Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
According to tradition, the founder of Buddhism was a Hindu named Siddhattha, son of the rajah of the Sakyan clan which
dwelt in the foothills of the Himalayas.
He is sometimes referred to as a Sakyamuni (muni meaning Sage), sometimes as Tathagata (literally "One who has come, or
gone, This Far"), more usually asGotama Buddha. The term Buddha is a title, not a personal name. Gotama is referred to as
the Buddha after his Enlightenment, which is reputed to have occurred in 528 B.C. in Bihar.
Thereafter he abandoned family life and promulgated his doctrine of deliverance from suffering and attainment of ultimate
peace, Nirvana.
His teaching is called the Dhamma (Sanskrit Dharma), and is summed up in the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold
Path....
There were many sects and sages in India 2500 years ago, but their teachings were transmitted orally. The Buddhist
Dhamma was not written down for centuries after it had been first enunciated. The various Sanskrit and Pali texts which
purport to contain the original teachings are therefore the product of evolution, and it is impossible to say which of the
divergent interpretations, if any, represents the pristine form.
What is quite certain is that the underlying philosophy had a great deal in common with ideas prevalent at the time. It bears
some resemblance to thecontemporary Jainist movement.
The breakaway from Hindu ritualism was not a unique innovation; neither was there anything new in the founding of an order
of monks. Various sects were already organized as mendicant monks, and it was an established custom for them to meet
periodically and proclaim their teaching in public. The early Buddhists followed this familiar pattern.
They made modifications, of course, and one feature was the rejection of the severe austerities which were practiced by
some of the sects.
Objections Answered
It is reasonable to wonder why so many scholars, while admitting the tissue of fable and unplausible history surrounding the
origins of Buddhism, neverthelessstill believe that Sakyamuni actually existed.
They usually justify their attitude by the argument that every sect must have had a founder. This assumption can be allowed if
it is merely taken to mean that someone must have begun the formation of any given group. It is clearly not true in the sense
that every sect originates in the new teaching of a remarkable personage.
As we have seen, there was in all probability a group of heretical Brahmanists for whom a Buddha signified "the enlightened
one." Even so, there were many Buddhas before the quasi-historical Buddha had acquired a personality, like the slain Jesus
of the Pauline Epistles....
A sufficient nucleus for the Buddha lay in the general Brahmanic concept of "Buddhas." There is even a tradition that at the
time when Sakyamuni came, many men ran about saying "I am the Buddha"...
On these grounds it is submitted that the figure of the Buddha, in its most plausibly rationalized form, is as unhistorical as that
of the gospel Jesus. Each figure shows how the religious mind manufactured a myth in a period in which the making of
primary Gods had given way to the making of Secondary-gods.
The mythopoeic process satisfied the craving for a Teacher-god who should originate religious and moral ideas as the earlier
gods had been held to originate agriculture, art, medicine, law and civilization.
Buddhism, like Christianity, is a "failure" from the point of view of its traditional origins.
In the case of Burma it admittedly did more to mold the life of the whole people towards its highest ethic than Christianity ever
did; but in India, where it arose, it collapsed utterly. It was overthrown by Brahmanism which set up in its place a revived
polytheism.
On our naturalistic view of the rise of the Teaching-gods, it is sheer human aspiration that has shaped all the Christs and their
doctrines.
One reason why the original teachings fail is that men persisted in crediting purely human aspiration to supernatural beings.
Men who are taught to bow ethically to a divine Teacher are not taught ethically to think. Any aspiration so evoked is
factitious, verbal, emotional, not reached by authentic thought and experience.
When the wisdom or unwisdom of the nameless thinkers in all ages is recognized for what it is - as human and not divine the nations may become capable of working out for themselves better gospels than the best of those which turned to naught
in their hands while they held them as revelations from the skies.