According to legends, Queen Maya had a dream in which she learned she would give birth to a child who would be holy. After Siddhartha was born, a prophecy foretold that he would be a great ruler or a holy man.
The king wanted him to be a great ruler so he shielded his son from seeing any pain or suffering. Siddhartha lived a life of luxury in a palace. Siddhartha grew up to become a caring and kind person. When he was 16 years old he married his cousin, Yasodhara. Photo by Margie Savage. He was the son of a king, raised in sheltered opulence. He married and had a son. Prince Siddhartha was twenty-nine years old when his life changed.
In carriage rides outside his palaces he first saw a sick person, then an old man, then a corpse. This shook him to the core of his being; he realized that his privileged status would not protect him from sickness, old age, and death. The prince renounced his worldly life and began a spiritual quest. He sought teachers and punished his body with ascetic practices such as extreme, prolonged fasts.
It was believed that punishing the body was the way to elevate the mind and that the door to wisdom was found at the edge of death. However, after six years of this, the prince felt only frustration. Eventually, he realized that the path to peace was through mental discipline. From that time on, he would be known as the Buddha. Stoneware sculpture of the Buddha attaining final transcendence, known as parinirvana , as he died.
Photo courtesy The Met. He spent the rest of his life teaching people how to realize enlightenment for themselves. He gave his first sermon in modern-day Sarnath, near Benares, and then walked from village to village, attracting disciples along the way. He founded the original order of Buddhist nuns and monks, many of whom became great teachers also.
Historians today generally agree there was a historical Buddha, and that he lived sometime in the 4th through 6th centuries BCE, give or take. Wood with pigment.
The buddha of the current age is the historical Siddhartha Gautama. Another person who realizes enlightenment within this age is not called buddha. Early scriptures name others who lived in the unimaginably long-ago earlier ages. There are other major traditions of Buddhism, called Mahayana and Vajrayana, and these traditions put no limits on the number of buddhas there can be. However, for practitioners of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism the ideal is to be a bodhisattva , one who vows to remain in the world until all beings are enlightened.
When he came of age he married Gopa, who gave birth to a son. He had, as we might say today, everything. And yet, it was not enough. Something—something as persistent as his own shadow—drew him into the world beyond the castle walls. There, in the streets of Kapilavastu, he encountered three simple things: a sick man , an old man , and a corpse being carried to the burning grounds.
Nothing in his life of ease had prepared him for this experience. When his charioteer told him that all beings are subject to sickness, old age, and death, he could not rest.
As he returned to the palace, he passed a wandering ascetic walking peacefully along the road, wearing the robe and carrying the single bowl of a sadhu. He then resolved to leave the palace in search of the answer to the problem of suffering. After bidding his wife and child a silent farewell without waking them, he rode to the edge of the forest. There, he cut his long hair with his sword and exchanged his fine clothes for the simple robes of an ascetic.
With these actions Siddhartha Gautama joined a whole class of men who had dropped out of Indian society to find liberation. There were a variety of methods and teachers , and Gautama investigated many—atheists, materialists, idealists, and dialecticians. The deep forest and the teeming marketplace were alive with the sounds of thousands of arguments and opinions, unlike in our time.
Gautama finally settled down to work with two teachers. From Arada Kalama, who had three hundred disciples, he learned how to discipline his mind to enter the sphere of nothingness. But even though Arada Kalama asked him to remain and teach as an equal, he recognized that this was not liberation, and left. Next Siddhartha learned how to enter the concentration of mind which is neither consciousness nor unconsciousness from Udraka Ramaputra. But neither was this liberation and Siddhartha left his second teacher.
For six years Siddhartha along with five companions practiced austerities and concentration. He drove himself mercilessly, eating only a single grain of rice a day, pitting mind against body.
His ribs stuck through his wasted flesh and he seemed more dead than alive. His five companions left him after he made the decision to take more substantial food and to abandon asceticism. Then, Siddhartha entered a village in search of food.
0コメント