Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey)
Ltd.
The Buddha
John
D. Hughes
Recorded Teachings
Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey)
Ltd.
33 Brooking St
Upwey, Victoria
Australia 3158
A.C.N. 005 701 806
A.B.N. 42 611 496
488
Phone: (03) 9754
3334
Fax: (03) 9754 3334
email: wbu@bdcu.org.au
Disclaimer and Copyright
The
following passage was written by a Buddhist Monk, the Venerable Piyadassi
Thera of Sri Lanka, ref. THE DHAMMAPADA 2517 - 1974. (Free distribution -
Buddhist Publication Society, Kandy)
Over 2,500 years ago, there lived in Northern India a
religious teacher who had attained supreme enlightenment and security from
bondage through moral, intellectual and spiritual perfection, a teacher
with an indefatigable zeal and steel determination for propagating the
truth he had realised. That dynamic personality is none other than
Siddhattha Gotama (Siddhartha Gautama in Sanskrit), popularly known as the
BUDDHA.
His father, Suddhodana, ruled over the land of the Sakyas
at Kapilvastu on the Nepalese frontier. Mahamaya, princess of the Koliyas,
was Suddhodana's queen.
At the early age of sixteen the prince
was married to a beautiful princess namSiddhatthara. Lacking nothing of the
earthly joys of life, he lived amidst song and dance, in luxury and
pleasure. However, with the advance of maturity, the prince began to
glimpse the woes and miseries of life, despite the father's endeavours to
keep them out of the sight of the son's enquiring eyes. Such attempts only
heightened the son's eagerness to understand the meaning of sorrow and to
find a way out of it for the benefit of suffering mankind.
The more
he came in contact with the world outside his palace walls, the more
convinced he became that the world was lacking in true happiness, and what
appeared to be happiness was distinctly temporary and unstable, and its
disappearance became a cause for further unhappiness.
Now at the
age of twenty-nine, when Yasodhara gave birth to his only son, Rahula, the
prince left the palace renouncing wife, child, father (his mother had
already passed away) and a crown that held the promise of power and glory,
and in the guise of an indigent ascetic retreated into the solitude of the
forest, there to seek an answer to the riddle of life and to obtain
enlightenment.
Dedicating himself to the noble task of discovering
a remedy for life's universal ill, he began a determined struggle to
subdue his body in the hope that his mind, set free from the shackles of
the body, might be able to soar to the heights of liberation. At the end
of six years' self-mortification, he realised the futility of such an
endeavour. He also realised that the path to the fruition of his ardent
longing lay in the direction of a search inward into his own
mind.
This led to a critical analysis of the function of the human
mind, which ultimately brought him a realisation of the four fundamental
principles appertaining to life which he called the Four Noble Truths: l.
The fact of DUKKHA, that is, suffering or disharmony or conflict or
unsatisfactoriness; 2. its CAUSE; 3. its CESSATION; and 4. the way leading
to its cessation.
Thus Siddhartha Gautama, by comprehending in all
their fullness and profundity the import of the Four Noble Truths, became
the Buddha or the Awakened One. Even after he became a Buddha, he did not
claim to be any divine being, a God or Brahma, who creates, and sits in
judgement over the destinies of mankind. He is a man among men. Asked as
to who he was, the answer came: "I am the one awake", and summed up his
attainments in these words:
"I know what should be known, what
should
Be cultivated I have cultivated.
What should be abandoned
that I have let go
Hence, I am BUDDHA, the Awakened One" (Sutta Nipata,
558)
His followers, therefore, do not pray to him, do not expect
rewards and punishments from him, knowing as they do that rewards and
punishments are consequences of one's own deeds and misdeeds. They take
refuge in him in the understanding that his life and teaching is a model
to be followed, and which, if faithfully followed, would lead them from
lower to higher levels of mental life, and finally to that bliss that
results from the highest culmination of spiritual progress which is
NIBBANA (NIRVANA in Sanskrit).
Without resting on his laurels, the
Buddha came out of his solitude, and beginning with his first sermon to
the five ascetics, his former friends, still steeped in the fruitless
rigours of extreme asceticism, embarked on a long and tireless mission of
a period of forty-five years disseminating the message of the Dhamma (his
teaching) far and wide.
He made no distinction of caste, colour,
class or clan when he disseminated the Dhamma. Men and women, the rich and
the poor - from different walks of life; the lowliest and the highest; the
literate and the illiterate; brahmins and outcasts; princes and paupers;
saints and criminals; listened to him as he showed the path to peace and
enlightenment. What the Buddha taught was not only for India. not only for
his time. It is for all men, for all time. The path he had pointed out is
open to all.
The Buddha passed away at the age of eighty at
Kusinara (in modern Uttara Pradesh in India) with a final admonition to
his followers:
"Subject to change and transiency are all component
things. Work out your deliverance with diligence."
This, in short,
is an account of who the Buddha is and what he had done for the world at
large. The Four Noble Truths is the priceless message that he gave unto
suffering mankind for their guidance and to help them to be rid of the
bondage of Dukkha, and to attain that absolute Happiness, that absolute
Reality- Nibbana.
These truths are not his creation. He only
discovered their existence. We thus have in the Buddha one who deserves
our respect and reverence, not only as a teacher, but also as a pattern of
noble, self-sacrificing and meditative life we would do well to follow if
we wish to improve ourselves.
Our Reference: LAN 1, NEWSLETTER
NO. 6 , DECEMBER 1981.
"The gift of Dhamma excels all other gifts".