Discovery Channel: Boy with Divine Powers / Buddha Boy

chimpanx

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Hi all - first post on the forums although I've lurked here for an age - I'm a rationalist and non-theist and a pretty happy one at that.

Anyway - the reason for my post is that I just watched the Discovery Channel documentary focussing on this boy who meditated in a tree for 10 months and supposedly didn't eat or drink.

I was appalled by the 'proof' offered in the programme and the bizarre rhetoric surrounding it. There was an awful lot of inconsistency in the documentary, especially around their claims to have videoed the boy for 96 hours straight (by which time he should be dead according to what we know about nutritional needs).

For example, they would cut back to this speedup video showing him sitting in a tree not moving and not eating or drinking. But of course we didn't see this end-to-end, for a speeded up 96 hours, we saw a few hours at a time, always during daytime and always fading out. Why was this? Well a clue was in the earlier commentary which briefly stated that each night they had to move away from the boy.

I was amazed they failed to mention the well documented cover that was placed over the boy each night (ample opportunity to take water and food), but even more amazed they claimed to have a 96 hour end-to-end video of his fasting...

And what the heck was that nutritionist going on about... living off 'spiritual energy'?!? And she is a nutritionist... yeesh.

Did anyone else see this and think it was pure rubbish? Did anyone see it and think it was a fantastic documentary?
 
I didn't see it, but i've read about this "miracolous" boy, and it's an appalling story. This poor kid probably thought it would be a fun way to get some attention, and now there are thousands of people coming to watch him every day. What if he gets tired of just sitting there? There must be an enormous pressure on him now.
Guys of his age ought to be riding mopeds, making out with girls, climbing trees and experimenting with euphoriants. Not just sit under some damn tree keeping up a holy charade for a mob of gullible believers.
 
He's actually disappeared now...

...it happened back in March...

(look up "Ram Bahadur Bomjon" on the wikipedia)

Its actually quite a feat for a 15-year old boy to sit for 12-hours a day under a tree (although to my mind its also child abuse) - but the ongoing claims of people who say they can live of the air or sun are ridiculous... not to mention dangerous.

I'm just disappointed that the documentary makers weren't brave enough to be honest.
 
I believe the kid finally did a runner with a local girl, although we did speculate that he'd starved to death and been secretly buried. Which in hindsight sounds a bit paranoid.
 
Maybe he is actually a plant.

chimpanx said:
...it happened back in March...

(look up "Ram Bahadur Bomjon" on the wikipedia)

Its actually quite a feat for a 15-year old boy to sit for 12-hours a day under a tree (although to my mind its also child abuse) - but the ongoing claims of people who say they can live of the air or sun are ridiculous... not to mention dangerous.

I'm just disappointed that the documentary makers weren't brave enough to be honest.
Click to expand...

You may utilise whichever definition of plant you prefer here.
 
Discovery

Isn't it a shame that such a grand institution as Discovery is now resorting to this type of nonsense. They even have a stupid show on now called "Psycich Detective" and they promote it as "true stories".

What a complete waste of a once damn fine tv station. don't watch the station anymore. sigh.....
 
I know alot of background on buddhism, there is no proof none, not anywhere close to circumstantial in this case. THey put up a screen everynight without cameras being able to record, and the most important thing is the boy let people do all this crap around him without giving a ****.

As you notice he does not have his head shaved and a serious student of the practice doesn't go attracting unwanted attention, there is a possiblity this whole thing could have been either a staged affair or the boy is a charlatan.

THe whole not eating and drinking in buddhism is also a whole load of ********, the middle way specifically rejected the notion of self-denial and advocates using your common sense to nourish yourself when you are hungry and thirsty.
 
chimpanx said:
I was appalled by the 'proof' offered in the programme and the bizarre rhetoric surrounding it. There was an awful lot of inconsistency in the documentary, especially around their claims to have videoed the boy for 96 hours straight (by which time he should be dead according to what we know about nutritional needs).
Click to expand...

