The historical facts about his life are roughly these: He was born around 563 BCE, in what is now Nepal, near the Indian border. His full name was Siddhartha Gautama of the Sakyas. His father was a king, but it would be more accurate to think of him as feudal lord. By the standard of the day his upbringing was luxurious. At sixteen he married a neighboring princess, Yosodhara, who bore him a son whom they called Rahula.
Despite all this there settled over him in his twenties a discontent, which was to lead to a complete break with his worldly estate. The source of his discontent, according to the legend of The Four Passing Sights: (1) an old man decrepit, crooked, bent body, leaning on a staff trembling (2) a body racked with disease, lying on the road side;(3) a corpse; and (4) a monk with shaven head, ochre (light yellow to brown color) robe, and a bowl. It was the body’s inescapable involvement with decrepitude, disease that made him despair of finding fulfillment on the physical plane.
Once he had perceived the inevitability of bodily pain and passage, fleshy pleasure lost their charm. One night in his twenty-ninth year he made the break, his Great Going Forth. He made a silent goodbye to his sleeping wife and son, left the palace and rode off toward the forest. At the edge of the forest Gautama changed his clothes, shaved his head and “clothed in ragged cloth” plunged into the forest in search of enlightenment. After six year of extreme ascetic life, he found no satisfactory answer to his quest and realized the futility of asceticism.
Having turned his back on mortification, Gautama devoted the final phase of his quest to a combination rigorous thought and mystic concentration along the lines of raja yoga of the Vedas. He sat down under a peepul tree that has come to be known as the Bo Tree (short for Bodhi or enlightenment). He vowed not to arise until enlightenment was his. After spending 49 days meditating Siddhartha Gautama became Buddha (The Awakened One). He had finally reached enlightenment.
It is a legend, this story, but like all legends it embodies an important truth. “Life is subject to age and death. Where is the realm of life in which there is neither age nor death?”
Nearly half a century followed during which the Buddha trudged the dusty path of northern India, until his hair was white, step infirm, and body nothing but a burst drum, preaching his ego-shattering, life –redeeming message. He founded an order of monks and nuns and challenged the deadness of Brahmin society. After an arduous ministry of forty-five years, at the age of eighty, and around 483BCE, the Buddha died of dysentery from eating dried boar meat. Two sentences from his farewell message have echoed through the ages. “All compounded things decay. Workout your own salvation with diligence”.
What was special about Buddha? Perhaps the most striking thing about Buddha was his combination of a cool head and a warm heart. He was undoubtedly one of the great rationalists of all times, resembling in this respect no one as much as Socrates (469-399BCE). Every problem that came his way was automatically subjected to cool, dispassionate analysis. He invented the Socrates method of questioning everything before Socrates did.
It is imperative that we understand Buddhism against the background of Hinduism out of which it grew. Between 800 BCE and 200 BCE, was “a turning point between the Vedic religion and Hindu religions, and a formative period of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism”. By the time Buddha came to the scene, Vedic religion was corrupt, degenerate, and burdened with worn-out rituals. In early 6th century BCE, before Buddha, Mahavira had founded Jainism as a reaction against the teaching of orthodox Brahmanism. Jainism rejects the idea of a creator god. Around the same time when Jainism and Buddhism arose in the sixth century BCE, there was also an explicitly atheist school of thought in India called the Charvaka School. The Charvakas were firm atheists who believed that nothing existed beyond the material world. To the Charvakas, there was no life after death, no soul apart from the body, no God, no samsara (rebirth), no karma, no fruit of duty, no sin and no world other than this one. The Mimamsa school of Hindu philosophy also rejected the idea of a creator God.
“There is no world other than this:
There is no heaven no hell: the realm of
Siva and like regions are invented by stupid
Imposters of other school of thought…
The enjoyment of heaven lies in eating delicious food,
Keeping company of young women, using fine clothes,
Perfumes, garland, sandal paste etc.”
Sarvasidhanta Samgraha
Buddha was not alone, after all! He was a product of his time.
What were Buddha’s teachings that were different from existing Hinduism of his time? They were mainly six:
1- Buddha preached a religion devoid of authority. His attack on authority had two prongs. On the one hand he wanted to break the monopolistic grip of Brahmins on religious teachings and make it accessible to all. His second prong was directed toward individuals. In a time when the multitudes were passively relying on Brahmins to tell them what to do, Buddha challenged each individual to do his own religious seeking. “Do not accept what you hear by report, do not accept tradition, do not accept a statement because it is found in our book, nor because it is in accord with your belief, nor because it is the saying of your teacher. Be lamps unto yourselves. Those who, either now or after I am dead, shall rely upon themselves only and look for assistance to anyone besides themselves, it is they who shall reach the utmost height.” The Greek philosopher Socrates could not have said it any better.
2–Buddha preached a religion devoid of rituals.Repeatedly, he ridiculed the lengthy and complicated Brahminic rituals as superstitious petitions to ineffectual gods. He taught that rituals were irrelevant to one’s life.
3- Buddha preached a religion that skirted speculations. “Whether the world is eternal or not, whether the world is finite or not, whether the soul is the same as the body or whether the soul is one thing and the body is another, whether Buddha exists after death or does not exist after death”-these things one of his disciples observed, Buddha did not bother to answer.
