The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons by H. S. Olcott (reading rainbow books TXT) 📕

Thus masterfully does Sir Edwin Arnold depict the sentiment which provoked this Great Renunciator. The testimony of thousands of millions who, during the last twenty-five centuries, have professed the Buḍḍhistic religion, proves that the secret of human misery was at last solved by this divine self-sacrifice, and the true path to Nirvāṇa opened.

The joy that he brought to the hearts of others, Buḍḍha first tasted himself. He found that the pleasures of the eye, the ear, the taste, touch and smell are fleeting and deceptive: he who gives value to them brings only disappointment and bitter sorrow upon himself. The social differences between men he found were equally arbitrary and illusive; caste bred hatred and selfishness; riches strife, envy and malice. So in founding his Faith he laid the bottom of its foundation-stones upon all this worldly dirt, and its dome in the clear serene of the world of Spirit. He who can mount to a clear conception of Nirvāṇa will find his thought far away above the common joys and sorrows of petty men. As to one who ascends to the top of Chimborazo or the Himālayan crags, and sees men on the earth's surface crawling to and fro like ants, so equally small do bigots and sectarians appear to him. The mountain climber has under his feet the very clouds from whose sun-painted shapes the poet has figured to himself the golden streets and glittering domes of the materialistic Heaven of a personal God. Below him are all the various objects out of which the world's pantheons have been manufactured: around, above—Immensity. And so also, far down the ascending plane of thought that leads from the earth towards the Infinite, the philosophic Buḍḍhist describes, at different plateaux, the heavens and hells, the gods and demons, of the materialistic creed-builders.

What are the lessons to be derived from the life and teachings of this heroic prince of Kapilavasṭu? Lessons of gratitude and benevolence. Lessons of tolerance for the clashing opinions of men who live, move and have their being, think and aspire, only in the material world. The lesson of a common tie of brotherhood among all men. Lessons of manly self-reliance, of equanimity in breasting whatsoever of good or ill may happen. Lessons of the meanness of the rewards, the pettiness of the misfortunes of a shifting world of illusions. Lessons of the necessity for avoiding every species of evil thought and word, and for doing, speaking and thinking everything that is good, and for the bringing of the mind into subjection so that these may be accomplished without selfish motive or vanity. Lessons of self-purification and communion, by which the illusiveness of externals and the value of internals are understood.

Well might St. Hilaire burst into the panegyric that Buḍḍha "is the perfect model of all the virtues he preaches ... his life has not a stain upon it". Well might the sober critic Max Müller pronounce his moral code "one of the most perfect which the world has ever known". No wonder that in contemplating that gentle life Edwin Arnold should have found his personality "the highest, gentlest, holiest and most beneficent ... in the history of thought," and been moved to write his splendid verses. It is twenty-five hundred years since humanity put forth such a flower: who knows when it did before?

Gauṭama Buḍḍha, Sākya Muni, has ennobled the whole human race. His fame is our common inheritance. His Law is the law of Justice, providing for every good thought, word and deed its fair reward, for every evil one its proper punishment. His law is in harmony with the voices of Nature, and the evident equilibrium of the universe. It yields nothing to importunities or threats, can be neither coaxed nor bribed by offerings to abate or alter one jot or tittle of its inexorable course. Am I told that Buḍḍhist laymen display vanity in their worship and ostentation in their almsgiving; that they are fostering sects as bitterly as Hinḍūs? So much the worse for the laymen: there is the example of Buḍḍha and his Law. Am I told that Buḍḍhist priests are ignorant, idle fosterers of superstitions grafted on their religion by foreign kings? So much the worse for the priests: the life of their Divine Master shames them and shows their unworthiness to wear his yellow robe or carry his beggar's bowl. There is the Law—immutable—menacing; it will find them out and punish.

And what shall we say to those of another caste of character—the humble-minded, charitable, tolerant, religiously aspiring hearts among the laity, and the unselfish, pure and learned of the priests who know the Precepts and keep them? The Law will find them out also; and when the book of each life is written up and the balance struck, every good thought or deed will be found entered in its proper place. Not one blessing that ever followed them from grateful lips throughout their earthly pilgrimage will be found to have been lost; but each will help to ease their way as they move from stage to stage of Being