Schools > Students > Ages 17-18 > Buddhism and God > Who is the Buddha? Who is the Buddha?
By now we know a good deal about the Buddha. We know
that 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 of
thirty-five, how he communicated his teaching, how he founded his
Sangha, and how, finally, he passed away. And there is a good deal
more we could find out. The traditional biographies give us all the
facts. We could find out the names of the Buddha's half-brothers and
cousins, the name of the town where he was brought up, the name of
the astrologer who came to see him as a baby. But although his life
is fully documented, although we've got the whole story, does his
biography really tell us who the Buddha was? Do we know the Buddha
from 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: where
they live, what they do - the sort of things people always want
to know about a person - how old they are, and so on. In some
sense you have an answer to the question, 'Who is this person?' You
know their social identity, their position in society. Gradually you
can fill in any number of details - how tall they are, their accent,
their background, their taste in food and music, their political affiliations
and their religious beliefs. You can then say you know about
this person. But however much you know about someone, you would
not claim to know them until you'd met them, until you'd met
them 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 also
know you. Eventually you may claim to know this person very well.
But is it really so? Do you really know them? After all, it sometimes
happens that we have to correct our evaluation of someone. Sometimes
we are taken completely by surprise. They do something quite unexpected,
quite 'out of character', and we say to ourselves, rather surprised
and sometimes a little hurt, 'Well, I never would have expected them
to 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 are
supposedly nearest and dearest to us. It's a wise child that knows
its own father, as the saying goes - and it's a wise father or
mother 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 the
experience of meeting - separately - a husband and wife, each
having come to talk to me about the other. And usually what happens
is that each gives a picture of the other that I would never have
recognized. The impression I've had is that neither really knows the
other. It's as though the so-called closeness gets in the way, and
what we know is not the other person to whom we are supposed to be
so close, but only our own projected mental state, our own quite subjective
reaction 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 than
the ordinary level of communication - which means, in effect,
that ordinary communication is not real communication at all. It's
just the same when it comes to knowing the Buddha. We may know all
the biographical facts about his life, but are we thereby any nearer
really knowing the Buddha? Well, no. The question continues to arise:
Who was the Buddha? This question has been asked since the very dawn
of Buddhism. In fact, the first question that was put to the Buddha
after 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, there
was something about the approaching figure that stopped Dona dead
in his tracks. There were plenty of singular-looking individuals walking
about India at that time - Dona himself was one of them -
but Dona could see that this individual coming towards him was
somehow 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 though
a light were shining from his face.
As the Buddha drew near, Dona asked him, 'Who are you?' Not 'Lovely
weather 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 town
and someone came up and said, 'Who are you?' you'd probably think
they were being rather impertinent, but in India, of course, it's
different, and Dona could put this question without fear of giving
offence. The point is that Dona was not asking who the Buddha
was in social terms; he was not asking what sort of a human being
the Buddha was. Dona was, in fact, wondering if this was really
a human being at all that he was seeing.
The ancient Indians believed that the universe was stratified into
various levels of existence. There were not just human beings and
animals, as we tend to think. There were also gods and ghosts and
yakshas and gandharvas - all sorts of mythological
beings - inhabiting a sort of multi-storey universe. The human
plane was just one out of scores of planes of existence. Dona's
first thought, therefore, impressed as he was by the appearance of
the 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 a
gandharva?' This creature is like a kind of
celestial musician, a beautiful, singing, angelic figure. The Buddha
again said, 'No.' 'Well,' said Dona, 'Are you a yaksha?'
A yaksha is a sort of sublime spirit, rather
a terrifying one, who lives in the jungle. But the Buddha rejected
this designation as well. Then Dona thought, 'He must be a human
being 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 once
again the Buddha said, 'No.' 'Well, that is odd,' Dona
thought. '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, now
even more wonderingly. 'If you are none of these things, who are you?
What are you?'
The Buddha said, 'Those conditions (or, perhaps better, those psychological
conditionings) on account of which I might have been described as
a deva or a gandharva or a yaksha or a human
being have been destroyed. Therefore am I a Buddha.' It is, as we
have seen, these conditioned mental attitudes, volitions,
or karma formations as they are sometimes called, which according
to Buddhism (and Indian belief in general) determine our rebirth,
as well as our human condition here and now. The Buddha was free from
all this, free from all conditioning, so there was nothing to cause
him 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 of
these 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 you
like, an incarnation - of the Unconditioned mind.
What Dona tried to do is what we all try to do when we meet something
new. The human mind proceeds slowly, by degrees, from the known to
the 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 of
this procedure. And we may say that the limitations of this procedure
are 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 in
categories 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 what
to do with you. They don't know how to treat you. They don't know
whether they can take water from your hand or not, whether they can
get to know you or not, whether you might marry their daughter or
not. All these things are very important, especially in southern India.
In Britain people are much more indirect in their approach, but they
try to worm out of you the same sort of information. They want to
know what sort of job you've got (and perhaps from that they try to
work out your income), they want to know where you were born, where
you were educated, where you live now, and by taking these various
sociological readings, they gradually narrow down the field, and think
they've got you nicely pinned down.
So likewise, when Dona saw this majestic, radiant figure, and
wanted to know who - or what - it was, he had at his disposal
various 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, 'None
of these labels fit. None of them apply. I'm a Buddha. I transcend
all conditionings. I am above and beyond all this.'
Dona may have been one of the first to puzzle over the Buddha's
nature, but he was certainly not the last. We have already come across
four of the Fourteen Inexpressibles: whether the Buddha would exist
after death, or not, or both, or neither. Although the Buddha was
constantly being asked about this - the ancient Indians had a
real thing about it - he would always say that it was inappropriate
to apply any of those four statements to a Buddha. And he would go
on to say, 'Even during his lifetime, even when he sits there in a
physical body, the Buddha is beyond all your classifications. You
can't say anything about him.'(footnote 29)
This point is easily made, of course, but actually very difficult
to accept, and it evidently needed to be constantly hammered home.
The most suggestive and evocative repudiation of any attempt to grasp
the nature of the Buddha is found in the Dhammapada:
'Whose conquest is not to be undone, whom not even a bit of those
conquered passions follows, that Enlightened One whose sphere is endless,
by what path will you trace him, the pathless one?'(footnote 30) According
to this well-known verse, therefore, there is absolutely nothing by
which a Buddha can be identified or tracked down or classified or
categorized. You cannot trace the path of a bird's flight by looking
for signs of its passage in the sky - and you cannot track a Buddha
either.
If this is clear, however, it has not really been understood. It is
somehow the nature of the human mind to keep on trying, and to imagine
that, having understood what is being said, it understands what it
is that is being spoken of. So if we turn to the Sutta
Nipata, 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 anything
about the Buddha because he doesn't have anything. In a sense, he
isn't anything. In fact, we are introduced in this sutta to an epithet
for an Enlightened being which says just this. Akincana,
usually translated as 'man of nought', is one who has nothing because
he is nothing. And of nothing, nothing can be said.
Although many of the Buddha's disciples gained Enlightenment, and
themselves went through the world leaving no trace, as it were, they
still worshipped the Buddha. They still felt there was something about
him, about the man who discovered the Way for himself with no one
to guide him, that was mysteriously beyond them and unfathomable.
