The History of Buddhism and Buddhist Philosophy

Buddhism

“First establish yourself in the way, then teach, and so defeat sorrow.”[1]

- The Buddha

The tradition of Buddhism was founded by a prince named Siddhartha who was born in Northern India and lived from 563-483 B.C. At the time of Prince Siddhartha’s birth, India was primarily practicing what now is called Hinduism. The great epoch stories of the Ramayana and the Bhagavad-Gita had already been recorded thousands of years previously. Thus the words of Rama and Krishna and the practice of meditation flourished throughout the land of India that was enjoying a golden age.

An astrologer working for Prince Siddhartha’s parents foretold of the Prince’s mystical destiny before his birth. Because the parents of the unborn prince wanted their child to be an heir to the thrown and not a wandering mystic, they decided to shelter the young prince in the palace and hide from him the ugliness of the world. This strategy, they hoped, would insure that the young Siddhartha would remain uninterested in religious life and oblivious to the suffering of humanity.

As luck would have it, one day Prince Siddhartha went traveling out and about his kingdom and stumbled across a sick old beggar. This led the young prince to ponder the concepts of suffering and death. After a time, he realized that to seek a solution to the problem of suffering and death was what he wanted to devote his life to. Thus, the future Buddha decided to forsake his lands and leave the kingdom of his ancestors to lead the life of a wandering sadu practicing the arts of astheticitism.

In the Buddha’s time, the practice of asceticism was very popular. In asceticism, a sadu would perform physical austerities such as fasting, extreme positions in Hatha Yoga, or even feats like staring into the sun for hours. Weakening the physical body, the Indian Occultists had discovered, would bring about a variety of mystical experiences. The body was thought to be unimportant, nothing more than an imaginary covering from Maya – the world illusion, and only containing impurities comprised of the three gunas which obscured the true self, the Atman.

For six years the future Buddha practiced with his fellow wandering ascetics - and although he had many mystical experiences, the once-prince Siddhartha eventually fell into a state of exhaustion and began to reason:

I must take steps to increase the strength of this body. ..Inward calm cannot be maintained unless physical strength is constantly and intelligently replenished. Only if the body is reasonably nourished can undue strain on the mind be avoided. When the mind is free from strain and is serene, then the faculty of transic concentration can arise in it…We can then win the dharmas which finally allow us to gain that highest state…without the proper nourishment this procedure is quite impossible.[2]

The future Buddha thus decided to break with his teachers and fellow sadus, and abandon the path of aestheticism. In his search for nourishment he found himself under a Bodhi Tree and in the company of a young maiden. The maiden saw the emaciated Siddhartha and begged him to have some rice-milk. Siddhartha accepted her offer. After he became strong again Siddhartha sat down to meditate and entered into a deep meditative state - Samadhi. Here he experienced the Four Watches of the Night and went through a transformation - what he later described as liberation.

Buddha means the liberated one. So after the young prince Siddhartha attained enlightenment and thus entered into the meditative state of Nirvikalpa Samadhi - he called himself the Buddha. Yet what had the Buddha been liberated from? The answer to this question is contained at the foundation of the Buddha’s philosophy, his Four Noble Truths. These four truths are the only assumptions that a Buddhist ever need make:

1. All of Life Contains Suffering – The first noble truth is a tad negative isn’t it? Yet it contains an answer the Buddha would give us to the above question: What is the Buddha liberated from? The Buddha is said to be jiva-mukta, liberated while living, because the Buddha has gone beyond the inherent suffering contained in all of life. The first noble truth simply states that life is not perfect…life contains sickness, sadness, suffering and death.

2. The Cause of Suffering is Attachment to Desires – The second noble truth is scientific in nature. The Buddha has just put forth a simple premise that life contains suffering. Now the Buddha is defining the cause for this suffering. According to the Buddha, our attachment to desire causes suffering. The Buddha does not distinguish between physical, emotional, or spiritual pain. Suffering always exists, according to the Buddha, only because one is attached to a particular desire. That desire could be as simple as the desire to live or avoid pain or as complex as a subtle psychological state that causes discomfort

3. There Exists a State beyond Suffering – The third truth is again another premise. The Buddha has posited that life contains suffering; he has also posited its cause; now the Buddha tells us the good news, that there is a state beyond suffering which he refers to as Nirvana. Nirvana loosely translates to extinction of the flame. What is the flame? The flame is the self, the Atman. Nirvana is going beyond the self, and thus with no self to experience suffering, we have magically eliminated suffering and realized this third truth. To actually live and realize this Truth is the final goal of all Buddhism.

4. The Eightfold Path Leads You to Liberation – Just as the second truth explained the cause of the first truth, this fourth truth explains the cause of the third truth, the entrance into nirvana. And what causes an individual to go beyond suffering and enter into the state of nirvana? For the Buddha it is following the Eightfold Path. This path contains eight ways of living and practicing that the Buddha felt would most likely cause enlightenment for his students. In a more modern sense, Rama has referred to this fourth and very important truth of Buddhism as “Mediation is the Pathway to Enlightenment.”[3] This means that what causes Enlightenment is bringing a meditative state into every aspect of your life. The Buddha sought to bring this meditative perspective into the life of his students by defining the Eightfold Path.

The Buddha lived for many years after his enlightenment and roamed India with the monks that chose to follow him. He gave many more discourses and refined his philosophy of liberation and the doctrine of no-self. Was the Buddha a guru? Not in the traditional sense. The Buddha believed that nothing could replace individual effort in the quest for enlightenment: “When I pulled out sorrow’s shaft, I showed you the way…It is you who must make the effort. The masters only point the way…”[4]

The Buddha actually upset the religious establishment of India in the same way that Christ later did in his time. The Buddha’s doctrine of an-atman, no self, offended many traditional religious groups of the time. The Buddha believed that the religious pundits of India, along with much of the mystical practice that flourished during his time, were only a distraction on the pathway to liberation. The Buddha taught to simply acknowledge the inherent suffering of life and then to find a way beyond that suffering. He felt that philosophy, religion, and even magic were, for the most part, a waste of time – only another attachment in one’s life.

Buddhism is not necessarily passive. The Buddha was not advocating simple self-reflection and a rationalization for all injustice in the world. Cornerstone to Buddhism is the ideal of the Bodhisattva Vow. When a Buddhist monk takes this vow, he or she, promises not to enter into Nirvana until all sentient beings are assisted in their quest for liberation first. The Bodhisattva vow is the karma yoga of Buddhism, the belief that helping others is the highest pathway and the quickest road towards liberation.

When the Buddha became old and was dying, he asked his students not to make statues of him. He felt that a religion revolving around the Buddha would only be a distraction from the primary task of attaining liberation. His goal in life was not to form a religion but to find a pathway beyond suffering that others could follow. When he died he had these final words for his students: “work diligently towards your own liberation”.

For more on American Buddhism visit: www.ramaquotes.com