Who was Gautama Buddha?

Unlike the Hindu religion, Buddhism can point to an individual founder and can look back to a date for its beginnings. The man who formulated Buddhism was Siddhartha Gautama, who was born a Hindu about 560 B.C., at Lumbini near the border of India in what is now Nepal.

Tradition says that when Gautama was born, a seer prophesied that he would become the greatest ruler in human history. The seer added that if Gautama ever saw four things ‑ sickness, old age, death and a monk who had renounced the world ‑ the boy would give up his earthly rule and discover a way of salvation for all mankind.

After his life‑changing experience, Gautama Buddha went back to the world of man. He began to preach and teach about the meaning of life and his way to nirvana. Soon he founded the Sangha, an order of monks. By the time Gautama Buddha died, 4S years later, many thousands had adopted his teachings.'

In some ways, Buddhism is similar to the Hinduism from which it evolved. In other ways, it is quite different, and many of Buddha's teachings were rejected as heresies by the dominant teachers of Hinduism, the Brahmin priests. For example, Buddha denied that the Vedas and the Upanishads were divine writings, saying they were of no help in finding the way to nirvana. He also denied that man has an atman (soul), which is part of the Brahman (world soul), and that the present world is maya (unreal).

Other Hindu concepts Buddha rejected included the Brahmin priesthood and the entire Hindu sacrificial system; instead, he emphasized ethics over ritual. He rejected the caste system and taught that enlightenment was open to anyone‑including women‑not just Brahmin males. Finally, Buddha radically challenged all the indifferent Hindu gods and goddesses, saying they were essentially unimportant in the quest for enlightenment.

GAUTAMA BECOMES THE "ENLIGHTENED ONE"

Finally, he sat under a tree for 40 days and nights. He swore that he would not move until he found what he was searching for. During this time, Mara, the evil one, tried to make him give up his quest. At the end of the 40 days, he experienced the highest degree of Godconsciousness‑nirvana‑literally, the "blowing out" of the flame of desire and the negation of suffering. Through this experience, Gautama felt he had found "salvation." From then on, he was known as Buddha or the "enlightened one."

Gautama, 29 years old, was determined to solve the riddle of life. He shaved his head, put on a yellow robe and wandered the countryside as a beggar monk. First he studied the Upanishads with the finest teachers, but he could find no satisfaction in these writings. Then he tried to find salvation through self‑denial. He starved himself until he was a walking skeleton, but this brought him no happiness either.

One of Buddha's most important teachings was his theory of the Middle Way. For Buddha, the Middle Way was a spiritual path of salvation, winding between the extreme asceticism and the unrestrained sensuality he had known while a Hindu. To describe his Middle Way, Buddha offered four main principles, which have come to be called the Four Noble Truths:

Suffering is universal. Buddha taught that the very act of living involves suffering from birth until death. Even death brings no relief, however, because of the cycle of rebirth, suffering and death. Salvation (nirvana) is to be released from this unending cycle of suffering. The cause of suffering is craving (selfish desire). People remain in this endless cycle, because they are too attached to their health, wealth, status and physical comfort. This is because they are ignorant of the nature of reality and they fall victim to what Buddha called tanha (attachment, desire). The cure for suffering is to overcome ignorance and eliminate craving. Since to live is to suffer and suffering is caused by craving, if a person could remove craving from his or her life, suffering would end. Suppress craving by following the Middle Way ‑ the Noble Eightfold Path. First, Buddha isolated the cause, tanha, humanity's inability to escape from the squirrel cage of death and rebirth. Next he worked out a system called the Eightfold Path by which a Buddhist could rid himself of tanha. The Eightfold Path consists of eight ways of right living: (1) right viewpoint, (2) right aspiration, (3) right speech, (4) right behavior, (5) right occupation, (6) right effort, (7) right mindfulness and (8) right meditation.

Buddha claimed that whoever could follow this Eightfold Path would eventually reach nirvana, a release from the endless cycle of death and rebirth. When Buddha was asked to define the state of nirvana, he replied that he had never tried to solve this question. His mission was to show man the way to escape the suffering of life, not to describe what he would find once he had been liberated.

The Hinduism that Buddha rejected said that life in this world is maya (illusion); thus, suffering, which is part of this world, is also illusion. Buddha, however, proclaimed that life in this world is quite real. It involves real suffering; because of this suffering, the world must be escaped by following Buddha's Eightfold Path.

Buddhism has always had great appeal for the peoples of the East. Unlike the elitist ideas of Hinduism, Buddhism offers a precise definition of man's problem, along with an exact "plan of salvation" for everyone.

Mahayana Buddhism, the doctrine of the "greater way," teaches that Buddha believed that nirvana is available to all people. Buddha originally taught that the only person who can save you is you, but Mahayana developed the idea of savior gods or Bodhisattvas.

Followers of Mahayana reasoned that Buddha had remained on the earth for 45 years when he could have gone straight to nirvana. He decided, however, to stay to save mankind and became the first and supreme Bodhisattva, a savior to mankind who can be called on by the faithful. Other Buddhist monks who achieve nirvana and become enlightened as Buddha did are also Bodhisattvas.

From all this, you can gather that Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism differ radically in their opinion of Buddha. To Theravada, Buddha was only a teacher (as Buddha himself claimed), but Mahayana has raised him to the position of a savior‑god for all people. Because of this, Mahayana Buddhism is by far the more popular. It is influential in Nepal, China, Tibet, Japan, Vietnam and Korea.'

One might have been born a king, but who could tell whether he would ever be enthroned, or that accomplished, whether he would not be dethroned again by a more powerful rival. But Jesus came into the world to fulfil a great purpose, He came to die and rise again, and to become by His death and resurrection the Saviour of men. He has accomplished the work that God gave Him to do: It is finished; and He has gone back again to heaven, that from thence He might give everlasting life to all who believe in Him. "Now He that ascended, what is it but that He also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens, that He might fill all things." Of which of the great names in human history could that be said? Buddha means the Enlightened, but those who follow him grope in impenetrable darkness. Jesus is the Light of the world, and He appeared once in the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself, and to dispel the darkness, and reveal what God is in the fullness of His love. He is the eternally worthy object of the Father's love, He is the worthy object of every sinner's trust.

Other religions have been compared with it. Mahometanism, everyone knows, was propagated by the sword, and gives a sensual paradise of houris, consecrating men's lusts. Buddhism, the most interesting phenomenon in the world, had no god, it was despair at the state of human nature without a remedy, and its founder obtained - Nirvana - practical annihilation by eating too much pork when he was fully eighty years old. Now he is a kind of god, and in one vast country where it prevails, is embodied in a man and, when he dies, another is ready prepared, and the living power passes into him. The miracles the word of God insists on were for the establishment of the faith, and the faith was established, and the grace and truth taught in it shine yet with undiminished and undeniable moral lustre, while its shell is picked at by those who do not like the truth itself, because it has a power which speaks too plainly to conscience - proves itself too clearly for the conscience to like it.

The ancient form of Hinduism differs from its present, winch is known under the name of Brahman-ism. But a mere glance at the course of idolatry after its authoritative establishment and organization in Egypt does not require more that the notice of the transition from the pantheistic aspect of the ancient Hindu mythology to the fundamental idea of one god, as Brahm, with polytheistic associations. There is another idolatrous system, that of Buddha. This is said to be less gross and barbarous than Brahmanism. While Brahm is a myth, Buddha may have been a real personage who, disgusted with the cruelties practised by the Brahmans, formed a sect of his own. But the Buddhists were driven out of India and settled principally in Ceylon. Some went to China, others to Tartary, and possibly even to Scandinavia. The Brahmans on the contrary would not go beyond the limits of India, their sacred region. In their emigration the Buddhists carried images of Buddha into these countries whither they went, and worshipped him as supreme, but mixed with his worship some of the Brahminical or Egyptian mythology. Thus the stream of that system of idolatry which had its beginning in Egypt has flowed thence over the greater part of the East and a modification of it sweeping back overflowed all Europe. And this must have happened between the years B.C. 1635 and B.C. 542, for at the later date the Buddhists had been driven out of India.