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THE BUDDHA is the greatest personality that India has produced in
the many millennia of her history For the people of Asia’s wide
expanses, to day as centuries ago, the Buddha is the great exponent
of the spirit of India, His name is known to the uncivilized nomad
in the icy steppes of Siberia as well as to the cultured son of
China. To him turn in homage the gentle Sinhalese of tropical Ceylon
and the war – like Japanese of Nippon’s Moderate climes When
early last century scholars of the West began to study the spiritual
life of Asia, the Sage of the Sakyans, as no other genius of the
East, became the prime focus of interest; no other has been so often
mentioned, praised and blamed; no other has exercised, even 2500
years after his death, such a significant influence on the
philosophy of Western thinkers among them I mention only
Schopenhauer as an example.
When searching for the cause of this extraordinary phenomenon,
we ask ourselves why just the Buddha could make such a strong and
long – lasting impact, while many other Indian thinkers and
prophets who at their times were equally popular, did not penetrate
beyond India’s borders and were even forgotten in their own home
country. In looking for the reasons we find that in the personality
of the Buddha several features are united which only in their
totality were able to produce that universal effect which the
founders of other Indian religions could not achieve. The first
among these features is the fact that in the course of his preaching
the Buddha summarized the results of prior philosophical thought and
did so in a or that was precise and yet intelligible to the
unlearned; secondly, the fact that the Buddha himself practiced and
embodied up to the highest point the ethical principles which he
taught; and thirdly, he made his way of salvation quite independent
from the limitations of Indian tradition and its caste system and
therefore offered it to the whole of humanity.
…Like all great teachers of mankind, the Buddha was also a
child of his time. From his predecesscrs he took over the teachings
of Karma, rebirth, the sorrow
yieldiing transiency of all craving, asceticism, liberation
through knowledge and Nirvana.
But by giving these teachings a distinctive philosophical
character that took them out of their connection with brahminical
tradition, the Buddha created a teaching of deliverance that was
meant for all men. Unlike them he did not speak of sacrifices or of
Brahma, but he may be called a phenomenologist who, restricting
himself to the actualities of the inner and outer world as perceived
by man, explained the nature of suffering, its cause, its cessation,
and the noble eightfold path leading to Nirvana Similarly as his
contemporary,
Heraklitus of Ephesus, he taught the Panta Rhei, the eternal
flux of all phenomena. The Brahmins taught as Parmenides did a state
of Being, abiding and eternal, in which every individual self has
its roots. The Buddha proclaimed the very antithesis of it: there is
no abiding Being, no immutable self there is only a becoming, flux,
only by understanding the nature not only of the external world but
also of the ego, is it possible to attain to the highest
selflessness that brings about Nirvana,
the dissolution of the imaginary personality – complex.
The Buddha’s teaching could not have had such an enormous
success in India and beyond its borders if not for his so very
attractive personality. The Buddha was not a theoretician who
offered good counsel to others, but he was one who by his own
example put the final, authentic seal on the ethical teachings he
proclaimed. Aged 29, he left the luxurious court of his royal father
at Kapilavatthu (in the Himalayas) and donned a mendicant’s robe
for seeking after salvation. In vain he searched for ultimate wisdom
among other teachers: in vain he undertook the severest ascetical
self – mortification for many years, Finally, after seven years of
spiritual struggle, the Eye of understanding opened within him,
under the holy fig tree (the Bodhi Tree) which can still be seen at
Bodh Gaya . Thus he became a Holy One, an Awakened One, a Buddha.
For over forty years he then walked through the northern parts of
India, in ascetics garb, living on collected alms food, and
preaching his doctrine. Up to his death at eighty he did not shirk
the hardships of the fatiguing peregrinations on foot, for the sake
of spreading his message. The texts describe him as a majestic
personality, a man of self – abnegation and of a rare kindness of
heart, the embodiment of passion –free serenity. Pious faith may
have later glorified the Buddha, surrounding him with a divine aura
and with a dense overgrowth of legends and miracles. But below that
sacral overpainting of the original picture there
remains the image of a man of rare equipoise and serenity:
the figure of a Saint who has transcended the world and whose
features radiate the perfect stillness of his mind.
The Buddha was no revolutionary in the Western sense. Though
he was opposed to the Brahmins arrogance, his aim was not a
revolution against the social order as represented by the caste
system in India A graded structural organization of society appeared
to him, the aristocrat, a necessity by natural law, as natural as
the gradation of beinigs in general, starting with the lowest
animals and rising, through men and spirits, to the gods: because,
according to the Buddha, even gods are subject to Karma as are men,
and therefore enjoy their present position only for a limited time
What he Challenged was the claim of Brahmins to be superior to the
other castes, by virtue of being the guardians of the sacred Vedic
tradition. For the Buddha, no class or caste privileges existed as
far as salvation was concerned. Hence his emphatic statement: “Not
by birth is one a Brahmin, but only by knowledge and moral conduct’
It is only the moral qualities that determine an individual’s rank
in the stages of his gradual progress towards deliverance.Hence also
members of the lower castes were admitted to his monastic order. So
we find among his disciples, side by side with Brahmins and warriors,
those who had been scavengers or had other despised occupations,
even a converted robber chief For the Buddha neither noble birth nor
wealth were decisive, but solely a man’s understanding and his
moral conduct.
