We can learn from the Saints!

[koralstratz]

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St. John Vianney / Patron Saint of Parish Priests
(Feast Day Aug 4)

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St. John Vianney, Priest (Patron of priests) Feast day - August 4 Universally known as the "Cure of Ars)," St. John Mary Vianney was ordained a priest in 1815. Three years later he was made parish priest of Ars, a remote French hamlet, where his reputation as a confessor and director of souls made him known throughout the Christian world. His life was one of extreme mortification.

Accustomed to the most severe austerities, beleaguered by swarms of penitents, and besieged by the devil, this great mystic manifested a imperturbable patience. He was a wonderworker loved by the crowds, but he retained a childlike simplicity, and he remains to this day the living image of the priest after the heart of Christ.

He heard confessions of people from all over the world for the sixteen hours each day. His life was filled with works of charity and love. It is recorded that even the staunchest of sinners were converted at his mere word. He died August 4, 1859, and was canonized May 31, 1925.




The Story of Saint John Vianney (a nice read)

link:The Story of Saint John Vianney

[wenlove24]

@koralstratz: maybe St. Gamaliel is popular among the Jews. What have you read so far?
Vianney is another section in DBTC =)

[koralstratz]

@koralstratz: maybe St. Gamaliel is popular among the Jews. What have you read so far?
Vianney is another section in DBTC =)

Uumm...I dunno how popular St.Gamaliel to the Jews? He was later known to be a Christian convert after all, that had got to have a negative impact to Judaism

But with regards to his popularity to us Catholics?? (he he he) I'm a bit ashamed to admit it but it is just recently that I chanced to read about him

Here's another interesting article about St. Gamaliel though:
JewishEncyclopedia.com - GAMALIEL I.:

Sis wen, what do you mean by DBTC?

[koralstratz]

[sileonies]

I like St. Francis of Assisi. mostly gpangbutang diri ky patay na and mga catholic nga saints, you should try to check mga saints from other religion and also some living saints.

Source: The Saints of the Dharma


The earliest example of Buddhist saints were the arhats ("liberated sages" in Pali, the language of the earliest Buddhist texts), the enlightened disciples of the Buddha who had completed their spiritual path. The tradition began with the Buddha's two principle disciples, Sariputra and Maudgalyayana, who are often represented in Buddhist art as standing on either side of the seated Buddha. Sariputra was known for his extraordinary wisdom and discernment, and Maudgalyayana was renowned for his psychic powers and abilities. In the intervening millennia, holy men and women who were masters with remarkable sagacity and powers in keeping with the first arhats, have been recognized as what we in the West would call saints.

Even the Buddha performed miracles, such as when he filled the sky with myriad perfect replicas of himself during a debate with a Hindu miracle worker. But the Buddha always taught that miracles and supernatural powers were the showy side effects of spiritual development, and should not be used or displayed except to further the faith of doubters or to help those in dire need.

In the later Tantric tradition of India and Tibet, beginning in the first centuries after Jesus' time and spanning a period of 1,500 years, ascetics who have come to be known as the mahasiddhas (realized and accomplished masters), lived saintly lives distinguished by magical powers. The best known lived during the Middle Ages, and have been sanctified as the 84 Mahasiddhas. What marked them, apart from their enlightenment, was that they came from wildly divergent backgrounds and social classes and used unorthodox methods to show that supreme liberation can take many and sundry forms. The adept Tandhepa, for one, started out as a compulsive gambler who lost all his money but became enlightened when he grasped the notion that the universe was as empty was his pockets.

Even today, there are teachers in the Tibetan tradition who fall into the mahasiddha category. I have had the extreme good fortune of meeting and studying with some of them, such as my late root guru, the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa, who was clairvoyant and a miracleworker, and the greatest lama I have ever met.

