thing about the ice caps is that they are
. directly related to the atmosphere itself.'
.
. 'NARRATOR Professor Hammer's team is testing a new
. Greenland core from the 530's AD that has just arrived
. at their laboratory. '
.
. 'If pieces of a comet or asteroid had exploded in the
. atmosphere the team would expect to find traces of rare
. chemical elements like iridium.'
.
. 'If there had been a massive volcanic eruption, however,
. they would expect an excess of sulphuric acid - the
. telltale signature of a volcano. '
.
. 'The sulphates would have been hurled into the
. atmosphere and scattered by the winds. They would have
. returned to earth in rain and snow, then finally been
. stored at the poles in ice.'
.
. 'CLAUS HAMMER And what we are going to do now is take a
. piece of ice out around 535 after Christ. We will have
. to clean it a little roughly here first"'
.
. 'CLAUS HAMMER We will now bring it into this set up
. here... where it will be cleaned in the end and on all
. sides and then it will be cut by the steel knife so
. that we are not touching the core. We have to remove
. quite a lot to be sure that we don't have any ice
. outside contamination.'
.
. 'NARRATOR The cleaned core is sliced into five
. centimeter lengths. Each length is then melted, and
. analyzed.'
.
. 'MARIE-LOUISE SIGGAARD-ANDERSEN They will be measured
. one at a time automatically from now on and the results
. will show up on this computer as chromatograms'
.
. 'NARRATOR What will the ice reveal-cometary debris...or
. volcanic sulphates?'
.
. 'MARIE-LOUISE SIGGAARD-ANDERSEN I can see that the
. sulphate peak is increasing when I go to the next
. sample. That must come from sulphuric acid in the
. atmosphere and that's an indication that there has been
. a volcanic eruption.'
.
. 'NARRATOR Apparently, it wasn't just any eruption.'
.
. 'CLAUS HAMMER And this, what is important, I'll show you
. here it's the sulphuric acid and actually these huge
. amounts of sulphate here and lasting several years and
. clearly higher than anything else in this part of the
. record corresponds exactly to this around 535. So
. there's no doubt there is a major eruption. '
.
. 'NARRATOR The results from Greenland's NGRIP core seem
. conclusive to Professor Hammer- lots of sulphates and
. no cometary debris. But for the eruption to have had
. world-wide consequences more evidence was needed. '
.
. 'CLAUS HAMMER If you want a climatic important major
. eruption it must show up with a large signal in both
. hemispheres, that is you must see it in Antarctic ice
. cores and you must see it in Greenland.'
.
. 'NARRATOR Current information from the Antarctic ice
. cores is incomplete. But Professor Hammer has found
. some evidence that indicates a volcanic signal in the
. southern hemisphere.'
.
. 'CLAUS HAMMER We have a volcanic signal which lasts
. several years. We have from an Antarctic core similar
. evidence as in Greenland but not as good, not as well
. dated but indicating that this volcanic eruption could
. have taken place. '
.
. 'NARRATOR There is evidence from both ends of the earth
. of a sulphur spike around the mid-sixth century. This
. strongly indicates the likelihood of a major volcanic
. eruption, just at the time Keys is investigating.'
.
. 'And while the idea of a volcano wreaking climatic havoc
. may seem far-fetched, it is far more likely than a
. catastrophic cosmic collision. '
.
. 'DAVID KEYS Cosmic collisions are extremely, extremely
. rare. I mean they only happen once every many, many,
. many millions of years whereas volcanic eruptions are
. occurring - I wont say all the time - but they're
. certainly happening every few thousand years you get a
. really major volcanic eruption.'
.
. 'NARRATOR Tree rings and ice cores now show that every
. thousand years or so, massive climate downturns have
. occurred. The mid-sixth century event is one of the
. most recent. '
.
. 'In fact, what surprises volcanologists is how few
. volcanic eruptions there have been in the last hundred
. years.'
.
. 'CLAUS HAMMER One of the amazing things which people
. sometimes forget, even scientists, is that our century
. is one of the most quiet centuries with respect to
. volcanism.'
.
. 'NARRATOR Other eras have seen much more volcanic
. activity, and much more ash in the skies.'
.
. 'CLAUS HAMMER If you go back in time in 19th century, in
. 17th century, 18th century, there's a lot of volcanoes,
. they come in lumps, say 20, 30 years, a lot of them,
. they even overlap in the stratosphere, mixing up '
.
. 'NARRATOR Volcanic dust creates spectacular sunsets,
. which may have influenced the paintings of Joseph
. Turner in the 19th century.'
