It was AWESOME!
This is seriously the first paper I've ever written that didn't fall prey to procrastination. I can truly say I gave it all I got. So when I headed up to the tower room this morning (the tower room is where they used to torture people, I'm sure THAT'S no coincidence...) I was strangely calm. I got there half an hour early because I was so scared of being late again. I ended up just sitting outside, chillin. I didn't even read as I was sitting there. That shit was finished.
In case anybody is interested in learning about the Ancient Indian historical, cultural, social, and religious climate (at approx. 400 BC) and how that shaped the ideas taught by the Buddha- 1. You probably have too much time on your hands. And 2. My Mom likes to read my papers, so I'll post it for her, and anyone else interested =)
So I had my first "read and defend your paper" tutorial this morning, and it went really well! She liked it! Made my day man. I celebrated by (get this Monica-) buying some super awesome soap at Lush downtown. For those of you who aren't familiar with Lush- it's an all natural cosmetics shop that is super popular in the UK, but they also have a few shops in and around Chicago too. The set-up of the store is so fun. Of course it's all environmentally conscious and animal friendly which I love. What's even better is I love the products even more. It's a little on the pricey side, but hey, I was celebrating. And I'm not gonna get mad at myself over soap. Come on.
I'm buying a new camera really really soon! I'm good and settled now. Things are gonna get exciting again soon, so I need to get decisive and pick a camera. Miguel gave me some good recommendations, so there's a starting point at least.
When I ran over to the guys' house this morning to use their printer, I learned they have slugs in their house. They find like, 7 a week. Disgusting! I've gotten used to the rain around here- which is sort of a constant. Sometimes it just mists for hours, so weird! There are times when it feels like everything is just a little damp. You almost don't notice it after awhile. I'll never get used to the slugs though. I haven't actually seen one yet, and thank god. Lets hope it stays that way.
I feel like this post just got boring. So here's a link to one of my favorite comics from Hyperbole and a Half- a blog written and illustrated by a girl who is much more entertaining than I'll ever be. Seriously, check it out.
Or be lame and read my paper. Whatever.
THE BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE
Buddhism
May 2nd, 2012
The
Buddha’s life was his teaching, and both revolved around the cessation of
suffering. He spent his life
trying to accomplish this, and once he did, spent the rest of it trying to
teach others how to do the same. To
understand the genesis of the Buddha’s teachings it is imperative to become
familiar with the environment in which he learned and taught. Buddhism was not born from or into
empty space. In every aspect of
his teachings, the Buddha was responding to at least one pre-existing doctrine
or tradition among his peers. His lessons then would automatically have one of
two components: the acceptance of
a pre-existing idea, which he would build upon and make his own, or the
rejection of an idea in its entirety.[1] It is not surprising then, that unless
a particular teaching was crucial to reaching nirvana, the Buddha would cease
to actively touch upon the subject.
Unfortunately, this often led to accusations that The Buddha lacked ditthi, or a viewpoint, but it was
merely a strategic technique to lessen antagonism. What the Buddha did teach was always strongly based on his
own personal experiences.[2] Here I will evaluate a number of the
Buddha’s experiences in terms of what was presented to him and the wisdom he
drew out of those occasions.
Through these examples it will be clear that the Buddha continuously put
forth a tremendous effort (whether mental, physical, or both) as he tested the
knowledge presented to him in terms of logic, morality, and it’s ability to
attain nirvana.
The
Buddha’s quest for the cessation of suffering began when he made the conscious
realization that there is suffering in the world. Stories about the early years of the Buddha’s life vary, but
it is commonly understood that the Buddha (then known as Siddhattha Gotama, or
in Sanskrit: Siddhartha Gautama[3])
was of noble birth. His late
mother’s auspicious dream foretelling that her son would be either a great
religious teacher or a great emperor led his father to shield his son from
life’s difficulties in a palace full of comforts and pleasures. However, when Siddhatta eventually left
the palace, fours signs of an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and finally a
samsara changed the course of his life.
The first three distressed Siddhatta and made him aware of the suffering
in the world. The fourth, that of
a religious mendicant, offered an understanding of life unbeknownst to the
vapid pleasures of palace existence and, Siddhattha hoped, the means to the
cessation of suffering.
