Who was the Buddha?

who is the buddha maybe you've seen statues or images like this fat laughing buddha this friendly image fits the common perception of buddhism as being about peace and happiness but as it turns out this popular laughing buddha is actually the standard depiction of buddha a possibly historical 10th century chinese monk that some chinese buddhists venerate as an incarnation of the future buddha but he's not the buddha in the sense that we usually mean it instead the buddha that we're going to talk about today is the buddha known as siddhartha gautama a teacher who lived around northern india and southern nepal in the 5th century bce his teachings grew into what we now know as buddhism you've probably heard the standard story of siddhartha gautama as pictured in movies such as the little buddha starring keanu reeves according to this story there was a wealthy but sheltered prince who one day left his palace walls and encountered sickness old age and death troubled by this experience he left his royal life to search for a way out of suffering he eventually attained awakening and became known as the buddha then he spent the rest of his life teaching others how to overcome suffering but before we get into that i want to ask what might seem like a weird question when does the life of the buddha actually start well we might say sometime in the 5th century bce with his birth in the earthly body that would eventually attain enlightenment according to buddhist tradition but buddhists have different assumptions about how the universe works so the answer is not quite so simple as his birthday in this video we'll talk about the general buddhist understanding of the buddha who he is where he came from and what he did as well as what scholars believe about the buddha as a historical figure to start to understand who the buddha is let's start with the word itself buddha literally the term buddha comes from the sanskrit root buddh which means to wake up so the term buddha literally means the awakened one and so the term buddha is a title not a personal name but why the awakened one what is he waking up from to answer that let's turn to buddhist cosmology as depicted in this schematic representation of the universe known as a bubba chakra or a wheel of life this example on screen is relatively recent but these types of images have a long history in buddhism so let's take a look one key point to understand about the wheel of life is that it works like a wheel which is to say it goes round and round endlessly and this is because early buddhists like most south asians believed in rebirth that is after you die that's not the end of the road instead you're reborn at some other place in the cycle perhaps here in the realm of the gods or maybe here in the realm of the hell beings or maybe here in the realm of the animals and this goes on and on infinitely eventually all beings die and are reborn even the gods importantly buddhists did not think that some creator god created this cycle it just is and while it might sound cool to constantly be reborn that's not generally how buddhists viewed it throughout history instead this endless cycle of being born suffering and then dying and then being reborn suffering and then dying was thought to be painful and something to be escaped the term for this endless painful cycle is samsara the buddha is the one who has overcome the suffering of samsara by attaining nirvana a term that we can translate as awakening or enlightenment because once the buddha has attained nirvana he's no longer subject to samsara and its endless cycles of death and rebirth the buddha is also someone who teaches other beings to escape it as well so to return to the title buddha the awakened one he is the one who has woken up to see the nature of reality while all other beings stumble through samsara in a dreamlike ignorant state in fact according to traditional buddhist cosmology there actually have been many buddhas buddhist tradition maintains that our buddha is siddhartha gautama but according to a buddhist understanding he's only one in a long line of buddhas so how does that work remember that time is largely cyclical in a buddhist understanding this means that it has been going on for a long long time maybe even an infinite beginningless time every so often a being realizes the nature of reality becomes a buddha and teaches other beings the path to awakening unfortunately each time a buddha comes into being his teachings are gradually forgotten over time and the world again enters into a period of ignorance and at some later point another buddha arises so remember our friend buddha who some think will be a future buddha each of them teaches the same teaching what buddhists call the dharma and that's because the fundamental nature of suffering and the path to overcome it never changes our buddha then doesn't claim to be teaching anything new he maintained that he had rediscovered the same truth that many before him had discovered so in that sense to understand the life of the buddha according to buddhist tradition we need to understand that he is one in a long line of buddhas each teaching the same truth but if there are many buddhas how does he become a buddha how did our buddha become the buddha according to buddhist doctrine becoming a buddha is the result of a long process of gradual training and perfection that takes place over billions of lifetimes and that begins with a vow some buddhist traditions tell the story in this way long ago it was the time of a previous buddha named dipankara de pumkara attracted great crowds to hear him teach one of the people who came to these teachings was named sumeda as the pumkara was walking sumita noticed that there was a big mud puddle that the pumpkira was about to walk through not wanting this honored buddha to get dirty sumida laid down on the road and spread his hair over the mud puddle so dupankara could walk over it without getting muddy and when dipamkara noticed sumeda doing this he made a prediction he pointed at sumida and said one day you will be born as siddhartha gautama and you will attain awakening and become a buddha and sumaida heard this and vowed that one day he would become a buddha this set him on a long journey of training and gradually accumulating the virtues and good karma over the course of billions of lifetimes that would one day enable him to attain awakening the buddhist tradition remembers these millions and millions of lifetimes in a genre of literature known as the jataka or birth stories these are accounts of the buddha's former lives prior to achieving buddhahood during this time before the buddha is awakened and therefore is not yet a buddha he's known in the sanskrit language as the bodhisattva one whose being or satva is oriented toward awakening bodhi in one story the bodhisattva is a monkey king who uses his own body as a bridge to help his monkey subjects flee from an attacking army and another he's a prince who sees a hungry tigress who's about to die and leave her five little cubs to starve as well and the prince sacrifices his own body to feed the tigress so that she can feed her cubs in each of these stories the bodhisattva practices virtues and skills that he'll need to attain enlightenment these include patience compassion insight meditation wisdom and perhaps most importantly generosity after many millions of lives gradually accumulating virtue and good karma the bodhisattva is finally born in what the buddhist tradition considers to be his last human body siddhartha gautama up until now we've been exploring the traditional buddhist account of the buddha's life but now we can ask what do we know about the buddha as a historical figure he was born in southern nepal at a place called lumbini located near the modern border with india he was thus born and raised in a multi-religious context particularly a context influenced by vedic brahmanism his name siddhartha means he who accomplishes his goal and the name gautama indicates the clan he was born into his people were the sakyas which is why he's sometimes called sakyamuni buddha and he was probably born around the 5th century bce now i'm emphasizing that probably because scholars debate the historical facts of the buddha's life what makes it tricky is that there are not many historical records from this time or place nor is there much archaeological evidence that scholars can turn to we do have buddhist accounts of the buddha's life the earliest are contained in the pali canon which is said to be the record of the buddha's teachings given during his lifetime these texts were said to have been memorized by the buddha's followers after his death and then written down around the 1st century bce so hundreds of years after the buddha's life but scholars maintain that a significant portion of the material dates back at least to the 3rd century bce so what do they say about the buddha's life well unfortunately not much interestingly in these early texts the buddha only makes the most vague references to his past and doesn't ever give the full story of his birth in early life for example let's take a look at a book called the noble search scholars think it's one of the earliest autobiographical accounts of the buddha's life dating to as early as the 4th century bce and thus at least within the first few centuries after the buddha's death in it the buddha describes his past in this way later while still young a black-haired young man endowed with the blessing of youth in the prime of life though my mother and father wished otherwise and wept with tearful faces i shaved off hair and beard put on the yellow robe and went forth from the home life into homelessness in other words when the buddha was young he gave up ordinary life to take up the robes of an aesthetic wanderer walking from place to place begging for food instead of having an ordinary home life now notice that this is a relatively simple story but later buddhists expanded these early accounts into more elaborate versions of the buddha's life story that flesh out the buddha as a character the version i'm gonna tell you is probably the most popular version but it dates to the 5th century ce over 800 years after the death of the buddha it's one of many texts that tell the story of the buddha's life in great detail now we as historians should note that these versions are relatively late and they contain much that the historical buddha likely never taught but these stories are also important because these stories are what later buddhists told themselves to help understand the buddha's teachings according to these accounts of the life of the buddha the being who became the buddha was born as a prince his birth is foretold by all kinds of wondrous signs for example his mother dreams that a white elephant enters her side and shortly after discovers that she's pregnant and when he was born his first action was to take seven steps to the north and proclaim i am chief of the world in this version siddhartha led a sheltered life away from any experience of pain or suffering he married a beautiful princess has a son and lives a seemingly comfortable life but one day the gods give siddhartha the idea to see what life outside the palace is like siddhartha convinces a