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The Essence of Buddhism
A Sermon Given
by The Reverend Roger Fritts
on February 14, 1999
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
About two thousand four hundred years ago a baby, the son of a king and a queen, was born near the foothills of the Himalayas, just inside the border of modern day Nepal. No firsthand written account describes his life, but accounts written about 500 years after his death describe the legend that arose about his life. This legend, embellished with fanciful details, is the core, the essence of Buddhism.
According to the legend, on the day of his conception the boy's mother had a dream. In the dream Gods took her to the Himalayas, bathed her in scented water, and placed her on a golden couch. As she rested, a white baby elephant, carrying a white lotus flower in its trunk, walked up to her and entered her right side.
As was the custom when a pregnancy approached its term, the mother embarked on a journey to the home of her relatives to give birth. On this journey, when the queen and her escort reached a grove of trees, she went into labor. She gave birth while standing up holding on to the trunk of a flowering tree. The child was born during a full moon in the spring. According to legend, on the day of the baby's birth an immeasurable light filled the universe, flowers rained from the sky and music and perfume filled the world. The legend says that immediately after his birth the boy stood up, walked seven steps and declared that this would be the last time he would be born.
When the child was presented to fortunetellers, five days after his birth, they saw special marks on his body. They predicted that he would be either a world ruler or an "enlightened one," the Buddha. His parents named the baby Siddhartha.
According to the story, a week after the child's birth his mother died. Her sister, his aunt, married the King and became a devoted stepmother to the child.
The parents raised young Siddhartha in luxury. Remembering the predictions of the fortunetellers, the boy's father was determined that his son would be a world ruler and not the Buddha. He hired the best teachers for his education. The young Prince amazed his teachers by how quickly he learned and understood everything they taught him. Nevertheless, even as a child, he was often seen sitting alone, deep in thought. For example, once he accompanied his father to a ceremony and his nurses left him alone under a tree. Later they discovered him sitting cross-legged, in a trance.
The King did everything he could to prevent his son from becoming aware of the sorrows of life. He built three palaces for the different seasons of the year, and he furnished them with the greatest luxury. The King surrounded Siddhartha with splendors and amusements. The father took precautions to keep the boy away from the sight of the sick, the aged, and the disabled. He would not allow any person to talk about illness, death, misery or unhappiness of any sort when in the boy's presence.
When the Prince was sixteen years old, the King and Queen sent invitations to all the eligible young women of the land so that he could choose a wife. Each young woman walked in front of the prince and he gave each a gift. In the Prince's eyes the last young woman in the line was the most beautiful, but by the time she arrived all the gifts were gone. "No gift for me?" she asked.
The Prince took a string of jewels from his neck and fastened the jewels around her waist. "To the fairest of them all," he said to her, telling her he wished she would be his wife.
However, before the parents of the bride would allow them to marry, the Prince had to show his prowess in an open contest with the other young male bachelors. This he did to the satisfaction of the young woman and her parents.
Within the confines of the palaces this sixteen-year-old man and his new bride discovered the pleasures of sexuality. They had a happy marriage. Palace life was comfortable, but the young man yearned for a deeper and more productive way of life. As time passed, the Prince asked his father's permission to go into the world outside. His father said yes to his son. The overprotective father, however, sent messengers to the people, asking them to hide all sights that might be unpleasant for the prince to see. The Prince was only to see healthy, smiling people. Once given permission, Siddhartha made four journeys with his chariot driver. In spite of his father's precautions, one day the Prince saw an old person bent over with age. The discovery of old age shook the young man. He ordered his charioteer to return immediately to the palace. In the palace Siddhartha reflected on what it meant to grow old. On another trip he saw a sick person covered with ulcers. On still another trip he saw a dead person being taken for burial. These experiences impressed upon him the transient nature of human existence and he came to realize that not even the palace walls could keep suffering and death at bay.
Within the walls of the palaces Siddhartha had every material and physical pleasure for which any young man could ask. However, after he became aware of the reality of human suffering, these material and physical pleasures were not satisfying for him. He underwent what we today might call a mid-life crisis.
On a fourth trip the Prince saw a holy person in whose face he saw the signs of deep, inner peace. The thought came to Siddhartha that he might seek a religious solution to the problems of suffering. That night he decided to leave the palace. Taking a last look at his sleeping wife and his newborn child, he departed. He was twenty-nine years old. It was the end of June and, according to the legend, the sky was lit by a full moon. Riding his favorite horse, and accompanied by his friend the chariot driver, Siddhartha galloped away into the night. He rode until he had gone beyond the border of his father's kingdom. Then he gave his friend his jewels and ornaments and sent the friend back to his family to break the news. Siddhartha cut off his long hair, which was a sign of nobility, and dressed himself in a single sheet. He had finally escaped the nest in which his father had kept him.
