THIS coming Sunday, Buddhists of all traditions celebrate Wesak Day to commemorate the birth, enlightenment and death of Gautama Buddha.
After 2,500 years, he continues to enlighten the way for anyone who reads the scriptures containing his thoughts.
But it will come as a thorough surprise to folk who are passionate about scripture reading that the Buddha cautions against blind acceptance of teachings merely because they bear the stamp of great traditional authority.
The Buddha was unknown to Europeans until modern times. It was only around 200CE that the Buddha was first mentioned in Christian literature by the theologian Clement of Alexandria.
The name Buddha vanished from Christian literature for the next 1,300 years, as there existed strong prejudice against any form of acknowledgment of the Indian or Chinese religions.
Buddhist studies in Western institutions started only in the 19th century when the Pali and Sanskrit texts were translated.
A century later, Western researchers in theoretical physics and other disciplines became fascinated by the Buddha’s evident scientific leanings.
Let’s take you on a mental journey back 2,500 years to a scene with the Buddha sitting among a group of young thinkers in search of the truth. What advice did he give?
The Buddha cautioned them: “Do not be misled by reports or traditions handed down for many generations, do not believe in a statement just because it is found written in scripture, do not be misled into believing something merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.”
Instead, the Buddha extolled the virtue of impartial observation, unbiased analysis, and use of reason.
The passage containing this advice is known as the Kalama Sutta in the Anguttara-Nikaya collection.
The Buddha wasn’t disparaging the importance of scripture.
In fact, going by volume the Buddhist sacred books are stupendous and comparable to the entire collection of Hindu scriptures of all schools of thought.
Combined, the scriptures of these two religions testify to the strong literary tradition of India and China and why they prefer to stand apart from the West.
A case in point to illustrate the necessity for caution in the interpretation of scripture is the concept of Superman (mahapurusa) in both the ancient Hindu and Buddhist traditions. There are 32 marks of a Superman, and such a man is destined to be either a monarch or a patriarch.
The Buddha taught his disciples to focus less on the Superman’s physical features and instead to understand the Superman concept as alluding to a person who has gained mastery of the mind, emancipation of the heart and who concerns himself with the welfare of humanity.
The Superman is described in the Lakkhana Suttanta (subtitled The Marks of the Superman) that is part of the Digha Nikaya collection.
In fact, there is also a well-established Superman tradition in the West Asia-Mediterranean region.
As in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, it is a toss between monarchy and patriarchy.
The old Judaism had long favoured the God-inspired patriarch or prophet as leader of the people.
But holy men struggled to hold Israel together in the face of armed attacks by powerful external enemies such as the Philistines.
The people felt the need for a king to lead the army in battle.
It was Samuel the Seer who broke the impasse between the rival concepts of monarchy and patriarchy when he picked Saul to be a king around the year 1000BCE and declared: “God has anointed you prince over his people.”
The people wanted a king, so they got a king chosen by God.
The next king, David, was styled a Son of God in accordance with one scriptural verse in the Second Book of Samuel: “I will be his Av (Father), and he shall be My Ben (Son).”
As David was already king, the divine family line was obviously never intended to be literal but metaphorical.
The Davidic royal title “Son of God” was itself borrowed from much earlier Superman traditions, beginning with King Gilgamesh of Sumeria in Iraq (around 2500BCE).
Gilgamesh was both divine and human, with one parent from the godly realm and the other parent from the earth.
The idea of God taking birth as a Superman to guide humanity became such an effective political device in establishing the legitimacy of kingship that it was copied throughout the West Asia-Mediterranean region.
All the pharaohs of Egypt were sons of the god Re.
Greece’s hero of the Trojan Wars, Archilles, was honoured with a revision of his lineage to make him the son of a goddess. Alexander the Great was proclaimed the son of Amon, the god.
Julius Caesar was recognised as a god of the Roman state in 42BCE and the first Roman emperor Augustus Caesar, seeing a comet in the sky as a sign from heaven endorsing his reign, lost no time branding himself as “Caesar Son of a God” roughly 20 years before the birth of Jesus Christ.
Splashed in comics and flying across the big screen, Hollywood’s Superman captures this fascination with the divine-born superhero. DC Comics’ extraterrestrial Man of Steel, the last son of the outer space planet Krypton, is adopted by human parents and grows into his role as saviour of humanity and Planet Earth.
Krypton is a substitute for archaic divinity in giving Clark Kent a far out-of-this-world origin.
The Buddha is proclaimed in scriptural tradition as a Superman “born out of compassion for the world” and he is omniscient and all awakened.
He is a vanquisher of evil, possesses telepathic abilities as well as psychic powers and has opened the doors to deathlessness.
Popular in all religions is the practice of spending time extolling the magnificent qualities of one’s founder, the Superman, coupled with a strong tendency to lean on him for salvation and peace in a time of war.
Yet the Buddha’s primary message is that Superman lives in all of us and the Buddha’s role is to teach us how to discard our shirts veiling the Superman. The shirt that hides Superman is our ego.
The enlightened person, a Buddha full of light, is one in whom the conceit “I am” is got rid of.
It is written of the Buddha: “Arrogance and contempt have been eliminated and completely rooted out. Egotism has been cut out; all forms of conceit have been struck down.”
It is only by stripping off the ego that duality merges into a universal oneness or sunyatta, and the combative sense of I versus you and we versus them disappears.
Around the world, prayers are being said for the people of Ukraine, Russia, and all nations – that war and bloodshed be avoided and a new, just peace be forged. But for war to end, the ego must be slain. This is the message of Wesak.
The writer champions interfaith harmony. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com
