Buddhism: Its Essence and Development - Assignment Example

BUDDHISM Buddhism began with a man, Siddhartha, born in 566 B.C.E. whose sole intention was to put an end to all the suffering in the world. He wasnamed Buddha as a result of his answer to people's question, "What are you" To this, the young man replied, "I am awake". And thus his title 'Buddha', the meaning of which in Sanskrit is 'to wake up'; to wake up to full consciousness of oneness with other beings and the universe. Nirvana is the word the Buddha used to name life's goal as he saw it. It is the highest destiny of the human spirit and its literal meaning is 'extinction', but what is to be extinguished are the boundaries of the finite self and the three poisons that feed that self - greed, hate and delusion. It does not follow that what is left will be nothing; what is left is that boundless life itself. A series of attributes, derived from Buddhist texts, that apply to Nirvana are that it is permanent, stable, imperishable, immovable, ageless, deathless and unborn, that it is power, bliss and happiness, the secure refuge, the shelter, and the place of unassailable safety; that it is the real truth and the supreme reality, it is the supreme goal and the one and only consummation of our life, the eternal, hidden and incomprehensible peace. When we approach Buddhist history, what strikes us immediately is that it splits. The Buddha dies, and before the century is out, the seeds of schism have been sown. One group took as its motto the Buddha's valedictory, "Be lamps unto yourselves; work out your salvation with diligence." They insisted that Buddhism was a full-time job; those who made nirvana their central object would have to give up the world and become monks as the Buddha himself had done. The other group held that compassion is the more important feature of enlightenment, arguing that human beings are more social than individual, and love is the greatest thing in the world. This group, pointing to its doctrine of cosmic help and its ampler regard for laypeople, claimed to be Buddhism for the masses. Accordingly it preempted the name Mahayana meaning 'Big Raft', the raft that would carry people across life's sea to shores of enlightenment. The former group preferred to call its Buddhism Theravada, the 'Way of the Elders'. The differences between the two groups can be summarized as follows: (1) For Theravada Buddhism progress is up to the individual. For Mahayanists the fate of the individual is linked to that of all life. (2) Theravada holds that humanity is on its own in the universe. God exists, but is of no help in winning liberation. For Mahayana, in contrast, grace is a fact. We can be at peace because a boundless power draws everything to its appointed goal. (3) In Theravada Buddhism the prime attribute of enlightenment is wisdom (bodhi), whereas Mahayana gave priority to compassion (karuna) over wisdom. (4) The Theravada community has traditionally had a monastic bias; the monks and nuns are isolated from the society except that they depend on local people for the one daily meal that is put into their begging bowls. The Mahayana community has sought to avoid spiritually privileging monks over laypeople. Even its priests usually marry, and they are expected to make service to the laity their primary concern. Theravada sought to incarnate a feature of Buddha's teachings that has not thus far been mentioned - his vision of an entire society that was founded, like a tripod, on the monarchy, the monastic community, and the laity, each with responsibilities to the other two and meriting services from them in return. Theravada remained faithful to its founder's vision of a Buddhist civilization and Mahayana Buddhism became a religion that is a part of civilizations whose social foundations had already been laid. The doctrinal differences between Theravada and Mahayana appear to have softened as the centuries have gone by. However, South Asian countries that remain to this day Theravadin are Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia whereas China, Korea, Japan and Tibet are places where the Mahayanists are more in number. Theravada Buddhism, as we have seen, is a more strict form of Buddhism in comparison to Mahayana. Theravadin monks are subject to a set of rules and non-compliance of those rules can even result in their expulsion from the community. Poverty, celibacy and inoffensiveness are the three main essentials of monastic life. A monk possesses almost no private property at all. He is allowed to have his robes, an alms bowl, a needle, a rosary, a razor to shave, and a filter to remove small organisms from the drinking water. Originally, the dress consisted of rags which were taken from the rubbish heaps in the villages, and which were stitched together and dyed a uniform saffron color. Later on the cloth for the robes was usually donated by the faithful. As a matter of fact, a monk should really rely on begging for all his needs. A number of monks, who wanted to lead a particularly strict life, conformed to this rule whereas others have accepted invitations into the houses of the