Buddha, The Awakened One

Buddhism is the teaching of Siddharta Gautama, who is called the Buddha (the Awakened One) and who was born in the sixth century BC as the son of the king of Shakya, a clan in Northern India, in present-day Nepal.

Young Siddharta grew up within the confined walls of the royal palace at Kapilavastu, where any kind of luxury was at his disposal. One day however, an encounter with an old man, a sick man and a corpse, made him realise the painful fragility of luxury and pleasure, and after a contact with a begging monk, he resolved to find a fundamental solution for human suffering.

At the age of 29 he left his palace, wife and son, and joined the sramanas (mendicant monks) in the Ganges valley. He followed philosophical masters, but their speculations seemed to be of no avail to Siddharta. Also the six years of austery led to no fundamental liberation. Siddharta broke off a strict fasting that nearly killed him, accepted a bowl of soup from a young village woman and decided to sit down under a tree and do nothing else but meditate. After seven days he awakened to the true nature of existence and freed himself from the bonds of suffering.

The remaining 45 years of his life he wandered to spread his insights to people of all classes and ways of life. The clarity and typical mild radicality of his teaching attracted an immense amount of people and even during his life a great deal of Northern India was converted. At the age of 80 the Buddha died of food poisoning in Kusinara (present-day Uttar Pradesh in India).

The Buddhas teaching: the four noble truths

The Buddha presented his insights in four steps, like a doctor who presents his cure: first he declares the patient ill, then investigates the cause, formulates the situation when that cause is taken away, and then prescribes a therapy to effectively take the cause away. These four steps the Buddha called the four noble truths. They are noble in the sense that they cannot be negated for anyone with a clear view on the human condition.

1. dukkha: suffering

The first noble truth is dukkha, usually translated as suffering and referring to the inevitably unsatisfactory nature of existence. This frustration is not only caused by unpleasant factors like diseases, pain and sorrow, but also lies in the fact that all pleasant experiences are impermanent. Because of this basic frustration, even at the very height of pleasure, deep down there is a whining protest against the loss that is at hand. Come what may, our way of existing offers a home for a continuous and practically unstoppable complaint in all our actions and experiences.

2. trishna: craving

The second nobe truth investigates the fuel of that existence, and finds that we feel unsatisfied because of our desire, our craving, our thirst (trishna). In the midst of impermanence we desperately try to hold on to sensual pleasure, and to throughts, ideas and convictions.

One of the most potent convictions is the conviction of having an impermanent core: an identity, unchanging and eternal, seperate from the tangible world. In his meditation the Buddha saw that indeed there is a sensitive being that is composed of a body, sensations, perceptions, volition and consciousness, but that nothing in this composite could pass for an independent self. He compares it to wheels, and axis, a bench and horses that form a car, without there being anything as the eternal soul of that car. All parts and functions of a living being are changing and are in a constant interaction with their environment. The problem is that we form ourselves a completely false self-image: a seperate entity, standing apart from the world and reducing itself immediately to a wailing cloud of likes and dislikes.

3. nirvana: blowing out the flame

The third noble truth names the annihilation of suffering: nirvana. The word nirvana litterally means the blowing out of a flame and thus alludes to the extinction of the fire of suffering existence, by taking away the fuel of desire. But the Buddha did not preach nihilism. The image of the flame is to be seen in the classical Indian vision that an extinct flame is not destroyed, but simply returns to the original dimension of being, beyond the world of phenomena. This makes the state of nirvana impossible to describe and therefore it is often expressed negatively: the unborn, not-death, the unconditional, the non-ego,...

4. dharma: the way to liberation

The fourth noble truth describes the way (dharma) to the annhihilation of suffering. The Buddha called it the middle path because it avoids the painful extremes of complacent indulgence in sensual pleasure (the low, common and pointless way) and relentless austerity (the painful, unworthy and pointless way). The middle path leads to quietness, insight and liberation. It is presented as an eightfold path:

- right understanding and right thinking (wisdom);
- right speech, right action and right livelihood (ethics);
- right effort, right attention and right contemplation (meditation).


The elaboration of these few practical guidelines formed the basis of the teaching that the Buddha continued to pass on for the rest of his life, and that would continue to be developed since his death, as it still is today.

Hinayana and Mahayana

About 400 years after the Buddhas passing, a new branch within the Buddhist school developed, offering its adepts new - and partly easier - ways of liberation. The orthodox school was in danger of becoming too lofty, and was turning into an exclusive and intellectual speciality for learned monks. The new school wanted to revive the old teaching by laying a new stress on the heart of the matter (the emptiness of all phenomena), and by establishing a broad movement with a place for everybody, where compassion was the main virtue.

The new branch called itself Mahayana, the Great Vehicle, and polemically dubbed the old school Hinayana or Small Vehicle, because they felt the orthodox monks strove all too exclusively for their own personal liberation. The Mahayana considered itself a logical development of the original teaching as it was expounded by the Buddha and did not even hesitate to put their new texts into the mouth of the Buddha himself. And indeed, their basic message is completely the same, and it is important to point out that for many centuries the Hinayana and Mahayana communities continued to share their monasteries.

The main difference is the use of upaya, or handy means by the Mahayana. Whereas the Hinayana remained faithful to the very words and rules of the original Buddhist community, the Mahayana would use anything on their way to help others toward enlightenment. They embroidered their texts with incredibly fantastic and cosmic settings, with thousands of universes and as many Buddhas residing there, and built a whole network of special beings: the so-called bodhisattvas.

These bodhisattvas are the symbols of the Mahayana-ideal. The Hinayana arhat (saint) wanted to dissolve into nirvana as quickly as possible, in order never to be reborn again, but Mahayana-compassion compelled the bodhisattvas (enlightened beings) to remain in the phenomenal world to use their insights and powers to help all other beings to free themselves.

To the devoted meditator, this ideal opened the door of great compassion toward all beings. To the common people, confined to daily toil, the bodhisattva became something of a heavenly creature to whom they prayed and that served as guideline in their lives. It is particularly in this last form that the bodhisattva would become so immensely popular throughout Asia.

Today Hinayana is mainly found in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma and Laos. Mahayana is present in Nepal, Tibet, China and Japan. Since the second half of the twentieth century, Buddhism has gained an ever growing foothold in the West as well, mainly throught the work of Tibetan (Vajrayana), Burmese (Vipassana) and Japanese (Zen) teachers.