buffalo divine eden № 7

odditiesoflife: Mountain Top Monastery, Greece At one time,...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:32:00 -0700

Mountain Top Monastery, Greece

At one time, there were 24 peak-top monasteries in the region of Meteora in central Greece. Built on sandstone megaliths that rise up to 1,800 feet (550 meters) from the valley floor, the first of these precarious enclaves dates to the 14th century. Now accessible by road and bridge, earlier monks and pilgrims had to rely on ladders and baskets raised by winches to reach the top.

gogoatz: what do you mean people born in 1997 arent 3

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:31:01 -0700

gogoatz:

what do you mean people born in 1997 arent 3

i like having a ridiculously large back catalog of posts (i was a dash clogger extraordinaire last...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:11:04 -0700

i like having a ridiculously large back catalog of posts (i was a dash clogger extraordinaire last summer). i’ll see a note on my dash that someone liked a post and i’ll click on it and i won’t even remember it. may as well have never seen it before. reblog! lol

buffalo-divine-eden-no7: Rudolf Hausner - Adam’s Overview,...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:08:11 -0700

buffalo-divine-eden-no7:

Rudolf Hausner - Adam’s Overview, 1968

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Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:29:59 -0700

"To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:02:20 -0700

“To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.”

- Thich Nhat Hanh (via jackthestripperfairieswearboots)

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Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:07:05 -0700

oblivionbath: Argument Clinic - Monty Python

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:25:59 -0700

oblivionbath:

Argument Clinic - Monty Python

briansmithart: charcoal/pencil sketch 2013

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:59:44 -0700

briansmithart:

charcoal/pencil sketch 2013

i started becoming really interested in hinduism either in high...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:58:47 -0700

i started becoming really interested in hinduism either in high school or shortly thereafter. the advaita vedanta school has always been the one that most spoke to me, but the fact that most of their gods and goddesses in the whole of india appear to have been conceived when they were tripping balls certainly adds to the appeal for me.

malformalady: A submerged idol of Hindu Lord Shiva stands in...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:47:48 -0700

malformalady:

A submerged idol of Hindu Lord Shiva stands in the flooded River Ganges in Rishikesh, in Uttarakhand, India. Monsoon torrential rains have caused havoc leading to flash floods, cloudbursts and landslides as the death toll continues to climb.

lord shiva remains undisturbed.

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Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:44:49 -0700

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Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:44:42 -0700

Vasily Surikov~Temptation of Christ, 1872

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:40:12 -0700

Vasily Surikov~Temptation of Christ, 1872

beauty in the beast by ~moonywolf

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:48:26 -0700

beauty in the beast by ~moonywolf

“I want to learn to fly an aeroplane.” “An...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:11:46 -0700

“I want to learn to fly an aeroplane.”

“An aeroplane? Well aren’t we grand. ‘No more buttered scones for me, I’m off to play the grand piano.’ ‘Oh, pardon me while I fly my aeroplane’. Now get on the table and put your arms out!”

king-in-yellow: Since I just came back from two weeks in India,...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:03:01 -0700

king-in-yellow:

Since I just came back from two weeks in India, lying in the sun, occasionally throwing sand onto myself with my flippers, I might post a bit on various things I saw.

The temples have all sorts of interesting mythological beasts. One that I saw a lot was the Yali, a kind of chimera with the - let me get this straight, I had it explained to me by a priest - it has the trunk of an elephant, head of a lion, body of a horse, and claws of a tiger. It’s sort of a “not-like-four-beasts” sort of animal like ol’ Suupuu. This mythological animal forms the body of an medival Indian lute called the yazh (“yali” and “yazh” have the same root because the L and ZH represent the same weird retroflex r/l consonant.)

Anyways, another interesting creature is the monster above, the Sharabha. It’s both interesting in its bizarreness (bizarritude?) and in what it represents in the Vaishnavite/Shaivite turf wars.

The story is that when the preserver god Vishnu took his ferocious lion-headed form, Narasimha (deets previously discussed here), he got kind of out of control and started tearing shit up. Then, according to Shiva-worshippers (Shaivites), Shiva took the form of Sharabha, who has some combination of two heads, bird wings, eight legs, a thousand arms, some variation on that. And then Sharabha grabbed and held Narasimha, as is depicted in the statue above, until Vishnu calmed down and transformed back. In other versions of the story, Shiva turned into a yali and did the same thing. There were no hard feelings or anything, it was just to keep the world from being destroyed.

Of course, some Vaishnavites (Vishnu-worshippers) don’t precisely like this story, so they say that instead of getting his ass kicked by Shiva, Vishnu then turned into an even bigger, tougher, two-headed bird monster called Gandaberunda, and the enormous strange monsters battled for eighteen days before they called a truce, or VIshnu deliberately threw the fight.

I like how the logic is that if you have one bizarre monster trashing the universe, the only response is to become a BIGGER, WEIRDER MONSTER. And then you keep upping the ante until you both get tired and decide that it’s cool.

Ferocious Vethala at Mahalaxmi Temple, Dodagadavalli...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:25:10 -0700

Ferocious Vethala at Mahalaxmi Temple, Dodagadavalli (Karnataka)
Dated: 1117CE
Photo by: Vijay Kumar

Kathmandu, Nepal - Durbar squareWood carving, Malla period

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:22:03 -0700

Kathmandu, Nepal - Durbar square
Wood carving, Malla period

brutals-realm: BLACK AND RED 1 by ~javierGpacheco

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 06:25:39 -0700

brutals-realm:

BLACK AND RED 1 by ~javierGpacheco