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Feature Articles (Archived) - BUDDHA and HIS TEACHINGS |
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THE BODHISATTVA
Other prophets and sages have served a nation, a people, a race, or a class. Humanity itself was Buddha’s passion: nay, human nature itself. It was the sorrows of others that grieved and appalled him, not his own. He yearned to save all the unknown, suffering souls of the world who might have no help but for him. It was this terrible yearning to save humanity, to feel its eternal misery as his own misery, year after year, lifetime after lifetime that has immortalized him, made him an eternal treasure in the memory of the human race. His first Hindu teachers taught him the path of liberation. But how to help humanity, how to end suffering, and overcome sorrow—this was his quest, not his personal liberation. He hungered to know the secret of life so that he could give it to others, not keep it for himself. Not his own salvation but others'—that was his mission. Buddha accepted from the Hindu tradition the concepts of reincarnation and karma, the unreality of the world, and the impermanence of sense-life. He added his own unique personification of the following ideals: The Four Noble Truths, Reverence for Life, Equality of Being. He eschewed metaphysics, discussions of God, the after-life, etc. He said they did not edify, meaning they are not instructive or helpful. Buddha broke away from the traditional idea of the Self2 in Hinduism in order to create a new path for humanity. He succeeded and gave the world another option that emphasizes ethics and morals—practicality only—for those not captured by philosophy, who want to be concerned with the immediate problems that face us in the struggle to realize truth.
The heart of his message: be perfectly, utterly unselfish. From this flows
the practice of charity, compassion and service. His great contribution
was
as
an embodiment of this message and exemplar of moral purity, and ethical
idealism.
1.
In Mahayana Buddhism, a deity or being that has attained nirvana but
remains in the human world to help others.
See
also: Words of Wisdom:
Buddha and
BUDDHA: THE COMPASSIONATE ONE.
BUDDHA: the
Compassionate
one It was the first full moon day in May when Buddha was born, reached enlightenment and left his mortal body. We are honoring this supreme exemplar of compassion and service with the following tribute. Ramakrishna remarked that to see God in others and as others was the last word in spiritual life. So if we have difficulty doing that―we're not alone. It is the last word!
Only a profound mystical experience―many
of them―can
bring us to that sta We know of saints and others who have experienced God, but who has agonized over the evils that beset mankind as Buddha did? His mind was transformed by an unabating sorrow for humanity. It is almost selfish to speak of mystical experiences when confronted by such unmatched compassion. It is true, spiritual experience gave him his Nirvana, his Four Noble Truths, his Philosophy of Life, the discovery of the innermost workings of the mind and karma. All this would have been veiled from him had he not known his mystical experience under the Bodhi tree. But it is not his philosophy so much as his personality that has captured the imagination of the world. A personality utterly rooted in a feeling of oneness with all living things. He would not even talk about his Experience after it had come―so immersed was he in the consciousness of the unity of all life.
Far more than his philosophy, what
immortalized Buddha was his life of purity and love, which exemplified renunciation, self-sacrifice and
service in his quest for Truth and the end of all suffering. For more on this subject, see also The Boddhisattva, and Words of Wisdom: Buddha.
mostly, we Talk toO much - thoughts on Right SpEeCh By Paul Hourihan, edited by Anna Hourihan from Course Lecture Transcripts This month we’re honoring the birth of the great Buddha with an article on Right Speech, one of the steps in his Eightfold Path.
Buddha, on that famous full-moon night in May, plunged into the depths of
his being and persisted in his determination to either die or gain
illumination. He emerged with the Four Noble Truths* and then
Buddha discovered the two great secrets of life: that our egocentric cravings cause all our suffering and unhappiness—and not, as we tend to believe, society or other people. The other secret was that behind the ego, behind self will, is the Buddha self, is the Great Self. How, then, to break the hold of this egocentric craving that is causing our suffering? Buddha’s revelation was the Eightfold Path. Right Speech is the third point in the Eightfold Path.
