The Book of Miracles
.cont ...............Here, then, for the first time in a single volume, the reader will find classic miracle stories from Hinduism and Buddhism alongside those from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Here the reader will revisit Moses as he divides the waters so that the Israelites might escape Egypt for the Promised Land. Here Jesus raises his friend Lazarus from the dead. The Prophet Muhammad miraculously produces food and water in the desert and blinds an opposing army with a handful of dust. Krishna lifts a mountain and thereby saves a village. The Buddha dazzles his kinfolk by rising in the air, dividing his body into pieces, and then rejoining them.
Also for the first time, I have brought together miracle stories of the great saints, sages, and spiritual masters revered in each tradition. Among them we will meet Talmudic wonder-workers like Hanina ben Dosa and Hasidic masters like the Baal Shem Tov; the early Christian hermit Saint Antony and Saint Francis, who bore the wounds of Christ; the early Sufi mystics, the Muslim female ascetic Rabi'a al-Adawiyya, and the martyr al-Hallaj; the classic Hindu saints like Shankara, Caitanya, and Mira Bai; and Buddhist saints from the earliest of the Buddha's disciples, like Moggallana, to the Tantric master Padmasambhava. The figures I have selected show us how miracles continued to accompany the spread of each religion. In this way, the saints themselves become figures in whom the Other that is God (or in Buddhism, the truth that is the Dharma) breaks through the mundane world, saturating it with meaning. Put another way, miracles disclose the whole of reality to those who can see only a part.
But The Book of Miracles is not another anthology. Anthologists collect texts by removing them from the contexts in which they find their meaning. This is questionable enough when what is being anthologized is isolated sayings, or sound-bite wisdom of the spiritually advanced. But miracles are by definition stories that make sense only within larger narratives. What I offer here is a guide to miracles as they unfold within the sacred scriptures of each tradition and are amplified in the sacred biographies of the saints, sages, and spiritual masters. My aim has been to show how those stories function within each tradition and what they reveal about those who perform them.
For example, when the Buddha walks on water, that story discloses to a Buddhist (or should) something quite different from what a Christian sees (or should) in the similar story of Jesus walking on the Sea of Galilee. But when the apostle Peter raises a dead man to life, his miracle echoes not only what Jesus did, but also what the prophet Elijah did several centuries before. And when the Prophet Muhammad ascends to heaven, it is both like the Ascension of Jesus and something very different. In other words, to understand the meaning of a miracle, one must know the tradition out of which it comes. One must also know what earlier tradition is being challenged or superseded. Thus, to read a miracle story literally is — inevitably — to miss the point. To ignore the literal meaning, however, is to fail to understand why the miracle story was told in the first place. Why should a story told of Jesus or the Buddha be less complicated than a story by Kafka or Joyce?
On the other hand, the reader might well ask why he should bother with religions not his own. The answer, I suggest, is because we must. We live in an age of convergence. In small towns now as well as urban centers, mosques and shrines and ashrams appear where once only churches and synagogues could be seen. The people Christian missionaries once went abroad to convert are now their children's playmates in the school yard back home. Diversity, in other words, has moved well beyond the categories of race, class, and gender to include the richer, more challenging, and more comprehensive category of religion. Religions are powerful symbol systems that define reality for those who live in their embrace. Jews and Christians, Muslims and Hindus all share the same experiences; what makes them differ one from the other is the insight into the meaning of those experiences. We cannot afford ignorance of what our next-door neighbors, or even the Bombay sales manager just an E-mail away, may believe about the nature and destiny of humankind. .............................
cont.......
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/w/woodward-miracles.html
Full Version: The Book of Miracles
so the miracles jesus did was done by others ............. how interesting.
nice find.
these days a miracle is called magic. why? miracles seem to only be performed by past masters who are famous for there spiritual leadership. chris angel and david blayne seem to be performing miracles. maybe calling it a miracle is to glorified for skepticks.
these days a miracle is called magic. why? miracles seem to only be performed by past masters who are famous for there spiritual leadership. chris angel and david blayne seem to be performing miracles. maybe calling it a miracle is to glorified for skepticks.
QUOTE (jelly metal @ Jul 2 2008, 11:26 AM) 
nice find.
these days a miracle is called magic. why? miracles seem to only be performed by past masters who are famous for there spiritual leadership. chris angel and david blayne seem to be performing miracles. maybe calling it a miracle is to glorified for skepticks.
these days a miracle is called magic. why? miracles seem to only be performed by past masters who are famous for there spiritual leadership. chris angel and david blayne seem to be performing miracles. maybe calling it a miracle is to glorified for skepticks.
thanks ... I was just amazed myself how we don't hear about these other miracles here in the US. It's only the christian ones that get the attention. I can't say miracles can't happen , but I believe 99% are explainable. Magic , tricks , illusion. Chris Angel and David Copperfeild 2000 years ago would have left jesus in the dust. If we were a gullable as man was then we'd believe in them now as miracle workers.
and I'd love to know how this is done -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcEqM8z1wgA
or heck this one !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zIpiuCeHCg
I donot beleive in miracles, i think pehaps some do as a way to label events that they have not encountered things before so the novelty appears miraculous .......certainly not the ones that are so common to all the creation narratives.....other than a way to jazz up a story I do not put much stock into miracle lores.....
my freind and I go round and round about this i donot see a hieriarchial order to events i do not see one event as better than or less than another all of life is the miracle..........its all in how you use any experince that matters in my world view...and a seemingly unpleasant one can be deemed a miracle to some....
my freind and I go round and round about this i donot see a hieriarchial order to events i do not see one event as better than or less than another all of life is the miracle..........its all in how you use any experince that matters in my world view...and a seemingly unpleasant one can be deemed a miracle to some....
QUOTE (Supra Sheri @ Jul 2 2008, 04:35 PM)
I donot beleive in miracles, i think pehaps some do as a way to label events that they have not encountered things before so the novelty appears miraculous .......certainly not the ones that are so common to all the creation narratives.....other than a way to jazz up a story I do not put much stock into miracle lores.....
my freind and I go round and round about this i donot see a hieriarchial order to events i do not see one event as better than or less than another all of life is the miracle..........its all in how you use any experince that matters in my world view...and a seemingly unpleasant one can be deemed a miracle to some....
my freind and I go round and round about this i donot see a hieriarchial order to events i do not see one event as better than or less than another all of life is the miracle..........its all in how you use any experince that matters in my world view...and a seemingly unpleasant one can be deemed a miracle to some....
true ........ but I think there are things we deem 'miracles ' just because we haven't figured them out. like how some can go into remission with certain cancers where most die.
but stories of people being pushed out of the way of an on coming cars unaware and yet no one was around ? strange to say the least.
QUOTE (Lt_Ripley @ Jul 2 2008, 01:41 PM)
true ........ but I think there are things we deem 'miracles ' just because we haven't figured them out. like how some can go into remission with certain cancers where most die.
but stories of people being pushed out of the way of an on coming cars unaware and yet no one was around ? strange to say the least.
but stories of people being pushed out of the way of an on coming cars unaware and yet no one was around ? strange to say the least.
that would just say there is something we don't know about medicine and really IMO that applys to alot of things across the board..... we don't know alot and at our level of awarness..one that is cured of cancer by a doctor would think its a miracle that medicine found a way......so how do we call some things miracles and soem things not... that is where i am at with it theese days.........
I do concur that some do label things miracles, but it sounds more practical to say there may be something we just dont know or didnt' figure in and such and such happened....or i can attest haivng a child the first time is pretty darn amazing then by #2 its amazing in another way and by the 3rd it has little to do with the actual birth and other things take forefront so is one child more miraculous than the other and how would i determine that... ?????. well what our culture calsl miralces is out i am not ready to sign on any dotted line thats for sure....lol
I don't know why people put so much faith in miracles...they're happening all the time in almost everything we do, and yet...people get fascinated by them.
QUOTE (Lt_Ripley @ Jul 1 2008, 12:10 PM)
The Book of Miracles
.cont ...............Here, then, for the first time in a single volume, the reader will find classic miracle stories from Hinduism and Buddhism alongside those from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Here the reader will revisit Moses as he divides the waters so that the Israelites might escape Egypt for the Promised Land. Here Jesus raises his friend Lazarus from the dead. The Prophet Muhammad miraculously produces food and water in the desert and blinds an opposing army with a handful of dust. Krishna lifts a mountain and thereby saves a village. The Buddha dazzles his kinfolk by rising in the air, dividing his body into pieces, and then rejoining them.
Also for the first time, I have brought together miracle stories of the great saints, sages, and spiritual masters revered in each tradition. Among them we will meet Talmudic wonder-workers like Hanina ben Dosa and Hasidic masters like the Baal Shem Tov; the early Christian hermit Saint Antony and Saint Francis, who bore the wounds of Christ; the early Sufi mystics, the Muslim female ascetic Rabi'a al-Adawiyya, and the martyr al-Hallaj; the classic Hindu saints like Shankara, Caitanya, and Mira Bai; and Buddhist saints from the earliest of the Buddha's disciples, like Moggallana, to the Tantric master Padmasambhava. The figures I have selected show us how miracles continued to accompany the spread of each religion. In this way, the saints themselves become figures in whom the Other that is God (or in Buddhism, the truth that is the Dharma) breaks through the mundane world, saturating it with meaning. Put another way, miracles disclose the whole of reality to those who can see only a part.
But The Book of Miracles is not another anthology. Anthologists collect texts by removing them from the contexts in which they find their meaning. This is questionable enough when what is being anthologized is isolated sayings, or sound-bite wisdom of the spiritually advanced. But miracles are by definition stories that make sense only within larger narratives. What I offer here is a guide to miracles as they unfold within the sacred scriptures of each tradition and are amplified in the sacred biographies of the saints, sages, and spiritual masters. My aim has been to show how those stories function within each tradition and what they reveal about those who perform them.
