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Sri Lanka The Life and Message of the Buddha
The founder of Buddhism was a man named Siddartha Gautama, a
prince of the Sakya clan in what is now Nepal during the sixth
century B.C. Popular stories of his life include many miraculous
events: before his birth his mother experienced visions that
foretold his future greatness; when he was born, he could
immediately walk and talk; wise men who encountered the child
predicted that he would become either a great sage or a great
emperor. Behind these legends is the tale of a young man reared
in luxury, who began to question the meaning of life. At the age
of thirty, he abandoned his home (including his beautiful wife
and child) and wandered throughout northeast India as a beggar,
searching for truth.
Gautama studied under several religious teachers and became
adept at techniques of meditation and self-imposed austerity.
Finally, he sat down under a bo (pipal) tree and resolved not to
move from that spot until he had achieved perfect enlightenment.
He entered into deeper and deeper concentration, until he finally
reached an understanding of the nature of existence and the
purpose of life. He thus became the one who knows, the Buddha
(from the verb budh, to know or understand). At first he
debated whether other beings would be able to comprehend the
knowledge that he had gained, but compassion moved him to bring
his message to the world and lead others to enlightment. He spent
the next fifty years traveling throughout northeast India,
discussing his knowledge with all sorts of people. By the end of
his life, his message and example had attracted large numbers of
converts, from kings to beggars, from rich men to robbers. At his
death around 483 B.C., he left behind a dedicated group of
disciples who carried on his work.
The Buddha summed up his message in Four Noble Truths that
still form the core of Buddhist belief. The first truth is that
life is suffering (dukkha). The material world, thoughts,
emotions, and ideas are all transitory and do not express or
contain any eternal truths. All beings repeatedly experience pain
and loss as they pass through innumerable lives, never able to
emerge from a conditioned existence (samsara) created through
their own consciousness. The second truth describes the cause of
suffering as attachment to the world and the products of one's
own consciousness. This attachment, or craving for existence,
causes beings to create mental views of the world and believe
they are correct, to form relationships with other beings, to
struggle and desire. Such efforts are in vain because none of
these strategies allows them to escape from their limited,
suffering world. The third truth says that the way to break the
limiting trap of samsara is to stop attachment. Once one has
concentrated awareness so intensely that all material and
spiritual phenomena appear empty, without real substance, then
existence becomes liberated and suffering ceases. The fourth
truth is the Noble Eightfold Path of behavior, which roots out
attachment and the conditioned view of the world and leads toward
the state of enlightenment
(
nibbana--nirvana, see Glossary)
gained by the Buddha. The true follower of the Buddha
rejects the world, becomes a full-time searcher after truth, and
practices meditation that concentrates awareness.
Data as of October 1988
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