Even his chief disciple, Sariputra, floundered
when it came to estimating the Buddha's stature. He was once in the
presence of the Buddha when, out of an excess of faith and devotion,
he exclaimed, 'Lord, I think you are the greatest of all the Enlightened
Ones who have ever existed, or will exist, or exist now. I think you
are the greatest of them all.' The Buddha was neither pleased nor
displeased by this. He didn't say, 'What a marvellous disciple you
are, and how wonderfully well you understand me!' He just asked a
question: 'Sariputra, have you known all the Buddhas of the
past?' Sariputra said, 'No, Lord.' Then he said, 'Have you
known all the Buddhas of the future?' 'No, Lord.' 'Do you know all
the Buddhas that now are?' 'No, Lord.' Finally, the Buddha asked 'Do
you even know me?' And Sariputra said, 'No, Lord.' Then the
Buddha said, 'That being the case, Sariputra, how is it that
your words are so bold and so grand?'(footnote 32)
So even the closest of his disciples didn't really know who the Buddha
was. To try to make sense of this attitude, they put together, after
his death, a list of ten powers and eighteen special qualities which
they attributed to the Buddha just to distinguish him from his Enlightened
disciples. But in a way this was just an expression of the fact that
they simply could not understand who or what he was at all.
This fact that the Enlightened disciples of the Buddha, enjoying personal
contact with him, did not understand who he really was does not say
much 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 with
Dona offers an important lead. What it is suggesting is that we
have to step back and bring in a whole new dimension to our search
for the Buddha. He is untraceable because he belongs to a different
dimension, 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 we
introduced in the first chapter, which model is, of course, one of
progress through space and time. This, however, is only one way of
looking at things. As well as looking at the Buddha from the standpoint
of time, we can also look at him from the standpoint of eternity.
The problem with any biographical account of the Buddha is that in
a sense it deals with two quite different people: Siddhartha and
the Buddha - divided by the central event of the Enlightenment.
But one tends to come away from the biographical facts with the view
that his early life simply built up to this point, and that after
it he was more or less the same as he was before - apart from
being Enlightened, of course. If we had been around at the time we
should probably have been none the wiser. If we had known the Buddha
a few months before he was Enlightened and a few months after, we
should almost certainly not have been able to perceive any difference
in him at all. We would have seen the same physical body, probably
the same clothes. He spoke the same language and had the same general
characteristics. This being so, we tend to regard the Buddha's Enlightenment
as a finishing touch to a process which had been going on for a long
time, the feather that turned the scale, the final piece of the jigsaw,
that little difference that made all the difference. But really it
isn'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, because
strictly speaking only a line can intersect another line, and although
we can represent time as a line, the whole point of the timeless -
eternity - is that it isn't a line. Perhaps we should think rather
in terms of time as a line which at a given point just stops, just
disappears into another dimension. It's rather like - to use a
hackneyed but (if we don't take it too literally) rather useful simile
- the flowing of a river into the ocean, where the river is time
and the ocean is eternity. Perhaps, indeed, we can improve on the
simile to some extent. Suppose we imagine that the ocean into which
our 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 the
ocean into which the river is flowing, so it seems as though the river
is flowing into nothingness, flowing into a void. It just stops at
the horizon because that is the point at which it enters the new dimension
which we cannot see.
The point of intersection is what we call Enlightenment. Time just
stops at eternity; time is succeeded, so to speak, by eternity. Siddhartha
disappears, like the river disappearing at the horizon, and the Buddha
takes 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 Siddhartha
just ceases to exist, and there is the Buddha, who has been there
all the time.
This difference of approach - in terms of time and in terms of
eternity - is at the bottom of the whole controversy between the
two schools of Zen, the gradual school and the abrupt school.
In the early days of Zen (or rather Ch'an) in China, there
were two apparently opposing viewpoints: there were those who believed
that 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 Platform
Sutra Hui Neng tries to clear up the whole controversy:
he says it isn't that there are two paths, a gradual one and a sudden
one; it is merely that some people gain Enlightenment more quickly
than others, presumably because they make a greater effort.
