Bill (Bills) Moderator Username: Bills
Post Number: 139 Registered: 03-2008
Rating: N/A Votes: 0 (Vote!) | Posted on Wednesday, December 07, 2011 - 02:30 am: |
|
At the age of twenty-nine Siddhartha Gautama, prince of a ruling house in Nepal, abandons the luxuries of home, and the affections of a wife and a young son, to become a wandering ascetic. He is following a pattern not uncommon in India at this time, when the rigidities of a priest-dominated Hinduism are causing many to seek a more personal religion. Only a few years previously, in a nearby district, a young man by the name of Vardhamana has done exactly the same - with lasting results in the form of Jainism. (The conventional dates for both men, revised by modern scholarship, have been a century earlier.) Gautama differs from Vardhamana in one crucial respect. He discovers that asceticism is almost as unsatisfactory as luxury. According to the traditional account (first written down in the 3rd century BC) Gautama follows an ascetic life for six years before deciding that a middle path between mortification and indulgence of the body will provide the best hope of achieving enlightenment. He resolves to meditate, in moderate comfort, until he sees the light of truth. One evening he sits under a pipal tree at Buddh Gaya, a village in Bihar. By dawn he is literally buddha, an 'enlightened one'. Like any other religious leader he begins to gather disciples. He becomes known to his followers as the Buddha. Gautama preaches his first sermon at Sarnath, about 5 miles (8km) north of the sacred Hindu city of Varanasi. In this sermon, still a definitive text for all Buddhists, he proposes a path to enlightenment very different from the elaborate ceremonies and colourful myth attached to the Hindu deities. Gautama's message is plain to the point of bluntness, at any rate when reduced to a simple list - as it usually is in primers on Buddhism. He states that enlightenment can be achieved by understanding Four Noble Truths; and that the pain of life, with which the Noble Truths are concerned, can be avoided by following an Eightfold Path. The four Noble Truths are that pain is inextricably part of mankind's everyday life; that our cravings of all kinds are the cause of this pain; that the way off this treadmill is to free oneself of these cravings; and that this can be achieved by following the Eightfold Path. |