Old Path White Clouds, Thich Nhat Hanh, 1987 – Visiting one too many monasteries in Ladakh, I picked up this book after that trip. This book is derived from 24 Pali, Sanskrit scriptures and Chinese sources and retold by the author in simple English. It covers the life of early Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama) as the prince, all the way to his death and everything he did in between, including the troubles he faced in running a large community of bhikhus.

You cannot learn meditation by reading a book – that the Buddha insists. It is through practice you will find it and not from theory and mental arguments. You will notice how much Buddhism of today is tainted and veered from Buddha’s teachings upon reading the book as he insists on not being dogmatic, not worshipping, chanting prayers etc. A lot of this is what transpired over the centuries post his death.

The following is a faithful reproduction of the ideas in the book. These are not my ideas (some touchy subjects have flared up here in the past – so qualifying it before proceeding). I have tried to restrict the notes to usable learnings and not the entire biography and characters – the book reads very different from the essence extracted here.

My notes –

• Buddha – means the enlightened one (’budh’ in magadhi is to awaken)

• Buddha walked just to enjoy walking, unconcerned about arriving anywhere. Each step slow, balanced and peaceful. Ate in silence, mindful of each bite.

• Bhikkhu was one who left his family to follow the Buddha and followed the Dharma, the path that lead to awakening as part of the Sangha the community that supports one along the path

• Buddha was kind to Svasti, the untouchable boy that tended buffaloes. It was impossible to be polluted by the touch of another fellow human being and it was wrong to create divisions

• The truth is the truth whether anyone believes it or not. A million people may believe a lie, it is still a lie. You must have great courage to live by the truth

• Live by love, understanding and compassion towards all life

• Abusing the body cannot help one find peace and understanding (on fasting indefinitely as a form of meditation). The body is just an instrument, a temple of the spirit, a raft with which we cross to the other shore and self-mortification is unjust

• “Why must the holy men chant so long?” and “Why can’t father recite the scriptures himself?” instead of having the Brahmans do it – queries which perhaps laid the foundation for the seeker in the young Buddha (”Reciting the scriptures does nothing to help the worms and the birds” – he concludes after meditating on it under the shade of the rose-apple tree)

• Siddhartha was taught that cosmos emanated from the Supreme being known as Purusa or Brahman, and that all castes in society had issued from various parts of the creator’s body

• Siddhartha did not like the power accorded to the Brahman priests. He felt they oppressed and manipulated the people with fees to conduct rituals at birth, death or marriages

• Siddhartha never missed a class of Vedas and liked to discuss with monks and hermits. He preferred their selflessness to the selfishness of the priests

• Buddha didn’t believe a river could wash away someone’s sins (then the fish, shrimp and oysters ought to be the purest beings of all)

• Young Siddhartha observed the workings of the Royal court – the power struggles in maintaining one’s position to alleviating the suffering of the people in need. He felt his father too was imprisoned by his position (of being unable to fix the greed and corruption)

• People were entrapped not only by illness and unjust social conditions but by sorrows and passions of their own making in their hearts and minds

• “I too am trapped by feelings of anger, jealousy, fear and desire”, young Siddhartha says to his Father while insisting he can point to the problems of the court but had no cure for the selfish ambitions of the court

• Pursuit of religion is not in the studying of holy scriptures but had to include the practice of meditation to attain liberation for one’s heart and mind

• Four stages of brahman’s life – youth he studies vedas, then marries and raises a family and serves society, in the third stage he retires and pursues religious studies and in the fourth, released from every tie and obligation, lives as monk – Buddha questioned why a person can’t live all four ways at once

• “A day upon the throne will be like a day of sitting on a bed of hot coals for me” – Siddhartha to his father before leaving to pursue his path of liberation

• Knowledge is attained from direct experience and direct attainment, not from mental arguments

• The realm of infinite space – the meditative state in which the mind becomes one with infinity, all material and visual phenomena cease to arise and the space is seen as limitless source of all things. Its not an object of the consciousness, but your very consciousness itself

