Buddha, The Light Of Asia

              Buddha, The Light Of Asia

         YOU SPOT the temple from afar. Its 51-metre-high tower dominates the sprawling Indian plain that has been cultivated by poor peasants through the ages. It was here in Bodh Gaya, under a spreading Bo tree, that the Lord Buddha attained Enlightenment 25 centuries ago.

      Buddha-Siddhartha Gautama-speaks to us all, whatever our faith, with the universal values of his teachings: his wisdom, his compassion, his humanity. Today, Buddhist communities exist in many Western countries. But the vast majority of the world's 261 million Buddhists still live in Asia.

     Buddha bequeathed to writings to posterity His sayings and the highlights of this life were passed on orally, not to be recorded until several centuries after his death around 480BC. Nevertheless, sifting all the evidence, scholars have isolated a core of facts about his life.

    Buddha's father ruled a rustic kingdom just north of India's border, in the verdant Himalayan foot-hills of present day Nepal. His mother, Maya, died a week after his birth. Named Siddhartha "Expectancy Fulfilled" the boy was brought up as a prince in his father's palace in the fortress capital of Kapilavastu. He learnt to ride and hunt, read scriptures and worship the old Hindu gods. He had a noble bearing and precocious mind, as well as an uncommon prowess with a heavy bow. A frothy blend of fact and legend covers his youth. We read of Oriental luxury, different pleasure domes for every season, a round of physical delights.

      Siddhartha married and was happy. But after his wife had given birth to their son, the prince rose in the middle of the night, took one last wistful look at his wife and child, and slipped away. According to legend, he mounted his horse, Kanthaka, and rode into the night with his groom holding on to the horse's tail. When he sent both horse and groom back, the horse died of a broken heart.

      What prompted this "Great Renunciation" at the age of 29? Roving about the outskirts of his father's park, the prince had seen a helpless old man, a dead man and a holy man. What caused man's condition of suffering and grief, he wondered. How could man overcome it? Then he recalled that the holy man, although clothed in rags and carrying a beggar's bowl, had worn an expresson of remarkable peace and serenity. Perhaps, he thought, the first step to discovering the answers was to renounce all material wealth and pleasure.

       So the runaway wandered through northern India as a homeless beggar, feeding on scraps collected in his begging bowl, seeking determinedly to come to grips with the true meaning of existence.

       First, he studied with two famous teachers of Hindu scripture. He then fell in with five ascetic monks who practised self-mortification. Following their example, he starved himself: "When I touched my belly I could feel my spine". Often, he was too weak to stand up. Worse, he made no progress in his search.

       Leaving the monks, Siddhartha made his way to the banks of a clear river, near today's Bodh Gaya in Bihar. Having bathed in the refreshing waters, he gratefully accepted a bowl of sweetened rice from a peasant girl. Extremes like gluttony and fasting, his common sense now told him, were equally pernicious. Henceforth he would follow the "Middle Way" in all things.

      And so we find Siddhartha, six years after leaving home, sitting under the Bo tree, legs folded under him, immobile for seven days and nights. Mara, the Evil One, we read, surfaced to tempt him, parading a bevy of bewitching women to arouse him, and next assaulting him with monsters from the bowels of hell.

       The lonely figure did not stir. It was a symbolic contest, in which Siddhartha triumphed over evil. Whatever legend may have added, the seeker surely went through a momentous crisis that marked the end of his search. He had seen the light, and ever after was known as Buddha, "the Enlightened One".

      Buddha carried his new-found knowledge to Benares (now-Varanasi), the throbbing heart of Hindu religious worship. He found his five hermit friends in a deer park just outside the town. The five monks fell on their knees when they saw his radiant figure and with them as his audience, Buddha delivered his most famous sermon, setting forth "Four Noble Truths".

       The first truth is that life is painful. The second, that pain is caused by a "constant craving for sensual delights, pleasure, material things". The third, that pain will cease when a person is emancipated from desire. The fourth prescribes a "way that leads to the cessation of pain. It is the noble eight-fold path: namely right views, right intention, right speech, right action, right living, right effort, right thinking, right concentration."

