LORD BUDDHA

 

LORD BUDDHA

On this birthday of Lord Buddha, let us enjoy a poem written about him by the Indian poet-politician Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949).  She was a most beloved personality during the freedom movement and was rightly called ‘The Nightingale of India’. Her intellectual calibre won her a fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature, London,  and her political services enabled her to become Governor of a state in free India.

                Gautama Buddha, popularly called Lord Buddha,  was born c.563-483 BCE in Lumbini, Nepal. Realising in his youthful days that pain and suffering are the constant part of terrestrial existence, he abandoned his princely life in set out in search of a remedy against these horrors . The remedy he found is known as eightfold path comprising : Right View, Right Understanding; ; Right Intention; Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort; Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration.  Followed strictly, this path is bound to  provide humans liberation from  suffering in their  worldly life. Lord Buddha himself achieved it. This is what  Sarojini Naidu reflects in her poem that follows:

                                TO A BUDDHA SEATED ON A LOTUS

LORD BUDDHA, on thy Lotus-throne,

With praying eyes and hands elate,

What mystic rapture dost thou own,

Immutable and ultimate?

What peace, unravished of our ken,

Annihilate from the world of men?

 

The wind of change for ever blows

Across  the tumult of our way,

Tomorrow’s unborn griefs depose

The sorrows of our yesterday,

Dream yields to dream, strife follows strife,

And Death unweaves the webs of life.

 

For us the travail and the heat,

The broken secrets of our pride,

The strenuous lessons of defeat,

The flower deferred, the fruit denied;

But not the peace, supremely won,

Lord Buddha, of thy  Lotus-throne.

 

With futile hands we seek to gain

Our inaccessible desire,

Diviner summits to attain,

With faith that sinks and feet that tire;

But nought shall conquer or control

The heavenward hunger of our soul.

 

The end, elusive and afar,

Still lures us with its  beckoning flight,

And all our moments are

A session of the Infinite.

How shall we reach the great, unknown

Nirvana of thy Lotus-throne?

 

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16^th May 2022                                                 G.R.Kanwal