Schools > Students > Ages 17-18 > The Buddha > Who-is-the-BuddhaWho is the Buddha?
By now we know a good deal about the Buddha. We knowthat he was born in the Lumbini garden, we know how he was educated,we know how he left home, how he gained Enlightenment at the age ofthirty-five, how he communicated his teaching, how he founded hisSangha, and how, finally, he passed away. And there is a good dealmore we could find out. The traditional biographies give us all thefacts. We could find out the names of the Buddha's half-brothers andcousins, the name of the town where he was brought up, the name ofthe astrologer who came to see him as a baby. But although his lifeis fully documented, although we've got the whole story, does hisbiography really tell us who the Buddha was? Do we know the Buddhafrom a description of the life of Gautama the Buddha?
What do we mean by 'knowing' the Buddha anyway? In what sense, really,do we know anybody? Suppose you are told all about someone: wherethey live, what they do - the sort of things people always wantto know about a person - how old they are, and so on. In somesense you have an answer to the question, 'Who is this person?' Youknow their social identity, their position in society. Gradually youcan fill in any number of details - how tall they are, their accent,their background, their taste in food and music, their political affiliationsand their religious beliefs. You can then say you know aboutthis person. But however much you know about someone, you wouldnot claim to know them until you'd met them, until you'd metthem a few times, probably. You'd then know them personally.This deeper knowledge would, in fact, be based on a relationship,on communication: you know someone, properly speaking, when they alsoknow you. Eventually you may claim to know this person very well.
But is it really so? Do you really know them? After all, it sometimeshappens that we have to correct our evaluation of someone. Sometimeswe are taken completely by surprise. They do something quite unexpected,quite 'out of character', and we say to ourselves, rather surprisedand sometimes a little hurt, 'Well, I never would have expected themto do that. They're the last person I'd have thought would do that.'But they did it, and this shows how little we really know other people.We are not truly able to fathom the deepest springs of their action,their fundamental motivation. This happens even with those who aresupposedly nearest and dearest to us. It's a wise child that knowsits own father, as the saying goes - and it's a wise father ormother that knows his or her own child.
Particularly, perhaps, it is a wise husband that knows his own wife,and a wise wife that knows her own husband. Sometimes I've had theexperience of meeting - separately - a husband and wife, eachhaving come to talk to me about the other. And usually what happensis that each gives a picture of the other that I would never haverecognized. The impression I've had is that neither really knows theother. It's as though the so-called closeness gets in the way, andwhat we know is not the other person to whom we are supposed to beso close, but only our own projected mental state, our own quite subjectivereaction to that person. In other words, our ego gets in the way.
In order really to know another person we have to go much deeper thanthe ordinary level of communication - which means, in effect,that ordinary communication is not real communication at all. It'sjust the same when it comes to knowing the Buddha. We may know allthe biographical facts about his life, but are we thereby any nearerreally knowing the Buddha? Well, no. The question continues to arise:Who was the Buddha? This question has been asked since the very dawnof Buddhism. In fact, the first question that was put to the Buddhaafter his Enlightenment was, 'Who are you?'
Walking along the road one day, the Buddha met a brahmin called Dona.As he saw the Buddha in the distance, coming towards him, therewas something about the approaching figure that stopped Dona deadin his tracks. There were plenty of singular-looking individuals walkingabout India at that time - Dona himself was one of them -but Dona could see that this individual coming towards him wassomehow utterly different from anyone he had ever seen. The Buddha,after all, was just fresh from his Enlightenment. He was happy, serene,and joyful; there was a radiance about his whole being, as thougha light were shining from his face.
As the Buddha drew near, Dona asked him, 'Who are you?' Not 'Lovelyweather we're having,' or 'Where are you from?' but 'Who are you?'If you were standing at the bus stop waiting for the bus into townand someone came up and said, 'Who are you?' you'd probably thinkthey were being rather impertinent, but in India, of course, it'sdifferent, and Dona could put this question without fear of givingoffence. The point is that Dona was not asking who the Buddhawas in social terms; he was not asking what sort of a human beingthe Buddha was. Dona was, in fact, wondering if this was reallya human being at all that he was seeing.
The ancient Indians believed that the universe was stratified intovarious levels of existence. There were not just human beings andanimals, as we tend to think. There were also gods and ghosts andyakshas and gandharvas - all sorts of mythologicalbeings - inhabiting a sort of multi-storey universe. The humanplane was just one out of scores of planes of existence. Dona'sfirst thought, therefore, impressed as he was by the appearance ofthe Buddha, was, 'This isn't a human being. He must be from -or on his way to - some other realm. Perhaps he's a sort of spirit.'So he asked the Buddha, 'Who are you? Would you be a deva?'- a deva being a god, a divine being, a sort of archangel.The Buddha simply said, 'No.' So Dona tried again. 'Are you agandharva?' This creature is like a kind ofcelestial musician, a beautiful, singing, angelic figure. The Buddhaagain said, 'No.' 'Well,' said Dona, 'Are you a yaksha?'A yaksha is a sort of sublime spirit, rathera terrifying one, who lives in the jungle. But the Buddha rejectedthis designation as well. Then Dona thought, 'He must be a humanbeing after all. That's strange.' So he asked, 'Are you a human being?'(the kind of question you could only ask in ancient India) and onceagain the Buddha said, 'No.' 'Well, that is odd,' Donathought. 'If he isn't a deva, or a gandharva, or a yaksha,or a human being, what on earth is he?' 'Who are you?' he asked, noweven more wonderingly. 'If you are none of these things, who are you?What are you?'
The Buddha said, 'Those conditions (or, perhaps better, those psychologicalconditionings) on account of which I might have been described asa deva or a gandharva or a yaksha or a humanbeing have been destroyed. Therefore am I a Buddha.' It is, as wehave seen, these conditioned mental attitudes, volitions,or karma formations as they are sometimes called, which accordingto Buddhism (and Indian belief in general) determine our rebirth,as well as our human condition here and now. The Buddha was free fromall this, free from all conditioning, so there was nothing to causehim to be reborn as a god or a gandharva, or even a human being.Even as he stood before this Brahmin, therefore, he was not any ofthese things. His body might appear to be that of a man, but his mind,his consciousness, was unconditioned, and therefore he was a Buddha.As a Buddha he was a personification, so to speak - even, if youlike, an incarnation - of the Unconditioned mind.
What Dona tried to do is what we all try to do when we meet somethingnew. The human mind proceeds slowly, by degrees, from the known tothe unknown, and we try to describe the unknown in terms of the known;which is fair enough so long as one is aware of the limitations ofthis procedure. And we may say that the limitations of this procedureare most pronounced when it comes to trying to know other human beings.
There always seems to be a basic tendency to want to put people incategories and think that we have thereby got them neatly pigeon-holed.In India I have often been stopped in the road by someone just passing,who has said, 'What is your caste?' - without any sort of preamble.If they can't classify you according to caste, they don't know whatto do with you. They don't know how to treat you. They don't knowwhether they can take water from your hand or not, whether they canget to know you or not, whether you might marry their daughter ornot. All these things are very important, especially in southern India.In Britain people are much more indirect in their approach, but theytry to worm out of you the same sort of information. They want toknow what sort of job you've got (and perhaps from that they try towork out your income), they want to know where you were born, whereyou were educated, where you live now, and by taking these varioussociological readings, they gradually narrow down the field, and thinkthey've got you nicely pinned down.
So likewise, when Dona saw this majestic, radiant figure, andwanted to know who - or what - it was, he had at his disposalvarious labels - gandharva, yaksha, deva,human being - and he tried to stick these labels on what he saw.But the Buddha wouldn't have it. His reply said, in effect, 'Noneof these labels fit. None of them apply. I'm a Buddha. I transcendall conditionings. I am above and beyond all this.'
Dona may have been one of the first to puzzle over the Buddha'snature, but he was certainly not the last. We have already come acrossfour of the Fourteen Inexpressibles: whether the Buddha would existafter death, or not, or both, or neither. Although the Buddha wasconstantly being asked about this - the ancient Indians had areal thing about it - he would always say that it was inappropriateto apply any of those four statements to a Buddha. And he would goon to say, 'Even during his lifetime, even when he sits there in aphysical body, the Buddha is beyond all your classifications. Youcan't say anything about him.'(footnote 29)
This point is easily made, of course, but actually very difficultto accept, and it evidently needed to be constantly hammered home.The most suggestive and evocative repudiation of any attempt to graspthe nature of the Buddha is found in the Dhammapada:'Whose conquest is not to be undone, whom not even a bit of thoseconquered passions follows, that Enlightened One whose sphere is endless,by what path will you trace him, the pathless one?'(footnote 30) Accordingto this well-known verse, therefore, there is absolutely nothing bywhich a Buddha can be identified or tracked down or classified orcategorized. You cannot trace the path of a bird's flight by lookingfor signs of its passage in the sky - and you cannot track a Buddhaeither.
If this is clear, however, it has not really been understood. It issomehow the nature of the human mind to keep on trying, and to imaginethat, having understood what is being said, it understands what itis that is being spoken of. So if we turn to the SuttaNipata, we find the Buddha saying:
There is no measuring of man,
Won to the goal, whereby they'd say
His measure's so: that's not for him.
When all conditions are removed,
All ways of telling are removed.(footnote 31)
When all psychological conditions are removed in a person,you have no way of accounting for that person. You can't say anythingabout the Buddha because he doesn't have anything. In a sense, heisn't anything. In fact, we are introduced in this sutta to an epithetfor an Enlightened being which says just this. Akincana,usually translated as 'man of nought', is one who has nothing becausehe is nothing. And of nothing, nothing can be said.
Although many of the Buddha's disciples gained Enlightenment, andthemselves went through the world leaving no trace, as it were, theystill worshipped the Buddha. They still felt there was something abouthim, about the man who discovered the Way for himself with no oneto guide him, that was mysteriously beyond them and unfathomable.Even his chief disciple, Sariputra, flounderedwhen it came to estimating the Buddha's stature. He was once in thepresence of the Buddha when, out of an excess of faith and devotion,he exclaimed, 'Lord, I think you are the greatest of all the EnlightenedOnes who have ever existed, or will exist, or exist now. I think youare the greatest of them all.' The Buddha was neither pleased nordispleased by this. He didn't say, 'What a marvellous disciple youare, and how wonderfully well you understand me!' He just asked aquestion: 'Sariputra, have you known all the Buddhas of thepast?' Sariputra said, 'No, Lord.' Then he said, 'Have youknown all the Buddhas of the future?' 'No, Lord.' 'Do you know allthe Buddhas that now are?' 'No, Lord.' Finally, the Buddha asked 'Doyou even know me?' And Sariputra said, 'No, Lord.' Then theBuddha said, 'That being the case, Sariputra, how is it thatyour words are so bold and so grand?'(footnote 32)
So even the closest of his disciples didn't really know who the Buddhawas. To try to make sense of this attitude, they put together, afterhis death, a list of ten powers and eighteen special qualities whichthey attributed to the Buddha just to distinguish him from his Enlighteneddisciples. But in a way this was just an expression of the fact thatthey simply could not understand who or what he was at all.
This fact that the Enlightened disciples of the Buddha, enjoying personalcontact with him, did not understand who he really was does not saymuch for our own chances in the matter. However, at a certain level,we can build up a collection of hints and clues, and the episode withDona offers an important lead. What it is suggesting is that wehave to step back and bring in a whole new dimension to our searchfor the Buddha. He is untraceable because he belongs to a differentdimension, the transcendental dimension, the dimension of eternity.
So far we have seen him very much in terms of time - his birth,his Enlightenment, his death - his historical existence. We have,in fact, been looking at him according to the evolutionary model weintroduced in the first chapter, which model is, of course, one ofprogress through space and time. This, however, is only one way oflooking at things. As well as looking at the Buddha from the standpointof time, we can also look at him from the standpoint of eternity.
The problem with any biographical account of the Buddha is that ina sense it deals with two quite different people: Siddhartha andthe Buddha - divided by the central event of the Enlightenment.But one tends to come away from the biographical facts with the viewthat his early life simply built up to this point, and that afterit he was more or less the same as he was before - apart frombeing Enlightened, of course. If we had been around at the time weshould probably have been none the wiser. If we had known the Buddhaa few months before he was Enlightened and a few months after, weshould almost certainly not have been able to perceive any differencein him at all. We would have seen the same physical body, probablythe same clothes. He spoke the same language and had the same generalcharacteristics. This being so, we tend to regard the Buddha's Enlightenmentas a finishing touch to a process which had been going on for a longtime, the feather that turned the scale, the final piece of the jigsaw,that little difference that made all the difference. But really itisn't like that at all - not in the least like that.
