With no offense meant, this is an important question. Buddha himself once faced this question and he handled it in his own way.
While I have lot of respect for Buddha, I suspect that some of his followers misunderstood him.
Buddha was a Hindu prince well trained in the Vedic school. Even his teachers were Hindu monks or scholars. Though Buddha spoke against some of the evil practices of Hindu society such as caste-based discrimination, over emphasis on rituals, it seems unlikely that he completely rejected Hindu beliefs all together.
Though Buddha rarely talked about God, God as a creator of this universe, he did talk about various Gods such as Indra, Varuna and so on, who figure prominently in the Vedas. Not only that he believed in their existence, the Tipitakas talk about Buddha meeting many of these Gods and even having discussions with them.
Buddha also talked about heaven and hell to which a person would go depending on his Karma. He also believed in rebirth. He never categorically denied the existence of soul though in his opinion it was futile to debate on existence of soul or otherwise, or identify oneself with some form of soul.
Buddha’s silence on the existence of soul was mainly meant to discourage people from idle debates that would agitate their minds. Besides, imagining oneself to be some form of soul makes it difficult to totally come out of all notions of form and longing for eternal existence.
Buddha was very much concerned with the misery undergone by lay individuals. But the Buddhists say that there is none who experiences them and these miseries are only some happenings in the mind which is insentient.
If Buddha did not believe in the existence of a sentient entity that is associated with a being – no matter what one calls it, I wonder why he should be so concerned with some apparently mechanical happenings within a mind!
But he was very much concerned. He spent most of his life guiding people how they can come out of these miseries. His method was meditation – a process that resulted in a completely tranquil mind.
Buddha identified mental craving as the root cause of cycles of births and deaths. So, he advocated cessation of cravings and calming of the mind to escape the cycle of births and deaths.
When the mind becomes completely calm, there is no motivation to take rebirth when one dies.
Now the fundamental question is that since Buddha had attained the completely tranquil state of mind, where did he go when he finally died since he would not take rebirth any more.
This was the question asked straight to Buddha by one of his opponents.
Buddha answered that question by performing a simple experiment.
He asked the person to light an oil lamp and watch what happens. The lamp burnt for some time. And finally, when the oil in the lamp completely got exhausted, it stopped burning.
Now it was Buddha’s turn to ask the opponent as to where the burning flame went?
Buddha explained that in the same way a flame stops burning once the oil that supported its burning got exhausted, even Buddha who has a completely tranquil mind stops taking any more births. He does not go anywhere since he did not come from anywhere.
Buddhists call this Nirvana which literally means putting off the flame. Buddha’s death is like putting off the flame that was burning in the form of a being called Buddha. Since Buddhists don’t believe in soul, according to them Buddha just ceased to exist after his death, in the same way the flame stops burning.
But some Buddhists are not so comfortable with letting off Buddha 😉 They say that Nirvana is actually a state beyond the world, into which Buddha went after his death. That means Buddha continues to exist in an inexplicable way.
Did Buddha really mean either of these versions of Nirvana?
Throughout his discourses Buddha talks about body/Mind and the Karma that governs the body and the Mind conjunction. I am not sure that he ever talked about states beyond these.
In my opinion, what Buddha meant was something similar to what I explained in the previous episode. He reached a state totally indistinguishable from the all-pervading Atma.
To recall the pot space analogy that we discussed, death of Buddha broke the pot that gave him a separate identity. When the pot breaks, there is no difference between the space that was inside the pot and the space outside the pot, because there is no pot.
Similarly, when Buddha died, there is no more Buddha but only the Atma that ever existed. Buddha did not merge with the Atma nor did he become the Atma.
Well, Buddha never explicitly say so, but considering his Vedic background, I take the liberty to take this position.
May be most Buddhists would disagree with me.
Assuming that the version given by the Upanishads is the right one, what do we get by such a view? We will discuss that in the next episode.
A series revolving around Mind – Science of Mind, Philosophy of Mind, Notions of reality, Mind modulation, Domains beyond Mind, and so on. © Dr. King, Swami Satyapriya 2019-2020
No comments:
Post a Comment