II know very little of what Siddhartha Gautama (hereinafter, The Buddha) said/preached to his disciple, and littler still of how he came to the so-called Three Jewels. With that implicit disclaimer I can go on to criticize what The Buddha preached and perhaps what his followers heard and how that religion (hereinafter called Buddhism) was established.
When
The Buddha returned to visit his erstwhile cohorts in the forest after being
enlightened, and when the latter saw a kind of serenity and peacefulness they
had never seen in anyone’s face earlier, they felt and knew that their friend
has been changed.
They
must have been curious not only about the change, but also about how it may
have come about. So, The Buddha told them his life story of the eight or so years
that he was searching for himself, and ended up by finding what he sought
within himself.
I
have read The Buddha being classified as the most intelligent man (of his
times?). I like this characterization because, and only because, The Buddha
then becomes accessible to ordinary people like me. If elevated to Godhood – be
it anyone – (s)he becomes inaccessible and also becomes beyond criticism. Then,
this post could not have come about.
Buddhists
(followers of Buddhism) chant “I take refuge in The Buddha! I take refuge in
the Dharma (as preached by The Buddha)! I take refuge in The Sangha (the
cohorts who distil the teachings they had heard)!”
Did
The Buddha really say these? We do not know and let us not go beyond accepting
what the Pali canon of Buddhism says.
The
Buddha was an empiricist – of this we are as sure as sure can be. So, when a
cohort chants “I take refuge in The Buddha!” I would tend to think of it as at
a level higher than the person (here, The Buddha) apparently invoked. The
Buddha must have been asking his followers (they are no more The Buddha’s
cohorts) to seek the truth within themselves and not within him, the person
who has come to be The Buddha.
Buddha,
like Socrates (of about the same era, and in historical terms, a couple of
centuries later), left many things unsaid but understood. If he did not respond
to a question, his followers thought either that the question is useless or the
answer too evident. As an empiricist, if a question leads one away from one’s
experiential self, it is irrelevant, or could even be harmful.
Why
did The Buddha not repeat and vigorously stress (by giving a commentary to what
the first gem says) this particular understanding, which stood shoulder to
shoulder with his deep philosophy grounded in empiricism, when his followers
chanted the first of the three gems?
Was
The Buddha truly releasing his followers from the dreariness of daily life? The
three gems, taken together, imply a strong “NO!”. He and his followers were
preaching others to obey the rules of the Sangha that an empiricist would be
most loathe to do; an empiricist is bound to be individualistic, just as The
Buddha himself was as he searched for the “TRUTH”.
The
Buddha was not beyond bending to the rules of the society – witness how he refused
membership of the Sangha to women for a long time. Here, I might be accused of
applying the standards of today to the society of about 25 centuries earlier.
In my defence, I do not agree. I have mentioned this only to say that The
Buddha could not see beyond the horizon on certain matters while he saw inside
himself as deeply as one could see. The contrast is so telling.
However,
I would also tell take refuge in The Buddha, not through the three jewels, but
through his action. He practiced not eating meat, but showing a measure of
empathy – my most important takeaway from the life of The Buddha – he ate meat
when somebody offered him for the simple reason of treating the other person as
a fellow human; he wanted the person offering him food to feel happy and, in turn, enjoy
what one may call “empathetic joy.”
On
this instance – I am sure there are many such – The Buddha is someone I try my
level best to follow. I am not ashamed to say that I fail more often than I
succeed but I am happy to be proceeding on this path even if ever so slowly.
To
conclude, the mistake The Buddha made was not to have left the first five
cohorts to their own ways after propounding on the principles he had developed.
He should have resisted and never should have allowed himself to be anointed as
the “Enlightened One!” After all, he had the “TRUTH” on his side. He was
“ENLIGHTENED”. Why shine a torch on a lit candle?
As
an aside, one day many years before I got interested in The Buddha, his life,
his teachings (I am still interested – recently I read an article that claimed
that The Buddha saw the futility of war in coming to an agreement in sharing of
waters in two neighbouring fiefdoms), I came to the conclusion that Raghuram
Ekambaram – the dog tag – comes to life only at his death. It is only then,
Raghuram Ekambaram with EVERYTHING he had thought, said, acted upon throughout
his life gets frozen and the true entity “RAGHURAM EKAMBARAM” emerges, in the
minds of everyone he has interacted with. This is not the Atma, so revered and
in whose unprovable existence, people have been enslaved.
I
would exist, in thousands of ideas people have of me in their minds, only upon
my death. There would be hundreds of thousands of Raghuram Ekambarams, each
distinct from the other, upon my death. Do not ask me how I define the “I”,
“me” and “my” in the above! That is the inadequacy of language.
I
believe, and very strongly at that, that The Buddha did not emphasize this sufficiently.
Had he done so, there would have been no differentiation between Mahayana,
Hinayana, Theravada and on and on.
The
Buddha erred in not letting the ideas grow on their own, as per each individual
branching off, branching into other ideas, coalescing if the ideas ever could …
We
may speculate, there may have been no Rohingya.
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