Читать книгу A Gaijin's Guide to Japan: An alternative look at Japanese life, history and culture - Ben Stevens - Страница 15

Obviously anything like a detailed account of Buddhism is not going to be supplied here. All I can do is to provide the briefest overview, as the Japanese perceive it.

Around 623 BC, a baby boy was born to the king of a tribe who existed on the Indian border of present-day Nepal. SiddhĚrtha Gautama, as the boy was named, was destined for a life of great luxury and indolence, his father determined that he should never be exposed to human suffering. At sixteen, Gautama married his cousin, and all in all spent twenty-nine years of his life stuck behind the walls of his father’s palace.

Then one day he grew so sick of his cosseted, uneventful existence that he ventured outside the palace. And what he saw shook him to the core: there was Old Age (an elderly man), Illness (a leper or someone with an obvious disease), Death (a decaying corpse) and—spot the odd one out—an ascetic.

Gautama was profoundly depressed by three of these sights, and so decided that the only way to defeat Old Age, Illness and Death was to follow the ascetic’s example and become a monk, disowning his inheritance and trying to understand how he could overcome suffering through meditation.

And meditate he did, on his own and with other hermits and monks; but still this didn’t give him satisfaction. So off he roamed around India, where he decided to try and gain ‘Enlightenment’ through depriving himself of all creature comforts, including food.

After nearly perishing of starvation, Gautama decided that starving himself wasn’t really such a good idea. He instead chose what Buddhist’s refer to as the ‘Middle Way’: neither over-indulging nor denying himself something to the extent that this denial became physically harmful. Aged thirty-five, Gautama decided to sit beneath a bo tree, and not stand back up until he’d achieved Enlightenment. Which, to cut a long story short, is eventually what happened.

Ignorance was the principal course of human suffering, he realised, and he had the Four Noble Truths (which are really a bit too deep to go into here) or ‘steps’ that anyone could follow to defeat ignorance and thus become Enlightened.

To bring this story to a rather abrupt conclusion, Buddha (as he was now known) spent the last forty-five years of his life travelling extensively and gaining many followers. He died aged eighty, having fallen ill after eating a meal of what is commonly believed to have been pork. Exercising true benevolence, however, he refused to blame the man (named Cunda, a blacksmith) who’d given him the meat dish.

‘All composite things pass away. Strive for your own salvation with diligence,’ were Buddha’s final words before dying.

What’s important to point out here is that Buddha didn’t claim to be any sort of god. Nor was he unique; he was merely the last in a long line of people who could also be called Buddha, people who’d also gained Enlightenment. In fact, according to my brother-in-law Taigi, who is the Buddhist head-priest of a temple belonging to the Jodo—‘Pure Land’—sect of Buddhism, there are (and this is a direct quote, including the pluralising of the word ‘Buddha’) ‘…as many Buddhas as there are grains of sand in this world…’

I suppose it just so happens that because he was the last of all these trillions of ‘Buddhas’, the Buddha who was previously SiddhĚrtha Gautama is the one getting all the attention. In other words, it’s been rather a long time since anyone new became a Buddha.

Failing to gain Enlightenment, humans are instead endlessly reincarnated, moving among the Six Realms that are Ten (basically heaven, which can’t be all bad), Ningen (which is the world as we know it, Jim), Chikusho (inhabited by animals), Shura (described by Taigi as being filled with an ‘everlasting anger’), Gaki (where you suffer from a general dissatisfaction and want of everything) and, finally, Jigoku (hell).

One of these days, then, someone will succeed in gaining Enlightenment and will thus break this vicious circle, thereby creating a new Buddha. In the meantime, Buddhists do their best to stay out of the ‘lower’ Realms by filling their lives with selfless acts of charity.