Siddhartha Gautama ~ Shakyamuni Buddha
For people new to Buddhism, one of the first questions is: "is your God that happy fat guy?" When they ask with genuine curiosity and not in a mocking way, I would take the time to explain first that though I pray to Buddha he is not a God. Second, I would say that actually there are many Buddhas, and the "happy fat guy" is actually not a Buddha yet but a Boddhisattva, like a Buddha in training. The next question then is "so there is more than one Buddha? To which I say "Yes". But for us humans there is only one historical Buddha, Shakyamuni Buddha or simply the Buddha; Shakyamuni Buddha is the one who attained complete enlightenment and then had the loving compassion to share his gift with humankind.
Shakyamuni Buddha is called the Historical Buddha because he was an actual man that was born in Lumbini which is today in the country of Nepal. He is believed to have lived from 563 BC to 483 BC, but the exact years of his life is not nearly as important as the message which he propounded. The Buddha was born a prince Siddhartha Gautama. His father was the King of the Shakya Clan. When he was born, a great ascetic foretold that he would either become a universal monarch or a Buddha. His father, hoping his son to follow ruling his kingdom, shielded young Siddhartha from the evils and sufferings of the outside world and gave him all the luxuries of life, while training him to one day become the king. However, one day Siddhartha ventured into the town and saw an old man, then the next day he saw a sick man, and finally he saw a dead man. Although not having faced the sorrows of old age, sickness and death himself he felt great pity for the people and decided to renounce his life of luxury, and left in search of a way for people to be free of such inevitable suffering. At the age of 29, Siddhartha left his palace, his wife, his son, his family in search of the universal truth. He wandered from teacher to teacher, and practiced extreme asceticism but still found no answer. So after six years, determined to achieve the knowledge on his own, Siddhartha sat under a bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya India, vowing not to rise until he attained enlightenment. Over 49 days, the Buddha meditated and he finally saw the conditions of suffering as they truly are. and removed all traces of ignorance on the 49th day, the Buddha rose from his seat and said the following: "Seeking but not finding the House Builder I traveled through the round of countless births; O painful is birth ever and again. House Builder, you have now been seen; You shall not build the house again. You rafters have been broken down; Your ridge pole is demolished too. My mind has now attained the unformed nirvana And reached the end of every kind of craving." Then he thought: "I have attained the unborn. My liberation is unassailable. This is my last birth. There will now be no renewal of becoming." At the age of 35, The Buddha had attained the ultimate truth. At first he was unsure what was to be his next step, as he knew that the message he held was very hard to understand and even harder for people to accept. Ultimately he resolved that though there are beings of limited capacity, there are still many who had previously developed good roots of compassion and wisdom and could also achieve nirvana with the Buddha's help, and so he set out to share his message with the world. To me the Buddha is even more than a God, who I worship from afar, instead he is a mentor, a teacher, and a guide to enlightened wisdom. *Excerpts taken from Entering the Stream by Samuel Bercholz and Sherab Chodzin Kohn (1993) |