Buddha in 60 Minutes E-Book

Walther Ziegler

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 108

Beschreibung

The Buddha is renowned as the founder of one of the five world religions. This is all the more astonishing because he never claimed to be a prophet. Unlike Mohammed, Moses or Jesus he promises human beings no afterlife in Paradise. Nor does he have any stories of God or God's grace. He simply shows us how we can free ourselves, by our own efforts, from fear and attain to the experience of 'Nirvana'. His concern is Man's self-salvation. He formulates his key idea in the doctrine of the 'Four Noble Truths'. To live always means also to suffer, runs the first 'Noble Truth', because, says the Buddha: "Ageing is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering, to be parted from loved ones is suffering..." The second truth then explains the causes of this suffering. These are, above all, our own wishes and needs for pleasure, youth, attractiveness, health, eternal life and happiness. If we succeeded in freeing ourselves from these things then, the Buddha's third Noble Truth runs, the suffering would end. The fourth Noble Truth, finally, describes the famous 'Eightfold Path' that we need to follow in order to achieve "liberation", "awakening" and "serenity" vis-à-vis our own needs. The book "Buddha in 60 Minutes" explains this fascinating doctrine in an easy-to-follow way, especially the key idea 'nirvana'. The Buddha, indeed, arrived at his Four Noble Truths and the nirvana experience only through meditation. But his doctrine can be grasped simply through reason. Are the Four Truths correct? Is the Eightfold Path one we can actually travel? Can the nirvana experience actually help us to achieve a redeeming serenity? Here, the Buddha's key ideas are explained using over a hundred of his most important quotations. The book appears as part of the popular series "Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes" which has now been translated worldwide into six languages.

Leseprobe

My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the English editions of this series of books.

My special thanks go to my translator

Dr Alexander Reynolds.

Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the needs of English-language readers.

Contents

The Buddha’s Great Discovery

The Buddha’s Central Idea

The Awakening – How Siddhartha Became the Buddha

The First of the Four Noble Truths:

Life Means Suffering

The Second of the Four Noble Truths: The Cause of Suffering

The Third of the Four Noble Truths: The Removal of Suffering

The Fourth of the Four Noble Truths: The Eightfold Path

Of What Use is the Buddha’s Discovery to Us Today?

The Buddha’s Answer to Humanity’s Most Important Questions – Beginning and End of the World

Can Everyone Follow the Way of the Buddha? The Simile of the Raft

The Secret of Breath-Meditation: Don’t Think!

Nirvana and Everyday Life – The “Two Worlds” Problem

The Buddha’s Legacy: Composure as Liberation and Radical Letting-Go

Bibliographical References

The Buddha’s Great Discovery

The Buddha (560-480 BC)2 counts, along with Confucius, as by far the most significant and influential of the many philosophers and itinerant wise men of the East. For forty-five years he travelled from place to place in north-eastern India and instructed people on how to live rightly. He is considered to be founder of one of the five great world religions. This is all the more astonishing because the Buddha never claimed, during his own lifetime, to be a prophet. Unlike Mohammed, Moses or Jesus, he promised human beings no sort of afterlife in heaven or in Paradise. Most importantly, he did not believe in God. He also looked very sceptically on the numerous minor godheads who composed the Hindu religion dominant in his time and place. Such ideas, he claimed, are based on mere chance or arbitrary human invention. In his famous parable of “the blind men and the elephant”3 he compares the high priests of India, the so-called Brahmins, with blind men, who describe their various godheads in the same way as men deprived of sight would describe an elephant. Many years ago, so ran the tale that Buddha recounted to his monks, a king had had several men blind from birth brought into his palace and placed, standing, around an elephant:

The first blind man assured the king that the elephant was like a winnowing basket, since the part of the elephant he had been next to was the big folded cavity of its ear; another said it was like a ploughshare, since the part he had touched was the tusk; another, who had touched the huge torso of the elephant, said it was like a storeroom; another, who had touched the elephant’s huge foot, said it was like a milestone; and yet another, who had been placed nearest its tail, said an elephant was like a brush. Each blind man, in other words, described a different part or aspect of the elephant. Nevertheless, a violent argument blew up between them about the elephant’s true nature. No different, taught the Buddha, was the situation as regards the supposed truths spoken by the Brahmins and the ascetics about the various gods:

The essential thing, however, is to grasp the whole. It is, for example, wrong, argued Buddha, to invent various gods to preside over different parts or aspects of the world, i.e. a god of health, of fertility, of wisdom, of good fortune at harvest-time or in war, and yet another god responsible for the bringing into being of the world. The Buddha rejected the account of a Creator God named Brahma lying at the root of everything, generally accepted at the time, as firmly as he did the Hindu doctrine of an eternal cycle of reincarnation and of the immortality of the individual soul. He rejected with especial vehemence the Brahmin religious practice of winning the favour of the gods through the sacrifice of animals.

If we compare it to the ideas generally shared by his contemporaries, the core notion taught by the Buddha is so sober and so radical a one that it is amazing that anyone at all was able to understand what he was teaching. Because for the Buddha the highest goal for Man consists in passing into the state of “nirvana”, which means being once and for all “extinguished” as an individual human being. He recommends to his monks and to all those who undertake to join and follow him

“Extinction” is indeed the literal translation of “nirvana”. This state called “nirvana”, or sometimes “nibbana”, in the ancient Indian languages Sanskrit and Pali is that redeeming final form which a human being can attain once he has come to recognize the meaning of life in all its implications:

The Buddha himself needed many years in order to decipher the meaning of life and to attain to the dimension of nirvana. He was born under the name Siddhartha Gautama as the noble son of a well-respected warrior prince and raised in the royal palace. At the age of twenty-six he left the sheltered and pampered world he had hitherto known and began to roam around India as a “sramana” or “houseless one”. He lived on the alms that he begged and attached himself to various brahmin masters and ascetics. But neither the doctrines that he learned from these men nor such ascetic practices as prolonged fasting brought him closer to the goal he was aiming for. It was only after six years of fruitless efforts of this kind that he was able, away from men in the solitude of the natural world, to achieve his redeeming knowledge. Sitting alone under a fig tree, the Buddha discovered his “Four Noble Truths”.

