Buddha Boy Article on Yahoo

The following article was found on Yahoo about an individual who is supposedly being referred to in Nepal as the newest incarnation of Buddha. The link to the article itself is http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081122/wl_sthasia_afp/nepalreligionbuddhism

After reading the article I am very skeptical of this story of the so called ‘Buddha Boy.’ Although many Nepalese citizens claim he is Buddha’s reincarnation, I personally don’t think that he should be classified as anything like this, and personally I would be more likely to consider him a liar and a hoax. It is not possible for any individual to survive without food and water for such a long period of time, and alongside the fact that he has been witnessed eating and sleeping when he claimed he was in meditation, this just shows how he is an individual out to deceive so many. I am shocked that word of mouth is enough to allow this boy to be considered as great by so many, and I think it highlights circumstances whereby if individuals hear constant rhetoric on a subject, they often believe it often without little evidence. Although I know that many religious concepts we believe in and follow cannot be factually proven, I am surprised that men and women across Nepal have been so easily influenced. I think that as the nation has such limited communication outlets due to the fact that it is technologically behind, individuals therefore have to rely on word of mouth for news to travel. However, even though it is a nation very different and fundamentally behind that of the US in terms of development and the economy, I still would have thought that citizens would use more enlightened thought and logic to question these highly speculative claims.

Personally, I believe that many religious principles in the past, also became common beliefs through this process of word of mouth, and therefore as I think this allows them to be easily altered, I would therefore consider many religious stories as skeptical, as they probably didn’t actually occur in the way that they are remembered today. Although I’m not saying that all religious principles are therefore untrue, do people agree that many religious principles probably came out of overstated and altered stories?

In terms of this issue what do people think? About what percentage of stories that are seen as religious do you this have been distorted and altered from the original ways, and do you think that now mass communication is so prominent, that this situation is happening less??