For example, when the Buddha walks on water, that story discloses to a Buddhist (or should) something quite different from what a Christian sees (or should) in the similar story of Jesus walking on the Sea of Galilee. But when the apostle Peter raises a dead man to life, his miracle echoes not only what Jesus did, but also what the prophet Elijah did several centuries before. And when the Prophet Muhammad ascends to heaven, it is both like the Ascension of Jesus and something very different. In other words, to understand the meaning of a miracle, one must know the tradition out of which it comes. One must also know what earlier tradition is being challenged or superseded. Thus, to read a miracle story literally is — inevitably — to miss the point. To ignore the literal meaning, however, is to fail to understand why the miracle story was told in the first place. Why should a story told of Jesus or the Buddha be less complicated than a story by Kafka or Joyce?
On the other hand, the reader might well ask why he should bother with religions not his own. The answer, I suggest, is because we must. We live in an age of convergence. In small towns now as well as urban centers, mosques and shrines and ashrams appear where once only churches and synagogues could be seen. The people Christian missionaries once went abroad to convert are now their children's playmates in the school yard back home. Diversity, in other words, has moved well beyond the categories of race, class, and gender to include the richer, more challenging, and more comprehensive category of religion. Religions are powerful symbol systems that define reality for those who live in their embrace. Jews and Christians, Muslims and Hindus all share the same experiences; what makes them differ one from the other is the insight into the meaning of those experiences. We cannot afford ignorance of what our next-door neighbors, or even the Bombay sales manager just an E-mail away, may believe about the nature and destiny of humankind. .............................
cont.......
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/w/woodward-miracles.html
.cont ...............Here, then, for the first time in a single volume, the reader will find classic miracle stories from Hinduism and Buddhism alongside those from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Here the reader will revisit Moses as he divides the waters so that the Israelites might escape Egypt for the Promised Land. Here Jesus raises his friend Lazarus from the dead. The Prophet Muhammad miraculously produces food and water in the desert and blinds an opposing army with a handful of dust. Krishna lifts a mountain and thereby saves a village. The Buddha dazzles his kinfolk by rising in the air, dividing his body into pieces, and then rejoining them.
Also for the first time, I have brought together miracle stories of the great saints, sages, and spiritual masters revered in each tradition. Among them we will meet Talmudic wonder-workers like Hanina ben Dosa and Hasidic masters like the Baal Shem Tov; the early Christian hermit Saint Antony and Saint Francis, who bore the wounds of Christ; the early Sufi mystics, the Muslim female ascetic Rabi'a al-Adawiyya, and the martyr al-Hallaj; the classic Hindu saints like Shankara, Caitanya, and Mira Bai; and Buddhist saints from the earliest of the Buddha's disciples, like Moggallana, to the Tantric master Padmasambhava. The figures I have selected show us how miracles continued to accompany the spread of each religion. In this way, the saints themselves become figures in whom the Other that is God (or in Buddhism, the truth that is the Dharma) breaks through the mundane world, saturating it with meaning. Put another way, miracles disclose the whole of reality to those who can see only a part.
But The Book of Miracles is not another anthology. Anthologists collect texts by removing them from the contexts in which they find their meaning. This is questionable enough when what is being anthologized is isolated sayings, or sound-bite wisdom of the spiritually advanced. But miracles are by definition stories that make sense only within larger narratives. What I offer here is a guide to miracles as they unfold within the sacred scriptures of each tradition and are amplified in the sacred biographies of the saints, sages, and spiritual masters. My aim has been to show how those stories function within each tradition and what they reveal about those who perform them.
For example, when the Buddha walks on water, that story discloses to a Buddhist (or should) something quite different from what a Christian sees (or should) in the similar story of Jesus walking on the Sea of Galilee. But when the apostle Peter raises a dead man to life, his miracle echoes not only what Jesus did, but also what the prophet Elijah did several centuries before. And when the Prophet Muhammad ascends to heaven, it is both like the Ascension of Jesus and something very different. In other words, to understand the meaning of a miracle, one must know the tradition out of which it comes. One must also know what earlier tradition is being challenged or superseded. Thus, to read a miracle story literally is — inevitably — to miss the point. To ignore the literal meaning, however, is to fail to understand why the miracle story was told in the first place. Why should a story told of Jesus or the Buddha be less complicated than a story by Kafka or Joyce?
On the other hand, the reader might well ask why he should bother with religions not his own. The answer, I suggest, is because we must. We live in an age of convergence. In small towns now as well as urban centers, mosques and shrines and ashrams appear where once only churches and synagogues could be seen. The people Christian missionaries once went abroad to convert are now their children's playmates in the school yard back home. Diversity, in other words, has moved well beyond the categories of race, class, and gender to include the richer, more challenging, and more comprehensive category of religion. Religions are powerful symbol systems that define reality for those who live in their embrace. Jews and Christians, Muslims and Hindus all share the same experiences; what makes them differ one from the other is the insight into the meaning of those experiences. We cannot afford ignorance of what our next-door neighbors, or even the Bombay sales manager just an E-mail away, may believe about the nature and destiny of humankind. .............................
cont.......
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/w/woodward-miracles.html
Interesting post my friend. Sounds like a good read, too. Just as your signature says "God is too big to fit one religion'. I totally agree with that. People need to come together in the name of God, rather than isolate themselves. There is common ground in all faiths. All faiths lead to the same God.
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