.
. 'CLAUS HAMMER And it's not speculation but people do
. think that Turner's paintings with his sunsets, it was
. not the taste of the artist to make them so red as they
. were but they were actually painted in a time when the
. real sunset looked like that.'
.
. 'NARRATOR We live on this planet with over 200 active
. volcanos. They may have been quiet recently, but a
. really massive eruption can turn the climate upside
. down. '
.
. 'To create a dust veil that envelopes the world, the
. eruption has to happen near the equator as only
. equatorial winds can spread dust over both
. hemispheres.'
.
. 'But there are over 90 equatorial volcanos. Could David
. Keys figure out which one caused the mayhem of the
. sixth century?'
.
. 'NARRATOR Keys began to narrow the search for the source
. of the sixth century eruption. He turned to ancient
. writings looking for mention of such an event. He
. focused on the area with the world's highest
. concentration of large tropical volcanoes. The
. volcanoes form an arc straddling Southeast Asia - and
. Keys found what he was looking for in nearby China.'
.
. 'DAVID KEYS I in great excitement started looking to see
. whether there was any trace of anything happening in
. 535 and in fact in February 535 there's a record of a
. loud bang, a huge thunderous sound coming from the
. south west and with this one there was no mention of
. lightning or anything, it was merely a rather sort of
. mysterious entry in which they only referred to the
. sort of thunderous noise and interestingly that points
. straight towards that Indonesian area where all those
. volcanoes are.'
.
. 'NARRATOR The sound must have been extraordinary if the
. Chinese bothered to record it.'
.
. 'But could the sound of a volcanic eruption have
. traveled the three thousand miles from Indonesia to
. China?'
.
. 'To answer that question, Keys turned back to experts at
. Los Alamos Laboratory to explain the physics of long-
. range sound travel.'
.
. 'ROD WHITAKER We know that near the volcano the sudden
. explosive eruption provides a shock wave in the near
. field and that propagates out, going out to thousands
. of miles but as it propagates out you lose the high
. frequencies, the shock, very sudden sharp reports of
. the volcanoes and all you're left with are the low
. frequencies that we measure in what we call infrasound
. which is generally below 10 cycles per second.'
.
. 'ROD WHITAKER The long range perception of that sound
. would be very low rumbling, much like very distant
. thunder. We're still talking about hearing it so you're
. down at the very low end of the human response and so
. it's going to be very low bass sounds, rumbling
. thunder.'
.
. 'NARRATOR The Los Alamos experts had said it was
. possible - now could Keys find any written evidence
. from Indonesia?'
.
. 'NARRATOR Unfortunately, very little writing survives
. from the area. But once again Keys found a fascinating
. clue. Housed in the Royal Palace at Solo in Central
. Java is a massive set of 95 manuscript volumes called
. the Book of Kings. '
.
. 'It records all of Java's history and was put together
. in 1869 by a Royal Courtier called Rangawarsita. Some
. is folklore and myth but scholars believe much is based
. on genuine oral and written history handed down through
. the generations.'
.
. 'NANCY FLORIDA Rangawarsita was a known to have done
. extensive fieldwork as it were traveling all over the
. island of Java and into Bali where it is said that he
. picked up great caches of palm leave manuscripts.'
.
. 'NARRATOR In one volume Rangawarsita describes an
. extraordinary event that took place around the middle
. of the first millennium AD. Javanese Royal Archivist,
. Prince Puger (POOJA) reads from the original text:'
.
. 'PRINCE PUGER (in Javanese) A mighty thunder which was
. answered by a furious shaking of the earth, pitch
. darkness, thunder and lightning and then came forth a
. furious gale together with a hard rain, a deadly storm
. darkening the entire world, in no time there came a
. great flood. When the water subsided it could be seen
. that the island of Java had been split in two, thus
. creating the island of Sumatra.'
.
. 'NARRATOR Had Keys struck gold with the Book of Kings?
. Geophysicists he consulted said the story accurately
. described a major volcanic eruption and would have been
. difficult to invent. And, the only major volcano in the
. specific area between the islands of Sumatra and Java
. indicated by Rangawarsita, is the legendary Krakatoa -
. the world's most notorious volcano.'
.
. 'But could Keys prove Krakatoa was the culprit?'
.
. 'Icelandic volcanologist Professor Haraldur Siggurdson,
