Continuing to discuss Buddhism

So, on our last post we saw that Siddhartha had left his palace and his pampered life to try and discern the truth of existence. He had joined a mendicant Hindu order, and wandered the Indian countryside as an ascetic. Now, Siddhartha, being a good mendicant, did this to the very best of his ability, and mortified himself through starvation to the point that he ended up passing out under a (or, as the Buddhists say, THE) Bodhi tree.

While he was unconscious, a woman passed by and thought he was a god. There are reasons why this is so, which we can certainly cover if anyone has questions about Hinduism. At any rate, she thought he might be a god, so she left an offering of fruit for him. When he awoke, he ate the fruit, and then he became the "Buddha," that is, "The Enlightened One." He realized that extreme pleasure and extreme renunciation were fruitless, and conceived his "Middle Way." He discerned the path to Enlightenment, and cracked the code, so to speak, of how to find peace and satisfaction in this universe.

He got up and was ready to proceed about his business, when the legend says that the Hindu god, Indra, pleaded with him to teach what he had discovered to others. The Buddha initially demurred, thinking nobody would want to hear what he had to say. However, Indra was persistent, so the Buddha relented. He then went back to his mendicant order and delivered his first "sermon." What he said to these men can be summed up as follows, and this "sermon" is known as the Deerpark Sermon, where he outlined the Four Noble Truths:

1) Life is suffering (dukkha)
2) Suffering caused by attachment (trishna/craving)
3) Eradicating attachment will eradicate suffering
4) Eradication achieved through The Eightfold Path:
1) Superior Understanding of Four Noble Truths
2) Superior Thought or Intention
3) Superior Speech
4) Superior Action
5) Superior Livelihood
6) Superior Effort
7) Superior Mindfulness
8) Superior Concentration

Later, the Buddha taught another "sermon," the teaching of "An-Atman," or the teaching of "No-Self," in which he taught that there is no eternal or abiding reality in any individual, which many of us would call a "soul," but instead, we are simply a conglomeration of PROCESSES (which he called "skandhas"), that we associated with some kind of permanent identity, WRONGLY. Think of it this way: when does a car become a car? When it has a chassis? When it gets tires? When it gets an engine? When it gets seats and headlights? Or, to put it another way, if you get in a fender-bender, when does your car cease having "car-ness?" Is it when it won't run anymore? Is it when it is irreparably damaged? The fact is, most of us would disagree on the answers to these questions, which illustrates the Buddha's point: there is no "you," only a series of processes working together in such a way that you think you are "you." If you lopped off one of your arms, or both of your arms and your legs, you would probably still say "you" existed. However, at what point do "you" cease to exist? Is it when your mind goes? Well, the fact is that you need your body for your mind to function, thus illustrating the Buddha's claim that you are nothing more than an assemblage of processes...

Now, five of the Buddha's audience saw the "wisdom" in his teaching and became "Arhats," that is, they were "enlightened" to the truth, but had not yet passed to that state known as "Nirvana." What that is, and the consequences of such a thought, shall be treated in the next post.