faithful. The Mahayana largely abandoned the practice of begging whereas Theravada even now believes that the practice of begging gives ample opportunities to watch well over the body, control the senses and to repress thoughts. The absence of ties, the great independence, and the ability to move around freely is considered as the greatest advantages of begging. Compared to the life of the wandering monk, the home life of the householder seems cramped and stuffy. Celibacy is another cornerstone of the monastic life. There are innumerable and meticulous rules hedged in the conduct of monks towards the women they meet on their alms rounds or the nuns they have to instruct. Celibacy has been considered essential due to the belief that attachment with women would be fatal to a man's freedom. Yet another essential practice expected out of a monk is inoffensiveness and non-violence. The Buddha's preaching was that we should cultivate our emotions so that we feel with others as if they were ourselves. If we allow the virtues of compassion to grow in us, it will not occur to us to harm anyone else, any more than we willingly harm ourselves. Due to this rule of non-violence, a monk would not eat meat. However, Monastic discipline would be undermined if monks would start to pick and choose the food in their begging bowl. In consequence, a compromise has been arrived at, and in actual practice, Buddhists who take their religion seriously, avoid eating meat unless compelled to do so. (Conze Edward. (1951). Buddhism: its essence and development) Theravadins believe that their community has but two central tasks, the 'insight task' (the work of meditation called vipassana) and the 'book task' (learning the preaching informed by the body of literature called Pali Canon). Less than a year after the Buddha's death, hundreds of monks gathered near the town of Rajagriha to recite and verify his teachings. At this First Buddhist Council, Ananda, the Buddha's shadow and secretary for virtually his entire forty five year teaching career, was the first to speak. The result was the Sutta Pitaka meaning 'basket of discourses'. Another monk, Upali, recited the entire code of rules the Buddha had enacted to guide the conduct of monks and nuns. The result was the Vinaya Pitaka, the 'basket of discipline'. These two 'baskets' of teachings were memorized by others and passed down orally for several centuries. Then a third one called Abhidhamma was created which contained summaries and systematized lists of the teachings found in the discourses. The entire canon was finally written down around 100 B.C.E. using the language called Pali. An interesting text that came into existence in and around this period is the Dhammapada. In fact, Dhammapada is a part of Pali Canon's Sutta Pitaka, but even to this day, this is one of the most beloved and accessible texts in Buddhism containing 422 verses of Buddha's teachings. Dhammapada is a carefully constructed work imbued with both spiritual and literary values. The virtue of the Dhamapada is that it beautifully, concisely and viscerally gives the reader a sense of the route a person travels as he or she advances toward realization of his or her inherent perfection. Each new topic unfolds in its proper sequence and rhythm, according to what the reader has already absorbed and what remains to be presented. (Maguire Jack. (2002). Dhammapada Annotated & Explained) The form of mental cultivation practiced by Theravada Buddhists has become generally known as Vipassana, roughly translated as 'insight' or 'penetrative seeing'. Theravadins begin the mind shaping work of vipassana with an effort to increase their capacity for prolonged concentration. At the outset of a typical training period, a meditator is asked to fix his/her attention on a single object, most commonly, the breath. A practitioner might work with this instruction hour upon hour for a number of days. The Pali term for this concentration training is samatha meaning 'tranquility'. Samatha is the basic Buddhist meditation practice and nearly every lineage recommends beginning with some form of it. In the Theravada tradition, however, samatha is not an end in itself, but a gateway to further meditative work. Without some measure of samatha, further steps are impossible. With it, however, two alternative possibilities open up - Jhana (deep absorptions) and Vipassana. Jhanas are profound states of absorption that can be induced by calming the mind. But if jhanas are clung to they can be harmful. Getting stuck in a superconscious state without understanding the necessity of developing insight is for Buddhism not a blessing but an unmitigated disaster. Contemporary Theravadin teachers do not particularly encourage them, and it is widely believed that the jhanas are neither sufficient nor necessary conditions for liberation. The most productive use of samatha, that is mind calming concentration, is not as a stepping stone to the jhanas, but as a platform for vipassana. In the discourse on the Arousings of Mindfulness, a student's samatha fortified awareness is directed towards observing one or more of four fields for penetrative seeing or vipassana. The first field is simply referred to as Kaya (body). The discourse provides six examples of body mindfulness: (1) Mindfulness of breathing (2) Mindfulness of basic body postures (3) Mindfulness of constant change in body activity (4) Mindfulness of the loathsomeness of the body (involves understanding the fact that the body is in many ways a stinking sack of garbage: hair, nails, blood, bile, pus, mucus, sweat, fat, urine and so on) (5) Mindfulness of the material elements (earth, air, water, fire) of which the body is composed. (6) Mindfulness of the inevitability of the decay of the body. The second field is the field of Vedana (body sensations). The meditator is asked to be closely and steadfastly attentive to the physical sensations that arise at successive moments in various parts of the body, noticing whether they are pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. The point is not to seek one experience over another, but simply to be aware of, without reacting, what is actually occurring at increasingly subtle levels of body sensation. The third field is the mind or what might be called moods. The meditator is asked to be attentive to whether the mind at the moment is scattered or concentrated, buoyant or heavy, turbulent or calm, worried or confident, confused or clear and so on. Again, the aim is to only notice what mental qualities are present and that sooner or later they change. The fourth field is mind objects, that is, thoughts. With mindfulness practice well under way, it will help to see the close fit between what one is actually experiencing and the path's major doctrines. What is to be penetratively seen again and again, until it sinks into one's marrow, is that all physical and mental events display the three marks of existence - impermanence, dissatisfaction and lack of self-existence. The Buddha listed three marks of existence as impermanence (anicca), dissatisfaction/suffering (dukkha) and the absence of independent existence (anatta). The concept of impermanence stated that nothing in nature is identical with what it was the moment before; in this the Buddha was close to modern science, which has discovered that the relatively stable objects of the macro world derive from particles that are so ephemeral that they barely exist. The most startling thing the Buddha said through the doctrine of anatta is that the human self has no soul. However, this definition of anatta is correct but incomplete. The Buddha also used anatta to characterize things no one ever would have claimed Buddha said, "All things (not only persons) are without a self." The crux of the Buddha's Awakening was the discovery of dependent arising: every thing and every process arises in dependence upon countless other things and processes. Buddhists often convey this insight with the image of Indra's Net, a cosmic web laced with jewels at every intersection. Each jewel reflects the others, together with all the reflections in the others. In the deepest analysis, each jewel is but the reflection of other reflections. Likewise, every thing and every person in the world is like every jewel in Indra's net, empty of own being because of the dependent arising. The final aspect of vipassana meditation is that its practice requires observing one's own physical and mental processes with a certain amount of detached objectivity. To the casual observer this is bound to appear emotionless. Yet the truth is that Buddhism meditation is very much concerned with our feelings and emotions. The Buddha was not out to suppress them, but to refine them. The path of meditation ends not in numbness, but in emotions that produce the purest and most durable forms of human happiness. Meditation, it turns out, is training in emotional intelligence, as the phrase now has it. (Smith & Novak. (2003). Buddhism) To summarize, what one needs to realize about Buddhism is that it is not a 'religion of books', like Judaism, Christianity or Islam, all of which are based on a primary body of scriptures. Instead, Buddhism is a religion of individual practice and enlightenment, aided by direction from a living teacher. This can be known by looking into the life led by a monk. A typical day of a monk begins at 3:00am and the monks restrict their daily activities to chanting, meditating, cleaning the premises, having their share of food, and going through Dhamma teachings with a little free time just before going to bed at 10:00pm. In addition to this, monks may involve themselves in activities such as sanctification of new homes and businesses and teaching novice monks and laypeople. All in all, practice of Buddhism demands extreme discipline, but at the same time, it is one of the most divine paths to enlightenment. Bibliography Huston Smith and Philip Novak. (2003). Buddhism. New York, Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., P.51, 53, 54, 57, 61, 63-75 Edward Conze. (1951). Buddhism: its essence and development. Bruno Cassirer Limited, Oxford. P. 54-62 Jack Maguire. (2002). Dhammapada Annotated & Explained. Woodstock, Vermont, Skylight Paths Publishing. Read More