• Buddha realised early on that his own mind was present in every phenomenon of the universe

• Everything in the universe is recreated in the mind and hence all phenomena is illusory – form, sound, smell, taste and tactile perception were all creations of our mind

• The realm of no materiality – a meditative state in which we see that no phenomenon exists outside of one’s own mind

• While the realm of infinite space and real of no materiality were precious fruits of meditation, Buddha realised it did not help resolve the fundamentals problems of birth and death, nor liberate one from suffering and anxiety. Buddha’s goal was not to become leader of a community but to find the path of true liberation

• State of neither perception nor non-perception – The path to liberation has to transcend all perception (samadhi). To transcend is to not escape but to be mindful to observe the feelings and perceptions as they arose

• Gautama took the atman, or separate self from the vedas and realised that in reality only non-self, or anatman was the nature of all existence

• River of perceptions flowed alongside rivers of body and feelings and they intermingled and influenced each other. Endless suffering arose from erroneous perceptions in believing the impermanent to be permanent, that which is without self contains self, that which has no birth or death has birth and death and in dividing that which is indivisible into parts

• Fear, anger, hatred, arrogance, jealousy, greed rose out of ignorance – the very opposite of mindfulness. They could be conquered only through direct experience, bypassing the knowledge of the intellect

• That which has never been born is incapable of ever dying (a new leaf has always existed in the universe but has simply manifested itself in its new form of perception)

• Interdepedence and non-self are the keys to liberation. Impermanence and emptiness of self are the very conditions essential for life. A rice grain won’t grow into a rice plant or clouds into rain or a child into adult if it were all permanent

• Birth/death, pure/impure, production/destruction, one/many, inner/outer, large/small were all concepts of false distinctions created by the intellect – and are sources of all suffering. Penetrating the empty nature of all things and trancending all mental barriers one can be liberated from the cycle of suffering

• Love and understanding were one and the same. To attain clear understanding, live mindfully, making direct contact with life in the present moment, truly seeing what is taking place within and outside of oneself

• Aryamarga – The noble path of right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration (the noble eight fold path of buddhism) to avoid mind’s false division of subject and object, self and others, existence and non-existence, birth and death and to destroy the jail keeper that was ignorance

• A person who lives in awareness knows what she is thinking, saying and doing and can avoid thoughts, words and actions that cause suffering to self and others

• To plunge into sensual pleasures or to pursue extreme austerity depriving body of its needs would both lead to failure in pursuing the path

• Five precepts for lay disciples – 1. Do not kill 2. Do not steal 3. Do not engage in sexual misconduct 4. Do not say untruthful things 5. Do not use alcohol

• Dependent co-arising – All things depended on each other for their arising, development and decline. Within one thing existed all things. Meditating on it had the power to break through fixed and narrow views that universe had been created by some god

• Our minds are busy chasing after yesterday’s memories and tomorrow’s dreams. The only way to be in touch with life is to return it to the present moment

• Your feelings and perceptions determine the quality of your life

• Once a person is caught by belief in a doctrine, he loses all freedom. When one becomes dogmatic, he believes his doctrine to be the only truth and others are heresy

• Buddha felt his goal was not to explain the universe but to help guide others to have a direct experience of reality – a method to experience reality and not reality itself

• “My teaching is a means of practice, not something to hold onto or worship”. Its a raft used to cross the river – there’s no point in carrying it after crossing the river

• Peace and joy were possible right in the very moments of working – means and ends were not two different things

• Spiritual enlightenment does not depend on age – months and years do not guarantee the presence of enlightenment

• Life has great need for love – but not of one based on lust, passion, attachment, discrimination and prejudice but based on kindness and compassion – maitri (capacity to bring happiness to others) and karuna (capacity to remove others suffering)

• Love based on selfish desire to possess others will not bring them peace and happiness and instead make them feel trapped. If the one we love is unhappy from our love, they will find a way to free themselves and not accept the prison of our love (love will devolve into anger and hatred)

• To love is to understand your loved one’s sufferings and aspirations. To relieve their suffering and to help fulfil their aspirations is true love

• Buddha refrained from answering esoteric questions that were not essential for the practice of realising the way to attain detachment, equanimity, peace and liberation.

