FROM THE PAGES OF HISTORY Buddhism II

 

FROM THE PAGES OF HISTORY

Buddhism II


( Monastery in Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka -  Jethavanaramaya)

The concept of Prajapati (the Lord of Creatures) was elaborated and a personal Creator god named Brahma, as distinguished from the impersonal neuter Brahman, the World-soul of the Upanisads, was honoured as the Supreme Deity. His position, however, was challenged by the followers of Visnu or Siva, and he could not retain his exalted position for very long. An important deity who appears in the period of the Brahmanas is Kuvera, the God of Wealth. The religion of the common people is rarely noticed in this literature of the Brahmanas. They worshipped local spirits called Yaksas, Nagas and Tree-spirits, and practised various forms of animism about which we learn something from the literature of the Jainas and the Buddhists.

The reaction against the ancient sacrificial religion gave rise to various religious sects who went under the generic term of Sramanas as opposed to the Brahmanas. Unlike the orthodox sects, recruited from among Brahmanas, these Sramanas admitted to their fold members of any social order. They did not accept the Vedas as authoritative, but strove to find the Truth by their own exertions. This they endeavoured to do by means of asceticism of varying degrees of severity. These Sramanas, who led a celibate life, also did not consider it obligatory for one to lead the life of a householder and procreate children before one adopted the spiritual life. They had no fixed abode and wandered from place to place, imparting to the people the Truths they claimed to have discovered, and their own remedy for the ills of the world. While the orthodox religion of the Brahmanas was elaborated in the land of the Kuru-Panchalas (the region round modern Delhi) the Sramanas mostly flourished in Magadha (modern Bihar). The doctrines these Sramanas held, and their mode of life, differed widely in the various sects; two of the outstanding among them were the Paribrajakas and the Ajivakas.

The intellectual ferment which resulted from the opposition to the claims of Brahmanas to be sole spiritual guides of the people gave rise, in the sixth century BCE, to two religions of which the founders were Ksatriyas by birth. Of these two religions, the earlier in date was Jainism, preached by Mahavira the Jina, which still has an influential, though not numerous, following in India. Buddhism, founded by Sakyamuni Buddha, has disappeared from the land of its birth after a brilliant history in India for about a millennium and a half, but has attained the status of a world religion with millions of adherents in many Asian lands. Having arisen contemporaneously in the same region, these two religions have much in common in their modes of expression and in the organization of their monastic and lay followers, but in fundamental matters there is a wide gulf between them. Jainism carried asceticism and rigorous mode of life to extreme, sometimes even absurd, lengths. In order to justify their name of Niganta, free from ties or entanglements, the disciples of Mahavira were enjoined not to wear clothing of any sort. The doctrine of ahinsa, non-injury was interpreted literally as to necessitate precautions against the accidental killing of insects. These excesses, however, were the result of a high moral sense. The Jainas not only admitted an individual soul of human beings, but extended this to birds and beasts as well as trees. Their attitude to philosophical questions is summarized by the expression syad-vada, ‘assertion of possibility and non-possibility,’ that is to say skepticism. Those to whom Buddhism was preached for the first time included many followers of Mahavira.

The Buddha, according to Ceylon tradition, was born in 623 BCE, but modern historians favour a date some sixty years later. He was the scion of the aristocratic republican clan of the Sakyas. His father was Suddhodana and his mother, who died a week after his birth, was Maya. He was named Siddhartha, and was brought up in the lap of luxury. He was married to a beautiful princess named Yasodhara, and had a son named Rahula. The suffering to which humanity is heir – old age, disease and death – so weighed on his mind that, despite all efforts of his father, he gave up his life of ease, in the twenty-eighth year of his age, and adopted the garb of a Sramana in order to discover a way of deliverance from these evils of existence. Not satisfied with path recommended by religious teachers of the time, he subjected himself to the most rigorous forms of asceticism for six years to discover the path of deliverance, but in vain. He then adopted a more moderate form of self-discipline, practised psychic trances and on the Full-moon day of Vaisakha in the thirty-fifth year of his life, seated under the Bodhi Tree at Gaya, He realized the Ultimate Truth after a severe mental struggle which is poetically referred in Buddhist literature as the Battle with Mara, the Evil One. Henceforward, He is called the Awakened One, the Buddha, One who has permeated Himself with the Ultimate Reality of the Universe (Dhammadhatu or Nirvana), and for whom the world process has ceased. This realization of the Ultimate Truth is called Transcendental Wisdom (Panna), which, to be real wisdom, has to be blended in equal measure with Transcendental Compassion (Karuna).