Siddhattha
was twenty-nine when he left home[4]
to join the paribbajakas and samanas. Although these people had deliberately chosen to leave the
structure of society, there were some common threads that bound them to be
alone together. “In contrast [to
the unrenouncing] the renouncer lives in celibacy, poverty, harmlessness and
desirelessness, which amount not so much to good activity as to inactivity, for
he simply does not commit acts which are charged with the awful power to cause
him to be reborn. Thereby the
successful renouncer escapes the cycle of rebirth completely.[5] The renouncers believed that as long as
a person was committed to society, their estate held little value next to the
power of their deeds, good or bad.
This universal law of causation, which turns a naked eye to the four
estates, was a relatively new idea, which the Buddha incorporated into his
later teachings. The renouncers
also introduced the Buddha to various methods to escape the law of causation,
and while he ultimately did not find any of these methods to be successful in
their own right, they were integral steps to developing his own successful
method.
The
founder of Jainism, Mahavira, was a contemporary of the Buddha, and for a time
the Buddha experimented with ideas of the Jainism movement such as
self-mortification (particularly fasting) and nonviolence, (ahimsa). Although the Buddha incorporated ahimsa into his own teachings, he believed self-mortification was
not the path to Enlightenment. In
fact, the Buddha recognized practices of self-mortification as quite the
opposite of his life of luxury at the palace. He saw both as futile and destructive, and from this
understanding sought out to develop a “middle way” between those two extremes
he knew so well.
The
development of the middle way began with meditation, another practice he
learned while living with the wandering ascetics. He had already mastered two separate kinds of meditation. Under the teaching of Alara Kalama the
Buddha mastered the meditative plane of nothingness. Although the meditative technique offered a temporary peace,
the Buddha ultimately found it wanting, and he sought another meditative
technique under Uddaka Ramaputta, who taught him the meditative plane of
neither perception nor non-perception.
Again, the Buddha found his new meditative strategy fruitless in his
search for the cessation of suffering, for although these meditative states
were blissful, they were only temporary.
“He rejected the yogic teachers’ claims that their particular
accomplishments led to final release.
But on the other hand, he implicitly accepted that meditation is, in
some ways, the spiritual tool par
excellence…but the final goal still had to be achieved by a quite different
step, a change in quality of thought and feeling, not in quantity of meditative
effort.”[6] He finally found release from the cycle
of rebirth in a meditative method he developed in solitude, later known as
insight meditation, or vipassana. “The goal of this was not peace and
tranquility but the generation of penetrating and critical insight (panna).”[7] Once the Buddha had been awakened, he
was content to live a life of seclusion.
He did not believe that the public would embrace his new wisdom. It was not until one of the Gods
pleaded with him to share his experiences that he decided to teach the
Dharma.
The
Buddha shared his teachings with people of all estates. Public debates were very common in
Ancient India, and while the Buddha would often gain many converts at these
lectures, he was often met with antagonism when he shared his ideas regarding
the “Self.” He “set himself apart
from the orthodox Indian religious tradition known as Brahmanism, which claimed
that each person possesses an eternal soul (atman)
which is either part of, or identical with, a metaphysical absolute known as brahman (a sort of impersonal godhead).”[8] Brahmans believed in an essence of a
person that carried through from life to life. They believed that this “Self” was unchanging,
interchangeable with what is known, and that it could be attained through
meditation. The Buddha opposed
this idea, and even set out to “reject it entirely and propose in its place the
characteristic Buddhist doctrine of nonself, anatta, the absense of an eternal, independent Self, whether in
ordinary consciousness, in meditative states or anywhere else.”[9] The Buddha points out that if atman is achieved through meditation,
and the Self is unchanging, but meditative states are unquestionably temporary,
than it is impossible for a Self to exist. He also points out that if a Self is interchangeable with
what that person knows, than reaching the meditative state of nothingness would
eliminate the “Self”. He asserts
further that clinging to a sense of self is a form of desire, which of course,
works against the cessation of suffering.
Another
of the Buddha’s more controversial teachings is his definition of a
Brahman. Although the high estate
of Brahmans were known for being good-looking, educated, of high birth, wise,
and virtuous, the Buddha points out that any of these individual qualities
could be missing and still constitute someone a Brahman except for two crucial
qualities: wisdom and virtue.[10] The Buddha’s claim then, is that if
character is what qualifies one as a holy person, then people should be judged
by their actions, not by their estate.
Furthermore, if it is a person’s actions that define them, then they
have control over their own fate, namely, whether or not to strive for nirvana. This is a very threatening idea because
it completely disregards one of the most inherent Indian ideas, that of the
four estates. The four estates lay
the groundwork for social structure to a paramount degree, and if the Buddha
were to unravel that, what would become of the higher estates that relied on
the conquests of their ancestors to keep their life of leisure and respected
status? The Buddha’s
deconstructive view was radical and threatening to many Brahmans. His most blatant standpoint in opposition
to them, however, might be found in his idea of the three fires. The Buddha claimed that “The
unenlightened are on fire with three fires: greed, hatred and delusion… [That he chose] the number three
is no coincidence: the orthodox
Brahmin was supposed to maintain always the three
fires required for major sacrifices, and the Buddha juxtaposed his fires to
those.”[11] The Buddha clearly sees little
wisdom or virtue within the estates, often acted as a hindrance to the
cessation of suffering. If people
learned they had the power to change their fate through their actions, not so
much through their caste, then they could take action (kamma) and possibly attain nirvana.
Karma
was established long before the Buddha’s time. “The word karma is
first mentioned in connection with rebirth in two brief passages in the Brhad-aranyaka Upanishad, one of the
oldest, if not the very oldest, of the Upanishads.”[12] Although the Buddha did not like to
dwell on karma, knowing it could only be truly understood by someone who had
already reached nirvana, he made one very important contribution to the
idea. “It is only in Buddhism that
… the whole universe is ethicized.
In other words, according to the Buddha’s teaching all sentient beings
throughout the universe are morally responsible and can be reborn in a higher
or lower station because of the good and evil they have done.”[13] By claiming that people are fated by
way of their actions, the Buddha is giving people free will. In a sense, he found the middle way
between determinism and total chaos[14], where humans can take ownership over their
actions and own their fate. After
all, as someone who so determined his own fate in discovering the path to
enlightenment and attaining it, how could the Buddha not believe in the fateful
power of one’s own actions?
In
addition to instilling people with power over their own karmic fate, he also
provided them with guidelines for how to completely end the karmic cycle of
rebirth. The four noble truths
state that life is suffering, suffering is caused by craving, suffering can
have an end, and there is a way to end suffering. These seemingly simple ideas are authored solely by the
Buddha himself. They are the
foundation of his enlightenment and the fruit of his existence. The common metaphor for the four noble
truths is that “of a medical diagnosis:
this is the disease, these are the causes of the disease, this is the
judgment of whether it is curable, this is the method of treatment.”[15] The Buddha started out simply enough as
a man who wanted to learn how to end suffering. The four noble truths are the means by which he reached
nirvana, and he taught them
to the world so others may end their suffering as well.
The
rather abstract beginning of Buddhism rose organically from the time and place
in which the Buddha lived. By
reaching a clear understanding of the common religious, social, and cultural
beliefs of that time, the innovative teachings of the Buddha can be more fully
appreciated. He spent his time
with many different kinds of people and incorporated into his teachings the
wise and effective tools they taught him.
At the same time, the Buddha was ready to challenge traditions that no
longer had a purpose, or beliefs that were not supported by reason. Above all else, the Buddha’s main
objective was always to bring about the cessation of suffering, first in
himself, and then to the world.
Bibliography
Carrithers, Michael. The Buddha. Oxford [Oxfordshire:
Oxford University Press, 1983.]
Cousins, L. S. "Buddhism." The New Penguin Handbook of Living
Religions, 369-439.
2nd ed. London: Penguin, 2000.
Gombrich, Richard F. "The Buddha's Dhamma." Theravada Buddhism: A Social History
From
Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo, 1-256. London: Routledge, 2006.
Gombrich, Richard Francis. How Buddhism Began: The
Conditioned Genesis of the Early
Teachings. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2006.
Gombrich, Richard. What the Buddha Thought. London:
Equinox Publishing, 2009.
Keown, Damien. Buddhism:
A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1996.
5.
Carrithers, The Buddha, 23.
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