And then there is the 12th-century saint Milarepa, Tibet's greatest yogi, poet, and miracleworker who could reportedly fly as well as keep himself warm while wearing nothing but a cotton robe. He also reportedly turned green from decades of ascetic Himalayan cavedwelling, subsisting mainly on boiled wild nettle soup,sd which lent him his fabled hue. One of Milarepa's contemporaries was Machik Labdron, the only female founder of an extant Tibetan Buddhist practice lineage, Chod (literally "cutting," which refers to ego cutting through radical meditation practices). The two preeminent 14th-century scholar and yogi saints Longchenpa and Tsongkhapa remain among the most highly venerated Tibetan sages today. In the same category is Atisha, the 11th-century Indian abbot who brought the lojong, which means "mind training" or "attitude adjustment," techniques to Tibet, stressing the awakening of "buddha-mind" (bodhicitta) in both ethical living and contemplative life.

One of my personal favorites is the 15th-century sage and renaissance man Thangton Gyalpo, known as the "Master of the Mountain Wilderness." In addition to being a yogi, alchemist, and meditation master who reputedly lived to the age of 125, he was also an engineer who invented a process for refining iron ore and designed and built iron chain-link bridges that still span valleys and chasms throughout Tibet. As a lama, he disseminated his own visionary revelations on how to practice Tantric meditations of Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of Love and Compassion, which were taught to me by the Lama Kalu Rinpoche and are still widely practiced today.

As I mentioned, each Buddhist tradition has its own set of saints, holy persons, and spiritual exemplars. One of the most prominent of saints in Chinese and Japanese Buddhism is the sixth-century Indian patriarch Bodhidharma, who founded the Zen or Ch'an school in China. In the 13th century, Dogen Zenji helped bring Zen from China to Japan, and widely disseminated it through his lucid, poetic teachings, writings, and with the establishment of monastic traditions; he remains that country's greatest religious personality. Others in Japan who are considered extraordinarily masterful and loving sages include Kukai (Kobo Daishi), 774-835, who was the founder of the Tantric Vajrayana "Shingon" sect and opened the first school for peasant children in Japan; Shinran, the 12th-century founder of the Japanese Pure Land (Amitabha) school; Nichirin, father of the eponymous Nichiren sect or Lotus School School in 13th-century in Japan; and Fuji-san, the living head of the Nichiren today.

In the Theravada Buddhist countries of Southeast Asia, the notion of sainthood is not so readily embraced--most practitioners look to the historical arhats as exemplars, and there is no tradition in Theravada such as that of the mahasiddhas. But some lineages have developed cults around the relics of such great masters as Ajaan Lee Dhammadaro, a great Thai adept and monk in the Forest tradition. Moreover, there are countless stories of great Theravadin monks and teachers performing miracles, healings, and mind reading. But they are not canonized in the way that, say, saints in Tibetan culture have been.

I still feel somewhat skeptical about miracles, though I have witnessed events for which there is no other explanation. Once, in the early 1980s, my guru, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, performed longevity empowerments for my French monk-brother's father, who was in the final stages of cancer, and he remarkably enough lived another 10 years. My friend's father was not a believer but was converted to faith during the years when this miraculous healing became obvious. The 16th Karmapa also healed a Tibetan lady I knew in Gangtok, Sikkim, in a similar fashion; on another occasion in the 1960s, at the consecration of his newly rebuilt monastery in Rumtek, Sikkim, the Karmapa also reportedly raised a large flagpole, using telekinesis.

Tibetan Buddhist history is peppered with historical saints. One was the Indian adept Shantideva, who in the eighth century C.E. wrote the classic Mahayana Buddhist text "Entering the Bodhisattva Path of Enlightenment" (Bodhicharyavatara). Still widely used as a teaching text in Tibetan Buddhism, it is a guide for beginners and lay students to developing the aspiration to free all sentient beings. Another, Padma Sambhava, whose name means "Lotus-Born" and refers to the legend of his birth from a lotus blossom, is said to have walked from India in the eighth century to help found Buddhism in Tibet and create its Dzogchen tradition.

Throughout the Buddhist world, the cremated remains of enlightened beings are said to leave extraordinary relics, and many can be seen in reliquaries at monasteries and temples in Asia and the West. Extraordinary events often occur at their cremations and funerals, too. The late Dzogchen master Dudjom Rinpoche displayed countless rainbows around his embalmed remains, known as kuding, at his funeral in Nepal in the late 1980s. I was among the witnesses, along with one of my most doubtful friends, who came away with a very different attitude!

