His Life
According to many modern Indians, the greatest teacher of their nation established Buddhism.
Literature and religion know him by several names. Since he belonged to the Gotama clan, he is sometimes referred to as Gautama. His father named him Siddhartha, meaning "one who accomplished his objectives in life."
Subsequently, after his reputation as a teacher was spread about, he was praised as Sakyamuni, the "sage" of the Sakya tribe. By his followers, Gautama was hailed as the Buddha (Enlightened One), Tathagata (the self-realized), or Bhagavān (the blessed). India has been sublimely indifferent to matters of history and chronology.
Most scholars tentatively conclude that Buddha was born about 563 B.C. and lived until 483 B.C. His father served as the elected king of a small realm in Nepal at the foothills of the snow-clad Himalayas.
The monarch was married to two sisters, one of whom—Maya—gave birth to Buddha, while the other brought him up. Maya lived only a week after the birth of her son. Most of our modern accounts of Buddha's life depend upon historical research carried out by Western scholars. For the Buddhists, everything about him is embroidered with colorful legends.
According to the faithful, the eternal Buddha surveyed the world, found conditions suitable for his descent to earth, miraculously assumed the form of a white elephant, and entered the womb of the sleeping virgin queen Maya. He remained inside her for ten months, and when he came forth from his mother's body, immediately the flowers burst into bloom.
The king later surrounded his growing son with extreme luxury. Living at various seasons of the year in three palaces, Gautama was dressed in the most expensive clothes, fed the choicest delicacies and served by lovely female minstrels.
As a prince, he received the best sort of education in classical Indian literature. Yet as a member of the warrior caste rather than the Brahmin priesthood, he also learned the physical arts of a gentleman: how to ride a horse, mount an elephant, drive a chariot, a lead an army.
Despite the ease and delights of palace life, the youth became dissatisfied with worldly ambitions and sensual pleasures. Gautama was gifted with a sensitive soul.
Unbridled indulgence, by some curious twist of fate, gradually transformed a monarch's heir and warrior prince into an apostle of limitless compassion.
Brahmins had warned the king that this might happen. They told him that as soon as his son saw old age, sickness, and death, as well as the existence of holy men, he would abandon the household.
The father heeded the warning and took every precaution to keep the boy in seclusion amid the luxuries of the palace and the beauty of the pleasure garden, to no avail.
According to a famous Buddhist tale, Gautama happened to encounter an aged man while driving along in a chariot. The man was bent over, leaning on a staff and tottering as he walked. The sight of old age shocked the prince.
On another occasion while touring his pleasure park, Gautama saw a man who was desperately sick and became similarly distressed: he was taken aback by the misery of human existence. On a third occasion the prince met a funeral procession and realized that all men must die.
When he finally encountered a shaven-headed yogin wearing the yellow robe of an ascetic order, he resolved to adopt the religious life, as the Brahmins had predicted.
Gautama made the vow to be "thorough in the peaceful life, thorough in good action, thorough in meritorious conduct, thorough in harmlessness, thorough in kindness to all creatures."'
After deciding to abandon the world, Gautama returned home to his wife, whom he had married at age sixteen. Even though he discovered at that time that he had become a father, such joy did not deter him from the ascetic life. Now twenty-nine, the prince moved from the palace, leaving his wife and child behind.
Determined to escape from life's endless misery, the prince proceeded to renounce the world. For six years, he subjected himself to the ascetic torture of his body. He tore off his clothes, plucked out the hair of his head and face, slept on a bed of thorn branches, and denied himself food.
However, by disciplining his physical senses and uprooting his passions, the former prince achieved no feeling of liberation from the endless wheel of rebirth. Gautama hence realized the folly of the ascetic life.
He resumed eating and drinking like an ordinary person. While sitting under a tree on the banks of a river, he resolved to attempt emancipation using intense concentration. By meditating all night, the former monk successfully attained complete enlightenment.
Henceforth, Gautama was the Buddha. Once he had achieved liberation, Buddha became a teacher. "I will beat the drum of the Immortal in the darkness of the world," he vowed.
Moving to Benares, he preached his first sermon, entitled "Discourse on the Turning of the Wheel of the Law":
Monks, two extremes should not be followed by one who has gone forth as a wanderer— Devotion to the pleasures of sense, a low practice of villagers, Devotion to self-mortification which is painful, unworthy and unprofitable. By avoiding these two extremes the Tathagata (Buddha) has gained knowledge of the middle path which gives vision, knowledge, calm, enlightenment, Nibbana. What is the middle path? Truly, it is the eightfold path: right view, right aim, right speech, right action, right living, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. Now this is the truth about suffering: Birth is suffering, decay is suffering, death is suffering. . . . In a word, this life of ours based on grasping— that is suffering. And this is the truth about the cause of suffering: It is craving that leads back to birth—craving for sensual pleasure, craving for continued existence, craving for life to end. And this is the truth about stopping suffering: Truly it is utter passionless cessation of, the giving up, the release from and the absence of longing for this craving. And this is the practice that leads to the end of suffering—the eightfold path.
