20 MINUTES TO MASTER … BUDDHISM. Kulananda

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СКАЧАТЬ as being somehow about a belief in God, in one or another of the many guises in which he is seen, but there is no God in Buddhism. Is it then simply a philosophy – a way of thinking about the world, or a way of leading a more ethical life? Or is it a kind of psychotherapy – a way of helping us to come to terms with ourselves and with the dilemmas which life constantly throws up? Buddhism contains all of these to some extent, but it is also very much more.

      Buddhism asks us to reconsider our usual preconceptions of what is meant by religion. It deals with truths which go entirely beyond the merely rational, unfolding a transcendental vision of reality which altogether surpasses all our usual categories of thought. The Buddhist path is a way of spiritual training which leads, in time, to a direct, personal apprehension of that transcendental vision.

      Every one of us has the capacity to be clearer, wiser, happier and freer than we currently are. We have the capacity to penetrate directly to the heart of reality – to come to know things as they really are. The teachings and methods of Buddhism ultimately have one goal alone: to enable us to fully realize that potential for ourselves.

      Over the course of its long history, Buddhism spread to all the countries of Asia. Wherever it alighted, the interaction between the indigenous local culture and the newly arrived teachings of the Buddha wrought profound effects on both. In many cases Buddhism ignited a cultural renaissance. In some situations, as in Tibet, it was even the harbinger of culture. And as it moved, Buddhism too changed, adapting wherever it went to local cultural conditions. Thus, today, we have the Buddhisms of Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Tibet, China, Mongolia, Russia and Japan; and within these a bewildering variety of schools, sects and sub-sects. Where in all this variety is Buddhism itself? What do all these different approaches have in common?

      What they most have in common is their ancestral origin. They are all branches, leaves and flowers which have grown out from the trunk of early Indian Buddhism. They all look back to the Buddha and they all accept and propound the Buddha’s original teachings, although with very different emphases.

      To understand the fundamentals of Buddhism, therefore, it is necessary to get back as close as we can to the Buddha himself. We can do this by looking into the earliest texts and seeing what they have to say for us today. This is not to reject later developments. Buddhists in the West today stand as heirs to the whole Buddhist tradition. We can admire, respect and make practical use of elements of Japanese Soto Zen as much as we can elements of Tibetan Vajrayana or Thai Theravada. But to understand the tradition as a whole we need to go back to its roots.

      Most of the basic teachings in this book go back to early Indian Buddhism. I therefore hope that there is little here that Buddhists of different traditional allegiance would take issue with. For the same reason, I have generally confined myself to the early Indian canonical languages in the few cases where I need to describe Buddhist technical terms, using either Pali or Sanskrit as seems most appropriate in context. (This not being a scholarly work, I have omitted diacritical marks.)

      The principal intention of this book is to introduce the general reader to the broad range of the Buddhist tradition by bringing out some of its most essential (and therefore most common) elements, and to show how the fundamental teachings of Buddhism have a significance which transcends their historical origins. Above all I hope it encourages some readers to try these out for themselves. Books are very useful, but if one really wants to know what Buddhism is about, one must try it out in practice. Even the most gifted writer cannot describe the flavour of an orange, and in the same way no book can ever capture the essence of Buddhist practice.

      ‘Just as the great ocean has one taste, the taste of salt,’ the Buddha said, ‘so my teaching has one flavour – the flavour of liberation.’

      CHAPTER 1

       THE BUDDHA

      ‘Buddha’ is not a name, it is a title, meaning ‘One Who is Awake’ – awake to the highest reality, to things as they really are. And one becomes a Buddha through achieving Enlightenment – a state of transcendental insight into the true nature of reality. There have been many Enlightened individuals throughout Buddhist history, but the term ‘the Buddha’ is usually used to refer to one particular Enlightened individual, Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of the Buddhist religion, the first person in our era to tread the path to Enlightenment.

      Siddhartha was born in about 485 BCE (Before Common Era) in Lumbini, near the town of Kapilavastu in the area below the foothills of the Himalayas which spans the current Nepalese border with India. It was a time of great political change. In the central Ganges basin, not very far to the south, powerful new monarchies were emerging which were gradually swallowing up the older, clan-based republics. One or two republics, however, still held out, and it was into one of these, that of the Shakyans, that Siddhartha Gautama was born.

      Siddhartha’s family belonged to the warrior class, and his father was a member of the ruling oligarchy. Later tradition, knowing only the monarchies which soon usurped the earlier republics, dubbed Siddhartha a ‘prince’, and his father, Suddhodana, the ‘king’; but whatever his correct designation, we know that Suddhodana was rich and powerful and that the young Siddhartha led a privileged life.

      At his birth, a seer predicted that the young boy was destined for either political or spiritual empire (his name, Siddhartha, means ‘he whose aim will be accomplished’). The legendary biographies tell that in his early life his father, wishing that his handsome and accomplished son should choose a life of political rather than spiritual empire, sought to attach him to the advantages of wealth and power by providing him with every available luxury, and keeping him sheltered from the harsher facts of the world about him. He arranged for Siddhartha’s marriage to a beautiful and refined young woman, Yashodhara, and she bore him a son, Rahula.

      But Siddhartha began to develop an acute sense of dissatisfaction. He sensed the hollowness which underlay his superficially comfortable life, and he was unable to brush this feeling aside. His innate integrity wouldn’t allow him to pretend that everything was as it should be. He was driven to intellectual and spiritual exploration, seeking for answers which his privileged environment was unable to provide. This period of questioning is vividly expressed by the story of the four sights – four formative experiences which occurred to the young trainee-warrior whilst travelling abroad in his chariot.

      The story goes that at the side of the road one day he caught his first ever sight of an old man, and thus realized, for the first time, the inevitable fact of old age. Similarly, he was confronted in turns by disease and by death. These experiences completely overwhelmed him. What was the point of living a life of ease and luxury when old age, disease and death were waiting in the wings – quietly biding their time before they came to claim him, his family and friends? Finally he saw a wandering mendicant, the sight of whom sowed in his mind the seed of the possibility that there was an alternative to the passive acceptance of old age, disease and death. But, at the same time, he saw that to embark on such a quest would require radical, even painful, action.

      And so Siddhartha passed his early years – restless, worried by matters of profound existential concern and torn between the life for which ancestry had prepared him and the religious quest towards which his restless spirit propelled him. His insight into the inevitable facts of old age, disease and death, left him with an acute and ineradicable sense of the painful vacuity of the ‘pleasures’ and plottings of upper-class Shakyan life. Ancestral duty demanded that he join in, put his sense of the hollowness of things aside, and get on with the business of warriorship and government. Yet, at his core, where he was truest to himself, he knew that a life which denied the fundamentals of reality was not for him. He saw that he had two stark options: he could deny himself reality or he could deny himself family, luxury and power. He chose СКАЧАТЬ