Gautama Buddha
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Karuna: awakening to
Pranav Khullar, Gautama Buddha’s Awakening To Karuna, June 3, 2020: The Times of India
Huston Smith evocatively dramatises the moment of the Buddha’s awakening from his deep meditative state under the Bodhi tree. Gautama is asked whether he is a god incarnate, an angel or a great sage. “I am awake,” he said, marking the transition of Prince Siddhartha to Tathagata Buddha. The etymological root of the word Buddha, ‘budh’ means to awaken and to know.
The legendary story of the Four Passing Sights is symbolic of the existential crisis that engulfed the sensitive prince. The images of disease, decrepitude and death, which struck the Buddha intensely, revealed to him the essentially impermanent character of all things. He resolved to journey out (or journey within), in search of something more lasting and fulfilling. This search brought up some simple home truths which, the Buddha realised, most people try to ignore. He reached out to his audience with the Four Noble Truths in his first sermon after enlightenment in the Deer Park at Sarnath.
The First Noble Truth: He reasoned that the kind of life we lead is dukkha, suffering, as all things are impermanent and leave a trail of pain in their wake. Even so-called pleasures do not sustain: They cause more pain thereby, as they engender a constant craving for these desires, and then the insecurity of losing these pleasures.
The Second Noble Truth: The cause of this pain, the Buddha goes on, is us, our tanha, desires, our will to impose. It is this selfish desire to dominate and impose and separate, out of tune with the universal symphony, that causes dislocation and existential anguish.
The Third Noble Truth: This truth points to the need to overcome this limiting, self-created delusion of self, which is causing this anguish, for only then would we be able to see beyond our narrow selves. It stresses on the human potential to overcome this anguish.
The Fourth Noble Truth: This chalks out the Eightfold Path as the way out of this self-seeking cycle. It lays out a blueprint for a way of living which will imbue our lives with meaning and purpose, as opposed to the kind of rushed but aimless life that most people lead. The Buddha does not offer props of any kind; he clinically places before one the harsh facts of life and asks each one to go on the path of Right Mindfulness, which will teach us to distinguish between the abiding elements of life and the trivia which our mind is used to. The Buddha’s only recommendation for this mind-clutter is self-examination, which later becomes the cornerstone of the Shunyavada exposition of Buddhist thought.
His seeking of the nature of reality made him reason out each nuance of life, introspecting into each motive of the mind, tracing the origin of thought relentlessly till thought itself dissolved. And his awakened state of consciousness transformed him into an apostle of infinite karuna, compassion. The Buddha reached out to all, irrespective of status or creed, to help them understand and live their lives better.
In emphasising the impermanent character of all things, the Buddha was wanting us to get rid of all our delusions with which we approach our lives, a reminder of how one needs to discriminate between the abiding principles of life from the transitory ones. As the Buddha would say, “Be a lamp unto yourself …” (The writer is joint secretary, Government of India)