• The practitioner observes his body, his breath, the four bodily postures of walking, standing, lying and sitting. Breathing in, he knows he is breathing in and breathing out, he knows he is breathing out. He contemplates feelings as they arise, develop and fade, irrespective of pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. When happy, he knows he is happy because he received praise and merely observes it and is aware. It is practised throughout the day

• The practitioner knows when he is centered or distracted, open-minded or close-minded, blocked, concentrated or enlightened, the practitioner knows at once. He is aware of the 5 hindrances to liberation – sense-desire, ill-will, drowsiness, agitation and doubt

• He is aware of the 7 factors of awakening – full attention, investigating dharmas, energy, joy, ease, concentration and letting go and 4 noble truths – existence of suffering, causes of suffering, liberation from suffering and the path that leads to liberation from it

• When a seed transforms to a tree, it did not die. The seed and tree are both birthless and deathless

• A person who has not tasted mango cannot know its taste no matter how many words or concepts someone uses to describe it to him. We can grasp reality only through direct experience

• tathagata, or suchness – one who comes from nowhere and goes nowhere

• If one is idle or lazy, one will not make progress in the practice. If one tried too hard, one will suffer fatigue and discouragement – know limits to not forcing mind and body

• It isn’t necessary to suffer and make sacrifices in the present to acquire happiness in the future – life exists only in the present moment. self-mortification, starving and austerity cause suffering to the body in the present and the future, as do sensual pleasures

• Birth and death cannot touch me – I smile because I have never been born and I will never die. Birth does not give me existence and death does not take existence away

The book is part biography of Buddha, part spiritual on his teachings, part history on ancient India from 600 BC. There’s a lot of repetition as the Buddha’s preachings only incrementally evolved over the decades he practiced and preached his way of enlightenment. The names of people, places may sound a bit off – perhaps from the translation or from this being truer than the anglicised versions we are used to. Buddha’s teachings are a marvel from ancient India and something I could connect to, despite it being 2500+ years old. A lot of the practice, without the tangent modern buddhism has taken is preserved in Vipassana meditation and is something I am hoping to try out. 9/10

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Since around 65% of business comes from enterprise, how does it work, does it mean they directly supply to businesses for end use and who are their major enterprise customers, could not find this information in AR.

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@Aditya_Mittal Thanks for those kind words.
I am relatively newer to market and things that I say might be incorrect.
KarXT might play is not confirmed by management till now, we are all guessing and hence whole thesis may fall apart.
Neuland should be announcing more capacity for the manufactoring of KarXT as per my calculation but they not increasing much capacity considering KarXT as chatgpt in tech.

You will need to have a solid rejection framework as you will see many stocks being added every month. I have got single digit ideas worth investing since I have started tracking this.
For eg, in this year, in most of the months I did not got any idea and hence you might find it boring.

Also the kind of ideas you will get will be fairly large small caps or midcaps from tracking mutual funds data which impacts the returns. Stocks like GPIL, SBCL will never be added by mutual fund when they are small in size and hence I have recently added other sources also(not integrated on the website though).

My total investing framework is based on copying credible sources for whom I can know with certainity when they added and when they exit.
Though, for selling I don’t depend upon others as for now.

I have sent you the website link in message, it is being maintained by me with no active development going on.
Also, most of the data refreshes by 15th of the month.

Bajel Projects Ltd A bajaj Group company

EPC segment company comprises of Power Transmission & Power Distribution. BPL provides end to end solutions ranging from in-house design, testing, procurement, manufacturing, installation & commissioning of the projects.
foreign Governments PE fund By 5% Stake in Dec-23 Quater, Finance Companies of Power sector already moved upwards now it’s time for Infra related companies in power sector BAJEL is one of them,

Note- Not A buy recommendations Just educational purpose

Hi, has anyone tried mstock and it’s MTF facility for swing trading? I see the interest rates are way less than Kotak or Dhan.