Weekly HERMES Quotes by Sri Raghavan Iyer - Weekly Quotes by Sri Raghavan Iyer Archives at Zinester. Inspirational

__The Dhammapada is the laser-like quintessence of Buddha's luminous message to all humanity. Bridging eternity and time, the unmanifest and the manifest, thought and action, theoria and praxis, it is a highly potent therapeia, a catalytic agent of self-transformation, rooted in the realization of that essential unity which enshrines the meaning of events and relations in an ever-changing cosmos. Although the Pali, the Chinese and Tibetan Buddhist canons contain thousands of treatises which reveal myriad facets of Buddha's 'Diamond Soul', the Dhammapada is a preamble to all of them. It is a direct mode of transmission, succinct in style and fundamental in its content. Transparent and shimmering like the calm surface of the shining sea in contrast to the variegated contours of the diverse lands whose shores it touches, it has awesome oceanic depths, sheltering vast kingdoms of obscure species, in which every form of life finds its place, rhythm and balance, in which everything is inexplicably interconnected in a complex whole that teases and taunts the untapped potentials of human cognition. Its immense cleansing and restorative power conceals a hidden alchemy.

__It teaches receptive seekers to free themselves without external props, without vicarious atonement or adventitious aids, through a self-chosen mode of purification which eludes the categories of behavioural psychology, utilitarian ethics and salvationist theology. It points to a radical rebirth, a programme of progressive self-initiation, becoming more than human, yet being in accord with all humanity, even in the most basic acts of daily life - rising in the dawn, rejoicing in bathing the body, in simple food, in sitting, thinking, meditating, speaking and working, and in preparing for sleep and death. The Dhammapada stands in relation to Gautama Buddha as the Gospels of John and Thomas stand in relation to Jesus Christ, for Ananda is like the beloved apostle John as well as the intuitive Thomas. Ananda walked with Buddha for twenty-five years and could recall the Master's words after his passing.

__Although Buddha told his disciples that they should not blindly follow him or assume that they understood him, he so lived his life that it could serve as the paradigm and proof of the Path to Enlightenment. His life and his teaching were a seamless whole, the pristine expression of Sanatana Dharma, the Eternal Doctrine, the Ancient Way of the Noble Predecessors, the Tathagatas who have gone before. Whilst modern scholarship* has focussed on the details of Buddha's life, viewing recorded history as an accurate chronicle and providing a firm chronology of events, Buddhists have been sceptical of modern claims to explain the true significance of events by reference to their temporal order rather than to the mature thoughts and feelings of those who meaningfully participated in them. They have been even more concerned with Buddha's life as what the Tibetans call a namtar, the story of an exemplary Sage, which can help the intuitive to pursue the timeless track to illumination and emancipation. These traditional accounts, fusing fact with myth, do not reduce fidelity to truth to emasculated literalism.

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* A rare exception is A. Foucher's perceptive life of Buddha. "My task has been to sketch as close a likeness of Buddha as possible, but I have been careful not to neglect reflections from the Doctrine that have highlighted the face of its Founder."
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__Born early in the sixth century B.C., Siddhartha Gautama (Gotama) was the handsome and gifted son of King Shuddhodana, who ruled Kapilavastu, the small, prosperous kingdom of the Shakyas in northern India. According to tradition, Siddhartha's birth was heralded in a strange dream which came to his mother, Queen Maya. In it a snowy white elephant with six tusks approached the mother and pressed a lovely lotus to her side. The lotus entered her womb and became the embryo of the Buddha to be. When the time for birth drew near, Queen Maya followed the custom of her ancestors and set out on the short journey to her father's home. The pains of labour came upon her while she rested in an exquisite grove midway between her husband's and her father's abodes, and she delivered Siddhartha beneath a great sala tree. Though the baby was born easily and in good health, Queen Maya died seven days later. Her sister, Mahaprajapati, brought up the baby.

