Talk:Cannabis in Buddhism
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The page covers cannabis and hemp in Buddhism: the precept and monastic rule against intoxicants and how they have been read, the Indian and Tibetan texts that name or may name the plant, Buddhist monastic codes and the Burmese and Ceylonese bans that witnesses grounded in Buddhism, hemp seed and hemp stalk in Korean and Japanese devotion, the legend of the Buddha's hemp-seed diet, and positions taken by monks and Buddhist councils in Thailand and Sri Lanka. Buddhist Tantra in general is on Tantra; the Burmese prohibition and its enforcement on Cannabis in colonial Burma.
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The hemp-seed legend
- The Chinese lives of the Buddha say he ate 一麻一米 a day. Beal (1883) renders the line in the Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king as "one hemp grain" (verse 1007, p. 143) and his summary of the chapter as "one grain of millet (hemp)" (p. xxii); Soothill and Hodous (1937) gloss the phrase "hempseed and a grain of rice". The Lalitavistara in the 84000 translation from the Tibetan has a sesame seed, a juniper berry and a grain of rice, and the Pāli Mahāsaccaka Sutta a handful of bean broth. Which plant the Chinese translators meant is not decided by these renderings.
- Abel (1980) dates Beal's translation to 1882; the volume's title page reads 1883. Touw (1981) calls the story "a Mahayana Buddhist tradition" and cites Aldrich (1977) for it.
Śaṇa in the Cakrasaṃvara Tantra
- Gray translates śaṇa in chapter 50 as hemp. Both Tibetan translations read tsa na ka, which he takes as chickpea, and Pandey's 2002 edition reads caṇakam; śaṇa also names sunn hemp. The same point is set out on Tantra.
Cannabis in Tibet
- Touw's statements that cannabis was sacred in Tibet and central to Tantric Buddhist meditation rest on Aldrich (1977) and Bharati (1965); her Tibetan medical evidence rests chiefly on Kirilov (1893). The monastic codes Jansen (2015) studies name alcohol, tobacco and snuff among the intoxicants they forbid; cannabis is not among the substances they name.
- Parker and Lux (2008), citing William Stablein's 1976 dissertation on the Mahākālatantra, write that its medical formulas include cannabis in several forms, and, following David White, they treat the Tārā Tantra as a Buddhist text that names cannabis. Its editor, A. K. Maitra, presents the Tārātantra as a text of the cult of Tārā whose votaries in India were by then Hindu, Buddhist worship of her surviving in Nepal.
- In Tibetan, so ma ra dza usually denotes mallows; some glossaries give it for hemp, which is sro ma nag po.
The Burmese ban
- Witnesses before the Hemp Drugs Commission in 1894 agreed that the Burmese kings had forbidden the drug. J. E. Bridges, Commissioner of the Eastern Division, added that the ban held in practice only for opium and that no notice was taken of growing hemp.
Statements by Sri Lankan monks
- Bengamuwe Nalaka's statement that the Buddha spoke of the medicinal properties of kansa is reported in the Daily Mirror (19 January 2021) without a reference to a text. Uragoda (1983) concerns opium; the ban on importing bhang and ganja in 1897 is given there without a stated reason.