4- Buddha preached a religion devoid of tradition.He encouraged his followers, to slip free from the past burden. “Do not go by what is handed down, nor on the authority of your traditional teachings. When you know yourselves: “These teachings are not good: these teachings when followed and put in practice conduce to loss and suffering”- then reject them.
His most important break from the past was not to preach in Sanskrit and teach in the vernacular of the people.
5-Buddha preached a religion of intense self-effort. During his time many had come to accept the round of birth and rebirth as unending. Those who still clung to the hope of eventual release had resigned themselves to the Brahmin’s sponsored notion that the process would take thousands of lifetimes, during which they would gradually work their way into the Brahmin caste as the only one from which release was possible.
Buddha taught that each individual must tread his own path himself or herself. “Those who, relying upon themselves only, it is they who shall reach the topmost height”. No god or gods could be counted on, not even the Buddha himself. When I am gone, he told his followers in effect, do not bother to pray to me; for when I am gone I will be really gone. Buddhas only point the way. Work out your salvation with diligence”.
6- Buddha preached a religion devoid of supernatural. He condemned all forms of prophecies, soothsaying, and forecasting as low arts. He refused to allow his monks to play around with those powers. “It is because I perceive danger in the practice of mystic wonders that I strongly discourage it”.
What were the teachings of Buddha?
Buddha’s first formal discourse after his awakening was a declaration of the key discoveries that had come to him as the climax of his six-year quest. They were the Four Noble Truths:
1- The First Noble Truth is that life is dukkha, usually translated as “suffering”. Buddha saw clearly that life as typically lived is unfulfilling and filled with insecurity.
2- The Second Noble Truth- the cause of suffering leading to endless rebirths is desire (ichha), craving (tanha) and, thirst (tisna): the thirst for things, immortality, sensual pleasure, and worldly possession and power.
3- The Third Noble Truth follows logically from the Second. If the cause of life’s dislocation is selfish craving, its cure lies in the overcoming of such cravings.
4-The Fourth Noble Truth prescribes how the cure can be accomplished. The overcoming of tanha, the way out of our captivity, is the Eightfold Path. The eight-fold path is also called The Middle Way which steers clear of the extremes of self-indulgence and self-denial. Three centuries later Greek Philosopher Aristotle (384-322BCE) believed that being morally good meant striking balance between two extremes. He called it The Golden Mean.
The Eight fold Paths are:
. Right view
.Right intention
.Right speech
.Right action
.Right livelihood
.Right effort
.Right mindfulness and
.Right concentration
Buddhist Ethics (Pancasila)
Buddha also preached Five Precepts for lay people:
1-Abstain from killing (ahimsa);
2-Abstain from stealing;
3-Abstain from sexual misconduct;
4-Abstain from lying;
5-Abstain from drugs and alcohol.
The precepts are not commandments and transgressions do not invite religious sanctions.
Conclusion
Buddha founded a religion- without authority, ritual, theology, tradition, grace, and the supernatural. Like the Charvakas and the Jains of his times, (6th Century BCE) he rejected the idea of a creator god. Whether he founded a religion without a God became debatable after his death. After his death all the trappings that the Buddha labored to protect his religion from came tumbling into it. Two schools emerged: the Theravada (the way of the Elders, also known as the Hinayana or the little raft) and the Mahayana (the big raft). The Theravadins revere him as a supreme sage, who through his own efforts awakened to the truth and became an incomparable teacher who laid a path for them to follow. For the Mahayanist, Buddha became a world Savior. Thus, the religion that began as a revolt against rites, speculation, and the supernatural, ends with all of them back in full force and its founder, who was an atheist (non-believer in god), was transformed into such a God.
Buddhism spread rapidly to Southeast Asia and Central Asia rapidly because its teachings were simple and it was taught in the language of the people. The patronage of two great emperors- Ashoka (reigned C268-232 BCE) and Kanishka (C127-150CE ) – made it a world religion. South Asians countries that remain to this day Theravadin- Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos. The Mahayanists are in Tibet, Mongolia, China, Korea, and Japan.
In India, Buddhism was not so much defeated by Hinduism as accommodated within it. Up to around the year 1,000 CE, Buddhism persisted in India as a distinct religion. The fact is that in the course of its 1,500 years in India, Buddhism’s differences with Hinduism softened. Hindus admitted the legitimacy of many of the Buddha’s reforms, including renewed emphasis on kindness to all living things and some reduction of caste barriers on religious and social matters. It was from Buddhists and Jains that Hindus acquired their respect for animal life and the notion of ahimsa or non-injury. All in all, the Buddha was reclaimed as “a rebel child of Hinduism”; he was raised to the status of divine incarnation. In the Vaishnava Puranas, the Buddha was adopted as the ninth avatar of god Vishnu.
In the end Buddha who was an atheist became a god. It is said that Buddha told his disciples from his death bed that they should follow no leader, but to “be your own light.”
Sources:
1- Houston Smith, The World’s Religions. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991.
2- E.A. Butt, The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha. New York: Mentor Books, 1955
3- S. Radhakrishnan and C.A. Moore. A Source Book in Indian Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957