As Buddhists mark the Buddha’s Enlightenment, Vishvapani asks, what is his significance today?
Thought for the Day 14/5/2014
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This week Buddhists around the world celebrate the Buddha’s Enlightenment in the festival of Wesak or Buddha Day. Buddhists believe that on night of the May full moon he sat beneath a spreading fig tree and entered a state of deep concentration. Exploring his consciousness in its profoundest depths, he saw the ingrained, instinctual responses, such as craving and ill will, that shaped his mind and sowed the seeds of future suffering. Then something changed. A new vision of existence opened, as if he’d been asleep and now he’d woken up.
This experience made him the Buddha, ‘the One who has Awakened’. It guided how he taught others in the remaining 45 years of his life, informed the practice of his disciples and inspired a pan-Asian civilisation. But what is its significance today?
The Buddha’s teachings resonate, to a surprising extent, with a secular outlook. He didn’t believe in a creator God or insist on the need for a saviour. He said reality was impermanent and insubstantial, and suggested that our failure to live in accordance with it produces suffering. Then he taught practices like meditation that reshape our minds accordingly. Their continuing relevance is seen in the current popularity of mindfulness practices. These have served centuries of Buddhist practitioners and are now being adopted in secular settings from parliament to schools as an antidote to our speedy, stressful lives.
But the goal of Buddhist practice is more than psychological health. It aims for the same liberation the Buddha experienced in his Enlightenment. While ideas and teachings are helpful in grasping this, images can evoke it.
So let us imagine a clear, blue sky stretching infinitely in all directions. We’re in the space of the creative imagination, and before us we see a light. It resolves into a figure and we sense that this figure embodies wisdom: our capacity to know, deeply and truly, the real meaning of our lives. It embodies compassion: the force that flows through us when self-preoccupation falls away. It embodies energy, creativity and beauty.
In Buddhist art the figures that appear in this space are defined by traditional iconography, but perhaps we can also allow room for our own intuition. What does wisdom look like to you? For Buddhists, the Buddha is both an individual and a symbol for a new way of being. So, in marking Buddha Day, we’re celebrating the human capacity to develop awareness, wisdom and compassion, and their potential to transform both individuals and the world.
Dear Vishwapani
Do you call the Buddha “Gautama” to indicate some denominational bias – i.e. privileging the Hinayana Dharma, or are you distinguishing Gautama Buddha from Shakyamuni Buddha on some ontological grounds, i.e. saying that they are two different Buddhas?
It’s just because your name, Vishwapani, is a Sanskrit name which suggests an affiliation with Mahayana. Also, the images of Buddhas on this page are Mahayana images, as opposed to Hinayana ones. Shouldn’t he, then, be in this context Shakyamuni Buddha? Or, at least it could be Shakyamuni Gautama, or Gautama Shakkyamuni.
If you call him Gautama out of hand, this places the context firmly in the Hinayana world; but the manifest context contradicts this.
It dont matter because the Buddha is the Buddha and his teaching are Divine and is for all Creatures! From:KeeBuddha
ver interesting!
Hi Guhyayogn, I take it you are asking, primarily, about the use of ‘Gautama’ in my book about him, as I don’t use the term in this post. My reason for that is the nature of that book: it seeks to locate the Buddha in history while leaving space for a sense of him as an Enlightened being. In the early sources he is called Gautama or Gotama by people who meet or know of him. Gotama is Pali, Gautama Sanskrit, and I choose the latter because it is a the language of Indian Buddhism in general, rather than the Theravada school in particular. In my book and other writing related to it, I donn’t think in terms of Mahayana and Hinayana in this respect – these are Mahayanist denominational terms; I look at the texts in the light of their reliability as historical sources (which is problematic, I know). It’s not so much that there are two Buddhas as that there are different ways of approaching the Buddha, and I think it is important that we allow space for the most significant of these. In my view, we must attend to both what history tells us and to what the tradition says about Buddhahood.
The page on which you are commenting is rather different. It’s a general talk on UK radio on Wesak/Buddha day intended to tell people about the Buddha and evoke what he represents. On this occasion I chose to do that in Mahayana terms and to illustrate it in light of that.
My own affiliation is Triratna. We draw on the Buddhist tradition as a whole, focusing on the core teachings and the Buddha himself.
I pronounce my name with a ‘v’, though in the mouths of my Indian friends that becomes a softened ‘b’: Bishwapani!
Mankind always add things to Divine teaching meant for all creatures sent from the Divine world of Beings. And thats