       For the next 45 years, Buddha ranged through north-east India, elaborating on his deer-park sermon addressing multitudes, converting thousands, acknowledged as the living light He was primarily a moral teacher. It is to ourselves, Buddha insists, that we must look in order to be saved. "It is you who must make the effort!" he repeated again and again.

     "All we are is the result of our thoughts. If we speak or act with evil in our mind, pain follows us as a wheel follows the hoof of the beast that draws the cart. If we speak or act with a pure heart, bliss follows us like our shadow" Abiding by the Noble Truths means victory over all evil motives: abstentation from greed, lies and slander, patience and compassion with all creatures.

      The time-honoured Hindu belief is that our soul, on our death, enters another body-human or animal. According to legend, it was Buddha himself who first traced a picture of the Wheel of Life. Between the spokes he showed the categories of existence-animals, human beings in various stages of beatitude and doom. All creatures, Buddha taught, are fettered to the turning Wheel, which jolts us from existence to existence. But unlike the Hindu faith, Buddha held out the hope of escape for those who walk the path. Freed from the prison of rebirth, with its attendant pain, they enter into Nirvana, that knows no craving, no delusion, no death.

      The spiritual life, especially under the guidance of so lovable a teacher, appealed to many, and reports of mass conversions probably rest on fact. Often his monks returned from preaching tours bringing with them streams of applicants. During a visit to his home, Kapilavastu-where Buddha begged in the streets and where his father did obeisance to him-a man from every family in the kingdom, 80,000 in all, enlisted in his ranks.

      Each follower solemnly vowed chastity and poverty. They were to keep no personal possessions except thread and needle, a begging bowl, a rosary and a razor with which to shave their heads in token of humility. They were to own a single yellow robe made from discarded rags-a rule amended to "three robes" after a cold night during which Buddha had to put on extra clothing.

       Around this "mob of beggars" there grew a Buddhist lay community of families and individual pursuing normal lives. Among his lay disciples was King Bimbisara, ruler of one of India's four main kingdoms. The king presented Buddha with a bamboo grove-today a memorial park at Rajgir, north-east of Bodh Gaya in which a rude shelter provided protection from the monsoon rains. Other patrons followed the king's example, and his lay disciples erected houses, which later became monasteries, on these lands.

       Though Buddha usually spent the rainy seasons in one of his monasteries, he was happiest outdoors, especially in the forest. The noise bothered him. Often he would withdraw for periods to some lonely spot, allowing but one monk to bring him food. His calm and immutable serenity were constantly replenished by meditation.

       Buddha had a strong affinity with creatures of the wild. There are stories of a monkey bringing him a honeycomb, and of a venomous snake snuggling into his begging bowl. He drank his spring and river water through a filter and told his monks to do the same, lest they imbibe some minute water creature. When a jealous relative let loose a killer elephant against him, Buddha met the ferocious beast head-on, and quietly subdued it with his gentle voice. No wonder that to his contemporaries, he seemed superhuman.

       Buddha started out on his final journey at the age of 80. Walking across the plain, he stopped to preach in wayside villages. A well-intentioned blacksmith in whose mango grove he rested served him a meal, and Buddha was seized with sharp pain and bleeding.

         He staggered on to Kusinara (today's Kasia), and there asked his devoted attendant Ananda to prepare a bed for him between two trees. As Buddha lay down on the right side under the trees, which legend has it, were blooming out of season, his body shone like burnished gold. He ordered a disciple who was fanning him to step aside so he could get a better view of the celestial host who had approached to welcome him. "Strive earnestly!" he said - and passed into Nirvana.

       At Kasia, in a shrine set in a grassy plot patrolled by wise old monkeys, there is a six-metre recumbent figure of the dormant Buddha, covered with gold cloth to his neck. Pilgrims leave small bunches of fresh flowers. A beatific peace hangs over this last halt of Buddha's way - the peace of an expectancy fulfilled.