Enlightenment - the Buddha's or anybody else's- represents 'the intersection of the timeless moment.'(footnote 33)We need to modify T.S. Eliot's analogy a little, becausestrictly speaking only a line can intersect another line, and althoughwe can represent time as a line, the whole point of the timeless -eternity - is that it isn't a line. Perhaps we should think ratherin terms of time as a line which at a given point just stops, justdisappears into another dimension. It's rather like - to use ahackneyed but (if we don't take it too literally) rather useful simile- the flowing of a river into the ocean, where the river is timeand the ocean is eternity. Perhaps, indeed, we can improve on thesimile to some extent. Suppose we imagine that the ocean into whichour river is flowing is just over the horizon. From where we are,we can see the river flowing to the horizon, but we can't see theocean into which the river is flowing, so it seems as though the riveris flowing into nothingness, flowing into a void. It just stops atthe horizon because that is the point at which it enters the new dimensionwhich we cannot see.
The point of intersection is what we call Enlightenment. Time juststops at eternity; time is succeeded, so to speak, by eternity. Siddharthadisappears, like the river disappearing at the horizon, and the Buddhatakes his place. This is, of course, from the standpoint of eternity.Whereas from the standpoint of time Siddhartha becomes,evolves into, the Buddha, from the standpoint of eternity Siddharthajust ceases to exist, and there is the Buddha, who has been thereall the time.
This difference of approach - in terms of time and in terms ofeternity - is at the bottom of the whole controversy between thetwo schools of Zen, the gradual school and the abrupt school.In the early days of Zen (or rather Ch'an) in China, therewere two apparently opposing viewpoints: there were those who believedthat Enlightenment was attained in a sudden flash of illumination;and there were those who believed that it was attained gradually,step by step, by patient effort and practice. In the PlatformSutra Hui Neng tries to clear up the whole controversy:he says it isn't that there are two paths, a gradual one and a suddenone; it is merely that some people gain Enlightenment more quicklythan others, presumably because they make a greater effort.
This is true, but you can go deeper than this. The abrupt attainmentof Enlightenment, you may say, has nothing to do with speed withintime. It doesn't mean that you begin the usual process of attainingEnlightenment and get through it more quickly. It doesn't mean thatwhereas you might normally spend fifteen or fifty years on the gradualpath, you are somehow able to speed it up and compress it into a year,or even a month, or a week, or a weekend. The abrupt path is outsidetime altogether. Sudden Enlightenment is simply the point at whichthis new dimension of eternity outside time is entered. You can neverget closer to eternity by speeding up your approach to it within time.Within time you just have to stop. At the same time, of course, youcan't stop without first having speeded up. So Enlightenment can belooked at from two points of view, both of which are valid. It canbe regarded as the culmination of the evolutionary process, a culminationwhich is reached through personal effort. But Enlightenment can alsobe regarded as being a sort of breakthrough into a new dimension beyondtime and space.
There is a rather picturesque story which vividly illustrates theparadoxical meeting of these two dimensions. It concerns a famousbandit, called Angulimala, who livedin a great forest somewhere in northern India. Angulimala'sspeciality was to ambush travellers on their way through the forest,murder them, and chop off one of their fingers as a trophy. Thesefingers he strung into a garland which he wore round his neck; hencehis name, Angulimala, meaning 'garland of fingers'. It washis ambition to have one hundred fingers on his garland, and he hadgot to ninety-eight when the Buddha happened to pass through thatforest. The village folk had tried to dissuade him from entering it,warning him that he was in danger of losing a finger - and hislife - to the notorious Angulimala, but the Buddhahad carried on regardless. The sight of him just about made Angulimala'sday, because he had been getting a bit desperate to find the lasttwo fingers for his garland. His mother, a devoted old soul,was living with him in the forest and cooking for him, and hehad got so fed up with waiting he had finally decided there was nothingfor it but to add one of her fingers to his collection (maybeshe used to nag him a bit). That would make ninety-nine, so he wouldjust need one more. He had been on his way to find his poor old motherwhen he saw the Buddha coming through the forest. He thought, 'Well,I can always deal with mother later. But first I will settle the hashof this shramana. Finger number ninety-nine coming up!'
It was a beautiful afternoon, a gentle breeze stirring the tree-topsand the birds singing, when the Buddha came walking along the littletrail that wound through the forest. He walked meditatively, slowly,thinking to himself or, perhaps, not thinking at all. Angulimalaemerged from the forest, and stealthily began to tail the Buddha,creeping up on him from behind. He had his sword drawn ready, so hecould make very quick work of his prey when he got close to him. Heloped along smoothly and rapidly to cut down the distance betweenthem before he was seen. The last thing he wanted was a long messystruggle.
After he had followed the Buddha for a while, however, he noticedthat something rather odd was happening. Although he seemed to bemoving much more quickly than the Buddha, he didn't seem to be gettingany closer to him. There was the Buddha way in front, pacing slowly,and there was Angulimala shadowing him and trying to catchup, but not getting any nearer. Angulimala quickened his pace,and then he was running, but he still got no nearer to the Buddha.When Angulimala realized what was happening, he apparentlybroke into a cold sweat of terror and astonishment and bewilderment.But he was not a man to give up easily - or to stop and thinkabout things either. He just lengthened his stride till he was sprintingalong in the wake of the Buddha. The Buddha, however, stayed justthe same distance ahead, and if anything he seemed to be going evenmore slowly. It was like a bad dream.
In desperation, Angulimala called out to the Buddha: 'Standstill!' The Buddha turned round and said, 'I am standing still. Itis you who are moving.' So Angulimala, who had considerablepresence of mind despite his fear - for he was a bold fellow -said, 'You are supposed to be a shramana, a holy man.How can you tell such a lie? Here am I running like mad, and I can'tcatch up with you. What do you mean, you are standing still?' TheBuddha said, 'I am standing still because I am standing in nirvana.I have come to rest. You are moving because you are going round andround in samsara.'(footnote 34)
Of course, Angulimala becomes the Buddha's disciple, but that,and what happens afterwards, is another story. What this particularadventure illustrates is that Angulimala could not catch upwith the Buddha because the Buddha was moving - or standing still,it is the same thing here - in another dimension. Angulimala,representing time, couldn't catch up with the Buddha, representingeternity. However long time goes on, it never comes to a point whereit catches up with eternity. Time doesn't find eternity within thetemporal process. Angulimala couldn't have caught up withthe Buddha even if the Buddha had come to a dead halt. He could stillbe running now, after 2,500 years, but he still wouldn't have caughtup with the Buddha.
When the Buddha attained Enlightenment, he entered a new dimensionof being. There was no continuity, essentially, from the person whowas there before. He was not just the old Siddhartha slightlyimproved, or even considerably improved, but a new person. This isactually a very difficult thing to grasp, it needs reflecting on,because we naturally think of the Buddha's Enlightenment in termsof our own experience of life. In the course of our lives we may addto our knowledge, learn different things, do different things, goto different places, meet different people, life teaches us things- but underneath we remain fundamentally and recognizably thesame person. Whatever changes take place don't go that deep. 'Thechild is father to the man' - that is, what one is now is determinedto a remarkable degree by what one was as a child. One remains muchthe same person as one was then. The conditions for one's fundamentalattitude to life were set up a long time ago, and any change thattakes place subsequently is comparatively superficial. This even appliesto our commitment to a spiritual path. We may take to Buddhism, wemay 'go for Refuge' to the Buddha, but the change isn't usually verydeep.
But the Buddha's experience of Enlightenment wasn't like that. Inreality it wasn't an experience at all, because the person to havethe experience wasn't there any more. The 'experience' of Enlightenmentis therefore more like death. It is more like the change that takesplace between two lives, when you die to one life and are reborn inanother. In some Buddhist traditions Enlightenment is called 'thegreat death', because everything of the past dies, everything, ina way, is annihilated, and you are completely reborn. In the caseof the Buddha, it is not that he was a smartened up version of Siddhartha,Siddhartha tinkered about with a bit, Siddhartha reissuedin a new edition. Siddhartha was finished. At the foot of thebodhi tree Siddhartha died and the Buddha was born - or weshould say, rather, that he 'appeared'. At that moment, when Siddharthadies, the Buddha is seen as having been alive all the time - bywhich we really mean above and beyond time, out of time altogether.