Siddhartha found religious teachers who told him that meditation was the way to achieve happiness in the face of suffering. He learned a meditation technique that induced a profound trance-like state. Although he zealously studied and practiced meditation, it was not the permanent solution he sought. Eventually he left the trance and came back to normal waking consciousness with the fundamental problems of sickness, old age and death still unresolved.
Next he studied with a religious teacher who believed people could achieve freedom from suffering by extreme austerity. Siddhartha decided to try this approach. First he practiced an exercise in breath control that involved retaining the breath for longer periods. Instead of producing spiritual knowledge, however, all this resulted in was painful headaches. Abandoning this technique, Siddhartha tried a second method that involved reducing his intake of food to just a spoonful of bean soup a day. He kept this up until he became emaciated. He was unable to sit upright and his hair began to fall out. He came to the conclusion that extreme fasting would not lead to happiness, any more than the extreme luxury of his father's palace had led to happiness, so he began again to eat. After reviewing his own experiences he decided to avoid the two extremes of indulgence and austerity. Instead, he decided to follow a middle path between these extremes.
Sitting under a tree, Siddhartha returned to meditation. He was now thirty-five years old.
The legend of the life of Siddhartha does not describe the instructions his teachers gave him when he learned to meditate. They may have advised him to concentrate on his breathing or to repeat a mantra silently to himself. Or they might have placed an object such as a flower a few feet away and instructed him to study it carefully. The goal of these exercises is for the mind to become completely engrossed until the awareness of subject and object dissolves into a unified field of consciousness.
This meditation is a "calming meditation." Siddhartha found it to be only a temporary escape from human suffering. In the legend, as he sat under the tree at the age of thirty-five, he created a new form of meditation, "insight meditation." After achieving peace and calmness using calming meditation, Siddhartha began to meditate on his own state of mind.
He examined his subjective experience, his physical sensations, his feelings, his mood and his thoughts. The realization came to him that he was free to choose how to react in all situations. A new sense of freedom replaced the grip of long-standing desires and compulsions. From this detached observation it gradually became clear to Siddhartha that even his conscious mind was but a process like everything else. He saw that the stream of consciousness is just another facet of the complex interactions of the body. Awareness developed that the body and the mind were nothing more than a temporary assemblage of bones, nerves, and tissues, not objects with which to become infatuated or excessively attached. This realization this insight that Siddhartha had at the age of thirty-five, was his enlightenment.
He became the Buddha, which means one who is awake. For the next forty-five years, he taught others what he had learned about ending suffering. The Buddha told his followers of the three components that make up the essence of what he had learned.
The first component is to live a moral life. Buddhism teaches that one should live according to the Dharma or universal law that governs both the physical and moral order of the universe. Good deeds result in a person gaining positive Karma and bad deeds lead to negative Karma. Buddhism shares the ideas of both Dharma and Karma in common with the Hindu moral tradition. Buddhism, however, did not embrace the Hindu caste system.
Second, to become enlightened, the Buddha taught that one must practice meditation. This will give the calmness to gain understanding of the true nature of existence.
Third, using insight meditation, one gains the wisdom. This wisdom reveals that even those things that seem most intimate, one's thoughts and emotions, are transient states that come and go. Meditators describe this wisdom as a great burden being lifted. The clamoring ego with its desires and disappointments is silenced. When a person gains this wisdom, a deep and lasting sense of peace and contentment replaces selfish craving and gratification.
Unlike the other major world religions, Buddhism does not teach about an anthropomorphic God. Buddhism teaches that an order exists in the universe. It does not claim that God created the order. Also, Buddhism does not teach that humans have a soul. In this, Buddha set himself apart from the Hindu religious tradition which claims that each person possesses an eternal soul.
However, the Buddha did believe in reincarnation, which causes me to wonder, if no soul exists, what gets reborn? The Buddha would say that I have asked the question incorrectly. It should be "How and why does rebirth take place?" The answer is that the unexhausted force of Karma at a person's death produces rebirth. Death, for the Buddha, is merely an incident between one life and another. The legend about the life of the Buddha reports that when he achieved enlightenment he gained the ability to recall many of his previous lives.
The essence of Buddhism is a story about a man who was born in India twenty-four hundred years ago. This man struggled to come to grips with the problems of human suffering as he saw them. He came to the conclusion that one can break free of suffering first by practicing moral behavior, second by practicing calming meditation, and third by using insight meditation to gain wisdom.
I want to end today with another part of the legend of the Buddha. When the Buddha taught about what he had learned, he always cautioned his students not to accept his teachings uncritically. He encouraged them to evaluate his teachings in the light of their own experience. Buddhism does not require the acceptance of creedal formulas. The fact that Buddhism imposes few requirements on its followers and encourages them to think for themselves has contributed to its popularity among Unitarian Universalists.
When the Buddha spoke to a congregation of disciples, he could have taken advantage of their devotion, acting as the expert, decreeing a foundational doctrine. Instead, according to legend, he said something like this:
Believe nothing, O monks, merely because you have been told it . . . or because it is traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings -- that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.
-- Amen.
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