His ministry continued for the next forty-five years. Wandering in the eastern part of the Ganges Valley and preaching in the major cities, he taught his gospel of the "middle path" between self-indulgence and self-negation.
Success crowned his ministry from the outset; within three months, he had converted sixty monks to his cause. Men of every caste—Brahmins, merchants, warriors, even untouchables—joined Buddha's monastic community.
For the final quarter century of his life, he resided in a beautiful park donated by a rich layman. At age eighty, Gautama's life came to a sudden end. While on a preaching tour, he became dangerously ill.
Realizing that his career would soon be finished, Buddha summed up his doctrine in a few sentences for his personal attendant and favorite disciple, Ananda. Then at a banquet provided for him and his retinue, Buddha suffered an attack of food poisoning caused by eating either mushrooms or pork.' Death came to Kusinara.
After asking his monks if they had any final questions for him to answer, Buddha began to contemplate. Amidst the shaking of the earth and peals of thunder— say the Buddhist scriptures—he entered final Nibbana.
His body was then wrapped in one thousand layers of the finest cloth and cremated. Relics were divided and distributed to eight cities, each of which erected a memorial shrine to contain them. Four spots were henceforth especially sacred—where Buddha was born, where he attained enlightenment, where he preached his first sermon, and where he entered Nibbana.
For Buddhists, the personality of Buddha is as important as his teachings. A professor at Nalanda University in India, for example, extols his unruffled calm, tolerance, practicality, ready wit, persuasive reasonableness, and deeds of service. 6 Even those who are only aware of the popular statues of Buddha are immediately struck by his profound peace of soul and tranquility of spirit.
Buddhist scriptures relate that one night their master overheard an angry debate about him between a wandering Indian holy man and a follower of the Enlightened One.
The next morning, Buddha told his monks that if anyone finds fault with him or his teaching, they should never become displeased or offended. Such feelings would only harm the disciples.
Nor should they be pleased to hear praise of him—for this too would disturb their calm. If men slander me, merely see if what they say contains some truth, he advised. And if they praise us, find out if their compliments are based on fact.'
Buddha's tolerance is also related in stories about his attitude toward the rival sect of Jains. General Siha, a prominent patron of Jainism, once visited Gautama to find out how the Buddhists could "bewitch" so many people.
Repeating all the accusations made against the Middle Path, Siha was amazed to see how Buddha analyzed each criticism and clarified his position. When the general asked to join the Buddhists, Gautama advised him to make further study rather than come to a quick decision.
This only increased Siha's enthusiasm, so Buddha accepted him as a lay disciple but only on the condition that the general continue to support the Jain monks with whom he had been associated.
At another time, a millionaire Jain layman encountered Buddha to expose his theological weaknesses. After finding himself caught in a series of verbal contradictions, the Jain pleaded to become a Buddhist.
Again, Buddha agreed only if the millionaire promised not to cut off his financial support of the Jain ascetics. Since Jainism and Buddhism were rival reform movements in Indian religion, Buddha's broad-mindedness and liberality appear even more admirable and unusual.
The impact that Buddha made on his own time and all subsequent centuries can be illustrated with two quotations, both modern, one from a distinguished Hindu, the other from an American philosopher. Professor D.S. Sarma of Madras wrote, "... ..during the lifetime of Buddha, the charm of his wonderful personality and the story of his great renunciation overcame everything.
For he was the most lovable of the world-teachers. No harsh word ever escaped his lips. He radiated peace, gentleness, and serenity, and he had boundless compassion for all beings. The success of his simple, practical teaching conveyed in the language of the people was immediate."
Professor E.A. Burtt of Cornell University won his scholarly fame for a book on the metaphysical foundations of modern science. Attracted to Buddhism, he prepared an anthology of Gautama's teachings found in the Buddhist sacred writings.
Of the Buddha, he said: "Gautama the Buddha seems to have combined in high degree two qualities that are rarely found together and each of which is rarely exemplified in high degree.
On the one hand, he was a man of rich and responsive human sympathy, of unfailing patience, strength, gentleness, and goodwill. His friendliness to all who came to him in sincere search was genuine and unreserved. He therefore aroused in his followers a wondering, eager, affectionate devotion such as only the greatest leaders of men have awakened.
On the other hand, he was a thinker of unexcelled philosophic power. He was one of the giant intellects of human history, exhibiting a keenness of analytic understanding that has rarely been equalled.
He probed through the deceptions of the thought of his day, adopting it where it seemed to him sound and abandoning or radically revising it when he saw that it was missing the true and the good.
It is in virtue of this characteristic of the Master that Buddhism is the only one of the great religions of the world that is consciously and frankly based on a systematic rational analysis of the problem of life, and of the way to its solution. Buddha was a pioneering lover of men, and a philosophic genius, rolled into a single rigorous and radiant personality.