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Something about the Buddha's life story gave me pause...
Mountains
Veteran
So for some reason, while sitting in my "kick your butt" physiology class this morning, when I should have been paying attention to the subject at hand, it struck me funny about the Buddha's life story...
The story goes that when his mother gave birth, the Buddha-to-be didn't cry, didn't cause his mother any birthing pains, and was cognizant, talking, and walking within (if you believe one story) minutes of his birth.
Okay, so if that's all true (wink..), who or what made him that way, and why? Wasn't he just a normal dude who later in life figured out how to become enlightened? If you believe the Jesus myth, he was special from birth. Not so with Siddhartha though, right? So why was he so "special" as a baby?
Perhaps he reincarnated as Siddhartha from some distant galaxy where he was already a fully enlightened being, and decided to bring the dharma to planet earth?
Just curious...
Mtns
The story goes that when his mother gave birth, the Buddha-to-be didn't cry, didn't cause his mother any birthing pains, and was cognizant, talking, and walking within (if you believe one story) minutes of his birth.
Okay, so if that's all true (wink..), who or what made him that way, and why? Wasn't he just a normal dude who later in life figured out how to become enlightened? If you believe the Jesus myth, he was special from birth. Not so with Siddhartha though, right? So why was he so "special" as a baby?
Perhaps he reincarnated as Siddhartha from some distant galaxy where he was already a fully enlightened being, and decided to bring the dharma to planet earth?
Just curious...
Mtns
0
Comments
I don't take such stories literally. Don't see any reason to since they are flatly not the kind of thing that humans do or can do. No human can spew fire and water from their body and survive it and no human regardless of how prodigious leaves the womb speaking and walking.
At the same time I don't see any reason to regard the stories as lies either. They are a literary or story telling device employed to convey a truth. That's the way I view them anyway.
You've obviously never been to the Goodfellow AFB/USAF World Wide Chili Cookoff, have you?
What i do want to share is that one time i was meditating on the suffering of hell beings. I thought how could any human being be put through such stuff. then i realized that i was the one with the impposible view. That they didnt' say human being they said sentient being. It wasn't untill i realized that bug could splat against a car window i realized that hell beings could be thrown into a wall and have thier gusts burst. then be reincarnated as the same species of bug and have the same thing happen again. This was a huge realizaton.
That's gotta hurt, Bob!
Mtns
This sutta indicates otherwise:
"Why wouldn't it have, Aggivessana? Before my Awakening, when I was still an unawakened Bodhisatta, the thought occurred to me: 'Household life is confining, a dusty path. Life gone forth is the open air. It isn't easy, living in a home, to practice the holy life totally perfect, totally pure, a polished shell. What if I, having shaved off my hair & beard and putting on the ochre robe, were to go forth from the household life into homelessness?'
"So at a later time, when I was still young, black-haired, endowed with the blessings of youth in the first stage of life, having shaved off my hair & beard — though my parents wished otherwise and were grieving with tears on their faces — I put on the ochre robe and went forth from the home life into homelessness.
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.036.than.html
We mythologise our own lives and the events we encounter. How much more do we invent to explain the mysteries beyond our immediate experience, like the journey of Gotama from pampered, spoiled brat to wandering, enlightened being.
Precisely the same thing happens with the birth and childhood of Jesus, although the canonical stories only include one of the myths surrounding them. Jesus, too, is said to have been born without pain in some versions. Why? Because both he and Gotama say that they have come to end suffering.
The deep lesson to learn is that we must drill down into the stories we are told to understand the message not the myth.
A contemporary example: we, her in the UK, are remembering the Battle of Britain, it being the 70th anniversary. This series of aerial conflicts over South-East England has become the stuff of legend. Churchill used it as a morale booster, making one of his most famous speeches and rallying a flagging nation. We are presented with pictures of beautiful and smiling young men in their Spitfires, not the burnt and disfigured survivors, not the foolish mistakes by government that denied us Frank Whittle's jet fighters, not the terror and the pain. These late summer days in 1940 have become part of the "matter of Britain" alongside King Arthur and the Angels of Mons.
Even your physiology class contains metaphors, Mountains. Just look up the origins of the names of bones: you have an 'anvil' in your ear for example.
I'm an aviation history fan and a pilot, but I'm not familiar with "foolish mistakes" that "denied" Britain Frank Whittle's engine... It was certainly under development in 1940, but it was nowhere even close to being an operational piece of hardware. The technology simply hadn't caught up with it yet. The Meteor flew in 1943 and was operational in 1944 with a variation of Whittle's design.
Mtns
You are right that I am "of a certain age" (67) and met B. of B. pilots and others, like Douglas Bader and Barnes Wallis, as a lad. My comment about Whittle is that it is now clear that he was on the brink of a useful jet engine in the '30s but failed to get War Department backing. A missed opportunity which it is necessary to overlook if we want to keep the myth of gallant little Britain.
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