A young man believed by followers to be a reincarnation of Buddha has returned to Nepal’s jungles to meditate alone, police said yesterday, as scholars cast doubt on his supporters’ claims.
“Buddha Boy” Ram Bahadur Bomjam, 18, became famous in 2005 after supporters said he could meditate motionless for months without water, food or sleep.
“Bomjam went back into the jungle late [on] Friday and all the devotees have left,” police officer Gobinda Kushwaha said from Neejgad, a town in Bara District, 60km south of Kathmandu.
The “Buddha Boy” reappeared earlier this month after supporters said in March last year that he was going to meditate for three years in an underground bunker, although he was spotted on two occasions.
For the last 10 days, he has been blessing thousands of devotees who came daily to the site in dense jungle close to Neejgad. The president of the Nepal Buddhist Council said claims by his supporters that he was a reincarnation of Siddartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, were not credible.
“We do not believe he is Buddha. He does not have Buddha’s qualities,” said Mahiswor Raj Bajracharya, president of the Nepal Buddhist Council, a center for Buddhist study and research in Kathmandu.
“He may have achieved great heights in meditation, but that alone does not make him a Buddha. A Buddha needs life experience. A young man who has not seen the world at all cannot be a Buddha,” Bajracharya said.
Despite being officially secular, Nepal — where around 80 percent of people are Hindu and 11 percent are Buddhist — remains a deeply spiritual place.
“This is a country where people worship idols and stones, and everyone educated or not believes in the supernatural,” the Buddhist scholar said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion