lifebuddha

VIP免费

2024-12-23 0 0 452.02KB 92 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

E-mail: bdea@buddhanet.net

Web site: www.buddhanet.net

Buddha Dharma Education Association Inc.

Ven. Piyadassi, Thera

The Buddha, His Life

and Teachings

The Buddha, His Life

and Teachings

The Buddha

His Life and Teaching

Piyadassi Thera

The Wheel Publication No. 5 a /b

Buddhist Publication Society

P.O. Box 61

54, Sangharaja Mawatha

Kandy, Sri Lanka

For free distribution only.

You may print copies of this work for your

personal use.

You may re-format and redistribute this

work for use on computers and computer

networks, provided that you

charge no fees for its distribution or use.

This edition was transcribed from the print

edition in 1995 by Bradford Griffith under the

auspices of the DharmaNet Dharma Book

Transcription Project, with the kind permission

of the Buddhist Publication Society

Namo tassa bhagavato

arahato sammà

sambuddhassa!

The Buddha

Introduction

“The ages roll by and the Buddha seems not so far

away after all; his voice whispers in our ears and

tells us not to run away from the struggle but, calm-

eyed, to face it, and to see in life ever greater oppor-

tunities for growth and advancement. Personality

counts today as ever, and a person who has im-

pressed himself on the thought of mankind as the

Buddha has, so that even today there is something

living and vibrant about the thought of him, must

have been a wonderful man—a man who was, as

Barth says, ‘the finished model of calm and sweet

majesty, of infinite tenderness for all that breathes

and compassion for all that suffers, of perfect moral

freedom and exemption from every prejudice.’ ”1

“His message old and yet very new and original for

those immersed in metaphysical subtleties, captured

the imagination of the intellectuals; it went deep

down into the hearts of the people.”2

Buddhism had its birth at Sarnath near the city

of Vàrànasi (Benares), India. With only five follow-

ers at the beginning, it penetrated into many lands,

and is today the religion of more than 600 million.

Buddhism made such rapid strides chiefly due to its

intrinsic worth and its appeal to the reasoning mind.

But there were other factors that aided its progress:

never did the dhammadåtas, the messengers of the

Dhamma, the teaching, use any iniquitous methods

in spreading the Dhamma. The only weapon they

wielded was that of universal love and compassion.

Furthermore, Buddhism penetrated to these

countries peaceably, without disturbing the creeds

that were already there. Buddhist missions, to which

the annals of religious history scarcely afford a para-

llel, were carried on neither by force of arms nor by

the use of any coercive or reprehensible methods.

Conversion by compulsion was unknown among the

Buddhists, and repugnant to the Buddha and his

disciples. No decrying of other creeds has ever exist-

ed in Buddhism. Buddhism was thus able to diffuse

itself through a great variety of cultures throughout

the civilized world.

“There is no record known to me,” wrote T.W.

Rhys Davids, “in the whole of the long history of

Buddhism throughout the many centuries where its

followers have been for such lengthened periods

supreme, of any persecution by the Buddhists of the

followers of any other faith.”

The Birth

The Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, lived over

2,500 years ago and is known as Siddhattha

Gotama.3 His father, Suddhodana, the kshatriya4

king, ruled over the land of the Sàkyans at Kapila-

vatthu on the Nepalese frontier. As he came from

the Gotama family, he was known as Suddhodana

Gotama. Mahàmàyà, princess of the Koliyas, was

Suddhodana’s queen.

In 623 B.C. on a full-moon day of May—

Vasanta-tide, when in India the trees were laden

with leaf, flower, and fruit, and man, bird, and beast

were in joyous mood—Queen Mahàmàyà was travel-

ling in state from Kapilavatthu to Devadaha, her

parental home, according to the custom of the times,

to give birth to her child. But that was not to be, for

halfway between the two cities, in the beautiful

Lumbini Grove, under the shade of a flowering Sal

tree, she brought forth a son.

