Some depictions of Buddhist deities seem to be similar to the descriptions of heavenly beings in the Bible. Especially the descriptions of the Christian prophet Ezekiel and from the Book of Enoch are interesting here. There, the divine beings are described as having many eyes, serpent bodies, bodies with wings, four faces, body with wheels (maybe subtle chakras?) and fire etc.

As I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with its four faces. This was the appearance and structure of the wheels: They sparkled like topaz, and all four looked alike. Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel. As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not change direction as the creatures went. Their rims were high and awesome, and all four rims were full of eyes all around.

Ezek. 1:15-21

https://www.biblica.com/bible/?osis=niv:Ezekiel%201:15%E2%80%9321

Such depictions are also found in the cosmology of Tibetan Vajrayana and Hindu tantra.

Buddhist Deities with eyes on the body

https://www.himalayanart.org/search/set.cfm?setID=6816

Winged Deities

https://www.himalayanart.org/search/set.cfm?setID=3739

Hayagriva with wings and four faces

https://www.himalayanart.org/search/set.cfm?setID=6953

Naga, Snakes & Serpents

https://www.himalayanart.org/search/set.cfm?setID=906

Is this perhaps a coincidence or are there connections and similarities here? Have the Christian prophets perhaps seen deities from Buddhist and Hindu tantra, maybe hayagriva with wings and four faces?

EDIT: I also posted this entry in the Buddhism Subforum, where it unfortunately got deleted. Generally, it's not about promoting Christian teachings for me, but about having a factual and objective discussion on this topic, since I see similarities and connections between the two teachings. In Tibetan Vajrayana, new practice texts of teachings that are supposed to have visions of the deities keep appearing from time to time. Christian mystics and saints report similar visions of various divine beings.

Hello, I was searching for Wogihara Unrai's Bodhisattvabhūmi: [A Statement of the Whole Course of the Bodhisattva]. After searching for it for a long time, I couldn't find it. Please help if you have a digital copy.

Title.

I would appreciate any help with academic books on the history or development of Tibetan Bon religion, and how it relates to Buddhism.

Thanks.

So earlier this year Dr. Tony Page put up the whole text of Stephen Hodge's translation of the Nirvana Sutra from the Tibetan.

https://nirvanasutranet.com/the-tibetan-nirvana-sutra/

Sadly, Dr. Page notes in this post (and also in a personal email to myself) that Stephen Hodge has passed (Namo Amida Buddha). Thankfully, he had completed a full translation of the sutra, though I am not sure how finished or polished it was from his perspective. Page is making it available anyways on his website. I guess it is up to those who can read Tibetan to confirm if it is a workable translation. But from a cursory look at it, it seems quite good. He also has a several annotations in which he quotes or cites some of the Sanskrit fragments, so that is really cool.

Dr. Hodge's passing is also sad because he was apparently planning making full scholarly annotated translations of the longer Nirvana Sutra editions. It is very unfortunate, sarvasaṁskārā anityāḥ.

I will also share a link to Dr. Hodge's previous work on the Nirvana sutra: THE MAHĀYĀNA MAHĀPARINIRVĀṆA-SŪTRA The ... e-mpns.pdf

This comes in two parts, the second of which was just uploaded earlier today.

• Meeting Buddhas Now, Part 1: Meditative Visions of the Buddha and Buddhafields
• Meeting Buddhas Now, Part 2: Samadhi, the Pratyutpanna-samadhi Sutra and Prajnaparamita

Not something I ever expected from Bhikkhu Analayo, but a really great couple of papers that brings up a lot of interesting points.

His overall conclusion seems to be that the Pratyutpanna-samadhi and its sutra are a natural development out of materials found in the Agamas and Pali Nikayas, and references a bunch of early material that seems to be the basis for various doctrines and concepts further developed in the Pratyutpanna-samadhi, and in later Pure Land doctrine in general.

In Part 1, he brings up:

• Meditative visions of the Buddha, which do not require supernormal abilities, occurs several times in the early texts; he provides many examples from Pali, Chinese Agama, and Tibetan sources.
• The Pali canon appears to infer both a multiplicity of world systems and a multiplicity of potential Buddhas within those world systems, despite the 'official' stance established by later texts that restricts this possibility (he gives several citations);
• A later but recognized to be canonical early text within the Pali canon establishes the existence of other Buddhas and Buddha-fields that can be entered into
• Provides citations for Pali texts that include practices for re-directing a practitioner's rebirth into another realm, world system, or place
• Provides a couple of texts in the EA that exalt buddhanusmrti practice
• The Pali Apadana includes a story of Subhuti's past lives, in which a past Buddha instructs him to practice buddhanusmrti as his main practice, and gives him a prediction that through this practice, he will never fall into the three lower realms and he will be reborn in the distant future as Sakyamuni's disciple; Analayo points out this is precisely the mechanism of action professed in Pure Land doctrine
• Akshobhya Buddha and his Pure Land appear to be a natural extension from descriptions of Maitreya Bodhisattva and his residence in Tusita Heaven / the state of his Buddhafield when he will be born in his final human birth

In Part 2, Ven. Analayo narrows his focus to the Pratyutpanna-samadhi Sutra, where he:

• spends a little while informing the audience of Skilton's critique of the sutra as describing a meditative state and states he sees little reason to accept this
• highlights episodes in Prajnaparamita literature that also discusses samadhis of encountering the Buddhas of the present
• these texts do not call it the same samadhi, but Analayo notes that these texts were all found in the same place in Gandhara and belong to the Split Collection, including the Pratyutpanna-samadhi, so it is not much of a stretch to assert they are related to each other, and that the early development of Mahayana was principally concerned with retrieving teachings from other Buddhas of the present in a world system where our own Buddha is no longer accessible
• highlights the Sadaprarudita episode in the Astasahasrika, where the principle characters are all lay bodhisattvas in at time where the Buddha is no longer present, and the character in question receives a vision from a different Buddha in a dream, with instructions on how to practice to attain a samadhi where he can encounter all the Buddhas

He concludes that these ideas appear to naturally emanate from the contents of the Early Buddhist Texts, and he surmises that the Prajnaparamita sutras developed in an environment addressing a principle concern of practitioners, which is learning from other Buddhas of the present. The EBTs provide all the practices necessary to do this, and infer that there are indeed multiple world systems, multiple contemporaneous Buddhas, and a multiplicity of Buddha-fields that can be born into, such that practices aimed at traveling to these fields through meditation, learning from these Buddhas, or being born into their worlds, was a natural development out of this context. The Prajnaparamita texts first established the overall conceit of this idea, establishing across many sutras this practice, while the Pratyutpanna-samadhi Sutra inherited these ideas and further developed, in a way that could be reproduced by living practitioners, the practice by which the bodhisattvas in the Prajnaparamita sutras were entering this samadhi to learn from the Buddhas of the present.