Ever since that day these four truths have formed the core of Buddhist teachings. They are of overwhelming clarity and simplicity. Firstly, life means suffering. Secondly, this suffering has a cause. Thirdly, this cause can be removed. And fourthly, there is a specific path which leads to this removal:

The first noble truth at which the Buddha arrived concerns the existence of suffering. It is a truth that it is hardly possible to dispute, since it consists simply in the recognition that every human life is, in basic principle, overshadowed by the painful experiences of growing old, getting sick, dying, and the loss of near and dear ones:

No anti-ageing programme nor any makeover can free us permanently from the effects of passing time. Nor can anything prevent our losing those who have become dear to us. But instead of trying hopelessly to resist this, argues the Buddha, we need to take a closer look at the emergence and the causes of this suffering. It is here that the second of the Four Noble Truths comes into play: the question as to the causes. The causes of suffering, argues the Buddha, are, in the end, just our own desires for youth, health, immunity from the ravages of time, and personal happiness. But our suffering from these things is something which arises from the fact that we perceive and feel the fulfilment or lack of fulfilment of these desires through our senses and reflectively refer this fulfilment or non-fulfilment back onto our consciousness of being a “self”. As soon as we cease to do this, so runs the Buddha’s third “Noble Truth”, suffering too will cease. The fourth “Noble Truth” then describes the specific way, the famous “Eightfold Path”, which we need to travel in order to arrive at this point. This is why the Buddha can say:

In that fourth of the “Four Noble Truths” which is also often cited as the “Eightfold Path” the Buddha describes for us in detail how we can progress step by step to the point where are able to ourselves liberate ourselves from suffering. Our “liberation” in this case, however, is, very significantly, not brought about by any God, any Redeemer, or anyone else who “grants us absolution”. Nor do we find in Buddhism any “original sin”, any “Last Judgment”, or any punishing and rewarding God judging us at the end of our lives. It is we ourselves alone who must, by our own efforts, free ourselves from suffering. It is true, indeed, that this freeing of ourselves demands, as its final step, a complete overcoming of the sense of being a “self” and of anything in the world of the feelings or of the intellect’s being traceable back to such a “self” or an “I”. It is only with this final step that we reach the enlightening dimension of nirvana, as the realization of the fourth and final truth. Buddha describes his own “awakening” in the following terms:

This “arising of true knowledge” in the former Prince Gautama also explains the name that was his from this point on. Buddha means, in the ancient Indian language Sanskrit, “the enlightened one” or, more literally, “the awakened one”. For this reason, after his discovery of the Four Noble Truths, which he first announced to the world in the deer park in Benares, Gautama was no longer addressed by his birth name but rather as “the Buddha” or “the Awoken One”. The central moment of this awakening was the nirvana experience.

One could say that whoever has understood the concept of nirvana, i.e. the goal set by the fourth noble truth, has also understood the Buddha’s central idea. But precisely herein lies the great challenge. The concept of nirvana and all that the Buddha associates with it is, for our Western form of thinking characterized by logic and its principle of logical exclusion, not at all easy to understand. As already mentioned, “nirvana”, translated literally, means “to be extinguished”. And in fact what is at stake here, for the Buddha, is indeed the “snuffing out” of the self, of the senses, of thought itself, the dissolution of the “I” into the cosmos, into a realm extending far beyond any individual perception of self.

But this “being extinguished” or “snuffing out” are things which are not so easy to define with any precision. It is a matter neither simply of a state of death or of total non-being, as one might think at first glance, nor of a persisting state of living being. In the binary logic of the Western mind there are always only two possibilities: either something is so or it is not so; either something has a certain quality or it doesn’t. To say that both statements are true at once is “illogical” and therefore impossible.

For this reason “nirvana” was, for a long time, translated into European languages as “nothingness”, i.e. as a privative thing forming the logical opposite to “something-ness”. Consequently, Buddhism became labelled as a nihilism, the goal of which was just a dissolution into nothingness. But this understanding of nirvana covers only a part of its original meaning. The concept “nirvana” does indeed, on the one hand, describe a “nothingness” in the sense of a state of non-being, insofar as, in entering into this state, we leave behind us our sense of self, our feelings, our thinking, and even the very possibility of relating things back to an individual “I”. On the other hand, however, nirvana is not a total nothingness or non-being in the sense of a biological death.

What, then, does “passing into the state of nirvana” mean concretely? Are we, when in this state, still “there” or not? Can that meditating person who succeeds thereby in freeing himself completely from his singularity, his awareness of being a “self”, still be said to be “alive”? Is he still a subject capable of “knowing”, or has he given up, along with his subjectivity, also all possible basis for perception and for memory?

The Buddha discovers, and recounts back to us, the fascinating possibility that one might achieve and experience nirvana even before death, i.e. that one might free oneself for certain periods both from every need and desire and also from the feeling of oneself as an individual self and then, after this profound spiritual experience, return into everyday life. If we succeed, the Buddha goes on to suggest, in achieving this experience of a “snuffing out” of our perception of time and space and of our consciousness of self, then this can serve to remove for us all that is weighty and oppressive in the challenges posed by life and the inevitability of death: