Religious Buddha Life
BUDDHISM AND THE WEST - Page 1
Roger Gunter-Jones
IF asked to draw the sharpest possible distinction between Christianity I and Buddhism in the briefest possible terms, one might choose some obvious antithesis, such as that Christians worship God while Buddhists do not, an antithesis that stands for attitudes so apparently irreconcilable that Westerners have often maintained that Buddhism is not a religion at all, but only a philosophy and a system of ethics. Yet this antithesis and all that goes with it, such as the Judeo-Christian world view, which is said to be teleological and anthropocentric, as compared with the Buddhist, which is trans-historical and universal, arises only from differences of cultural response to the same essential problem: the problem of establishing a relationship with the source of our being and the infinite life that surrounds us.
In relation to this problem, faiths and their practices are no more than different means to the one end. And if, in the event, the ends achieved by different faiths turn out to be contradictory, then evidently some of the means are in some way deficient and in need of revision; either they were inadequate in the first place (though perhaps good enough for the times) or have been perverted since. For all religions are derived from, and refer back to, the fact of life; all religious systems and philosophies whatsoever converge on this singleness of fact; they are interpretations of it, come into being in response to needs and circumstances that arise from it, prosper for a while, decline, become transformed into something else, or vanish altogether. Only and always the singleness of fact remains and (for as long as the human race exists) man's variable capacity for experiencing and understanding it. In this respect, Buddhism is a description of what is said to be, according to the Indian tradition, an ancient Road leading from death to immortality. The knowledge of this Road is not confined to any one country or to any one religion.
Where precisely a particular religion begins is hard to say; seldom is its origin as clear-cut as seems to be the case when viewed in the perspective of the established structure. In the beginning, the Way of the Buddha was one of a number of variations of the ancient Indian religious tradition. Enough is known, however, for us to be sure that the variation now known in the West as "Buddhism" had Its origins in the life story of Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, who was born in India in approximately 563 B.C.
From time to time, great souls, or geniuses, appear who put their finger on a fault, or have clearer vision than any of their contemporaries, and set things to right again. Among these, Siddhartha Gautama is one of the greatest the world has ever known; to him was given the title "Buddha," meaning "The Enlightened One." Two thousand five hundred years ago he saw a fault in the contemporary religious scene and found a remedy for it which is still potent today. A brief account of this event and its outcome will serve as an introduction to our main discussion.
The facts and legends of the Buddha's life show that his spiritual Odyssey was motivated by an acute existential disquiet caused basically by the conflict between selfish desire and the brute facts of the world. He perceived that suffering was a universal characteristic of human life, and sought a solution to the problem raised by this perception, first of all for the sake of his own peace of mind and then also for the benefit of all beings.
According to the legend, the crisis was brought on by the sight of sickness, old age, and death. It was these facts of life that gave rise to doubt and conflict in the mind of the Buddha and caused him to forsake the life of ease in the palace of his father, the ruler of a small country on the borders of what we now call Nepal, in order to go in search of a solution to his problem. The abandonment of his wife and son, the surrender of his inheritance, and his going forth from his home to adopt the life of a wandering ascetic would probably be condemned today as selfish and irresponsible, but in those days it was not only an acceptable response to religious yearnings but was also considered a noble one, and it is traditionally and respectfully called by Buddhists "The Great Renunciation."
After six years of fruitless study along traditional lines under the best available teachers, the Buddha's discovery of the solution to his problem came about through intense meditative absorption, a means suggested to him by the recollection of a youthful mystical experience of unity and tranquillity. This absorption led to the event known as his "enlightenment." According to a form of the legend most in accord with modern experience, at dawn one day, after a period of intense absorption, the Buddha happened to glance up and saw the brightly shining morning star. This vision, it seems, coming when his mind was in a state of perfect clarity, inwardly illuminated the source and nature of his own being and of the whole bubble of the universe. This was the "great awakening" of Siddhartha Gautama, his second birth, the moment when he was reborn as The Buddha, the Fully Enlightened One.
Primitive Buddhism, teaching self-abnegation and the widening of the human capacity for love, was the result of the Buddha's search and achievement. The origin of his teaching is the enlightenment event, and its prime purpose, whatever its intermediate ends may be, is ultimately to bring all beings to the same experience, to the same transformation of consciousness. This transformation is the essence of the Buddhist goal which is sometimes called Nirvana.
The Buddha's philosophy and Way are outlined in the first two discourses delivered at Benares shortly after his enlightenment. First of all he announced the principle of The Middle Way which avoids the extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification. Speaking from first-hand experience of both, he said the first was "low, coarse, vulgar, ignoble, and useless," and the second, "painful, ignoble, and useless." Next he outlined his philosophy in the form known as the "four noble truths" concerning the fact of suffering, its cause, its cessation and the way leading to its cessation. The fourth truth sets out the way known as "the noble eightfold path," which has three components: "wisdom," "morality," and "mental discipline"; these components interact on each other and are to be cultivated simultaneously, not successively. Lastly, in the second of the two discourses, he gave out the most important of all Buddhist doctrines. This is concerned with the nature of the person which he declared to be Anatta — without self, egoless. This represents a denial of what was then one of the principal contemporary philosophies according to which (in simplified terms) there is an inner reality, Atman, and an outer reality, Brahman, and the object of religious practice was to unite the inner Atman with the outer Brahman; this was in effect a soul-theory as compared with the Buddha's no-soul-theory. From the earliest times there has apparently been some dispute as to what precisely the Buddha meant by his doctrine of Anatta — no-self; did he mean that there was no self or only that no self is to be found within phenomena? This is a question that can only be settled by direct personal experience of the nature of one's own "self"; theoretical debate about it has proved on the whole unprofitable. In any case, the doctrine is of value principally for its effect in practice. Briefly stated, its purpose is to bring us to the realisation that within phenomena we cannot discover anything of which it can be said, "This is I, this is mine, this is my self". The significance and outcome of this practice will be discussed later. Meanwhile, it is sufficient to remember that Buddhism in theory and practice revolves around this doctrine; it is the Buddha's teaching about egolessness that gives to Buddhism its unique character among the religions of the world.
The whole structure of Buddhism rests upon these two discourses from the Theravada canon which have their equivalents in the Mahayana. All later developments with any legitimate claim to be called Buddhist can be traced back to the principles contained in these discourses, and in so far as any form of Buddhism deviates from these principles in spirit, to that extent it ceases to be typically Buddhist.
The teaching as briefly outlined above came to the fore in India a few generations after the death of the Buddha, partly for religious and partly for political reasons. In time It became established in virtually the whole of Asia. However, by the twelfth century of our era it had declined in India and was finally driven from there by the sword of Islam. Quite recently it has been driven out of Tibet by Communist armies, and for all practical purposes also from China, where It is now only a museum piece. It still survives in most of the other countries of Asia and has recently been re-introduced into India as the religion of the "Outcastes." Wherever it survives in the East today it is being subjected to various modernising pressures connected with resurgent nationalism and democratic aspirations. During all these Eastern journeyings the teaching itself has been evolving, sometimes into forms which the Buddha would hardly recognise as having very much to do with what he originally taught. It took two thousand years and the advent of European colonialism to carry Buddhism to the countries of the West. What will now happen to it in the alien milieu of our own bustling, neurotic, greedy, and violent world cannot be foreseen.
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