__Since maya means 'illusion', the essential characteristic of the seven prakritis or planes of manifest existence, it is held to be hardly surprising that Queen Maya died seven days after Siddhartha's birth. The lotus symbolizes the architectonic paradigm of the cosmos, and the six tusks are its six primary powers or shaktis. The elephant itself is an emblem both of divine wisdom and its timely application in this world. Siddhartha was born between two homes, in the homeless state which is the mental perspective, and often the physical condition, of ordained monks or bhikkhus. Born away from his father's house and losing his mother shortly after birth, Buddha was indeed anupadaka, parentless. Thus his entire life as a homeless wanderer was prefigured in his birth. There is no reason to doubt the broad outlines of the traditional story, even if some of its symbolic elements were embellishments after the event. The legendary lives of Great Teachers are inimitably rich with allegorical significance that is readily enshrined in myth and sacred symbolism. About two centuries after Buddha's Parinirvana, the emperor Ashoka raised an inscribed stone pillar to mark Buddha's actual birthplace and the striking pillar stands even today.

__The court astrologers found Prince Siddhartha's horoscope enigmatic. Some thought it indicated that he would become a Chakravartin, an emperor who justly rules over many lands, but others, including Kaundinya, saw in it the cryptic lineaments of a consecrated life of renunciation and spiritual teaching. The Sutta Nipata tells of the Rishi Asita, who divined Buddha's birth and hastened to the palace to see him. Upon seeing the baby he wept, because he would not live long enough to hear Buddha's teaching. Siddhartha's father, King Shuddhodana, took due note of these discordant responses and sought to guide his son gently towards statesmanship. He initiated a plan of systematic study and royal training that provided Siddhartha with all the arts and sciences appropriate to a Kshatriya ruler, whilst screening him from those tragic experiences in life which turn the mind to profound and radical thoughts. So Prince Siddhartha grew up, blest in myriad ways, shielded from the unsettling facts of human misery which plunge so many into a state of utter helplessness. The prince's education was by no means easy, for he was subjected to a demanding intellectual discipline, mastering arts and letters, astronomy and mathematics; he was schooled in the kingly arts of diplomacy and warfare, learning to drive chariots, to handle deftly the spear and the bow, and gaining that combination of courage, stamina and magnanimity essential to statecraft; and he learnt the intricate etiquette which enables a man of high authority to set others at ease, to treat all with courtesy and correctness and to wield his gifts with grace and propriety.

__While still rather young, Prince Siddhartha married his beautiful cousin Yashodhara, who gave him a son, Rahula. Established in a lavish court appropriate to a compliant Crown prince within the royal compound, Siddhartha took up the cloistered life of a future monarch. Traditional accounts of Buddha's life depict this formative period as a time of enjoyment, and even dalliance, perhaps to contrast it sharply with the rigorous and austere life to follow. Nonetheless, the allegorical Jataka stories seek to show that Buddha did not attain his astounding insight in a single life. He had spent many lifetimes learning to render the highest wisdom accessible to the awakened soul into skilful, compassionate action that could aid others without violating the subtle, interconnected balances of karma. Queen Maya's dream of the white elephant suggests that Buddha, like Krishna Avatar, chose to take up incarnate existence at a specific time for a specific purpose. The persisting discontent that hampered his princely life culminated in four critical events. Tradition testifies that Prince Siddhartha insisted upon investigating the world beyond the palace grounds and asked his faithful charioteer, Channa, to drive him through the city and into the countryside. On successive occasions he saw decrepitude, sickness, death and, finally, a homeless ascetic. Several chronicles show Siddhartha as wholly unprepared for these disturbing sights, for he had none of the defensive indifference that preserves the average person from collapsing under their cumulative impact.

__Allegorically, they point to the receptive nature of a noble soul who combines prajna and karuna, insight and compassion, for whom the inexplicable, immense suffering of others became more urgent than his own concerns. He felt that the very core of cyclic existence is duhkha - suffering, pain and dissatisfaction - for all that lives must decay and die. Even if one could hide the inevitable end of each incarnate existence under a glittering veil of hedonistic distractions, ceaseless and chaotic change marks the filigree of the intricate veil itself and so reveals starkly that all things fade and vanish every moment. Since life and death are necessarily interrelated terms in a complex series of events, the prime fact of suffering is a powerful stimulus for altering and even transforming radically one's own consciousness. Siddhartha sensed that the only solution to omnipresent duhkha lay in that timeless realm beyond the vicissitudes of change, a realm so far beyond the familiar plane of the senses that only a fundamental metamorphosis of fragmented consciousness could experience it, a realm in which there could be no 'I' and 'you', 'mine' and 'thine'. If any such solution were at all possible, it must apply to all sentient beings and not to oneself alone.