Not quite. You can live without food for much longer than that (think "David Blaine"), but you will begin to become dehydrated after a day or so.

Four days without water? Icky, but not impossible, especially if you fill up plenty just before the cameras start rollin'...
 
Has anyone yet considered the possibility that the kid was actually just a spectacularly oddly-shaped root vegetable?
 
4 days without drinking...

...and you'd really be starting to suffer.

And the specific claim of the programme was that they'd filmed him for 96 hours straight (which they hadn't) and in that time he hadn't eaten or drunk anything. He showed no signs of dehydration on his skin, lips etc. even after those 4 days of 'continuous' filming.

Amusingly they made a big thing out of the fact he sweated when he was stared at by a buddhist meditiation master. They failed to point out that in order to sweat you'd need some moisture inside you and that would have to come from somewhere, but whatever... I'd given up on the documentary makers by this points.

As an aside, I was in Thailand recently. I've always been very anti-organised-religion, but had made excuses in my own head for Buddhism, largely because it seems peaceful and lacks the belief in a man in the sky as such. However, upon visiting a few temples and talking to the locals about how they give all their money and food to the monks because of the Buddhist idea of you get what you give (i.e. karma) I quickly cooled to it...

There are a lot of very poor people in Thailand...
 
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Apparently while the documentary team were "away" he spontaenously combusted! Yet he looks fine when we next see him!
Watching this prog right now,quite a few people claiming to live on fresh air,guru's and such;one was 83 and claimed he hadn't eaten or drank for many years(can't recall figure).
Why are Discovery perpetuating the lie? Reading here reminded me the boy was covered by a screen every night!
 
i know this thread isnt currently running but I saw a repeat yesterday on discovery. it looked to me like what we were looking at was actually an animated doll, with very routine eye and mouth movements. the boy was also leaning slight to the right to the side of the tree he was sitting in.

if i wanted to pull a scam and make approx 20,000 rupees a day (i have no idea what the equivalent in cost-of-living terms is), i would get an animatronic doll shiped in very discretely.

considering nobody was allowed nearer than 3 feet of the boy, and there was even mention of fire (maybe the doll malfunctioned), and the 'comittee' were quite strict about who got within any distance, nor were there any scientific or medical team allowed near it.

im fairly certain it is a doll, but its kind of embarrassing that so many would be fooled by it, even the monks seemed to make excuses and reason their way to why it could be a real phenomenon, i was disappointed that one of the monks didnt just go tap him on the shoulder, i cant see why someone so deep in meditation and not responding to the day to day noise around his tree would become in any way irritated by a concerned monk.

just my 1.49 euro cent
 
Slightly off track, but India's still ridled with this kind of nonsense:

I was out there earlier this year and read a wonderful story in one of the papers (India Times I think) about a young girl in a small village who was held to be holy, with people travelleing for miles to see her for a blessing. She apparently stated that she was going to commit "Sansara" (?) to move to a higher spiritual plane and duly dissappeared the following Sunday. All the villagers and believers proclaimed it proof of her divinity and of course a "miracle".

Unfortunately for them she was discovered a couple of weeks later in a village about 30miles away, having done a runner to be with her boyfriend!
 
JonWhite said:
Slightly off track, but India's still ridled with this kind of nonsense:

I was out there earlier this year and read a wonderful story in one of the papers (India Times I think) about a young girl in a small village who was held to be holy, with people travelleing for miles to see her for a blessing. She apparently stated that she was going to commit "Sansara" (?) to move to a higher spiritual plane and duly dissappeared the following Sunday. All the villagers and believers proclaimed it proof of her divinity and of course a "miracle".

Unfortunately for them she was discovered a couple of weeks later in a village about 30miles away, having done a runner to be with her boyfriend!
Click to expand...
You will love this then: Acheiving sansara means existing on the plane where nothing is of importance and your are one with everything. However literally it is Sanskrit for "to run around". She literally told the truth.:D
 
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