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Buddha & Buddhism

Dr. M. V. Kamath

In the absence of an acknowledged gentleman of letters, to fill the Last Page  we are falling back on MVK’s writings.  His book – Letters to Gauri – includes some of his brush with historical wisdom. We are reproducing them with some sequential order for the benefit of our readers. – Editor

 My Dear Gauri

Of all the saints and savants, of all the founders of religions, the Buddha stands out, Gauri, for his great compassion. He was no ascetic, though he followed the usual path of asceticism to find the Truth. Like Mahavira, he too, was born the son of a minor prince. His father was the head of a hill tribe of the Shakyas. There are charming stories told about how in his childhood he was baffled by old age, sickness and death and decided to find out what was behind them. These legends are mostly unreliable, though, as it happens in such cases, there could possibly be a grain of historical truth in them. It is hard to imagine that every sermon attributed to him is, in actual fact, his. After all not every word that he said was taken down verbatim and his disciples had to rely on memory.

But some things we do know: that he left his wife and son, that he sought to perform penance for several years, that one day, no doubt after a particularly concentrated effort at meditation, he received enlightenment while seated under a bodhi tree at Gaya, in modern Bihar. There are legends about how temptations came to him and how he resisted them. It was not that he started as an ignorant man. He was fully conversant with the knowledge and wisdom of the Vedas and the Upanishads. He had discussed them with learned Brahmins who could not, however, fully satisfy him. He had to find his own answers. And find them he did. He was then thirty-five, having left home at the age of twenty-nine.

Having received enlightenment, Buddha, who was born as Siddhartha, went round the country, but mostly in Magadha and Kosala (corresponding to modern Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh) and to some peripheral ‘republics’, preaching his doctrine till he passed away at the ripe old age of eighty at a place called Kushinagara, a small town in the hills.

His disciples were drawn from all classes of society and included both men and women. Besides preaching to those who came to listen to him, he recruited a small, select band of monks and nuns who constituted the Sangh and upon whom, on his passing away, the responsibility for carrying on his mission mainly devolved.

We think of the Buddha as a man of immense dignity and affability, wisdom and kindness. He was a man of great tenderness who could comfort the bereaved and console the afflicted. His serenity was unshakeable. He faced opposition and hostility, even personal danger, with the calm and compassionate smile that has lingered down the ages. He won over friends by his courtesy and thoughtfulness and his supreme and unfailing self-confidence. He impressed kings and ordinary people alike. Long after Buddha’s time Ashoka the Great was to embrace Buddhism.

It is well known that the Buddha himself never wrote anything. Apart from his personal example, his teaching was entirely oral through discourse to, and discussion with, his disciples. He addressed people in their local dialect with which he was obviously familiar and forbade the use of Sanskrit. He told the monks: “You are not to put the Buddha’s message into Vedic. Whoever does so shall be guilty of an offence. I authorize you, monks, to learn and teach the Buddha’s message in his own dialect”. The Buddha wanted to reach out to people. He did not want his message restricted to the elite and to the scholar. The only trouble with this advice was that when the Buddha’s saying finally came down to be written they were put down in half a dozen different languages, including Sanskrit. A great Buddhist scholar has said that “the canonical literature came into existence over a period of roughly a thousand years, from the first to the tenth century after Christ”. That is just another way of saying that somewhere down the line, words had been put into the Buddha’s mouth. Sound wisdom, to be sure, but perhaps not necessarily the Buddha’s own wisdom. As it happens with all great men and their teachings, there was a schism in Buddhism as well. One regrets it, because in the process, Buddhism is diminished. The split in Buddhism came during the fourth Buddhist Council, held, according to tradition, during the reign of Kanishka. Two groups of Buddhism were set up: the Mahayana and the Hinayana. The new school of Buddhism claimed to offer salvation to all and styled itself Mahayana (or the greater vehicle to salvation). This school dismissed the older school of thought contemptuously as the Hinayana (or the lesser vehicle). The Mahayana scriptures claimed to represent the final doctrine of the Buddha, revealed only to most spiritually advanced disciples, whereas the earlier doctrines were viewed as merely preliminary.

One reason for the schism, you must remember, Gauri, was that in the preceding two hundred years north-west India was prey to a succession of invaders like the Bactrian Greeks, the Scythians the Parthians and a people from Central Asia known as the Kushanas. Each of these people must have influenced and, in turn, been influenced by, Buddhism and when this happened, modifications in thinking were bound to take place. It is quite possible that even when the Buddha was alive, there was a tendency to treat him as a God. 

In Indian religions, divinity is not something completely above man or far above all mortal things, as it is, for instance, to the Christians, Jews or Muslims. That is why we Hindus can consider a Rama, a Krishna or a Buddha as an avatar or incarnation of God indeed even God himself.

Buddhism spread to Central Asia and from there travelled to China and thence to Japan and to the south-east Asian countries because along with traders (remember the Great Silk Route?)   Buddhist monks went along too, spreading their message. Missionaries of Mahayana sects established themselves in Central Asia, China and Japan, whereas Hinayana Buddhism was more popular in Sri Lanka and later in south-east Asia.

One of the most distinguished disciples of Buddhism was Ashoka the Great, who, after the battle in which he defeated the Kalinga people, was so aghast at the killings that he then and there disavowed all violence. This, however, is not a book on history and for a full understanding of Ashoka and the Mauryan empire you must refer to proper textbooks. Ashoka’s empire included almost all of India except the extreme tip. He was responsible for setting up stone edicts in different parts of the country, laying down the law and advising the citizens how to live and work.

In my next letter I will give you a flavor of what Buddhism stands for before I move on to other matters.

Your loving

 Ajja