The Dalai Lama of Tibet and the Vietnamese master Thich Nhat Hanh are among the most saintly Buddhist sages we have today.The 14-year-old Gyalwa Karmapa, who escaped from Tibet to India in January, is one to watch, too. They say that if you chant his name-mantra, "karmapa Khyenno," you will generate auspicious karma, increase your spiritual aspirations and devotion, and meet him in this lifetime (I'm sure that this is true). By chanting their mantras and invoking their presence, Tibetans pray to Buddhist saints for blessings, inspiration, and guidance--a graceful, devotional practice known as guru yoga.

[koralstratz]

@sileonies...Feel free to post the other saints from other religion bro/sis (particularly sa imong religion)....Para sa ako lang kay dili kaayo ko maka share about saints of other religions kay gamay ra ko ug kaalam bahin ana...mao nang mu prefer na lang ko sa Catholic saints (dili man sad ko expert gyud ana pero arang arang na lang gamay he he he)

[petite fleur]

@koralstratz DBTC
Don Bosco Tech Center
Musta everyone!

[koralstratz]

St. Emygdius
(Feast Day Aug 5)

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Emygdius was born in Treves [Germany] of a noble Frank family. In his twenty-third year he embraced the faith of Christ in spite of opposition of his parents who were idolaters, and this faith he steadfastly professed. He lived with three disciples, Euplus, Germanus and Valentinus. He scorned human pleasures, and thus he applied himself the more entirely to divine things. Fired with a burning love of the neighbour, he journeyed to Rome in order to bring about the salvation to many souls, and he was there received as a guest, in the Island of the Tiber, where he cured, by baptism, the daughter of his host, who had been ill for five years of an incurable disease. A little later he opened the eyes of a blind man, in the presence of the people by the sign of the Cross. Thereupon the crowd, thinking that he was the son of Apollo, carried him off by force to the Temple of Aesculapius. he there declared himself the servant of Christ, and by calling upon Christ's name he restored to health a great number of sick persons, who were vainly beseeching the help of the idol. Emygdius tore down the altars, and having broken in pieces the statue of Aesculapius, he cast it into the Tiber. These acts, and the conversion of thirteen hundred of the heathen, which followed, together with that of the priests of Aesculapius, enraged Posthumius Titanus, the Prefect of City. Emygdius, by the counsel of an angel, escaped from his threats, and betook himself to the Pontiff, Saint Marcellus, by whom he was consecrated Bishop, and sent to Ascoli.
On his way thither Emygdius converted a multitude of persons to Christ by the many miracles which he wrought. The demons, whose wailing issued from the idols and filled the temples upon his arrival at Ascoli, declared a traveller to be the cause of their distress. The people were aroused, and sought to slay him, whereupon Polymius, the Governor, who was brought out by the tumult, called Emygdius to him, and in a long fruitless discourse he urged him to worship Jupiter and the goddess Angaria, the patroness of Ascoli. He even promised him as a reward the hand of his daughter Polisia, whom Emygdius converted to Christ and baptized on the spot. Her baptism was followed by that of sixteen hundred men, the Saint having drawn, by a miracle, an abundance of water from the rock. Thrown into fury by these events, Polymius cut off the head of the holy Bishop, whereupon the body, wonderful to relate, stood erect, and , bearing in its hands the head which had been cast upon the ground, carried it to the Oratory, a disctance of three hundred feet. it was removed thence to the principal church, where it is honoured by the people of Ascoli, as well as by a multitude of people from other parts of [Italy]. The blessed death of Emygdius took place during the persecution of Diocletian.

[koralstratz]

@koralstratz DBTC
Don Bosco Tech Center
Musta everyone!

Thnx sis,,,mao diay nang DBTC?...abi man gud nakog Radio/TV station na mura man gud ug EWTN

Musta na?? You've been busy with your "GOAL"? .

[koralstratz]

"It is to be feared that the angels, who are at present our guardians, will become our accusers at the day of judgment."
(St. Aloysius Gonzaga)