This is true, but you can go deeper than this. The abrupt attainment
of Enlightenment, you may say, has nothing to do with speed within
time. It doesn't mean that you begin the usual process of attaining
Enlightenment and get through it more quickly. It doesn't mean that
whereas you might normally spend fifteen or fifty years on the gradual
path, 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 outside
time altogether. Sudden Enlightenment is simply the point at which
this new dimension of eternity outside time is entered. You can never
get 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, you
can't stop without first having speeded up. So Enlightenment can be
looked at from two points of view, both of which are valid. It can
be regarded as the culmination of the evolutionary process, a culmination
which is reached through personal effort. But Enlightenment can also
be regarded as being a sort of breakthrough into a new dimension beyond
time and space.
There is a rather picturesque story which vividly illustrates the
paradoxical meeting of these two dimensions. It concerns a famous
bandit, called Angulimala, who lived
in a great forest somewhere in northern India. Angulimala's
speciality was to ambush travellers on their way through the forest,
murder them, and chop off one of their fingers as a trophy. These
fingers he strung into a garland which he wore round his neck; hence
his name, Angulimala, meaning 'garland of fingers'. It was
his ambition to have one hundred fingers on his garland, and he had
got to ninety-eight when the Buddha happened to pass through that
forest. The village folk had tried to dissuade him from entering it,
warning him that he was in danger of losing a finger - and his
life - to the notorious Angulimala, but the Buddha
had carried on regardless. The sight of him just about made Angulimala's
day, because he had been getting a bit desperate to find the last
two fingers for his garland. His mother, a devoted old soul,
was living with him in the forest and cooking for him, and he
had got so fed up with waiting he had finally decided there was nothing
for it but to add one of her fingers to his collection (maybe
she used to nag him a bit). That would make ninety-nine, so he would
just need one more. He had been on his way to find his poor old mother
when he saw the Buddha coming through the forest. He thought, 'Well,
I can always deal with mother later. But first I will settle the hash
of this shramana. Finger number ninety-nine coming up!'
It was a beautiful afternoon, a gentle breeze stirring the tree-tops
and the birds singing, when the Buddha came walking along the little
trail that wound through the forest. He walked meditatively, slowly,
thinking to himself or, perhaps, not thinking at all. Angulimala
emerged from the forest, and stealthily began to tail the Buddha,
creeping up on him from behind. He had his sword drawn ready, so he
could make very quick work of his prey when he got close to him. He
loped along smoothly and rapidly to cut down the distance between
them before he was seen. The last thing he wanted was a long messy
struggle.
After he had followed the Buddha for a while, however, he noticed
that something rather odd was happening. Although he seemed to be
moving much more quickly than the Buddha, he didn't seem to be getting
any closer to him. There was the Buddha way in front, pacing slowly,
and there was Angulimala shadowing him and trying to catch
up, 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 apparently
broke into a cold sweat of terror and astonishment and bewilderment.
But he was not a man to give up easily - or to stop and think
about things either. He just lengthened his stride till he was sprinting
along in the wake of the Buddha. The Buddha, however, stayed just
the same distance ahead, and if anything he seemed to be going even
more slowly. It was like a bad dream.
In desperation, Angulimala called out to the Buddha: 'Stand
still!' The Buddha turned round and said, 'I am standing still. It
is you who are moving.' So Angulimala, who had considerable
presence 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't
catch up with you. What do you mean, you are standing still?' The
Buddha said, 'I am standing still because I am standing in nirvana.
I have come to rest. You are moving because you are going round and
round in samsara.'(footnote 34)
Of course, Angulimala becomes the Buddha's disciple, but that,
and what happens afterwards, is another story. What this particular
adventure illustrates is that Angulimala could not catch up
with 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, representing
eternity. However long time goes on, it never comes to a point where
it catches up with eternity. Time doesn't find eternity within the
temporal process. Angulimala couldn't have caught up with
the Buddha even if the Buddha had come to a dead halt. He could still
be running now, after 2,500 years, but he still wouldn't have caught
up with the Buddha.
