Words Of The Buddha example essay topic

Siddartha Gotama was both a real historical character and a mythical man of legend. Born in 563 B.C. in a prosperous kingdom of Northern India, now Nepal, he was the son of a king and heir to the throne. He lived his early life as a prince, protected by his parents from the harsh realities of life in the outside world, and grew up in luxury. He was a man of exceptional physical appearance - there are numerous references to the perfection of his physical body. He married a beautiful young woman and they had a handsome son. He was destined to inherit his father's position of wealth, power and prestige.

But in his twenties he renounced his royal inheritance, his temporal fortunes, and even his family, after having witnessed what legend calls "The Four Passing Sights". One day, on seeing a decrepit old man he became aware of old age. Another day he saw a diseased person lying on the road and became aware of illness. On a third day, he saw a corpse and became aware of death. These sights filled him with despair, but on a fourth day he saw a Brahman monk, and in thinking about the life of renunciation he decided that he too would renounce his worldly estate and go forth to seek an understanding of what made life so full of what he later described as dukkha, and to seek the truth of existence leading to the cessation of dukkha. For six years he lived as a solitary forest-dweller, at first as the disciple of two renowned Hindu masters.

Then, after deciding he had learned all that they could teach him - which he felt was not enough - he joined a band of ascetics and with them he practiced such extreme austerities and ate so little that he nearly died. Study with the Hindus had not brought him the enlightenment he was seeking, nor had his experiment with asceticism. Rejecting self-indulgence as well as self-mortification, he determined to follow what he called the "Middle Path", and to devote himself to a course of mental cultivation and mystical concentration. In the town of Bodh gaya in Northeast India, Siddartha Gotama sat down beneath a fig tree (the Bo tree, from Bodhi, enlightenment) to embark on an extended period of meditation, and determined not to rise until he had found the truth.

For 49 days he meditated, formulating a body of wisdom which was to bring mankind a new religion. When he arose he was enlightened, he was the Buddha, ready to go forth and teach others how to become enlightened. Soon after his enlightenment the Buddha preached to a small group of the curious and those who heard his words became his disciples. From then on the Buddha devoted the rest of his life to teaching those who sought his advice, his compassion, his wisdom. The growth in the number of his disciples led to his establishment of the Sangha, the Buddhist monastic order, and it was his disciples who passed along his teachings, by word of mouth, from generation to generation. Not until some considerable time after his death, were the words of the Buddha recorded in written form.

Bibliography

G arrow, David J. "Buddah". The World Book Encyclopedia. 1990 ed. "Buddah".