The monks and nuns who, withdrawn from worldliness, lived
either singly or in communities a life of renunciation and of active
lovingkindness for all that lives, had always been only a minority
among the Buddha’s followers, as they represented only the upper
ranks of his disciples. Below them were numerous lay devotees who,
at various stages of dedication and inner development, observed only
a part of the rules binding on monks; and finally there were the
still larger numbers of those who were in Sympathy with the teaching
and participated in its rites, but who , without exclusive
allegiance and with the Indian’s typical tolerance, were devoted
also to other religious cults. Hence, from the Buddhist point of
view, the teaching of deliverance can be understood and practised by
different people to a very different extent, according to their
inclinations and capacities. The “road to enlightenment” starts
even as far down as on the level of animals; we hear, for instance,
of pious elephants and hares, or of a frog who as reward of homage
paid to the Buddha, was reborn in a devout huiman family and,
progressing steadily, finally gained deliverance. If one wishes to
have a correct idea of the Buddhist “Weltanschauung” and outlook
on life, one has to familiarize oneself with the Buddhist conception
that an incalculably large number of living beings, through
thousands of years, in thousands of lives, proceed on their way to
the light, slowly though not without relapses. The Western concept
that salvation depends on the moral quality of one single life must
not be used as a basis for judgingBuddhist ethics. Hence the widely
spread opinion that because the Buddha taught renunciation to his
monks, he wanted all men to be monks, is quite erroneous and so also
the idea derived from it, that Buddhism is averse to culture.
Because only a few among the countless beings will reach Nirvana
after slow progress, therefore Buddhism, from its very start, has
provided less stringent ethical precepts for those who only
gradually can achieve that maturity required for final liberation.
Hence, in Buddhist countries, art and sciences have always been
cultivated, and it is not by chance that Buddhists have been among
the founders of Indian medicine, as it was one of their foremost
endeavours to help suffering humanity. For the great majority of
Buddhists and this I found also in present – day Burma, Siam,
China and Japan Nirvana is only the ultimate, distant goal to which
practically only the monk is devoted. Buddhism when it flourished,
was certainly not a pessimistic and life denying religion. This can
be seen from the fact that some of the greatest rulers of ancient
India, Ashoka (250 B.C.), Kanishka (100 A.C.) and Harsha (650 A.
C.). were Buddhists.
Buddhism did not establish in India an organized Church in
the Western sense, and it had no central ecclesiastical authority
laying down what was the true faith and what was not Hence there
arose many schools and sects who differed from each other in several
doctrinal issues, though all of them revered the Buddha as their
master As enforced concersion is alien to Buddhism and as it did not
demand exclusive allegiance nor a formal repudiation of other
religions, the total number of Buddhists underwent strong
fluctuations. Buddhism was never the dominant religion of india, and
it was always only a section of the population that professed it.
Even at periods of its widest dissemination on the Indian
subcontinent, Brahmanism always remained a strong force. When, since
about the 8th century A.C., Brahmanism came to the fore
again and vigorous religious movements arose in its midst to which
an ageing Buddhism was no match, Gautama Buddha’s teaching almost
vanished in India. Similarly as Christianity which in present day
Palestine counts only very few followers but instead had conquered a
large part of the world, so also Buddhism found in the Far East and
in South – East Asia rich compensation for the loss in India. In
Burma. Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, in Tibet, Sikkim and Bhutan
almost the whole population is Buddhist: in Ceylon It is a large
majority, and in China, Korea and Vietnam Buddhism has a large
number of followers, while in Japan it is the predominant religion.
Within the long history of Indian religion, the one and a
half millennia of Buddhist history on Indian soil are only an
episode but it is an episode of a significance that can hardly be
rated highly enough. Buddhism has amalgamated the currents of Indian
thought in a system of ingenious synthesis which decisively
influenced minds at a time of India’s political and cultural
greatness. It was through Buddhism that Indian ideas became known in
most parts of Asia, and this was an achievement of cultural
propaganda of a vast extent. But also in contemporary India. The
impact of the Buddha, his teaching and his community of monks is
still very much in evidence. The formulations given by the Buddha
and his disciples for fundamental concepts of the Indian world view
have partly been adapted by the opponents and made parts of their
systems. This applies, for instance, to formulations connected with
the law of moral causality (Karma), the teachings on a gradual path
to enlightenment, libheration by knowledge, and Nirvana. Also the
towering personality of the Buddha could not be overlooked or by
passed:
hence they gave to him, the great heterodox, rank or an
incarnation (avatar) of God Vishnu.
THE BUDDHIST
PUBLICATION SOCIETY
FOUNDED
1958
Publishes authentic literature on many aspects of Buddhist Teadhing
and its practical application to life. Many general, as well as
specialized booklets are available in the WHEEL Series, covering such
subjects as:-
Buddhist
teaching, philosophy and meditation
Buddhist Culture
Translations
from Buddhist sacred literature.
Other
specialized treatises bear on some particular aspect of Buddhism when
compared with beliefs and attitudes common to the West or concepts of
western religions.
A small
library of Buddhist literature has already been published in the WHEEL
series of booklets, 200
issues to date.
Smaller
booklets dealing with many different aspects of Buddhism are available
in BODHI LEAVES, 70 issues to date.
Contributions
to both are written by representative Buddhist scholars, These
publications circulate in eighty seven countries.
Acomplete
book list will be sent, without obligation, on request.
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