When the Buddha attained Enlightenment, he entered a new dimension
of being. There was no continuity, essentially, from the person who
was there before. He was not just the old Siddhartha slightly
improved, or even considerably improved, but a new person. This is
actually a very difficult thing to grasp, it needs reflecting on,
because we naturally think of the Buddha's Enlightenment in terms
of our own experience of life. In the course of our lives we may add
to our knowledge, learn different things, do different things, go
to different places, meet different people, life teaches us things
- but underneath we remain fundamentally and recognizably the
same person. Whatever changes take place don't go that deep. 'The
child is father to the man' - that is, what one is now is determined
to a remarkable degree by what one was as a child. One remains much
the same person as one was then. The conditions for one's fundamental
attitude to life were set up a long time ago, and any change that
takes place subsequently is comparatively superficial. This even applies
to our commitment to a spiritual path. We may take to Buddhism, we
may 'go for Refuge' to the Buddha, but the change isn't usually very
deep.
But the Buddha's experience of Enlightenment wasn't like that. In
reality it wasn't an experience at all, because the person to have
the experience wasn't there any more. The 'experience' of Enlightenment
is therefore more like death. It is more like the change that takes
place between two lives, when you die to one life and are reborn in
another. In some Buddhist traditions Enlightenment is called 'the
great death', because everything of the past dies, everything, in
a way, is annihilated, and you are completely reborn. In the case
of the Buddha, it is not that he was a smartened up version of Siddhartha,
Siddhartha tinkered about with a bit, Siddhartha reissued
in a new edition. Siddhartha was finished. At the foot of the
bodhi tree Siddhartha died and the Buddha was born - or we
should say, rather, that he 'appeared'. At that moment, when Siddhartha
dies, the Buddha is seen as having been alive all the time - by
which we really mean above and beyond time, out of time altogether.
Even to talk in this way is again misleading, because it is not as
if, being outside time, you are really outside anything. Time and
<$Ispace>space are not things in themselves. We usually think of space
as a sort of box within which things move about, and time as a sort
of tunnel along which things move - but they are not really like
that. Space and <$Itime>time are really forms of our perception. We
see things through the spectacles, as it were, of space and time.
And we speak of these things that we see as phenomena - which
are, of course, what make up the world of relative, conditioned existence,
or samsara. So what we call phenomena are only realities as
seen under the forms of space and time. But when we enter the dimension
of eternity, we go beyond space and time, and therefore
we go beyond the world, we go beyond samsara, and, in the
Buddhist 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 Enlightened
person sees things free from any veils or obscurations, sees them
without being influenced or affected by any assumptions or psychological
conditionings, sees them with perfect objectivity - not only sees
them, but becomes one with them, one with the reality of things. So
the Buddha, the one who has awoken to the Truth, the one who exists
out of time in the dimension of eternity, may be regarded as Reality
itself in human form. This is what is meant by saying that the Buddha
is an Enlightened human being: the form is human, but in the place,
so to speak, of the conditioned human mind, with all its prejudices
and preconceptions and limitations, there is Reality itself, there
is an experience or awareness which is not separate from Reality.
In the Buddhist tradition this crystallized eventually into a very
important distinction which came to be established with regard to
the Buddha. On the one hand there was his rupakaya
(literally 'form body'), his physical phenomenal appearance; on the
other, 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 time
in the dimension of eternity. Wherein lies the true nature of the
Buddha, in his rupakaya or his dharmakaya, is
declared definitively in a chapter from one of the great Perfection
of 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 point
in the Pali canon. Apparently there was a monk called <$IVakkali>Vakkali
who was very devoted to the Buddha, but his devotion had got stuck
at a superficial level. He was so fascinated by the appearance and
the personality of the Buddha that he used to spend all his time sitting
and 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 the
Buddha. So one day the Buddha called him and said, 'Vakkali, this
physical 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) So
Vakkali meditated on this, and he gained liberation by meditating
in this way very shortly before he died.
