The Light of Asia (and the World)

Sir Edwin Arnold (BuddhaNet.net); Wisdom Quarterly

Book The First

The Scripture of the Saviour of the World,

Lord Buddha--Prince Siddartha styled on earth

In Earth and Heavens and Hells Incomparable,

All-honoured, Wisest, Best, most Pitiful;

The Teacher of Nirvana and the Law [Dharma].

Then came he to be born again for [humans].

Setaketu, Tusita world, high in Sense Sphere

Below the highest sphere four Regents sit

Who rule our world, and under them are zones

Nearer, but high, where saintliest spirits dead

Wait thrice ten thousand years, then live again;

And on Lord Buddha, waiting in that sky,

Came for our sakes the five sure signs of birth

So that the Devas knew the signs, and said

"Buddha will go again to help the World."

"Yea!" spake He, "now I go to help the World.

This last of many times; for birth and death

End hence for me and those who learn my Law.

I will go down among the Sakyas,

Under the southward snows of Himalay,

Where pious people live and a just King."

That night the wife of King Suddhodana,

Maya the Queen, asleep beside her Lord,

Dreamed a strange dream; dreamed that a star

from heaven--

Splendid, six-rayed, in colour rosy-pearl,

Whereof the token was an Elephant

Six-tusked and whiter than Vahuka's milk--

Shot through the void and, shining into her,

Entered her womb upon the right. Awaked,

Bliss beyond mortal mother's filled her breast,

And over half the earth a lovely light

Forewent the morn. The strong hills shook; the waves

Sank lulled; all flowers that blow by day came forth

As 't were high noon; down to the farthest hells

Passed the Queen's joy, as when warm sunshine thrills

Wood-glooms to gold, and into all the deeps

A tender whisper pierced. "Oh ye," it said,

"The dead that are to live, the live who die,

 

Setaketu ("White Banner") reborn as Siddhartha ("Wish-Fulfilled") finally awakened.

 

Uprise, and hear, and hope! Buddha is come!"

Whereat in Limbos numberless much peace

Spread, and the world's heart throbbed, and a wind blew

With unknown freshness over lands and seas.

And when the morning dawned, and this was told,

The grey dream-readers said "The dream is good!

The Crab is in conjunction with the Sun;

The Queen shall bear a boy, a holy child

Of wondrous wisdom, profiting all flesh,

Who shall deliver men from ignorance,

Or rule the world, if he will deign to rule." More

• Project Gutenberg: Light of Asia (online reader)

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The Lost Lands of Buddhist Belief

Renuka Narayanan, Hindustan Times, Nov. 17, 2012; Wisdom Quarterly

French archaeological team on top of giant 4th century Buddhist stupa cut into mountain in Samangan province, Afghanistan, 2006. A historic site to the south and east is Mes Aynak now at risk from mining (John Moore/Getty Images).

 

Gandhara became Pakistan and Afghanistan

In today's religiously riven landscape, it's hard to imagine how Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Islam, Sikhism, and Christianity took turns to water the land, each to its own degree. Of these, perhaps we know the least about Buddhism, because it originated so very long ago.

But around CE (Common Era) 406, it was recorded that there were 3,000 monastics of the Theravada school in Bannu at the Northwest Frontier of India [modern Afghanistan/Pakistan, ancient Gandhara]. 

 

In Peshawar, the grand pagoda built by Kanishka was so impressive that the opinion was, "Of the various pagodas in the inhabited world, this one takes the highest rank."

 

In the Punjab proper, across the river Indus, lay a region called Bhida where Buddhism flourished. 

 

The local people were very touched to see foreign Buddhists [from the West] and looked after them with great care and affection as the Buddha himself would have wished. Across the Land of Five Rivers, there were many monasteries with nearly 10,000 monks and nuns.

• Saving the Buddhas of Mes Aynak, Afghanistan

In Vrajamandal at Mathura, there were 20 monasteries on the banks of the Yamuna river. It was also observed that, "All the kings of the countries to the west of the desert [where the Buddha was born] are firm believers."

