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Gautama Buddha,
whose original name was Prince Siddhartha, was the founder of
Buddhism, one of the world’s great religions. Siddhartha was the son
of king ruling in Kapilavastu, a city in northeast India, near
border of Nepal. Siddhartha himself (of the clam of Gautama and the
tribe of Sakya) was purportedly born in 563 B.C. in lumbini, within
the present borders of Nepal. He was married at sixteen to a cousin
of the same age. Brought up in luxurious royal palace, Prince
Siddhartha did not want for material comforts. Nevertheless, he was
profoundly dissatisfied. He observes that most human beings were
poor and continually suffered from want. Even those who were wealthy
were frequently frustrated and unhappy, and all men were subject to
diseases and ultimately succumbed to death. Surely, Siddhartha
thought, there must be more to life than transitory pleasures, which
were all too soon obliterated by suffering and death.
When he was
twenty-nine, just after the birth of his first son, Gautama decided
that he must abandon the life he was living and devote himself
wholeheartedly to the search for truth. He departed form the palace,
leaving behind his wife, his infant son, and all his worldly
possessions, and became a penniless wanderer. For a while he studied
with some of the famed holy men of the day, but after mastering
their teachings, he found their solutions to the problems of the
human situation unsatisfactory. It was widely believed that extreme
asceticism was the pathway to true wisdom. Gautama therefore
attempted to become an ascetic, for several years engaging in
extreme fasts and self-mortification. Eventually, however, he
realized that tormenting his body only clouded his brain, without
leading him any closer to true wisdom. He therefore resumed eating
normally, and abandoned asceticism.
In solitude, he
grappled with the problems of human existence. Finally, one evening
he sat beneath a giant fig tree, all the pieces of the puzzle seemed
to fall into place. Siddhartha spent the whole night in deep
reflection, and when the morning came, he was convinced that he had
found the solution and that he was no a Buddha, and “enlightened
one”.
At this time, he
was thirty-five years old. For the remaining forty-five yeas of his
life, he traveled throughout northern India, preaching his new
philosophy to all who were willing to listen. By the time he died,
in 483 B.C., he had made thousands o converts. Though his words had
not been written down, his disciples had memorized many of his
teachings, and they were passed to succeeding generations by word of
mouth were passed to succeeding generations by word of mouth.
The principle
teachings of the Buddha can be summarized in what Buddhists call the
“Four Noble Truths”:
First, that human
life is intrinsically unhappy;
Second, that the
cause of this unhappiness is human selfishness and desire;
Third, that
individual selfishness and desire can be brought to an end- the
resulting state, when all desires and cravings have been eliminated
is termed nirvana (literally “blowing out” or “extinction”);
Fourth, that the
method of escape from selfishness and desire is what is called the
“Eightfold Path”:
The right views,
Right thought,
Right speech, Right action, Right live hood, Right effort, Right
mindfulness, And right meditation. It might be added that Buddhism
is open to all, regardless of race, and that (unlike Hinduism) it
recognize no distinctions of caste.
For some time after
Gautama death the new religion spread slowly. In the third century
B.C. the great Indian emperor Asoka became converted to Buddhism.
His support brought about the rapid expansion of Buddhist influence
and teachings in India and the spread of Buddhism to neighboring
countries. Buddhism spread south into Ceylon, and eastward into
Burma. From there it spread into all of Southeast Asia, and down
into Malaya, and into what is now Indonesia. Buddhism also spread
north directly into
Tibet,
and to the northwest, into Afghanistan and Central Asia. It spread
into China, where it won a large following, and from there into
Korea and Japan.
Within India
itself, the new faith started to decline after about 500, and almost
vanished after about 1200. In china and Japan, on the other hand,
Buddhism remained a major religion. In Tibet and in Southeast Asia,
it has been the principal religion for many centuries.
Buddha’s teachings
were not written down until several centuries after his death, and,
understandably, his movement has split into various sects. The two
principal divisions of Buddhism are the Theravada branch, dominant
in southern Asia, and considered to most Western Scholars as the one
closer to the Buddha’s original teachings, and the Mahayana branch,
dominant in Tibet, China, and northern Asia generally.
Buddha, as the
founder of one of the world’s major religions, clearly deserved a
place near the head of this list. Since there are only about 200
million Buddhists in the world, compared with over 500 million
Muslims and about one billion Christians, it would seem evident that
Buddha has influenced fewer people than Muhammad [PBUH] and Jesus
[PBUH]. However, the difference in numbers can be misleading. One
reason that Buddhism died out in India is that Hinduism absorbed
many of its ideas and principles. In China, too, large numbers of
persons who do no call themselves Buddhists have been strongly
influenced by Buddhists philosophy.
Buddhism, far more
than Christianity or Islam, has very strong pacifist element. The
orientation toward nonviolence has played a significant role in the
political history of Buddhist countries.
It has often been
said that if Christ were to return to earth, he would be shocked at
many of the things which have been done in his name, and horrified
fights between different sects of persons who call themselves his
followers. Buddha, too, would doubtless be amazed at many of the
doctrines that have been presented as Buddhist. But while there are
many sects of Buddhism, and large differences between those sects,
there is nothing in Buddhist history that remotely compares with the
religious wars that took place in Christian Europe. In this respect,
at least, Buddha’s teachings seem to have had far greater influence
on his followers than Christ’s teachings had on his.
Buddha and
Confucius have had an approximately equal influence upon the world.
Both lived at about the same time, and the number of their adherents
has not been too different.
I have chosen to
place Buddha before Confucius for two reasons
First, the advent
of Communism in china seems to have greatly diminished Confucian
influence; and second m the failure of Confucianism to spread widely
outside of
China indicates how closely the ideas of Confucius were
grounded in pre-existing Chinese attitudes. Buddhist teachings, on
the other hand, are in co sense a restatement of previous Indian
Philosophy, and Buddhism has spread far beyond the boundaries of
India due to the originally of Gautama Buddha’s concept, and the
wide appeal of his philosophy.
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