Right Speech What is the effect of our speech and where do we notice it? Its effect is on the mind. The mind is the great witness. The mind is the register of everything we do and say and think—it’s a super computer. If we speak idly or gossip, the mind reacts and registers this as what our life is like—kind of trivial and idle. When someone presents a serious idea to that mind that talks a lot or gossips, it doesn't take it well and tends to shrug it off. So these people cannot receive serious ideas and, sadly, there is no way they can reach enlightenment. If they're lucky they may find some way to stay out of trouble. Liberation requires a serious and steady mind. If the mind is not steady, it cannot receive ideas that will free us. Our ideas precede the life, hence, the purpose of study and spiritual gatherings. They have their place. If we don't have a relatively serious mind, we can’t take in these thoughts when they come to us. It’s like water and oil: they don't mix. Idle speech and gossip trivializes the sacred mind. It's sacred because it's with the mind that someday we’ll realize the Truth. So the mind is sacred and speech is sacred too.
We need to be more aware of this. But how can we be more aware when we're
caught up talking and before we know it we're babbling? If we meditate,
then through meditation we'll be able to control this. But meditation is not a
panacea, we still have to make efforts outside of the meditation chamber
to live right. However, without meditation, our speech goes on just the way it
always has. If we've been gossips, we'll continue to be gossips. We won't
have that check or awareness developed. So meditation is absolutely the
thing to learn and through it we can try to make some modifications so
that increasingly we will reflect the seriousness and sanctity of our
minds.
* The Four Noble Truths
are: See also The Boddhisattva, BUDDHA: THE COMPASSIONATE ONE, and Words of Wisdom: Buddha. By Paul Hourihan edited by Anna Hourihan from Course Lecture Transcripts Since we’re occupied with work for so many hours each day, Right Livelihood, part of Buddha’s Eightfold Path, is very important to our spiritual progress and is the subject of this essay. Right Livelihood is also translated as Right Occupation. It's natural at first to expect something from work in the way of attention, promotion, recognition, applause, or admiration. But it’s the ego, the creaturely part of us that is motivating us and that wants those things and not the higher self or soul. When we’re acting from this egocentric craving, we don’t gain spiritually. We all do it that way, but it's not an enlightened way and consequently we write off, in a spiritual sense, all those hours of work. It’s only if we're able to work selflessly, that is, not expecting anything in return that we do gain spiritually. When we work in the normal manner expecting something for our effort, it seems that nothing happens to us spiritually, but in fact we lose ground. In life itself, we’re either advancing or regressing; there's no such thing as a vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum. This is the case for spiritual nature also. So unless we act in such a way that the soul, the higher self, benefits we’re tending to feed the ego—it’s always one or the other. Naturally, for the spiritual person some occupations are better than others. Some of the less desirable ones are in law, business, politics, and commission selling. Although they may be respectable fields, the difficulty is that in each of these we are manipulating people and the ego is the dominant factor in our success. Immanuel Kant, the philosopher, stated that we should treat everyone as an end in himself or herself and not as a means to an end because everyone is an end in themselves. We all have the Divine within us. If we treat people as a means to an end, we’ll have missed the point. And this is what the politician, the lawyer, the person in business does and that's why they're often charming because they want our vote or our money. If for some reason we balk them or frustrate them in their desire, they're not charming anymore. Immediately they're cold to us and they don't like us. So the charm is not real charm and so with other similar occupations. These occupations aren’t bad for everyone. We need people to fill these functions, but they are more appropriate for those who aren’t interested in a spiritual outlook. There are some occupations that are good in themselves such as teaching, nursing, doctoring and so forth—although not absolutely—nothing is absolute; everything is relative. It's our attitude, not the thing in itself that matters. Even an ideal occupation in itself is not enough. Nurses and doctors after a while tend to become mechanical and tend to lose the spiritual outlook that would bulwark them against all the misery and the endless suffering, sickness and death they encounter. We can’t blame them because they're so overwhelmed in a way and finally they become almost like machines, so that a lot of the potential good is lost. So nothing can help us in itself; we have to have the right attitude. Even humanitarian work must be done in a way so that in the course of helping others the ego is diminished—that's the purpose of it. The secret of work then is to act in such a way that our soul, our higher self, benefits and as a result the ego is slowly killed. How can we do that since it's so unnatural, so against the grain? We can't unless we meditate, unless we turn deep within especially in the morning before the day and its activities get a hold of us. Then we may get a sense of how we want to live that day and slowly we build up a momentum for the future. Buddha’s life and teachings, as well as Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, and other luminaries help us by providing another angle of approach, another motivation for our work and livelihood.
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te.
But Buddha acted on that prescription
before his enlightenment. He saw everyone with such empathy and
fellow feeling that he didn't need a mystical experience to fulfill
Ramakrishna's statement. We see that Buddha before his enlightenment
was far superior to almost any one else after theirs. 