Even to talk in this way is again misleading, because it is not asif, being outside time, you are really outside anything. Time and<$Ispace>space are not things in themselves. We usually think of spaceas a sort of box within which things move about, and time as a sortof tunnel along which things move - but they are not really likethat. Space and <$Itime>time are really forms of our perception. Wesee things through the spectacles, as it were, of space and time.And we speak of these things that we see as phenomena - whichare, of course, what make up the world of relative, conditioned existence,or samsara. So what we call phenomena are only realities asseen under the forms of space and time. But when we enter the dimensionof eternity, we go beyond space and time, and thereforewe go beyond the world, we go beyond samsara, and, in theBuddhist idiom, we enter nirvana.
Enlightenment is often described as awakening to the truth of things,seeing things as they really are, not as they appear to be. The Enlightenedperson sees things free from any veils or obscurations, sees themwithout being influenced or affected by any assumptions or psychologicalconditionings, sees them with perfect objectivity - not only seesthem, but becomes one with them, one with the reality of things. Sothe Buddha, the one who has awoken to the Truth, the one who existsout of time in the dimension of eternity, may be regarded as Realityitself in human form. This is what is meant by saying that the Buddhais an Enlightened human being: the form is human, but in the place,so to speak, of the conditioned human mind, with all its prejudicesand preconceptions and limitations, there is Reality itself, thereis an experience or awareness which is not separate from Reality.
In the Buddhist tradition this crystallized eventually into a veryimportant distinction which came to be established with regard tothe Buddha. On the one hand there was his rupakaya(literally 'form body'), his physical phenomenal appearance; on theother, there was, or rather is, his dharmakaya(literally 'body of Truth' or 'body of Reality'), his true, his essential,form. The rupakaya is the Buddha as existing in time,but the dharmakaya is the Buddha as existing out of timein the dimension of eternity. Wherein lies the true nature of theBuddha, in his rupakaya or his dharmakaya, isdeclared definitively in a chapter from one of the great Perfectionof Wisdom texts, the Diamond Sutra.In it the Buddha says to his disciple, Subhuti:
Those who followed me by voice,
Wrong the effort they engaged in.
Me those people will not see.
From the Dharma should one see the Buddhas,
From the Dharma-bodies comes their guidance.
Yet Dharma's true nature cannot be discerned,
And no one can be conscious of it as an object.(footnote 35)
The Buddha is found to be equally emphatic on this pointin the Pali canon. Apparently there was a monk called Vakkaliwho was very devoted to the Buddha, but his devotion had got stuckat a superficial level. He was so fascinated by the appearance andthe personality of the Buddha that he used to spend all his time sittingand looking at him, or following him around. He didn't want any teaching.He didn't have any questions to ask. He just wanted to look at theBuddha. So one day the Buddha called him and said, 'Vakkali, thisphysical body is not me. If you want to see me, you must see the Dharma,you must see the dharmakaya, my true form.'(footnote 36) SoVakkali meditated on this, and he gained liberation by meditatingin this way very shortly before he died.
Vakkali's problem is actually one that most of us have. It's not thatwe should ignore the physical body, but we should take it as a symbolof the dharmakaya, the Buddha as he is in his ultimateessence. That said, it must be admitted that the word Buddha is ambiguous.When, for instance, we say, 'The Buddha spoke the language of Magadha,'we are obviously referring to Gautama the Buddha, the historical figure.On other occasions, however, 'Buddha' means the transcendental Reality,as when we say, 'Look for the Buddha within yourself.' Here we don'tmean Gautama the Buddha; we mean the eternal, time-transcending Buddha-naturewithin ourselves. Broadly speaking, the Theravada School todayuses the word Buddha more in the historical sense, whereas the Mahayana,especially Zen, tends to use it more in the spiritual, trans-historicalsense.
