Kala bears, wicked mutations of Australia's koala bears (marsupials), are on the rise.
Humans were destroying the koala's whole world, their trees. They were powerless to resist until, under pressure, a mutation occurred. Their eyes went from brown...
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Comrades, Commander Winnie has reviewed the last report. He says, "it good story", but the bit about Devadatta should be expanded. He says it will help the reader to understand his conflict with GUteater if they first hear about the demon's role in Devadatta's decline. He says "it good" to convey a feel for those earlier days when the Buddha roamed on Earth. I concur, and so I present the following brief history of the Buddha. Milinda of the Archive.
The Life of The Buddha.
The Buddha was born a prince, the son of a king in an area that now includes the border regions of Northern India and Nepal. According to the custom of the time, astrologers were consulted as to his future prospects. The astrologers were astonished by the signs, and they declared: 'Siddhartha Gautama of the Sakya clan is destined to become a universal monarch, either as a king of kings or a fully enlightened buddha'.
Siddhartha's father, King Suddhodana, naturally hoped his son would follow in his footsteps and become the mighty king the signs foretold. In order to lead him in that worldly direction, King Suddhodana surrounded the young Prince with all the pleasures of the royal house. Siddhartha grew happy and strong. He mastered the martial skills of his warrior caste, he danced and sang, he was the darling of the royal court. He fell in love with and married his cousin, the beautiful Yasodhara, when they were both 16. It was a fortunate union of arrangement and love. Their marriage was a great joy to them and all around them, and 13 years later they had a son, Prince Rahula.
Siddhartha's life was truly wonderful. All the benefits of power, wealth, and beauty ripened upon him. His father was careful to ensure the future king not only had every pleasure but was also shielded from anything unpleasant.
Siddhartha should have been the happiest man on earth, but he wasn't. He was troubled. He began to question the meaning of life, the very thing his father had hoped to distract him from doing. He ventured outside the palace to see how the other half lived and there he was confronted by the squalor that was otherwise kept hidden from him.
He saw sickness, old age, and death.
Of course, he'd have known of these things before, even in the palace, but now it struck him as a realisation. Prince Siddhartha of the Sakya clan, along with everyone he knew and loved, was equally destined to get sick, grow old, and die.
This realisation, on top of his growing dissatisfaction with the emptiness of palace life, lit a fire under him. He determined to seek an answer to the truth of suffering .
Siddhartha abandoned his wife and son. (Please hold back from judgement on this for now. We shall return to Yasodhara and Rahula, just as the Buddha did.)
He left the palace, exchanged his princely robes for a beggar's rags, and embarked on the homeless life. For six years he roamed, possession-less, exposed to the elements. He practiced yoga and meditation. He sought the greatest teachers of the time and soon surpassed them all. He undertook hardships; the austerities of fasting and the various ways of denying the body in order to liberate the spirit, ideas popular at the time. He took himself to death's door, a living skeleton.
One day a milkmaid found him like that, starved and close to death. She fed him milk, brought him rice, and slowly he was restored.
With his strength regained, Siddhartha made one final push.
He sat at the foot of a Bodhi tree and made the ultimate vow.
"I shall not leave this seat 'til I find the solution to suffering, or the flesh rots from my bones."
He entered a profound state of meditative absorption, samadhi, and during the night he did battle with Mara; the embodiment of desire, fear and delusion. Mara tempted him with sensual pleasures, threatened him with every terror and when these failed, offered him the kingship of the world. But Siddhartha was not moved. Finally, as the sun rose, all the fetters fell away and Siddhartha attained the perfection of mind, enlightenment. He became the Buddha.
At that point he could have stayed absorbed in bliss for all eternity. But the perfection of mind includes the perfection of compassion, and so he returned to the world.
He set about establishing the teachings and the system of ordination that we now know as Buddhism. He included safeguards within that system; like ethics and a rigorous adherence to truth; that have allowed the teachings to continue unpolluted down to us today.
In a forerunner to the scientific method, the Buddha established ways for examining and purifying the mind - definite methods with definite results. In this way he put enlightenment in the hands of the individual.
His former homeless companions, those he'd practised the austerities with, became his first followers. Thus began the Sangha, the organisation of monks and nuns.
Siddhartha returned to the palace, to his wife and son, not as husband and father but as teacher. His son, Rahula, now 7, famously asked for his inheritance, meaning his spiritual inheritance. He asked to follow the Buddha, saying "Lord, even your shadow is pleasing to me." The Buddha accepted Rahula as a monk and began his education.
The Buddha also began the ordination of women, the first nun being Mahapajapati Gotami, his adoptive mother and sister to his birth mother Mayadevi, who passed away soon after his birth.
Mahapajapati was soon joined in ordination by Siddhartha's wife, Yasodhara. Numerous others followed their lead. This ordination of women seriously upset the Brahman priests who represented the Hindu patriarchy of the time. They spoke out against the formal entry of women into the spiritual path, but the Sakya clan were also the political power of the time, so there wasn't much they could do about it.
A great number of the extended Sakya clan ordained, including the Buddha's cousin Devadatta, which brings us back to our story.
(In the next episode we will see how Winnie and the demon GUteater fit into the story of the Buddha and Devadatta.)
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