Buddhism began in India but Siddhartha came from the northwestern frontier (pakistaniat)

 

While everyday people gave utmost respect to Buddhist monastics, the monastics occupied themselves with "benevolent ministrations and with chanting liturgies, or sitting in meditation."

When wandering monastics arrived, they were welcomed at these monasteries with water, oil, and "the liquid food allowed after hours" and given rooms to rest in. More

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Buddhist monk competing in Olympics

Wisdom Quarterly

"Usain - not every man wants to be the fastest in the world," Durex brags on billboard.

  
Ven. Kenki Sato is in London competing in the Olympics. The sport he is competing in is -- not the archery Siddhartha was so good at, which would currently have him being beat by a blind man -- equestrian. Sensei is a Mahayana Buddhist monastic who resides in Myoshoji Temple, Japan. 

  

"Oh, I get it! That's pretty funny."

The monastery is located in the mountains near Nagano. His father, Shodo, is the 25th master of the 460-year-old temple and adjacent horse-riding club. Sensei follows his younger brother Eiken, who not only trained as a monk but in addition rode at the Beijing Olympics. His 24-year-old sister, Tae, is a five-time national show-jumping champion.

With his horse -- not named "Kanthaka" like Siddhartha's boyhood pony -- "Boy Toy," the venerable monk is seen on the track. He has won two gold medals in individual and team jumping at the 16th Asian Games in 2010.

• PHOTOS: Olympic sports part of daily life for tribes worldwide

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Noah Levine teaches Against the (Dharma)?

Seth Auberon and Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly

He's a Dharma punk and not dumb, so how does he know so little about the Buddha?

In a devastating blow to Buddhist history, author and "Against the Stream" founder Noah Levine turned the Buddha's life into an unrecognizable mishmash of revisionist thought, doubt and outlandish speculation. At one point he had Siddhartha tying stones to his privates, all the while laughing and engendering laughter from an eager American audience. The constant refrain was, "We just don't know. These things weren't written down. There was a lot of mythologizing..." Therefore we can throw anything into the story we like and it'll be just as true/doubtful as all the rest of it? Levine's heart was obviously in the right place.

(LINK) BBC documentary: "The Life of the Buddha"

   

Maybe its less Buddhism than recovery and punk

But one would have to guess -- based solely on his bumbling through the life story -- that he only recently became acquainted with Buddhism as a sacred tradition of the East. The Buddha's life, certainly much informed by mythological elements prevalent in ancient India, is retold to inspire our own path: We live luxuriously, we suffer, we assume that the only antidote to suffering is hedonism, then one day occurs to us that this has never worked. So we try something else. We go on a quest. We question convention. We go have a look for ourselves. And inasmuch as we question or reject society, we look inward for answers: What is true? What can I know to be true? How can I bring suffering to an end, not just for myself, but for all beings who suffer?

• See Noah Levine continue Wednesdays live in Hollywood

Siddhartha did not set off on this quest only once; he (reappearing in various transient forms, not as the same being but not altogether another) spent many lives developing the perfections. These enabled him to become a master physician for what ails living beings, a superlative teacher able to communicate that subtle and profound discovery of what's been going wrong in our own search for a way out, a samma-sam-buddha or "right and fully awakened one." Levine is not alone in sowing doubt and, possibly inadvertently, ridiculing the "less important" Buddhist teachings, such as its venerable history and origins.
  
Former Buddhist monk and continuing British iconoclast Stephen Batchelor, author of Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, seems to have profoundly influenced Levine's view of not only Buddhist history but its theology (yes, it has one in spite of being a non-theistic tradition) and cosmology as well. There's more than a little of fellow punk and Zen Master Brad Warner in Levine's approach as well.
   

(ABC News) Stephen Batchelor talks about his confessions with ABC

To hear Levine tell it, Buddhism doesn't know its zafu from its zabuton and is ass-backwards on everything but its core insight (vipassana) teachings. With teachers like Jack Kornfield and his own father, Buddhist author Stephen Levine, that comes as a surprise. One would imagine his time in prison gave him time to reflect, grow hungry for answers, and then satisfy that hunger through books, monastics, and comparative religion professors.

