🧚 Opening, part 1 · page 2

Seven days after Gotama was born, his mother died, and he was brought up by his aunt and step-mother.195 When he was nineteen years old, he married his own cousin.196 For ten years he lived a life of ease, in the enjoyment of all the comforts and luxuries which riches and high position could give him.197 When he was twenty-nine years old, a change came over him.198

For many centuries, it has been a common belief in India that when a human being dies, he is at once born again.199 If he has lived a good life, he will be born again on earth as the child of a king or of a rich man, or in one of the heavens as a god.200 If he has lived an evil life, he will be born again as a ghost, or as an animal, or in some place of torment.201

According to this belief, every person has been born and has lived and died so many times that it would be impossible to count the number.202 Indeed, so far back into the past does this series of lives extend that it is impossible even to imagine a beginning of the series.203 What is more to the point, in each of these lives every person has endured much suffering and misery.204

Said the Buddha: “In weeping over the death of sons and daughters and other dear ones, every person, in the course of his past lives, has shed tears more abundant than all the water contained in the four great oceans.”205

And again: “The bones left by a single person in the course of his past lives would form a pile so huge that were all the mountains to be gathered up and piled in a heap, that heap of mountains would appear as nothing beside it.”206

And again: “The head of every person has been cut off so many times in the course of his past lives, either as a human being or as an animal, as to cause him to shed blood more abundant than all the water contained in the four great oceans.”207

Nothing more terrible than this can be imagined.208 Yet for many centuries it has been a common belief in India.209 Wise men taught that there was a way of escape, a way of salvation.210 If a person wished to avoid repeated lives of suffering and misery, he must leave home and family and friends, become a monk, and devote himself to fasting, bodily torture, and meditation.211

The Buddhist Scriptures tell us that when Gotama was twenty-nine years old, he saw for the first time an Old Man, a Sick Man, a Dead Man, and a Monk.212 The thought that in the course of his past lives he had endured old age, sickness, and death, times without number, terrified him, and he resolved to become a monk.213

Leaving home and wife and son, he devoted himself for six years to fasting, bodily torture, and meditation.214 Finally he became convinced that fasting and bodily torture were not the way of salvation, and abandoned the struggle.215 One night he had a wonderful experience.216 First he saw the entire course of his past lives.217 Next he saw the fate after death of all living beings.218 Finally he came to understand the cause of human suffering and the cure for it.219

Thus it was that he became Buddha, the Awakened, the Enlightened.220 He saw that the cause of rebirth and suffering was craving for worldly pleasures and life and riches.221 He saw that if this craving were uprooted, rebirth and suffering would come to an end.222 He saw that this craving could be uprooted by right belief, right living, and meditation.223

For forty-five years the Buddha journeyed from place to place, preaching and teaching.224 He founded an order of monks and nuns, and won many converts.225 He lived to be eighty years old.226 Missionaries carried his teachings from India to Ceylon and Burma and China and Tibet and Japan.227 In a few hundred years the religion of the Buddha had spread over the whole of Asia.228 Hundreds of millions of human beings have accepted his teachings.229

In at least two respects, the teachings of the Buddha were quite remarkable.230 In the first place, he insisted on the virtue of moderation.231 He urged upon his hearers to avoid the two extremes of a life devoted to fasting and self-torture, and a life of self-indulgence.232 In the second place, he taught that a man must love his neighbor as himself, returning good for evil and love for hatred.233 But this was not all.234 He taught men to love all living creatures without respect of kind or person.235 He taught men not to injure or kill any living creature, whether a human being or an animal, even in self-defense.236 All war, according to the teaching of the Buddha, is unholy.237

In the course of time it came to be believed that Gotama had become Buddha as the fruit of good deeds performed in countless previous states of existence, especially deeds of generosity.238 At any time, had he so desired, he might have uprooted craving for worldly pleasures and life and riches by meditation, and thus have escaped the sufferings of repeated states of existence.239 But this he deemed an unworthy course.240 Out of pity and compassion and friendliness for living creatures, he preferred to be reborn again and again, to suffer and to die again and again, in order that, by the accumulated merit of good works, he might himself become enlightened and thus be able to enlighten others.241

In comparison with the career of the Future Buddha, devoted to the performance of good works, unselfish, generous to the point of sacrificing his own body and blood,--the career of the monk, isolated from the world, selfish, seeking by meditation to uproot craving for worldly pleasures and life and riches, seemed low and mean.242 The disciple began to imitate his Master.243 Thus began the Higher Career or Vehicle of Mahāyāna or Catholic Buddhism, as distinguished from the Lower Career or Vehicle of the more primitive Hīnayāna Buddhism of the Pāli texts.244 Thus did the quest of Buddhahood supplant the quest of Nibbāna.245 This development took place long before the beginning of the Christian era.246

Gotama Buddha made frequent use of similes, allegories, parables, fables, and other stories, to illustrate his teachings.247 His example was imitated by his followers, and in the course of time hundreds and hundreds of stories were attributed to him on general principles.248 Most of these stories were, in their original form, nothing but simple folk-tales, many of them of great antiquity.249 Parallels and variants are found in the Mahābhārata, the Panchatantra, Bidpai’s Fables, the Hitopadesha, the Kathāsaritsāgara, and other fiction-collections, especially those of the Jains.250

Of the twenty-six stories contained in this book, of eight of which two versions are given, eleven stories or versions of stories (6, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17 _a_, 18 _a_, 19 _a_, 20 _a_, 23 _a_, 24 _a_) are taken from the oldest canonical texts of the Buddhist Sacred Scriptures.251 Of these eleven stories, the first nine are said to have been related by Gotama himself, the last two being attributed to the Buddhist sage Kumāra Kassapa.252 It is highly probable that the tradition embodied in the texts regarding these eleven stories is correct.253 We may therefore feel quite certain that such remarkable parables as _Brahmadatta and the prince_ (6), _Blind men and elephant_ (13), and _The birds_ (16) were actually related by Gotama himself, in substantially the same form as that in which we now have them.254 It is not at all unlikely that such a parable as _Brahmadatta and Mallika_ (8) was also related by Gotama, but of this we cannot be certain.255