Lord Buddha, his teachings, philosophy
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Buddha’s Robe
Harsha V Dehejia, May 27, 2021: The Times of India
Clothes, both sacred and secular, have a protective function, they ornament the body, state the social and economic status of the person, store memories, express the wearer’s persona and are markers of a tradition.
Weaving is a very ancient tradition in India and weaving and philosophy share many common words, words such as sutra, yantra, grantha and tantra. Sutra is a thread, and it is also a condensed thought in verse; yantra is the loom and it is also a diagram for meditation; grantha means to tie or string together, as also a compilation of ideas in a book. Tantra is not only the warp but also a system of philosophy. In the Rig Ved, the concept of time is understood as the warp and the weft.
Threads or sutra are an important part of Indic traditions, both religious and secular. There is a sense of wonder in creating a thread from a cotton pod and then weaving a fabric from it. And it is from threads that fabrics of all kinds are woven. Weaving has often been compared to music, both are fine arts and done with a dedication and latifa, pleasure.
To fully understand a certain piece of textile, its colour and texture, design and motifs one must bring to it not only one’s sight but touch as well. Just as music begins with a single note, textile begins with a single thread. And like the many notes of the musical scale, there are many types of threads and they can be combined in many ways to produce a fabric.
When the weaver fills his bani, weft, and throws his shuttle, it is as if the musician has started the alap, and like a raga, weaving has a certain laya, rhythm. And just as a raga has a certain rasa, the weaver infuses a certain feeling in what he weaves, and each fabric like each raga requires a different technique.
A fabric of both aesthetic and metaphysical interest is the robe of the Buddha. The Buddha wore a robe of tattered and fragments of cloth stitched together. In wearing this, he was making a statement not only of poverty and asceticism, but even more, that our life is a coming together of fragments of time. Nothing is continuous or unfragmented to the Buddhist, but the cultivated and chastened mind brings these fragments together and makes it whole.
It is said that King Bimbisara wanted to pay homage to Buddhist monks but was having trouble picking them out of the crowd. One day, he complained and asked the Buddha to make a distinctive robe for his monks. They were walking by a rice field in Magadha at the time, and the Buddha asked Ananda, his personal attendant, to design a robe based on the orderly, staggered pattern of rows of the rice paddy fields.
Theravada Buddhist monks wear saffron or ochre-coloured robes, which date back centuries. It is believed that this is the closest to what the Buddha and his disciples wore originally. The most elaborate Buddhist robes are found in Tibet and throughout the Himalayas, in the esoteric form of Buddhism known as Vajrayana.
Buddha, as understood by succeeding generations
Devdutt Pattanaik, February 3, 2020: The Times of India
The Buddha one imagines tends to be filtered through the politics one prefers
Buddha was imagined differently by Ambedkar, Savarkar and Nehru. Ambedkar believed that Navayana Buddhism, rooted in social justice, was the only way to stop caste affirming Manuvadi Brahminism that threatened India’s Constitution. Savarkar argued that pacifist Buddhism is the reason why India gave up its martial Hinduness and was overrun by violent Muslim and Christian forces in the last thousand years. Nehru admired Buddhist ideals as the inspiration behind the secular governance of India’s greatest emperor, Ashoka. All these three imaginations about Buddha, which are widespread even today, owe their origin to Edwin Arnold who in 1879 published a book called Light of Asia that introduced the literary world to the Buddha.
Before the publication of this book, Buddha was largely unknown to the Western world, as well as to Indians. He was at best a minor avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, preserver of the world. Arnold’s book was a loose adaptation of the Mahayana scripture, Lalitavistara, which was composed in Sanskrit in the 3rd century AD, 800 years after the historical Buddha. In 1928, the book was adapted into a silent film called Prem Sanyas, directed by Franz Osten and Himanshu Rai.
It is this Orientalist vision of Buddha that most of us are familiar with, as it is the Buddha that reappears again and again in popular books of the 20th century, including the Amar Chitra Katha retelling. It tells the story of Prince Gautama of India, who renounced his kingdom, his wife and newborn son, and became an enlightened monk, who taught people the importance of conquering desires to overcome suffering. It is this understanding of Buddhism that is carried forward till date by the gentle and avuncular ever-smiling Dalai Lama. And it is this understanding of Buddhism that startles the West when confronted with the violent politics of Buddhist countries such as Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand. Academics are only now unravelling the diversity of Buddhism in its 2,500 year history.
Scholars of the Pali language are trying to differentiate the actual words spoken by the Buddha from later additions by monks, who were mostly from elite Brahmin families. They have argued that Buddha never claimed he was from a royal family. All we know is that he came from an affluent family of farmers, who had many houses and were known to be generous. He never refers to his wife or child.
Gender studies are now pointing out to the essential misogyny and patriarchy of early Buddhism. The Vinaya Pitaka, the code of discipline for monks, are full of stories where women are seen as the obstacles of dhamma. One reason why Buddhist monks were encouraged to wear robes rather than wander naked, like Jain munis for example, was to hide their spiritually charged bodies from the lust of women. Monks were advised to travel in pairs, if not groups, to avoid contact with women.
While women were allowed to be monks, there were more rules for women than for men, and they were never allowed to lead the community, and the belief emerged that they had to acquire male bodies in order to attain nirvana. In these rulebooks, we find the first documented laws that were meant to keep gays, lesbians, hermaphrodites and transgenders out of the monastery. Literary analysis of Jataka tales reveals that while the Buddha-to-be took birth as plants and animals and humans in various professions, he never once took the form of a woman. Art historians are noticing that women are relatively underrepresented in Buddhist art. There are more images of Buddha with his mother, who died soon after his birth, than with his wife, who he renounced. Mahayana texts describe all-male heavens such as Sukhavati with paintings of Buddhas who are born from lotus flowers, to avoid contact with female flesh. The popular Buddhist goddess Tara appeared only a thousand years after the historical Buddha, around 5th century CE, in the Ellora caves of Maharashtra, and in cave paintings of China, around the same time, manifesting as the female wish-fulfilling Bodhisatva or Kwan-yin. Unlike the passive and dispassionate Buddhas of older Buddhism, Buddhas of Himalayan Buddhism dated to the Pala period (7th to 10th century) are both sexual, copulating with shaktis, and yoginis, and even violent, trampling Hindu gods such as Brahma, Indra, Shiva and Ganesha, in the form of Heruka and Yamantaka.
European Orientalists took pains to differentiate Hinduism and Buddhism. In India, such differentiations mattered only in elite circles, between orthodox Brahmins and orthodox Buddhists. Rest of society worshipped both Buddha as well as Brahminical gods, which is why the Buddhism, which spread to Southeast and East Asia from 3rd to 13th century CE, has Hindu gods such as Indra, Brahma, Ganesha, Kubera, Lakshmi and Saraswati alongside images of Buddha. Even Muslim warlords who broke idols in northwest India 7th century onwards, did not differentiate between Hindu and Buddhist images. For them, the Arabic-Persian word for any idol was ‘but’, a derivative of ‘Buddha’.
Lazy scholarship, and politics, prefers a static, simplistic and homogenous vision of the past. This is why WhatsApp groups are nowadays flooded with memes seeking to either appropriate Buddhism into Hinduism (‘Hindu gods worshipped in Buddhist Japan’), or position Buddhism as a counter to Hinduism (‘Mindfulness yoga is Buddhist, not Hindu’). The former is favoured by Hindutva groups, the latter by Ambedkarites and neo-Buddhists. The only way to dilute such pernicious binaries is by exploring the many Buddhas out there.
Causation and Dharma Chakra
Ashok Vohra, The Theory Of Causation & Dharma Chakra, April 30, 2018: The Times of India
The Buddha, in his teachings, was primarily concerned with questions like: ‘Why do we suffer misery, pain, old age and death?’ He answered these questions and showed a path to his disciples that could lead them to get rid of all sufferings.
The Buddha regarded metaphysical questions concerning nature of the universe, nature of ultimate reality, nature of the soul, and life after death, as ethically useless, indeterminate questions. They have no bearing on the lived life. Whenever he was asked metaphysical questions, he responded with silence.
His silence does not mean that the Buddha did not know the answers of these metaphysical questions. In Majjhimannikaya Sutta, 63, he says, “Surely do I know much more than what I have told you. And wherefore, my disciples, have I not told you that? Because my disciples, it brings you no profit, it does not conduce to progress in holiness, because it does not lead to the turning from the earthly, to the subjection of all desire, to the cessation of the transitory, to peace, to knowledge, to illumination, to Nirvana.”
Like existentialists, the Buddha argued that questions relating to suffering and sorrows, their origin, cause and the path leading to their cessation, are the most significant of all philosophical questions. These questions, he argued, are profitable in leading a happy and contented life. They deal with ‘fundamentals of religion’. By bringing an end to hate, they usher a life of ‘absence of passion, quiescence, knowledge, supreme wisdom and nirvana’. He argued, “Philosophy purifies none, peace alone does.”
The Buddha firmly believed in ‘pratityasamutpada’, the causality principle – namely, that everything has a cause. ‘Nothing comes out of nothing – ex nihilo nihil fit.’ Following this principle, he argues that the fact of suffering has to have a cause. It must depend on some antecedent conditions.
Through the 12-linked chain for the cause of the existence of suffering called Dwadash Nidan, Janam-maran chakra, Samsara-chakra, Dharma-chakra, or Bhava-chakra, the Buddha shows that the root cause of pain and suffering is desire and ignorance.
According to the 12-spoked wheel, there is suffering because of birth. Birth is because of the will to be born, which in turn is because of clinging to worldly objects due to desire for enjoyment of earthly objects. Craving is because of sense-experience that comes with contact with the objects. Contact is possible because of six sense organs. Sense organs cannot exist without the mind-body organism. Mind-body organism would not function without consciousness. Primordial consciousness is due to impressions of our karma. Finally, impressions are there because of ignorance.
Removal of ignorance leads to cessation of suffering, desire and attachment. Buddha not only finds the cause of suffering but also tells us about the eightfold path with which we can attain nirvana, liberation from suffering.
The Dharma Chakra forms the core of the Buddha’s teachings. His other teachings like law of karma, momentariness, no-soul doctrine, eightfold path, and unreality of matter can be deduced as its corollaries.
The Dharma Chakra is precursor of the biological Darwinian as well as anti-Darwinian evolutionary theories. Modern evolutionary theories uphold that past present and future evolution of the animate organism is an internal response of the species to the external, inherited or environmental material conditions. The theory of causation proves that the internal conditions like conscious or unconscious desire and will, are responsible for the external phenomenon of suffering.
Buddha, Sangha And Dharma
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
On the spiritual path there are three factors: Buddha, the master or the presence of the enlightened, sangha, the commune or group, and dharma, your true nature. Life blossoms naturally when there is a balance between the three.
The Buddha is a doorway, and the doorway needs to be more charming than what lies beyond so that people come to the doorway.
Similarly, the closer you get to the master, the more charm, newness and love you feel. Nothing in the world could give that much peace, joy and pleasure. It's like depth without a bottom. This is a sign that you have come to the master.
Once you enter the door, you see the world from there, from the eyes of the master. Then in any situation you will think: “How would the master handle this?” See the world from the eyes of the master and the world looks so much more beautiful as a place filled with love, joy, cooperation and compassion.
Looking through the doorway there is no fear. From inside your home, you can look at the storm and the bright sun too; yet you can be relaxed as you are in the shelter. Such a sense of security, fullness and joy comes. That is the purpose of having a master.
Sangha is charming from a distance, but the closer you get, it pushes all your buttons and brings out all the unwanted things from within you. If you think a group is good it means you are not yet completely with the group. When you are totally part of that group, you will find that some bickering will come up. But you are the one who makes the group – so if you are good, your group will also be good.
Sangha has a reverse nature to Buddha. Buddha makes your mind one-pointed; sangha, because it is of so many people, can scatter your mind, fragment it. Once you are used to a sangha, it loses its charm. This is the nature of sangha. Still, it is very supportive. If it were repulsive all the time, then nobody would be part of sangha.
Buddha uplifts with Grace, love and knowledge, Buddha pulls you up from above, and sangha pushes you up from below.
Dharma is to be in the middle. Avoiding extremes is your nature –to be in balance, to smile from the depth of your heart, to accept entire existence totally as it is. Often you crave for Buddha and are averse to sangha, and you try to change; but by changing sangha or Buddha, you are not going to change.
The main purpose is to come to the centre deep within you, which means to find your dharma. A sense of deep acceptance for this moment, for every moment, is dharma. All problems and negativity are generated from our mind.
The world is not bad; we make our world ugly or beautiful. So when you are in your dharma, your nature, you will blame neither the world nor the Divine.
Dharma is that which puts you in the middle and makes you comfortable with the world. It allows you to contribute to the world, be at ease with the Divine, to feel part of the Divine.
Mental health And Buddhist healing
Oct 18, 2023: The Times of India
The Buddha’s wisdom can help to heal the mind
Speaking Tree
Mental health issues often lead to loss of equanimity. The Buddha was a mind specialist as can be seen from the change in the mental health of some of his followers in the Sravaka Sangha. The story goes that Patachara, the only daughter of a wealthy man, fell in love with the household help and eloped with him. On her way back to the paternal house, after her husband’s death, she crossed a river that was in spate and lost one of her children. The second one fell prey to an eagle. When she reached the outskirts of her village, she witnessed a mass funeral – that of father, mother, and her two brothers. Facing all these tragedies, one after the other, she lost her mental balance, and started wandering on the streets aimlessly. Once, she stopped to hear a sermon by Tathagata and her life changed; she was accepted by the sangha and dharma was imparted to her. It helped to heal her mental state. Angulimal, as his name suggests, wore a garland of fingers. He was a merciless robber. He had killed 999 people. He cut their fingers and strung them in a garland. The Buddha was his last target. He joined the sangha after the Buddha counselled him. Patachara suffered from dukkha, deep depression, and Angulimal was full of himsa, hatred. Both recovered and subsequently attained Arahanthood. But the Buddha’s two followers, Devadutta, his cousin, and Prince Ajatashatru, could never be cured, though they too were part of the sangha, because they failed to practise the medicine, the dharma. The Buddha did not give importance to the individual, but to his bodha, understanding. He taught his followers anapanasati, concentrating on the breath. It is an exercise to connect with the body; it helps the mind regain its power to focus and the restlessness within subsides.