chariot driver named chana to take him around on his journey he has what becomes known as the four sites first he sees an old man and he says what's that and china tells him old age comes for all people second he sees a sick man and he asks chana what's that and chana tells him no man lives without becoming sick at least once third he sees a dead man and he asks what is that and chana tells him all people eventually die siddhartha is horrified and asks will this happen to me to my wife to my son and chana informs him that death comes for all beings according to the story this is the first time that siddhartha had ever heard that people get old and die suddenly siddhartha realizes that all his money all the good food and beautiful things in the palace will not last forever it's all going to come to an end he realizes that the world he's living in is samsara an endless cycle of birth suffering death and rebirth and he begins to feel unsatisfied with life as he's been living it and then comes the fourth site he sees someone sitting in meditation and siddhartha asks now what is that china replies that the man is seeking away out of old age sickness and death and so right at that moment siddhartha has this sudden realization about the fact of suffering he also learns that people are seeking a way to overcome it at this point siddhartha wants to search for a way out of suffering he decides to leave behind life at the palace including his wife and small child in a search of a solution to the problem of suffering now abandoning your wife and kid might seem incomprehensible but from siddhartha's perspective he could best care for his son by finding a solution to the problems of existence so siddhartha sets out from his life in the palace and lives the life of a wandering religious beggar he studies with various teachers but none of them can answer all of his questions he even tries fasting in order to try and control his mind and so for six years siddhartha does these harsh practices and grows painfully skinny eventually he realizes that this is not actually helping him solve the problem of suffering all it's doing is making his body weak so he decides to start eating again to have the strength to do what must be done then he goes to sit under the bodhi tree and bodhgaya in modern day bihar a demon tries to tempt him and distract him but to no avail eventually siddhartha realizes the nature of reality he attains awakening and he understands the path out of birth illness suffering and death we'll talk about in a future video what exactly his realization is but the important thing to know now is that he's the buddha he then proceeds to spend the next 45 years teaching and gathering disciples before finally dying at the age of 80. one aspect of the story you might have noticed is that the buddha is often portrayed as a special almost quasi-divine being in the story there are miraculous signs the intervention of gods and various other superhuman elements this might surprise some people today because many modern forms of buddhism downplay the supernatural but for most of buddhist history buddhists maintain that the world is populated by various visible and invisible beings including powerful gods and demons and that the buddha himself had special abilities now he's still a human and not a god but he's often portrayed with supernatural powers the fact that so many people today downplay these supernatural elements is largely the product of modernist forms of buddhism that have emerged since the 19th century but we'll leave that topic for a future video to conclude one important takeaway from studying the life of the buddha is that there are in fact many lives of the buddha according to buddhist tradition this is true for buddhists in the sense that our buddha siddhartha gautama is held to be only one in a long line of buddhas who have taught a path out of suffering each of these buddhas in turn has many lives this is because the buddhist tradition maintains that it takes billions and billions of lifetimes of gradually practicing virtues like compassion and generosity in order to become the buddha we can also take a step back as historians of buddhism and say that there are many lives of the buddha in the sense that there are many versions of the buddha over the 2500 year long history of buddhism buddhists have told and retold the story of the line of the buddha reshaping it for various purposes different ways of telling the story ground different sorts of practices and different views of what the buddhist tradition actually is this proliferation of the lives of the buddha continues to this day as people re-tell the story of the life of the buddha in order to imagine new ways of overcoming the suffering that all of us face hey everyone thanks for watching that was episode 2 in a multi-part series on buddhism episode 3 will focus on buddhist meditation and i'm already working on videos on specific traditions within buddhism such as pure land buddhism and zen buddhism i'm able to do all this because of our patrons on patreon they enable me to bring in the expert scholars who help me make these videos so if you're able please consider becoming a patron on patreon we're trying to get to 700 patrons by the end of this year which happens to be the seven year anniversary of religion for breakfast thank you to everyone who has taken this journey with me over the past seven years you

Channel: ReligionForBreakfast

Views: 1,895,511

Keywords: The Buddha, Siddartha Gautama, Dipamkara, Sumedha, nirvana

Id: heUhARKl2bY

Length: 16min 44sec (1004 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 14 2021