Buddha Jayanti 2025

Atish Dipankar Dhyan Kendra marked Buddha Jayanti — the birth, enlightenment and passing of Shakyamuni Buddha — with an evening of music, recitation, talk and film screening at Indumati Sabhagriha, Jadavpur, on May 12.

The programme began with ‘Muktir Prarthana’, a prayer song sung by the members of Atish Dipankar Dhyan Kendra.

Amita Chattopadhyay, Emeritus Professor at Department of Philosophy and School of Cognitive Science, Jadavpur University, delivered the keynote address in Bengali on ‘From Doctrine of No-self to Brahmavihara in Buddhist Philosophy: A Relook’.

This was followed by ‘Tathagata Sharanam’, a Bengali musical piece on vignettes from the life of Buddha, written and performed by members of the Dhyan Kendra. The music direction was by Ranjini Mukhopadhyay, with Debayan Majumder on esraj, Tuhin Sengupta on tabla and Uttam Mukherjee on keyboard.

A documentary film on the lives of a group of Buddhist nuns in Myanmar was also screened on the occasion.

Anchored by Anuttama Banerjee, the Buddha Jayanti programme came to a close with a vote of thanks by the Dhyan Kendra’s trustee, Pallavi Banerjee, and a dedication prayer on the four Brahmaviharas by the managing trustee, Anindya Chatterjee.