. now joined the chase.'
.
. 'He had studied the volcano and knew that Krakatoa's
. history hid details of an ancient eruption far bigger
. than any recorded in modern times.'
.
. 'HARALDUR SIGGURDSON About five years ago when we were
. doing research on the 1883 volcanic eruption of
. Krakatoa we discovered this deposit of a major eruption
. and so we became very interested in this deposit but at
. the time we didn't have the time and resources to study
. it in detail so what we really want to do is ideally
. find charcoal within this layer or charcoal immediately
. above and immediately below it in order to give us a
. date of the event. '
.
. 'NARRATOR To give Professor Siggurdson the opportunity
. to unlock the history of Krakatoa, and search for the
. tell-tale charcoal, the film's producers decided to
. sponsor an expedition to Java.'
.
. 'The goal - to test Key's theory by dating Krakatoa's
. major eruption.'
.
. 'NARRATOR Krakatoa is part of a group of uninhabited
. rainforest islands lying west of Java and just south of
. the equator. In addition to the ancient eruption
. Siggurdson is attempting to date, Krakatoa is also the
. scene of the most deadly volcanic eruption of recent
. times.'
.
. 'HARALDUR SIGGURDSON Well Krakatoa became a notorious
. volcano in 1883 when the eruption killed 36,000 people,
. mostly by tidal waves but also by hot ash clouds
. sweeping over the ocean and reaching the land and
. incinerating people on the shores around the Sunda
. Straits, it is a very difficult area for access, it's
. remote and the conditions are harsh here. The
. environment here is difficult.'
.
. 'NARRATOR The lava fields on the island of Anak Krakatoa
. will be the first stop for Professor Siggurdson and his
. team.'
.
. 'Anak means child, and this child was born out of the
. 1883 eruption. '
.
. 'In just over a century, it has grown into a thousand
. foot high volcano. The lava, rock, and ash it
. frequently spews continues to accumulate. '
.
. 'Anak is unpredictable, and each year it becomes bigger
. and more dangerous.'
.
. 'SIGGURDSON / STEVE Ah, the volcano erupted this
. morning. A small volcanion explosion as we call it. It
. threw out a lot of blocks and ash and created a plume
. rising up into the atmosphere. '
.
. 'Now actually when you get up to them '
.
. 'These rocks they are the size of houses 5, 6 metres in
. diametre. And these were ejected by the explosions of
. Anak and they traveled through the air like a bomb
. basically and they fall to the ground and when they hit
. the ground they create a crater"'
.
. 'SIGGURDSON & STEVE Now this is about as big as they
. come! This bomb must be 2 metres high and, what do you
. think, about 4 metres wide?'
.
. 'STEVE Ja, I would say so'
.
. 'SIGGURDSON What a big bomb'
.
. 'STEVE Beautiful crust though'
.
. 'SIGGURDSON Hard to imagine this thing flying through
. the air and landing here during an explosion. Plonking
. down and creating this crater that it sits in ...
.
. ... This one is a good one cause you can hide behind it
. in an explosion and take shelter. '
.
. 'Lets hope they don't land like this today - it would be
. very dangerous: '
.
. 'NARRATOR Anak Krakatoa is a noisy and quarrelsome
. child.'
.
. 'Only two hours after the team left the island, Anak let
. rip, hurling rocks and lava onto the area where the
. scientists had just stood. '
.
. 'From the safety of the sea they gazed back on one of
. mother nature's most impressive fireworks displays.'
.
. 'These pyrotechnics are part of a cycle that has been
. going on for hundreds of thousands of years. Krakatoa
. erupts, islands grow, till eventually they blow
. themselves apart. '
.
. 'NARRATOR Siggurdson's task is to journey back into
. history to try to discover when Krakatoa's major
. eruptions have occurred.'
.
. 'NARRATOR For decades scientists have thought that
. Krakatoa contains a centuries old secret. Illustrations
. taken from a 1920's book show a possible pattern. '
.
. 'First there was ancient Krakatoa. which exploded,
. possibly around 535, leaving islands behind that,
. through a series of minor eruptions, grew into the
. Krakatoa of 1883. '
.
. 'This in turn blew up, leading to the Krakatoa islands
. of today.'
.
. 'Siggurdson's last survey of the islands seems to
. confirm this idea. Five years ago he charted the ocean
. floor using sonar. The charts show the outlines of a
. caldera - the giant crater left after a massive
. volcanic explosion.'
.
. 'HARALDUR SIGGURDSON There is a structure out here in
. the ocean, a circular structure which is much larger in
. diameter and it is possible that this buried feature,
. circular feature that we see here to the north and the
. east may in fact be a gigantic ancient caldera of
. Krakatoa.'
.
. 'HARALDUR SIGGURDSON Well, we must be right on the edge
. here ... '
.
. 'NARRATOR Can Siggurdson find the hard evidence to date
. the major eruption of ancient Krakatoa?'
.
. 'He is looking for charcoal which is formed when hot
. lava instantly carbonizes trees. For precise carbon
. dating, Siggurdson must find charcoal from the major
. eruption layer. Failing that, he can narrow the margin
. by finding charcoal in the layers above and below.'
.
. 'HARALDUR SIGGURDSON Well, all set here...Ah, it's a
. vertical drop.'
.
. 'NARRATOR Still no easy task'
.
. 'HARALDUR SIGGURDSON It looks like OK all the way... I'm
. right in the middle of this major pyroclastic deposit
. and it's formed by a very large eruption of Krakatoa,
. now this is very likely to be the deposit that was
. created by a eruption, possibly in the 6th century AD
. and this is the one I'd really like to get some
. charcoal from so we can date this very important event,
. now we'd be very lucky to find charcoal but I'm going
. to keep digging around here a little bit and see what
. we've got.'
.
. 'NARRATOR The material in the volcanic debris layers
. left by Krakatoa spans hundreds of thousands of years.
. And there is very little charcoal to be found. So each
. precious sample has the potential to narrow down the
. date of the major eruption.'
.
. 'HARALDUR SIGGURDSON Often it's extremely difficult to
. find charcoal you might think you would be a lot of
. burnt wood or carbonised trees here because it's a
. tropical environment, but many volcanoes are barren
. because there's so much activity that vegetation and
. the forest doesn't really get established. We've had a
. lot of problem with finding charcoal in this particular
. deposit but we must keep in mind that there are only
. small pieces of the island sticking up above sea level
. so we have very small area to prospect.'
.
. 'NARRATOR During the two weeks he was in Krakatoa
. Professor Siggurdson was only able to find ten charcoal
. samples. '
.
. 'He found none big enough to carbon date from the major
. eruption layer. '
.
. 'However, he did collect good samples from the layer
. immediately above it, and from a layer a few levels
. below.'
.
. 'The samples will now be dated to see whether the major
. eruption could have occurred in 535. If not, it is
. highly unlikely Krakatoa is the culprit, and David Keys
. will have to rethink his theory.'
.
. 'NARRATOR 6 weeks later the carbon dating is complete.
. Professor Siggurdson faxes the results and his analysis
. to David Keys.'
.
. 'DAVID KEYS Ah ... It's really good news...'
.
. 'NARRATOR The data shows that the layer immediately
. above the major eruption dates from 1215 AD. Carbon
. from several layers below is from 6,600 BC. Back in his
. office Siggurdson was able to make a deduction. '
.
. 'HARALDUR SIGGURDSON Well if we look at this in detail
. over here then we have this picture we have 1215 AD
. right on top here in this deposit. Then we have the
. major eruption deposit right underneath it, then we
. have about five layers down here we have the charcoal
. that we dated 6,600 BC so in here we have quite a
. period of activity and development of the volcano
. possibly several thousand. Now that leads us to think
. that the event is much closer to 1215 AD as opposed to
. 6600. That span still covers the 535AD event so it
. doesn't rule it out at all - in fact as a result of
. this we are focusing more and more in on that time
. frame.'
.
. 'DAVID KEYS He thinks that the lead period, the lead
. option if you like, for when the major eruption that
. we're talking about took place was the first millennium
. AD. So although technically it can be anything between
. 6600 BC and 1300 AD all the other pieces of evidence
. that he's got suggest that its actually, we can narrow
. that down to the period lets say 0 to 1,000 now 535 is
. marvelously right in the middle of that window, so it's
. looking good.'
.
. 'NARRATOR David Keys's years of detective work suggest
. to him that there is overwhelming evidence of a massive
. volcanic eruption around 535 AD. While some scientists
. believe there is not enough evidence to point the
. finger at Krakatoa - others feel Keys' hypothesis is
. not unreasonable.'
.
. 'If Krakatoa was the cause of the climatic catastrophe,
. it had to have been spectacular explosion.'
.
. 'NARRATOR Such a cataclysmic eruption would have spewed
. ash and sulfur dioxide high into the atmosphere,
. enshrouding the earth in twilight, causing global
. chaos, and changing the course of human history.'

end of part 1, continued in part 2 of 2 ...

I think people as a whole should pay a lot more attention to what effects are created in the world, by the causes we make: of how we view life.

____ Epilog _______________________________________

The Buddha's highest teachings were the purpose of the Buddha's advent on this earth.

The Buddha did not appear on this earth to drain people's compassion with discussions of the emptiness and meaninglessness of life which is just a void.

The Buddha did not appear on this earth to teach people to live in such a narrow and momentary way, that there would be no context for self-examination and conscience.

The Buddha did not appear on this earth to possess people's minds with such illogic as to befuddle their ability to choose correctly between what is good and what is evil.

The Buddha did not appear on this earth to teach people how to commit atrocities and genocide, in the exploration of their "infinite possibilities", or "new states of being".

The Buddha did not appear on this earth to teach people how to maim and kill with their hands efficiently, quietly, loudly, with increased terror inflicted, or to maximize their subjugation to control the public sentiments for political ends.

These are all profoundly evil distortions of the Buddha's true teachings, which introduce infinities in the variables holding good and evil, removing all shades of gray in the propositional calculus of value.

Simply stated, the Buddha made his advent on this earth with the purpose of teaching the compassionate way of the bodhisattva, which is at the heart of the true entity of all phenomena, which is the eternal Buddha at one with the eternal Law. Which is how to navigate the sea of sufferings of birth, aging, sickness and death. He originally set out on his path, because of his observation of the sufferings of common people and wanting to understand the source of those sufferings (enlightened wisdom) and how to transform those sufferings into unshakable happiness (enlightened action).

