Let me preface today’s post by saying that I will try my best to be fair and generous as I explore the life of the Buddha. If I piss you off, though, please bear in mind that it’s nothing personal. I wasn’t all that nice when I talked about Jesus, either. I’m an equal opportunity scoffer.
So, let’s get on with it. Who was the Buddha? (And please, I beg you—always say “the Buddha” when you’re talking about the specific guy who founded Buddhism. “Buddha” alone is just a word, a title that can theoretically apply to anyone who achieves enlightenment. Got that?)
The Buddha was born in the month of May around 560 bce in what is now Nepal but was then part of India. He was the son of a king (well, technically a king, but given the size and organization of India at the time, his dad was really more like a feudal lord). The little prince’s name was Siddhartha Gautama.
A local fortune-teller assured the king that his new son would one day become either the ruler of the world or the Supremely Enlightened One. Tall order, huh? And I thought my parents expected too much of me . . .
As you might assume, the king preferred option number one—ruler of the world—a lot better, so he did everything he could to keep his son safe within the walls of the palace. He gave the growing boy all the luxuries a spoiled prince could possibly ask for—fabulous food, beautiful dancing girls, a gorgeous and adoring young bride. It sounds like a pretty decent life, if you ask me.
But, like most men, Siddhartha wasn’t satisfied with all the good stuff he had at home. So he defied his father’s wishes and started going outside the palace to explore the world.
Although dear old dad did his best to keep Siddhartha from seeing anything that might upset him, I guess even a king can’t control everything. Eventually, Siddhartha stumbled upon a few bitter realities—an old man who needed a cane to walk, a sick person, and a corpse.
Supposedly, the “brilliant” young man, as all the books depict him, never realized that such horrible things existed, because he had been so sheltered all his life. I don’t buy it, but I’ll be nice and just let it slide.
After seeing all this terrible suffering, Siddhartha was traumatized and wanted to know why the world was so cruel. On another of his little trips outside the palace, he noticed a monk, radiant in spiritual tranquility, and learned that some people found inner peace by renouncing the world.
Apparently, that sounded pretty good to Siddhartha, because he decided to leave the palace and embark on his own spiritual quest.
As religious scholar Huston Smith puts it, “One night in his twenty-ninth year he made a break, his Great Going Forth. Making his way in the post-midnight hours to where his wife and son were locked in sleep, he bade them both a silent goodbye.”
Yup. You read it right. The Buddha, that great noble guy we’re all supposed to emulate, sneaked out of his house in the middle of the night and abandoned his wife and baby.
Now, I’ve read this story many times and the books never say what I’m always thinking as I read about how the Buddha began his spiritual journey: that he was a wife-leaving deadbeat dad. So, I was kind of surprised to see that one book—Gary Gach’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Buddhism—actually does address the issue.
Gach writes: “True, Siddhartha was . . . walking away from his responsibilities as a father as well as a prince. He was aware of the pain he’d cause others by leaving, but suffering seemed the ever-present essence of this ultimate enigma he intended to resolve, once and for all. Once he’d found the answer, Siddhartha would return, bringing it back to his people and all the land.”
Okay, maybe I’m just a Negative Nelly, but that paragraph really sets off my bullshit meter. Because life involves suffering, it’s all right to abandon your family—just make sure you teach the world how to meditate and all will be forgiven. Very noble.
But let’s move on. After leaving the palace, Siddhartha tried a few different paths, hoping to find enlightenment. He studied with spiritual teachers in the forest. He became an ascetic, eating only a grain of rice a day until he almost died of starvation (again, this part of the story leads me to question his supposed great intelligence).
Finally, he determined that the “Middle Way”—moderation in all things—was the only possible path to enlightenment. Or so he said.
While emphasizing the importance of moderation, he sat down and did nothing but meditate under a tree for 49 days. Nah. That’s not excessive, is it? I always did think that anything worth doing was worth doing for 49 days without stop.
But I guess all that meditation in moderation worked out, because Siddhartha Gautama found what he was looking for: nirvana.
Huston Smith explains: “. . . while the Bo Tree rained red blossoms that full-mooned May night, Gautama’s meditation deepened . . . until, as the morning star glittered in the transparent sky of the east, his mind pierced at last the bubble of the universe and shattered it to naught, only, wonder of wonders, to find it miraculously restored with the effulgence of true being. The Great Awakening had arrived. Gautama’s being was transformed, and he emerged the Buddha.”
But what had he learned that suddenly (after 49 days) clued him in to reality? Gary Gach sums it up:
“In the dark of night, gazing into his heart and the heart of creation, he saw into the mystery of life, that we are bound to die and thus bound to suffer. Mortality ensures cravings never to be fulfilled—and perpetuates with them the false mind-sets of self that only produce more suffering. . . . He saw, too, the happiness of being free.”
Sounds fabulous. And Buddhism tells us that, thanks to the efforts of the Buddha, we don’t have to spend 49 straight days meditating to reach enlightenment. We can glean some insights from his arduous struggle and get to nirvana in our own time.
The Buddha spent around 45 years after he reached enlightenment teaching others what he had learned. He died of dysentery after eating some bad food he received as alms around 483 bce—supposedly on the anniversary of the same May evening on which he had discovered nirvana.
I’m going to leave it at that for today and try to move on, ignoring all the snarky comments that keep racing through my mind. And believe me—it’s not easy.
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