The Buddhist doctrine traces back to the religion founder Gautama (surname) Siddhartha (proper name) out of the ruling warrior clan of the Shakya in the oligarchic Republic of Shakya in North India, in the border area to today's Nepal. Most sources state 560-480 B.C. as his life data. North India at this time bore the mark of drastic change. Through the transition from cattle-raising to agriculture administrative structures strengthened fundamentally. The caste system changed: due to the establishment of hereditary monarchies the warrior caste became less important; the Brahmins (priests) scaled up and became the highest caste in place of the warriors. Small political systems at the Himalaya mountainsides like the one of Shakya got under political pressure of the large hereditary monarchies and lost their independence.
Moving ascetics who had given up their possessions und left their families were a reflection of this upheaval of the society and had a high reputation in the population. Also Gautama left his family for this kind of search. At 29 years of age he left behind his wife and his little son. Later they both followed just like his stepmother and two of his cousins likewise into the way of life of hiking religious seekers. About the youth time of Gautama and his experience of the transitoriness, there exist many legends. Well known over all is the story that Gautama, although the son of the ruler and protected from all negative, is confronted with senility, illness and death.
The personal search of Gautama was characterized by hardest mortification. After six years of this practice it came to a second turning point, which led to the fact that he moved away from asceticism again and developed his specific doctrine. The Buddhist tradition purports that Gautama in a night and a day under a tree realized „equanimity and pure present awareness“. He awoke from the "dream existence of joy and misery of the transitoriness"
and experienced direct insight into the transitoriness and lack of substance of being and into the Conditioned Arising of all phenomena. From this time on he was given the surname Buddha, which means the awoken or illuminated one.
After this experience Gautama spent approximately 45 years to pass his insights on to people looking for the meaning of their lives or for practical advice. The group of humans who left their possessions and joined Gautama grew steadily. The fact that in this community and in the contact with people looking for advice no caste differences were recognized represented a revolutionary element of Buddhist practice. A further existed in the position of the women. In his statements Gautama made clear from the beginning that for him men and women were equal in their ability of personal and religious development. However he hesitated first to include groups of women into his movement. Today Buddhist men cloisters and Buddhist women cloisters exist, although in Buddhism altogether men are clearly over-represented in leading positions. In western Buddhist groups this ratio is more balanced, and women are established more and more as religious teachers.
It is typical for Gautama´s teachings that they contain complex philosophical ideas on the one hand, but on the other hand they are also practically and not speculatively oriented. In discussion with Brahmins he said for example that none of them had ever seen Brahman ("God"). In another teaching he emphasized that the release from greed, hate and ignorance was actually a value for itself, also without a reward for it after death. Traditional presentations that stood in contradiction to single elements of the Buddhist philosophy, like the concept of personal rebirth or the Hindu Gods canon, were relativized or amended but not posed in question in principle. Persons from most different social classes addressed themselves to Gautama and also rulers looked for his advice.
After Gautama´s death a relatively ascetic current prevailed at first in the religious community.5 Later on the two Buddhist schools of interpretation formed: Hinayana (the small vehicle) and Mahayana (the large vehicle).6 In the Hinayana the students concentrate over all on their own development, for example by means of meditation and body exercises. This school is today particularly common in Southeast Asia. In the Mahayana the students try to include all beings into their self realization (Bodhisattva ideal). The reality of the world as an inseparable whole is stated this way. The Mahayana direction is particularly common in China and Japan, Zen is a part of the Mahayana.
In the context of the propagation of Buddhism to Eastern Asia the development of Zen takes its beginning. The Indian monk Bodhidharma who traveled in the fifth century A.D. as a Buddhist teacher from India to China is considered as the founder of the Zen tradition. The Japanese word Zen comes from Chinese Chan which is derived from the Sanskrit word Dhyana (concentration, meditation). Zen represents a specific connection of Indian, Chinese and Japanese elements. In the opinion of various Zen authors Chinese culture tends to be more practically and less speculatively oriented than Indian culture, which reflects itself in the alignment of Zen on practical life experience: "What’s the use of talking about a musical masterpiece? What counts, is, that one performs it."
Eisai (1141-1214, Rinzai school) and Dogen (1200-1253, Soto school) are the founders of the two large Zen schools in Japan, which respectively trace back to Chinese schools of older date. At the time of Eisai and Dogen Buddhism became part of the popular culture in Japan. Today in Japan there exist various other Buddhist schools beside Zen, e.g. Jodo Shin, Shingon, Tendai, and Nichiren. Apart from Zen practice in a Japanese tradition, today above all the Vietnamese Zen teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh8 and his students are well-known in the West. In Tibet its own direction of Buddhism exists which combines local cultural traditions with the Buddhist doctrine and is popular likewise in the West. In India Buddhism disappeared practically completely in the 13th century: 1000-1250 A.D. all monasteries were destroyed through Islamic invasion.
The propagation of Buddhism as the first world religion was connected with the transmission of cultural heritage and cultural techniques, e.g. the transfer of medical knowledge from India to China, or the adoption of Chinese writing in Japan. A further explanation for the expansion of Buddhist ideas consists in the fact that Buddhist monks always accepted local divinities and placed them merely under the Buddhist Law of Transitoriness.
In Europe an influence of Buddhist ideas in philosophy and humanities can be determined starting in the 18th century and reaching a first peak in the 19th century when the preoccupation with Buddhism became a proper fashion for certain society circles. Above all philosophers as for example Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and later in the 20th century Heidegger appointed themselves to Gautama´s ideas.
After the discussion of Buddhist theory, the Western preoccupation with Buddhist practice started to a greater extent after 1945. The contact between Japan and the USA due to the war actions of the Second World War contributed to the propagation of Zen practice in the United States. The books of Zen author Daisetz Suzuki (e.g. Suzuki 1993) attracted attention in the West. Starting from 1970 Zen and other meditation centers were established in the United States, for example by Shunryu Suzuki (Suzuki 1997) in California.
Today Buddhism as a religion is important above all in Asia and increasingly also in the West. Buddhism is the predominant religion in the Himalaya region and in Mongolia; considerable parts of the population are also Buddhists in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka, South Korea, Japan, and China. It is common to the different Buddhist currents that they do not proselytize and claim no contradictoriness regarding other religious systems. As a consequence many Japanese practice Buddhist and Shintoistic rites as well, or Roman Catholics and Protestants practice Zen Meditation.
No comments:
Post a Comment