RLST 303 - Dr. Leona Anderson
October 1, 2004
Essay #1
Buddha as Deity
Founding Myth of Buddhism:
Siddhartha Gautama, a Kshatrya whose father ruled the kingdom of the Sakyas in modern day Nepal, lived in the sixth century B.C.E. Some versions of the myth state how he was born to Maya through immaculate conception and immediately walked and talked. Before his mother passed away, a hermit named Asita prophesized Siddhartha will be a great teacher and his father, angered, vowed his son would be a great ruler like himself and sheltered his son in luxury, away from the suffering of the world so that he may be satisfied with the householder lifestyle of his station. Following the custom of his time, Siddhartha married young and had a son named Rahula, born just after he visited outside the walls of his palace and seen the ‘Four Sights’ of suffering: old age, illness, death, and sramana, a wandering mendicant. Siddhartha chose to leave his life of luxury at the age of thirty or so, in order that he could find a solution to the human condition of suffering that no one can escape and he left on his religious quest for liberation.
Siddhartha Gautama spent six years wandering the valley of the Ganges, learning and following different aesthetic practices of his time, from both indigenous yogic teachings and Vedic systems. He realized he was on another wrong path and that both a life of leisure and a life of aestheticism are extremes. He decided to follow a middle path, sat down under a bodhi tree near the river Neranjara and meditated. His meditation included struggling with Mara, the great tempter spirit, and being victorious by combating eight states of mind: Mara’s armies of desire, discontent, hunger and thirst, ceaseless clinging, laziness and sleep, fear, doubt and pretense and stubbornness. Some of these eight armies are also represented as Mara’s beautiful daughters who come and tempt Gautama off his path of seeking enlightenment. Either way, Mara failed and Gautama succeeded to found a prescriptive practice that others could follow by accepting his four noble truths: that suffering is the nature of existence (dukkha), the cause of its arising (tanha), cessation of its arising (nirodha), and the path that leads to its cessation, the eightfold path of the middle way (marga). Siddhartha Gautama now became the Buddha (the enlightened one).
The Buddha, having reached Nirvana, a state of awakening to Ultimate Reality and its interdependence of all things (pratitya-samutpada), hesitated on teaching his awareness’s to others. He was visited by a Hindu god, Sahampati Brahma, who asked Buddha to use his wisdom eyes to see how some people will be able to grasp his teachings and thus be awakened as well. Buddha does so and takes two merchants as his disciples and then proceeds to find the aesthetic disciples at Deer Park in Sarnath. Buddha then creates his missionary practice, and anyone can now become a disciple of the Buddha by taking the three refuges of Buddhism: refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.
Contextual Overview and Characteristics of Buddha:
Buddha: The Seeker as a Questioning Human and Great Teacher of Enlightenment
Buddha lived about 2500 years ago in the central plain of the River Ganges, south of Himalayas as a historical person who did extraordinary feats as a human answering the grand question of why there is human suffering and how to eliminate it. Buddha lead by example a path that contains no origin myths of the universe since in Buddha’s teachings, called dharma, there is no gods or spiritual conception; there is only emphasis on experiencing Ultimate Reality through the goal of Nirvana, which is awakening or enlightenment. Buddha in Indian conception is a man who had previous lives of karmic influence, with enough merit that lead up to this incarnation where he could become a great teacher of The Middle Way.
The established religion of Buddha’s time was the Vedic tradition of Brahminism, where a privileged caste of priests controlled the mediation of the gods and humans through religious rites. Buddha, upon realizing that suffering is an inherently aspect of life, became a seeker, giving up the established order of his life in order to find an answer to human suffering. Buddha began to wander rather than look within Brahminism, following the ancient yogic traditions indigenous before the Aryan invasions that did not have formal organization or a professional priest caste. These yogic traditions, Sramanas, emphasized direct personal experience of the Ultimate Mysteries, and were learned through aesthetic and meditative practice following someone who has achieved this, a guru. Sramanas used oral beliefs and practices that emphasized that wisdom and revelation were to be found inside the human heart. Archeological evidence of this tradition has been found in ruins of the Indus Valley, both Mohenjo Daro and Harappa excavations have found images of yogis in the lotus posture.
Buddha transmitted his dharma through oral tradition and it was not until King Asoka’s accepted Buddhism as state religion that the oral tradition became widely textual. Buddhism has been transplanted all over the world and has retained its Indian elements while also absorbing local traditions, creating a pluralism of Buddhist traditions. These Indian elements are the Buddha myth and his first teachings.
Buddha: Incarnation of Vishnu
Within Vaishnavism, Buddha is seen as Vishnu, who incarnates to bring destruction to the demons and their followers by revealing an evil doctrine that will bring moral and physical ruin. This story is one way of accounting for Buddhist doctrine as it started to become popular within Hindu society.
Interpretive Tools:
Textual Tradition within Buddhism
The Pali Canon is an enormous body of literature that includes all the Theravada Buddhist classical and commentary texts written in Pali. Known as the Tipitaka, the three baskets, these include three divisions known as Pitakas: the Vinayas, texts concerning the rules of conduct within the confines of the Buddhist community; the Suttas, discourses of central teachings from Buddha and his immediate disciples that are again divided into five collections, or nikayas; and the Abhidhamma consisting of core doctrinal principles reformulated into a more systematic framework. The Jatakas are a collection of stories of Buddha’s previous births, taken from the tenth book of the Khuddaka Nikaya found in the Sutta Pitaka. There are also many scholarly and public presentations of Buddhist principles and practices.
Textual Tradition without Buddhism
Various myths of Visnu incarnated as Buddha to delude the demons can be found within Hindu literature, such as the Visnu Purana and the Padma Purana.
Aesthetic Practice and Intellectual Paths of the Middle Way
Theoretically, meditation is the prime directive of Buddhist tradition and the textual and philosophical tradition is usually secondary. A life following the precepts of Buddha is recognized and that all ideology is empty of substance but to be used as ‘fingers pointing to the moon’. Ironically, the philosophical tradition is substantial, especially in its logistics but all doctrine and concepts are to be questioned and experienced for oneself rather than taken on belief.
Source Material: Textual Tradition
My research has been through both practice of meditation and study of the textual tradition, unfortunately mainly secondary sources. For this presentation, these have included:
Bullit, John. (Aug. 27, 2004) Tipitaka: The Pali Canon. Web page: Somerville, MA.
www.accesstoinsight.org/ca
Mitchell, Donald W. (2002) Buddhism: Introducing the Buddhist Experience. New
York: Oxford University.
O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger. (1975) Hindu Myths. London: Penguin.
Rahula, Walpola. (1974) What The Buddha Taught. New York: Grove Press.
Snelling, John. (2001) Thorsons Way of Buddhism. London: HarperCollins.