The shifting usage of this word only adds to the confusion Westernersare liable to feel when it comes to identifying the Buddha. Like Dona,we want to know who the Buddha is, we want to slap a label on him.But with our Western, dualistic, Christian background we have onlytwo labels available to us: God and Man. Some people tend to say thatthe Buddha was just a man - a very good man, a very holy man,very decent, but just a man, no more than that. He's someone ratherlike Socrates. This is the view taken, for instance, by Catholic writersabout Buddhism. It's a rather subtle, insidious approach. They praisethe Buddha for his wonderful piety, wonderful charity, great love,compassion, wisdom - yes, he's a very great man. Then, on thelast page of their book about Buddhism, they carefully add that ofcourse the Buddha was just a man, and not to be compared with Christ,who was, or is, the son of God. This is one way in which the Buddhagets misplaced. The other way people fail to see him is by saying,'No, the Buddha is a sort of god for the Buddhists. Of course, hewas originally a man, but then, hundreds of years after his death,those misguided Buddhists went and made him into a god, because theywanted to have something to worship.'
Both these views are wrong, and the source of this misconception probablylies in a general misunderstanding of what religion is necessarilyabout. People for whom the idea of a non-theistic religion is a contradictionin terms will always want to resolve the question of how the Buddhastands in relation to God. Christ is said by his followersto be the son of God. Muhammad is supposed to be the messenger ofGod. The Jewish prophets claim to be inspired by God. And Krishnaand Rama are claimed to be incarnations of God. Indeed, many Hindusthink of the Buddha as one as well. They look upon him as the ninthincarnation, the ninth avatar, of the god Vishnu. This is howthey see him because the category of avatar is a familiar oneto them. But neither the Buddha nor his followers make any such claim,because Buddhism is a non-theistic religion. Like some other religions- Taoism, Jainism, and certain forms of philosophical Hinduism- in Buddhism there is no place for God at all. There isno supreme being, no creator of the universe, and there never hasbeen. So Buddhists can worship as much as they like, but they willnever be worshipping their creator or any conception of a personalGod.
The Buddha is neither man nor God, nor even a god. He was a humanbeing in the sense that he started off as every other human beingstarts off, but he didn't remain an ordinary human being. He becamean Enlightened human being, and according to Buddhism that makes agreat deal of difference - in fact, all the difference. He wasan Unconditioned mind in a conditioned body. According to the Buddhisttradition, a Buddha is the highest being in all the universe, highereven than the so-called gods (whom in Western terms we would callangels, archangels, and so on). Traditionally the Buddha is calledthe teacher of gods and men, and in Buddhist art the gods are representedin a very humble position, saluting the Buddha and listening to histeaching. Therefore there is no possibility, whether on a philosophicalor a popular level, of confusing the Buddha with any kind of god.
For those of us brought up to imagine that if anyone is the highestbeing in the universe that person is God, it is not so easy to reallydiscern the Buddha in that position. Even if we don't believe in God,we see a God-shaped empty space, and the Buddha simply does not measureup to it. After all, he has not created the universe. We see the Buddhain this way because there's a category missing, we may say, from Westernthought. If, therefore, we are to perceive who the Buddha is we haveto dispel the ghost of God, the creator of the universe that loomsover him, by substituting for God something completely different.
After all this, are we any nearer to answering the question, 'Whois the Buddha?' We've seen that Buddha means Unconditioned mind, Enlightenedmind. Knowing the Buddha therefore means knowing the mind in its Unconditionedstate. So the answer to the question 'Who is the Buddha?' is reallythat we ourselves are the Buddha - potentially. We really, trulycome to know the Buddha only in the course of our spiritual life,in the course of our meditation, in the course of actualizing ourown potential Buddhahood. It is only then that we can really say,from knowledge and experience, who the Buddha is.
We can't do this all at once. It certainly can't be done in a day.First of all we have to establish a living contact with the Buddha.We have to arrive at something intermediate between mere factual knowledgeabout Gautama the Buddha - the details of his career - andon the other hand, the experience of Unconditioned mind. Thisintermediate stage is what we call Going for Refugeto the Buddha. And it means not just reciting 'Buddham saranamgacchami' ('to the Buddha for Refuge I go'), though it doesn'texclude that. It means committing ourselves to the goal of Enlightenmentas a living ideal, as our ultimate objective, and striving to realizeit. It is only by Going for Refuge to the Buddha, with all that thisimplies, with all that this means, that we can answer from the heartand the mind and the whole of our spiritual life the question: 'Whois the Buddha?'
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