Vakkali's problem is actually one that most of us have. It's not that
we should ignore the physical body, but we should take it as a symbol
of the dharmakaya, the Buddha as he is in his ultimate
essence. 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't
mean Gautama the Buddha; we mean the eternal, time-transcending Buddha-nature
within ourselves. Broadly speaking, the Theravada School today
uses the word Buddha more in the historical sense, whereas the Mahayana,
especially Zen, tends to use it more in the spiritual, trans-historical
sense.
The shifting usage of this word only adds to the confusion Westerners
are 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 only
two labels available to us: God and Man. Some people tend to say that
the 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 rather
like Socrates. This is the view taken, for instance, by Catholic writers
about Buddhism. It's a rather subtle, insidious approach. They praise
the Buddha for his wonderful piety, wonderful charity, great love,
compassion, wisdom - yes, he's a very great man. Then, on the
last page of their book about Buddhism, they carefully add that of
course 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 Buddha
gets 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, he
was originally a man, but then, hundreds of years after his death,
those misguided Buddhists went and made him into a god, because they
wanted to have something to worship.'
Both these views are wrong, and the source of this misconception probably
lies in a general misunderstanding of what religion is necessarily
about. People for whom the idea of a non-theistic religion is a contradiction
in terms will always want to resolve the question of how the Buddha
stands in relation to God. Christ is said by his followers
to be the son of God. Muhammad is supposed to be the messenger of
God. The Jewish prophets claim to be inspired by God. And Krishna
and Rama are claimed to be incarnations of God. Indeed, many Hindus
think of the Buddha as one as well. They look upon him as the ninth
incarnation, the ninth avatar, of the god Vishnu. This is how
they see him because the category of avatar is a familiar one
to 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 is
no supreme being, no creator of the universe, and there never has
been. So Buddhists can worship as much as they like, but they will
never be worshipping their creator or any conception of a personal
God.
The Buddha is neither man nor God, nor even a god. He was a human
being in the sense that he started off as every other human being
starts off, but he didn't remain an ordinary human being. He became
an Enlightened human being, and according to Buddhism that makes a
great deal of difference - in fact, all the difference. He was
an Unconditioned mind in a conditioned body. According to the Buddhist
tradition, a Buddha is the highest being in all the universe, higher
even than the so-called gods (whom in Western terms we would call
angels, archangels, and so on). Traditionally the Buddha is called
the teacher of gods and men, and in Buddhist art the gods are represented
in a very humble position, saluting the Buddha and listening to his
teaching. Therefore there is no possibility, whether on a philosophical
or 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 highest
being in the universe that person is God, it is not so easy to really
discern 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 measure
up to it. After all, he has not created the universe. We see the Buddha
in this way because there's a category missing, we may say, from Western
thought. If, therefore, we are to perceive who the Buddha is we have
to dispel the ghost of God, the creator of the universe that looms
over him, by substituting for God something completely different.
After all this, are we any nearer to answering the question, 'Who
is the Buddha?' We've seen that Buddha means Unconditioned mind, Enlightened
mind. Knowing the Buddha therefore means knowing the mind in its Unconditioned
state. So the answer to the question 'Who is the Buddha?' is really
that we ourselves are the Buddha - potentially. We really, truly
come to know the Buddha only in the course of our spiritual life,
in the course of our meditation, in the course of actualizing our
own 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 knowledge
about Gautama the Buddha - the details of his career - and
on the other hand, the experience of Unconditioned mind. This
intermediate stage is what we call Going for Refuge
to the Buddha. And it means not just reciting 'Buddham saranam
gacchami' ('to the Buddha for Refuge I go'), though it doesn't
exclude that. It means committing ourselves to the goal of Enlightenment
as a living ideal, as our ultimate objective, and striving to realize
it. It is only by Going for Refuge to the Buddha, with all that this
implies, with all that this means, that we can answer from the heart
and the mind and the whole of our spiritual life the question: 'Who
is the Buddha?'
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