LORD
BUDDHA’S SECRET OF HAPPINESS
Lord
Buddha (c.500s BCE) is also known as Gautama Buddha, Siddhartha Gotama ,
Siddhartha Gautama and Buddha Shakyamuni.
Buddha
is not a name but a title which one earns after becoming Enlightened. In
Sanskrit, a buddha is one who has shed , for all to come , the sleep of ignorance .
Another title by which Lord Buddha is known is
Tathagata. It means ‘The Perfect One.’ There
is also one more title ‘The Blessed One.’
According
to the Bhagavadgita, the Song of Lord Krishna : What is night for all beings is the time of waking
for the disciplined soul; and what is the time of waking for all beings is the
night for the sage who expels all illusions and achieves a rare clarity of
vision.
In his broadcast on the All India Radio on May 19, 1956, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan said (he was then the Vice-President of India) that prince Gautama was the son of
a minor ruler of Kapilavastu, grew up in luxury, married Yashodha, had a son,
Rahul, and led a sheltered life where the world’s miseries were hidden. On four
occasions when he went out of his palace, he is said to have met an old man and
felt that he was subject to the frailties of old age; met a sick man and felt
that he was liable to sickness; met a corpse and felt that he was also subject
to death; and met an ascetic with a peaceful countenance who had adopted the traditional ways of seeking religious truth. The sight of the holy man, healthy in
body and cheerful in mind ( without any comforts of life) convinced Gautama that the pursuit of religion is the only goal
worthy of man. It makes him independent of
the temporary trials and fleeting
pleasures of the world. So, he himself decided
to renounce the world; left his home, wife and child, put on an ascetic’s garb and habits, and fled into
the forest to meditate on the causes of human suffering , and how to overcome them.
Then
he spent six years in the study of the
most complex religious doctrines, ,
practiced severest self-denials, starved himself to mortify physical appetites to
attain the knowledge of truth, but because
it did not happen and he was about to stumble out of life, he gave up all these practices,
resumed normal life, refreshed himself with the water of the river Nairanajana,
accepted milk pudding and after gaining physical health and mental vigour spent seven weeks in the profoundest
meditation under the shade of the Bodhi tree where at one night , towards the
dawn , he attained enlightenment.
Now
he began to address himself in the third person as the Tathagata and announced
that he would go to Benares where he would preach the Law of eternal life. For this, he travelled from place to place,
touched the lives of all and sundry, taught for forty-five years the beauty of charity,
the joy of renunciation and the need for simplicity and equality.
At the age of eighty, when he took leave of
the beautiful city of Vaishali and his disciples including Ananda wept and thought that they had lost their master, he said
to them: “Do not weep, do not despair.” Man must depart from all that he has.
The doctrine which I now preach is your master.
“
Verily, I say unto you, O monks: All things are perishable; work out your deliverance
with earnestness ”
According
to Dr. Radhakrishnan these were his last words: “ his spirit sank into the
depths of mystic absorption and when he had attained to that degree where all
thought, all conception disappears, and when the consciousness of individuality
ceases, he entered into the supreme nirvana.”
As for
‘ the secret of happiness’ Lord Buddha
spelt it out in his famous sermon at Benares.
It consists of the “Four Noble Truths, which
read as follows: I. Existence is unhappiness. II. Unhappiness is caused by selfish craving. III.
Selfish craving can be destroyed . IV. It can be destroyed by the following eightfold path:
1.Right understanding. 2. Right purpose. 3.
Right speech. 4. Right conduct. 5. Right vocation. 6. Right effort. 7. Right awareness.
. 8. Right concentration.
May I conclude by saying that whoever walks on
this eightfold path will find himself in a perfect state of happiness.
**********
27th
May 2021 G.
R. Kanwal
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