He married and had a son. Prince Siddhartha was twenty-nine years old when his life changed. In carriage rides outside his palaces he first saw a sick person, then an old man, then a corpse. This shook him to the core of his being; he realized that his privileged status would not protect him from sickness, old age, and death.
The prince renounced his worldly life and began a spiritual quest. He sought teachers and punished his body with ascetic practices such as extreme, prolonged fasts.
It was believed that punishing the body was the way to elevate the mind and that the door to wisdom was found at the edge of death. However, after six years of this, the prince felt only frustration. Eventually, he realized that the path to peace was through mental discipline. From that time on, he would be known as the Buddha.
Stoneware sculpture of the Buddha attaining final transcendence, known as parinirvana , as he died. Photo courtesy The Met.
He spent the rest of his life teaching people how to realize enlightenment for themselves. He gave his first sermon in modern-day Sarnath, near Benares, and then walked from village to village, attracting disciples along the way. He founded the original order of Buddhist nuns and monks, many of whom became great teachers also.
Historians today generally agree there was a historical Buddha, and that he lived sometime in the 4th through 6th centuries BCE, give or take.
Wood with pigment. The buddha of the current age is the historical Siddhartha Gautama. Its practice has historically been most prominent in East and Southeast Asia, but its influence is growing in the West. Many Buddhist ideas and philosophies overlap with those of other faiths. In Pictures Ltd. Gautama was born into a wealthy family as a prince in present-day Nepal. Although he had an easy life, Gautama was moved by suffering in the world.
He decided to give up his lavish lifestyle and endure poverty. Thus, he sought a life without social indulgences but also without deprivation. After six years of searching, Buddhists believe Gautama found enlightenment while meditating under a Bodhi tree. He spent the rest of his life teaching others about how to achieve this spiritual state. When Gautama passed away around B. In the 3rd century B.
Buddhist monasteries were built, and missionary work was encouraged. Over the next few centuries, Buddhism began to spread beyond India.
The thoughts and philosophies of Buddhists became diverse, with some followers interpreting ideas differently than others. In the sixth century, the Huns invaded India and destroyed hundreds of Buddhist monasteries, but the intruders were eventually driven out of the country. Islam began to spread quickly in the region during the Middle Ages , forcing Buddhism into the background.
Today, many forms of Buddhism exist around the world. The three main types that represent specific geographical areas include:. If a man does a good deed or thinks a good thought, the effect upon him is to increase the tendencies to goodness in him. The understanding of kamma gives us power. The more we make the doctrine of kamma a part of our lives, the more power we gain, not only to direct our future, but also to help our fellow beings more effectively.
The practice of good kamma, when fully developed, will enable us to overcome evil and even to overcome kamma itself, thus bringing us to our goal, Nirvana. The principle of dependent origination and the law of kamma provide the background for understanding the nature of rebirth.
According to Buddhism, death is "the temporary end of a temporary phenomenon. Our physical forms are only the outward manifestations of the invisible kammic force. When the present form perishes, another form takes its place according to a good or bad volitional impulse—the kamma that was the most powerful—at the moment before death. At death the kammic force remains entirely undisturbed by the disintegration of the physical body, and the passing away of the present consciousness creates the conditions for the coming into being of a fresh body in another birth.
The stream of consciousness flows on like a river which is built up by its tributaries and dispenses its water to the countryside through which it passes. The continuity of flux at death is unbroken in point of time; there is no breach in the stream of consciousness, and therefore there is no room whatever for an intermediate stage between this life and the next. Rebirth takes place immediately. The present being, present existence, is conditioned by the way one faced circumstances in the last and in all past existences.
One's present character and circumstances are the result of all that one has been up to the present, but what one will be in the future depends on what one does now in the present. The true Buddhist regards death as a momentary incident between one life and its successor and views its approach with calmness.
