Dharma Wheel

Thanks that will do just fine.

Indrajala wrote:Here's an old translation you can download:

http://archive.org/details/siyukibuddhistre01hsuoft

I am interested in the state of early Buddhism in India, and I'd like to find out what Xuanzang (a Chinese Buddhist traveler in India in the 600s) said about it in his Great Tang Records on the Western Regions . Unfortunately Google Books doesn't have an e-copy. Is anyone here aware of a digital cop...

I looked that up. http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/lotus/lot14.htm Thanks for the reference. Yeah those large numbers provide a lot of impact, when reading the passage discussing the number of Bhuddas that have arisen. The large figures are essential for the effect of the mahayana sutras. For exampl...

OK so then this is more of an aspect of Indian culture, that spread with Buddhism?

Interesting. Nor, of course, would this be limited to Indian culture. I recall the Colossus of Rhodes, as well as a statue of Constantine in a Roman basilica that was quite large.

I have been looking at statues of the Buddha online, and they seem to be pretty big--the one at Leshan, China; Bamiyan (Afghanistan--before it was destroyed); and I've also seen some pretty large reclining Buddha statues as well. These are pretty amazing. All this has me wondering--was there somethi...

Yes, I'm beginning to sense that this was more an Indian thing than a particularly Buddhist thing. The key (for me) was simply that these were real "numbers" that were being referred to--part of teh common parlance of the language of the time, as opposed to terms like "gazillion"...

Thanks, cdpaton. Yeah nayuta isn't the highest number, but if khoti is the Sanskirt/Indian crore (which your Sanksrit numeral page suggests), that would still be a pretty high number--100 billion (100 kotis making an ayuta, and a 100 ayutas making a nayuta--calculating a koti as 10,000,000). Unfortu...

I just came across a passage in the Lalitavistara (http://iteror.org/big/Source/buddhism/Lalitavistara-ch12.html) that records a story of the Buddha counting incredibly high numbers. My question is--were these numbers in actual use by other astronomers/mathematicians, or was this something that the ...