 

Is Levine opinionated? It would not seem so, for when local meditator Sherry asked him to define "atheist," he suddenly had no personal opinion and turned the question on her like a reticent therapist.

  

Wisdom Quarterly would retell the story of the Buddha's life just for Levine's benefit. But any child with a picture book and even Keanu Reeves can get the highlights right.
  

   
It is difficult to see how one can have a sense of the Buddha's teaching, the Dharma, without a basic understanding of what the historical Buddha went through to arrive at the breakthrough that gave rise to the dispensation and the mythological elements that got added.

• FULL INTERVIEW: Stephen Batchelor's Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist

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Is Buddhism a Religion? Yes, and No. How's That for a Koan?

We often talk about Siddhartha, the young man who became known as the Buddha, as if he were a god. The fact is that he was just a simple Indian guy, a human being like you and me. We think of him as some kind of super-genius for having attained complete spiritual awakening, but in fact his real genius was in showing how any one of us can attain the same awakening as he did. We describe him as a prince and a member of the elite royalty of his time, and we think that must have given him an advantage over us -- but the reality is that most of us today are probably better off, in material terms, than Siddhartha was. The point is, we shouldn't mythologize Siddhartha's life and think that his spiritual awakening was due to his special circumstances. Most of us today actually live in conditions very similar to Siddhartha's, in terms of our material situation.

James: This is something that many in the West don't understand. They think we worship Buddha when we bow to his statues. I think a segment of this misunderstanding stems from the Western idea of what a religion constitutes. The main religions practiced in the West all have the common denominator of a belief in an omnipotent being that rules over all humanity--a "God." Combine that with a relative cultural isolation of many Americans and you have a recipe for misunderstanding Buddhism and other non-Western belief systems.

Siddhartha was a truth seeker, nothing more. He wasn't looking for religion, as such -- he wasn't particularly interested in religion. He was searching for the truth. He was looking for a genuine path to freedom from suffering. Aren't all of us searching for the same thing? If we look at the life of Siddhartha, we can see that he found the truth and freedom he was seeking only after he abandoned religious practices. Isn't that significant? The one who became the Buddha, the "Awakened One," didn't find enlightenment through religion -- he found it when he began to leave religion behind.

James: I don't think this means that we should abandon monasteries, temples and teachers but it is a necessary caution in reminding practitioners that these things are tools to help us along the path that only we can walk. For example, I think we deify our teachers a bit and lean upon them sometimes too much like a crutch. Yet Buddha was clear that we can know the Dharma like the back of our hand but all that is worthless unless we set out on our own and put them into practice. No one can walk the path for us. No teacher can cure us of our suffering--regardless of how enlightened and talented they may be. So, in that sense Buddhism isn't a religion in the Western sense but rather, perhaps, a spiritual school. Let me be clear, however. It doesn't hurt to practice with others in a physical sangha because it offers us support and encouragement but just remember that Buddha had none of these things. And if he can do it, so can we.

After all, what would you do if you were the last Buddhist on Earth? Would you stop practicing because there were no more teachers, temples, statues and sanghas? Of course not. These things are maps but they aren't the path itself. Spiritual materialism and attachment to it's trimmings is just as sure a pitfall as falling into the delusional hole that we don't need any teaching or guidance at all. Ironically, fittingly and beautifully we come back to the conclusion that Buddhism itself should be approached with the middle-path mindset. The way we view it should be balanced between traditional practice and freelance adaptation to an individuals particular karma.

Neither wrong to attend a temple or monastery nor wrong to be more of a hermit Buddhist as Buddha initially was. Some teachers I have read will actually recommend certain students leave the monastery to study on their own as a hermit. So, there are many paths but only one Dharma. That said, neither I, nor Rinpoche are advocating we do away with Buddhism as a religion but rather to go beyond Buddhism as a religion. This means having the structural integrity of the Dharma as our foundation but we shouldn't let organized religion hold back our practice to where we simply copy someone else's practice. In my years of practice I have found that mimicking the path of someone else is simply yet another delusion.

To read the rest of Rinpoche's insightful article, simply click on this sentence.

~Peace to all beings~

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