His only concern is that his future should be such that the condition of that life may provide him with better opportunities for perfecting himself. Buddhism teaches that with the practice of meditation and concentration the memory can be trained. By meditation and mind culture one can acquire the power to see one's rebirth as a link, or a succession of links, in a chain of births; one can also acquire the power of looking back into one's previous lives.
Not only this, but Buddhism also teaches that with the attainment of Nirvana in this life itself, through enlightenment and true wisdom, one can reach the end of this chain of rebirths. Nirvana, the state to which all Buddhists aspire, is the cessation of desire and hence the end of suffering.
Nirvana in Sanskrit means "the blowing out. Among Westerners Nirvana is often thought of as a negative state, a kind of "nothingness. Nirvana is freedom, but not freedom from circumstance; it is freedom from the bonds with which we have bound ourselves to circumstance. That man is free who is strong enough to say, "Whatever comes I accept as best. Nirvana is the dying of the kammic force. The Buddhist ascends to Nirvana through many stages of the Middle Way, the path of wisdom, morality, and control.
There is not space enough here even to mention these phases or the various aspects of the regimen recommended by the Buddha in his vast scriptures; but it may be taken for granted that the life of the conscientious Buddhist is full and rich. Through the cycle of rebirths he ascends, he perfects himself, he conquers his cravings through wisdom and love.
Slowly the kammic force ebbs away, the flame dies down. At the root of man's trouble is his primal state of ignorance. From ignorance comes desire, which sets the kammic force in motion. Hence the way to Nirvana lies through knowledge, and we come again full circle to Dhamma, the Buddha's teachings.
For in Dhamma, as truth, lies release from ignorance and desire and perpetual change, and the Buddha has shown us the way to truth. What, then, is the meaning of Buddhism? Ultimately Buddhism, although not strictly speaking a religion, is a systematic exercise in spirituality, certainly one of the greatest ever conceived. It offers the individual a means by which he may fulfill himself through understanding, reaching eventually the plane of the supraperson on which both the self and self-knowledge are no longer useful.
Meister Eckhart, the great Christian mystic, said: "The kingdom of God is for none but the thoroughly dead. And some Buddhists believe Gautama Buddha lived from B.
But virtually all scholars believe Siddhartha Gautama was born in Lumbini in present-day Nepal. He belonged to a large clan called the Shakyas.
In , archaeologists working in Lumbini found evidence of a tree shrine that predated other Buddhist shrines by some years, providing new evidence that Buddha was probably born in the 6th century B. Siddhartha "he who achieves his aim" Gautama grew up the son of a ruler of the Shakya clan.
His mother died seven days after giving birth. A holy man, however, prophesied great things for the young Siddhartha: He would either be a great king or military leader or he would be a great spiritual leader. To protect his son from the miseries and suffering of the world, Siddhartha's father raised him in opulence in a palace built just for the boy and sheltered him from knowledge of religion, human hardship and the outside world.
According to legend, he married at the age of 16 and had a son soon thereafter, but Siddhartha's life of worldly seclusion continued for another 13 years. The prince reached adulthood with little experience of the world outside the palace walls, but one day he ventured out with a charioteer and was quickly confronted with the realities of human frailty: He saw a very old man, and Siddhartha's charioteer explained that all people grow old.
Questions about all he had not experienced led him to take more journeys of exploration, and on these subsequent trips he encountered a diseased man, a decaying corpse and an ascetic. The charioteer explained that the ascetic had renounced the world to seek release from the human fear of death and suffering.
Siddhartha was overcome by these sights, and the next day, at age 29, he left his kingdom, his wife and his son to follow a more spiritual path, determined to find a way to relieve the universal suffering that he now understood to be one of the defining traits of humanity. For the next six years, Siddhartha lived an ascetic life, studying and meditating using the words of various religious teachers as his guide.
He practiced his new way of life with a group of five ascetics, and his dedication to his quest was so stunning that the five ascetics became Siddhartha's followers. When answers to his questions did not appear, however, he redoubled his efforts, enduring pain, fasting nearly to starvation and refusing water.
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