Lumbini, or Rummindei, the name by which it

is now known, is one hundred miles north of Vàrà-

nasi and within sight of the snowcapped Himalayas.

At this memorable spot where Prince Siddhattha, the

future Buddha, was born, Emperor Asoka, 316 years

after the event, erected a mighty stone pillar to mark

the holy spot. The inscription engraved on the pillar

in five lines consists of ninety-three Asokan charact-

ers, among which occurs the following: “hida budhe

jàte sàkyamuni. Here was born the Buddha, the sage

of the Sàkyans.”

The mighty column is still to be seen. The pillar,

as crisp as the day it was cut, had been struck by

lightning even when Hiuen Tsiang, the Chinese

pilgrim, saw it towards the middle of the seventh

century A.C. The discovery and identification of

Lumbini Park in 1896 is attributed to the renowned

archaeologist, General Cunningham.

On the fifth day after the birth of the prince,

the king summoned eight wise men to choose a

name for the child and to speak of the royal babe’s

future. He was named Siddhàrtha, which means one

whose purpose has been achieved. The brahmins

deliberated and seven of them held up two fingers

each and declared: “O King, this prince will become

a cakravarti, a universal monarch, should he deign to

rule, but should he renounce the world, he will

become a sammà-sambuddha, a Supremely Enlight-

ened One, and deliver humanity from ignorance.”

But Koõóa¤¤a, the wisest and the youngest, after

watching the prince, held up only one finger and

said: “O King, this prince will one day go in search of

truth and become a Supremely Enlightened

Buddha.”

Queen Mahàmàyà, the mother, passed away on

the seventh day after the birth of her child, and the

babe was nursed by his mother’s sister, Pajàpati

Gotami. Though the child was nurtured till

manhood in refinement amid an abundance of

material luxury, the father did not fail to give his son

the education that a prince ought to receive. He

became skilled in many branches of knowledge, and

in the arts of war easily excelled all others.

Nevertheless, from his childhood the prince was

given to serious contemplation.

The Four Significant Visions

When the prince grew up, the father’s fervent wish

was that his son should marry, bring up a family, and

be his worthy successor; for he often recalled to

mind with dread the prediction of the sage Kon-

da¤¤a, and feared that the prince would one day

give up home for the homeless life of an ascetic.

According to the custom of the time, at the early age

of sixteen the prince was married to his cousin, the

beautiful Princess Yasodharà, the only daughter of

King Suppabuddha and Queen Pamità of the Koliyas.

The princess was of the same age as the prince.

His father provided him with the greatest com-

forts. He had, so the story tells, three palaces, one

for each of the Indian year’s three seasons. Lacking

nothing of the earthly joys of life, he lived amid song

and dance, in luxury and pleasure, knowing nothing

of sorrow. Yet all the efforts of the father to hold his

son a prisoner to the senses and make him worldly-

minded were of no avail. King Suddhodana’s endeav-

ours to keep away life’s miseries from his son’s

inquiring eyes only heightened Prince Siddhàrtha’s

curiosity and his resolute search for truth and

Enlightenment. With the advance of age and matur-

ity, the prince began to glimpse the woes of the

world.

On one occasion, when the prince went driving

with his charioteer Channa to the royal gardens, he

saw to his amazement what his eyes had never

beheld before: a man weakened with age, and in the

last stage of ageing, crying out in a mournful voice:

“Help master! lift me to my feet; oh, help!

Or I shall die before I reach my house!”5

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

eBUDDHANET'SBOOKLIBRARYE-mail:bdea@buddhanet.netWebsite:www.buddhanet.netBuddhaDharmaEducationAssociationInc.Ven.Piyadassi,TheraTheBuddha,HisLifeandTeachingsTheBuddha,HisLifeandTeachings2TheBuddhaHisLifeandTeachingByPiyadassiTheraTheWheelPublicationNo.5a/bCopyright©1982BuddhistPublicationSocietyBudd...

展开>> 收起<<

lifebuddha.pdf

共92页,预览19页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

lifebuddha

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: