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A book on the Life of the Buddha
Bunks
Australia Veteran
Hi everyone! Happy Friday :thumbsup:
So I've read heaps of books on the teachings of the Buddha but I have felt the urge lately to read a book about the life of the man himself.
Can I anyone recommend a book that covers the life of the Buddha before and after enlightenment? Something that gives a feel for what India was like at the time he lived.
Thanks! :om:
So I've read heaps of books on the teachings of the Buddha but I have felt the urge lately to read a book about the life of the man himself.
Can I anyone recommend a book that covers the life of the Buddha before and after enlightenment? Something that gives a feel for what India was like at the time he lived.
Thanks! :om:
0
Comments
http://www.holybooks.com/the-buddha-his-life-and-teachings/
Accounts differ as to certain details, but the general consensus is that the Buddha's mother, Queen Maya, died just after childbirth, and the Buddha was raised by his mother's younger sister, Pajapati, who married his father after her sister's death. His father, fearing predictions by brahmin scholars that his son would either become a great leader or holy man, did everything he could to make sure that his son would follow in his footsteps, giving him anything he desired and keeping him sheltered from the outside world. At the age of about 16, his father arranged a marriage between him and Yasodhara, a cousin of the same age from another prominent family.
Together, they lived a royal lifestyle for a number of years, and eventually conceived a child. However, becoming increasingly restless and dissatisfied with worldly life, the Buddha began to contemplate the nature of human suffering and was overcome by an overwhelming desire to seek a way to conquer ageing, sickness, and death. At the age of 29, near or at the time of his son's birth, the Buddha decided to renounce the worldly life and set out in search of an end to suffering as a wandering mendicant, a goal he's said to have achieved 6 years later. (In most traditional accounts, the Buddha's spiritual restlessness is said to have been the result of seeing an old man, a sick man, and a corpse during a chariot ride through the country, while his decision to leave the worldly life behind was inspired by the sight of a wandering ascetic.)
His path to awakening began by studying with two ascetic teachers, where he practiced meditative techniques leading to the development of the third and fourth 'formless meditations' (arupa-jhanas), respectively, as well as other ascetic practices such as relying on alms. Unsatisfied with results under these teachers, however, who took their respective meditative states as the supreme goal, he set out with five other ascetics to practice even more extreme austerities in the hopes of subduing his passions and finding a permanent end to suffering, such as subsisting on a handful of food or less a day. His self-mortification is said to have been unrivalled among his companions, nearly starving himself in the process. But this, too, he found unsatisfactory.
He began taking food again, which caused his fellow ascetics to abandon him. Reassessing his path, he decided to take a moderate or 'middle' approach, avoiding the indulgences of his youth and the extreme asceticism he barely survived. He continued to explore meditation, and it was through a combination of developing the first four jhanas together with cultivating insight, directing the mind towards penetrating with discernment 'knowledge and vision of things as they are present' (yatha-bhuta-nana-dassana), that finally lead to the Buddha's awakening (MN 36, SN 12.23), which is synonymous with nibbana (unbinding)—the end of suffering; the extinction of craving (tahna) (AN 10.60); and the extinguishing of greed, hatred, and delusion (SN 38.1).
After his awakening experience, the Buddha set out into the world and began teaching whoever would listen, starting with his five former companions and including his family, until his death some 45 years later. Throughout this narrative, there are many miraculous tales surrounding the Buddha's life, some of which are admittedly hard to swallow, such as the story of the Buddha taking seven steps and speaking after his birth.
While many see these fantastic events as something to either be 100% believed or rejected, I see them as being full of rich symbolism and meant more as teaching aids than events we're required to accept as literal occurrences, or else later additions and/or exaggerations attempting to essentially deify the Buddha, potentially in an effort to compete with rival schools, as well as teachers from other sects. It should also be noted that a lot of the Buddha's pre-awakening biographical information comes from much later sources, and many were probably co-opted from other places and myths, such as the biography of Mahavira.
I speculate that nobody really thought those kinds of deals were important at the beginning. The Buddha was most likely a skilled and gifted teacher, and his teachings and presence were enough to inspire confidence in his followers. After the Buddha's death, however, his followers may have felt the need to talk him up a bit in order to compete with the claims of other sects and their founders, not only to make themselves feel better but to help gain adherents by illustrating the Buddha's greatness and wisdom. And since they didn't have much to go on a generation or so later, they lifted some of the details from other sources, eventually creating an amalgamation of facts and legends that became the Buddha's biography.
That, or the historical Buddha never existed and was himself just a legend. But I personally don't think that's the case. I tend to think there was someone like the Buddha, and I agree with Prof. Gombrich that, "the central part of the [Pali] Canon... presents such originality, intelligence, grandeur and - most relevantly - coherence, that it is hard to see it as a composite works" (Theravada Buddhism, p. 20), meaning its consistency of content suggests a large portion of it likely originated from a single source (which we give the label 'Buddha') rather than multiple ones over a relatively long period of time.
If you read, absorb. learn about, come to understand and accept the Four Noble Truths, you will quickly appreciate that all struggles, all human beings experience, are 'related to' the struggles Siddhatta experienced prior to his search for The Truth.
The Four Noble Truths unite us all.
no one human being, is different to another, in their experience of those truths.
That's what you need to really, really understand......
I found the book to be a good read and I think the author accomplished what he was trying to do.
The Historical Buddha by H. W. Schumann. A classic.
Lives: Buddhaby Karen Armstrong. Anything by Armstrong is worth reading. Another of hers which puts the life of the Buddha in a world context is The Great Transformation: The World in the Time of Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah.
Martine Batchelor-- The Spirit of the Buddha also has a different historically informed story of the Buddha-- a guy who was married as a teenager, got a family life he never asked or wanted and may have stuck around at home just long enough to see his child off. (Stephen's version was that the Buddha may have been off at Taxila University for the duration of his marriage and may have only visited home to conceive a child who he expected to be raised by his extended family). In both cases, this is an ancient and alien (to me) family system.