When you embrace the void by following an evil man such as Bodhidharma, in that moment you create an emptiness in your future. Each time you embrace the void again, that emptiness grows. But it doesn't have to be ...
___________________________________________________

Nichiren Daishonin writes (Encouragement to a Sick Person, WND p. 78):

. "During the Former and Middle Days of the Law, the
. five impurities began to appear, and in the Latter
. Day, they are rampant. They give rise to the great
. waves of a gale, which not only beat against the
. shore, but strike each other. The impurity of
. thought has been such that, as the Former and
. Middle Days of the Law gradually passed, people
. transmitted insignificant erroneous teachings
. while destroying the unfathomable correct
. teaching. It therefore appears that more people
. have fallen into the evil paths because of errors
. with respect to Buddhism than because of secular
. misdeeds."

Because Bodhidharma discarded the Buddha's highest teaching (the Lotus Sutra), and due to his lazy nature turned to shortcuts to enlightenment, he came to the distorted view that life is acausal and empty, that the true entity is the void.

This erroneous view really comes from a misunderstanding of the Sutra of Immeasurable Meanings, where the True Entity is described by negation (the only way it can be): "... neither square, nor round, neither short, nor long, ..."

The description of the True Entity is logically voidal, but the True Entity itself is not. Bodhidharma was simply confused, due to the slander of negligence (laziness), and false confidence. The truth of life is that at the heart of the True Entity is the compassion of a bodhisattva for others.

Non-substantiality does not mean empty. Life has value. Humans are respectworthy. There is a purpose to everything. And every cause has an effect, so we are responsible for our thoughts, words and deeds. Zen is acausal. Zen is the greatest poison, which compares to the even greater medicine of the Lotus Sutra.

Suffice it to say: the purpose of Zen in the world is to corrupt and undermine everything that is not based upon the truth and the true teaching. All religions, disciplines, institutions and organizations which are undermined by Zen will eventually fall after glaring revelation of their worst defects, sooner rather than later.

If there is some good in your family, locality, society and culture, or country that you would like to retain, then cease the Zen, and begin to apply the medicine of the Lotus Sutra to heal the Zen wound in your life.

"Zen is the work of devilish minds." - Nichiren

-Chas.

. a prescription for the poisoned ones:
.
. The only antidote for the toxic effects of Zen in your life ...
.
. be that from Zen meditation, or the variant forms: physical
. Zen in the martial arts, Qigong, Acupuncture, Falun Gong,
. Copenhagen Convention of Quantum Mechanics, EST,
. Landmark Education, Nazism, Bushido, the Jesuits,
. Al Qaeda, or merely from having the distorted view that life
. is acausal, and that the true entity of all phenomena
. is the void ...
.
. with the effects of the loss of loved ones, detachment,
. isolation or various forms of emptiness in your life ...
.
. is the Lotus Sutra: chant Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo
. at least 3 times, twice a day, for the rest of your life,
. in at least a whisper ...
.
. and if you can, chant abundantly in a resonant voice !!!
.
. The full 28 Chapters of the Lotus Sutra,
. Nichiren Daishonin's Gosho volumes I and II,
. the Record of the Orally Transmitted Teachings
. (Gosho Zenshu, including the Ongi Kuden) and the
. SGI Dictionary of Buddhism are located at:
.
http://www.nichirenlibrary.org/en/
.
. To find an SGI Community Center:
.
http://www.sgi-usa.org/sgilocations/
__________________________________

LS Chap. 16 .....

All harbor thoughts of yearning
and in their minds thirst to gaze at me.
When living beings have become truly faithful,
honest and upright, gentle in intent,
single-mindedly desiring to see the Buddha
not hesitating even if it costs them their lives,
then I and the assembly of monks
appear together on Holy Eagle Peak.
At that time I tell the living beings
that I am always here, never entering extinction,
but that because of the power of an expedient means
at times I appear to be extinct, at other times not,
and that if there are living beings in other lands
who are reverent and sincere in their wish to believe,
then among them too
I will preach the unsurpassed Law.