Course XXVII - Teaching 19: Buddhism

Indian religion had degenerated in such a way that became mere external idolatry.
Superior castes tyrannized the people infusing religious terror into them. Even images of gods, with awful aspect, monstrous heads and macabre postures did not infuse love or veneration but superstition and panic.
Just as after a tremendous storm the waters become quiet and the sun shines, so amid Hindu decadence, the Buddha’s religion emerges on the firmament of the world like a radiant sun.
The Aryan religion of the Hindu, too much permeated by materialism, was to be substituted for a new monotheistic religion.
Certainly, this awakened the heart of the ancient Vedic religion, which seeing itself whipped by the new faith, tried to recover its pristine form; but also it left a deep groove in the world of universal religions.
Buddhism is so closely linked with the figure of its founder that it is impossible to speak of the one not remembering the other.
In Kapilavastu, small Punjabi kingdom, prince Siddhartha, ninth incarnation of god Vishnu, is born. Devaki Maya, his mother, dies during the delivery, and the king, his father, and sages of the kingdom take care of him. He grows up being unaware of miseries of the word, very comfortable in his palace. At the age of twenty, he marries a neighbor princess, and very soon becomes father of a little boy.
But an infinite doubt stirs the mind of this beautiful prince: he desires to know life such as it is. Therefore, unobserved, one day gets out of his palace and as soon as he sees men suffering, getting older and dying, decides to quit his crown and his family to go in search of the secret of the eternal happiness.
The prince becomes a Sannyasi, and begging bread, goes through dusty roads in search of the Arcane. He follows the path of study and knowledge; tries Tantric Yoga’s exercises, by penitence reduces his body to a skeleton and passes through trials of mystical love, but he does not find the secret. It is then when, under the holy Bo tree, he receives the highest Initiation and discovers the reason of human suffering; attachment is cause of pain in lifetime, of death and of rebirth. As a being is devoid of desires and renunciation is absolute, then he does not suffer or come any more to Earth, and finds eternal happiness by returning to the Non-Absolute.
From that day on, he begins his mission on Earth: teaching men the path to happiness, the right path. The simple Buddhism stands up and drags the multitude as a reaction produced in a religious consciousness harassed by many symbols, ceremonies and laws.
Wherever the Buddha goes, there are thousands of adepts. And could one not to follow such clear and simple religion?
He said, men are all equal, and gave a deadly blow to Hinduism strongly adhered to caste division. He said, God is the essence of everything, and threw down and killed millenary gods at one stroke. He said man should do only a right work; so he destroyed another basic belief of the ancient religion, which founded the fruit of future life rather in divine help than in right behavior.
In Buddha’s view, celibacy was the summit of perfection; that is why columns of monks went behind him after quitting everything in the world in order to hear and practice his word. One day, his own son would come and ask to be admitted to his community.
You cannot imagine how much hatred the Buddha’s doctrine produced among Brahmans. But this hatred emerged along with the desire of competing with him; this was like a Hindu Counter-Reformation.
Among different Hindu sects, men emerged that understood that such an enlightened man and such an useful doctrine could be attacked only by using the same weapons. They understood the need of coming back to the early source of their religion, of drinking in Vedic pages those eternal truths they had forgotten and of applying and professing them again in their temples and ceremonies. In short: Buddhism awakened the conscience of India, brought a word of freedom that until then had felt slaves, and encouraged a rehabilitation of the early Vedas.
But Buddhism was not destined to settle in India. After Buddha’s death at the age of eighty in the arms of this disciple Ananda, again fights began and did not end until two generations later, when the Chatrias, guided by Brahmans, destroyed all Buddhists in India and this religion in its entire soil. But the blood of martyrs is always seed of new triumphs; the Buddha’s religion was not dead: it had been just transplanted to other more fertile lands in need of spiritual help.