Dr. Kundan Aryal -
This year Lord Buddha’s 2565th birth anniversary was celebrated amidst low-profle activities owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. Limited number of monks and Buddhist performed rituals by maintaining social distance and health safety rules. They recalled the Buddha’s humanistic teachings and enlightenment ideas at this critical hour of health crisis. Over the century the different schools of Buddhism have developed their independent systems of chronology. However, as S. Radhakrishnan, a philosopher and the second president of India, states that all the schools agreed to consider the full moon day of May 1956 as the 2,500th anniversary of the mahaparinirvana of Gautama Buddha. Since then, the full moon of the month of Vaisakha of the Bikram Sambat calendar has been considered the most sacred day, which is associated with three important events in the life of the Buddha - birth, enlightenment and parinirvana.
Intellectual ferment
In the six century BCE, The Buddha was the most prominent figure among his contemporaries whose contributions are still remembered for stimulating remarkable spiritual unrest and intellectual ferment. The most significant features of Buddhism involve its great sociological ideas as reflected on the good conduct in day to day life of human beings and pertinent ethical guidelines for professional intellectuals. The teachings of Buddha are relevant to professional journalism where fairness is one of the cardinal principles. Today, journalism is bearing the responsibility to mediate the entire society by acting as a communication bridge. The guidelines to normative ethics are pertinent to this endeavor though the Buddha does not directly address the theory of communication, even nonviolent communication. Read Full article in The Rising Nepal.
