Buddhist Dingbats

This a fun little Dingbats (or Pictionary?) quiz I made for my Year 10s today. Can you guess the twelve Buddhist key terms from the words and pictures above?

You can download the question sheet here and find the answers here. 

Life of the Buddha - Free Ebook

I'm already on summer holidays (yay), and I'm planning on spending a bit of time over the summer reading around Buddhist ethics and traditions. My school has a fair number of Buddhist students, so to reflect this I'd like to incorporate more Buddhist perspectives into my GCSE RS classes in ethics and philosophy. 

As a starting point, I've found these free pdf and ePub versions of E.B. Cowell's translation of  the Buddhacarita (Life of the Buddha), which I thought I'd share here.

The Buddhacarita, the earliest full biography of the Buddha, was written by the Indian poet Ashvagosha in the second century C.E., some 500-600 years after the Buddha lived (actually, the dates of the Buddha's life are a matter of some debate). Much of the original Sanskrit version has been lost, but translations survive in Chinese and Tibetan.

Buddhist Ethics: Five Precepts Revision Postcards

The Five Precepts: No. 3

A few weeks ago I uploaded a set of Christian ethics revision cards, to help students remember some of the key Bible verses that relate to the ethical issues we study at GCSE. I was pleased to see that quite a few students did actually put them up in their cubicles (I work in a boarding school), and rather natty they looked too.

In a similar line, I've created a small set of revision postcards illustrating the Five Precepts, the basic ethical code of Buddhism. As with the Christian ethics postcards I uploaded a few weeks back, the idea is to get the students revising them so they can easily incorporate them into their exam answers.

You can download them as a pdf here, or if you have a TES account, as a Word document here.