It was therefore natural that the Buddha, after the Great Awakening, resolved to preach the Truth (Dhamma) that He had realized to the whole world, so that those prepared for it may follow the Path and attain the same end. The Dhamma was preached for the first time two months after the attainment of Buddhahood, at the Deer Park (Isipatana) near Benares, to five of His former companions. This discourse is known among the Buddhists as ‘The Turning of the Wheel of the Truth,’ and in it the Buddha abjured His hearers to eschew the two extremes of rigorous mortification of the flesh and the habitual indulgence in the pleasures of the senses. They were enjoined to follow the Middle Path which was formulated as the Noble Eightfold Path, namely, (1) Right Views, (2) Right Concepts, (3) Right Speech, (4) Right Conduct, (5) Right Livelihood, (6) Right Effort, (7) Right Mindfulness, and (8) Right Concentration. On the philosophical plane also the teaching of the Buddha avoided the extreme views of realism and nihilism, and advocated the middle path of conditioned or relative existence which is formulated in the Paticcasamuppada (Chain of Causation or Dependent Origination).

The doctrine of the Buddha has been preached in different terminology to suit the mental equipment and background of various people to whom it was meant on each occasion. To state it briefly, the purpose of the doctrine being to remove suffering, the correct approach was to find the cause thereof. The root-cause of all suffering is stated to be the inherent craving for becoming and non-becoming, which itself is due to the delusion of a permanent being (ego) which every individual has inherited from beginning-less Time. This ego-consciousness engenders attraction to, or repulsion from, external sense objects, leading to one’s being enmeshed in the world-process and its concomitant evils. The disciple is taught various spiritual exercises by means of which he could attain that state of tranquility in which the external object no longer deludes him, and he can view things ‘as they are in reality’. The obvious truth of the existence of suffering, that there must be a cause for his suffering, and what that is, the corollary that if there is a cause there must be the possibility of the cessation of that cause, and the method of effecting that cessation are the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism.

This path leading to Deliverance can only be trodden to its ultimate goal by those who have given up all worldly ties. The path to spiritual perfection is graded into four stages, of which three can be realized even by a householder; but the final stage, that of being an arhat, can be attained only by the homeless. Disciples came to the Buddha in considerable numbers after the beginning of His mission, many of them giving up wealth and position. Those disciples were organized into an Order called the Sangha, which generally followed the practices of Sramanas, but unlike the Nigantas and some others, the members of the Buddha’s Sangha were enjoined to avoid practices which violated social decency. They were required to clad themselves decently, but not with costly garments or those worn by householders. So that they may not be a burden on society, they were enjoined to have their garments sewn out of rags collected from dung-heaps, to have them dyed to a saffron colour, so as to make them unattractive and of no value.

The members of the Order were thus known as bhikkhus i.e. beggars, and the Order itself was called bhikkhu-sangha, ‘the Association of Beggars.’ For abodes, they had to be satisfied with the shade of trees or leaf-huts. Except the bare necessities like a begging-bowl they possessed nothing which they called their own. Supporting themselves in this manner without being a burden to society, they were enjoined to exert strenuously to attain the end to which they had given up the world, and once the goal had been reached, to devote the rest of their lives ‘for the welfare of the many,’ says Prof. S. Paranavitana in University of Ceylon.    

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