In Aryavarta, a northern province of ancient India south of the Himalayas, is the Roseapple Land called Jambudvipa, green with forests and jungles in the wet season, hot and dry in the hot season, chilly in the cold season. The land was sparsely settled twenty-six centuries ago, the tribes usually keeping to their own borders without much tension. Each tribe had its own chief city, connected to the cities of the other tribes by the great rivers and by overland trade-routes for ox-carts and horsemen. Civilization was centered in the great city of Baranasi, now called Banaras, on the holy river Ganga. The religion was the True Religion of the Vedas. The caste-system was solid. Marriage between blood relatives was held to be far preferable to mixing castes in marriage. The tribe of the Sakyas and that of the Koliyas north of the Ganga were friendly neighbors and intermarried freely. Thus it was that brother and sister of the Gautama clan of Sakyas married their cousins, sister and brother of the Kacchana clan of Koliyas. The son born to the Gautamas is the boy of this story. He married the girl born to the Kacchanas, his double cousin. Although inbred biologically, the boy had no physical defects. Instead, he exhibited signs of greatness from earliest childhood. This book is the story of his boyhood, youth, and early maturity, his human questionings, frustrations, and hard decisions. In adulthood his teachings expanded beyond all castes and classes, and in this present time his reverent followers number many millions all over the world.
Blossom of Buddha: The Prince, A Novel of the Life of Gautama Based on the Pali Canon and Other Buddhist Scriptures, Louise Ireland-Frey, Blue Dolphin Publishing, Paperback, 356 pp., $19.95
Louise Ireland-Frey, M.D., had her first encounter with death in Colorado as a young girl, when she had several flashbacks to a past life when she drowned in the ocean as a boy in China. Interest in such subjects continued through college (at CU Boulder), graduate school (at Mt. Holyoke College, Massachusetts), and medical school (at Tulane University). While in medical school she received membership in Alpha Omega Alpha and the Honor Medical Society and graduated in 1940 at the top of her class. In 1980, after conquering many years of health problems through self-hypnosis, she took more training and became a hypnotherapist. Past-life encounters were frequent among her clients, and, as she reminds us, "When one has lived before, one has died before." She states unequivocally, "Consciousness does continue after the body dies." Dr. Ireland-Frey is retired and lives in Durango, Colorado. In her late 80s, she is rounding up her life in anticipation of the next major step, her Transition.
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