In the metropolis, the old man led the young hotel clerk to the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street and pointed to a vast new building there, a palace of reddish stone, with turrets and watchtowers, like a castle cleaving the New York sky. “That,” he declared, “is the hotel that I have just built for you to manage.” The young man, George C. Boldt, was stunned. His benefactor was William Waldorf Astor, and the hotel the most famous of its day, the original Waldorf-Astoria (Amazing Real Life Experiences 2014, 1).
Love may not always hold such dramatic or lucrative rewards, but its rewards are sure enough. Through love we find our way to becoming greater persons. If, at times, “life’s too much like a pathless wood where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs broken across it and one eye is weeping from a twig’s having lashed across it open,” and we think we’d “like to get away from earth a while,” let us not forget our conviction that “earth’s the right place for love” (Frost 1969, 122).
7. Sermon delivered by the author at the Church of the Reconciliation Unitarian Universalist, Utica, New York on December 15, 1963.
8
Gotoma Buddha8
And the Blessed One observed the ways of society and noticed how much misery came from foolish offenses done only to gratify vanity and self-seeking pride. And the Buddha said: “If a man foolishly does me wrong, I will return to him the protection of my unbegrudging love; the more evil comes from him, the more good shall go from me; the fragrance of goodness always comes to me, and the harmful air of evil goes to him.”
A foolish man learning that the Buddha observed the principle of great love which commends the return of good for evil, came and abused him. The Buddha was silent, pitying his folly. When the man had finished, the Buddha asked him, “Son, if a man declined to accept a present made to him, to whom would it belong?” And he answered, “in that case it would belong to the man who offered it.”
“My son,” said the Buddha, “thou hast railed at me, but I decline to accept thy abuse, and request thee to keep it to thyself. Will it not be a source of misery to thee? As the echo belongs to the sound, and the shadow to the substance, so misery will overtake the evil-door without fail.”
The abuser made no reply, and the Buddha continued: “A wicked man who reproaches a virtuous one is like one who looks up and spits at heaven; the spittle soils not the heaven, but comes back and defiles his own person. The slanderer is like one who flings dust at another when the wind is contrary; the dust does but return on him who threw it. The virtuous man cannot be hurt and the misery that the other would inflict comes back on himself.” The abuser went away ashamed, then came again and took refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha (Carus, 1894, 100–101).
There was a woman who had only one child and he died. In her grief she carried the dead child to all her neighbors, asking them for medicine, and the people said: “She has lost her senses. The boy is dead.” At length she met a man who replied to her request: “I cannot give you medicine for the child, but I know who someone who can.” And the woman said: “Pray tell me, sir, who is it?” And the man replied: “Go to the great one, the Buddha.” She repaired to the Buddha and cried: “Lord and Master, give me the medicine that will cure my boy.”
The Buddha answered: “I want a handful of mustard seed.” And when the woman in her joy promised to procure it, the Buddha added: “The mustard seed must be taken from the house where no one has lost a child, husband, parent, or friend.” The poor woman then went from house to house, and the people pitied her and said: “Here is mustard seed; take it!” But when she asked, “Did a son or daughter, a father or mother, die in your family?” They answered her: “What is this you say? The living are few, but the dead are many. Do not remind us of our grief.” And there was no house but some beloved one had died in it.
The woman became weary and hopeless, and sat down at the wayside, watching the lights of the city, as they flickered up and were extinguished again. At last the darkness of the night reigned everywhere. And she considered the fate of men, that their lives flicker up and are extinguished. And she thought to herself: “How selfish am I in all my grief! Death is common to all.” And the woman disposed of the dead body of her son and then came again to the Buddha. He said:
As all earthen vessels made by the potter end in being broken, so is the life of mortals. . . . So, the world is afflicted with death and decay, therefore the wise do not grieve, knowing the terms of the world. In whatever manner people think the thing will come to pass, it is often different when that happens, and great is the disappointment; see such are the terms of the world. Not from weeping or from grieving will anyone obtain peace of mind; on the contrary, his pain will be the greater and his body will suffer. He will make himself sick and pale, yet the dead are not saved by his lamentation. . . . He who seeks peace should draw out the arrow of lamentation, and complaint, and grief. He who has drawn out the arrow and has become composed will obtain peace of mind; he who has overcome all sorrow will become free from sorrow, and be blessed. (Gangulee 1957, 183–84)
These are two of the many parables of Buddhism about its founder, Gotoma Buddha. They portray the understanding, compassion, and wisdom that are said to have been typical of him. Something that is not often realized about Buddha is that he was not thought of as a god during his lifetime, and is not thought of as divine today in any sense in which others cannot also be. Throughout the ages he has successfully withstood the temptation to be deified, an amazing accomplishment considering our failure to do likewise with the central figure in our religious tradition.
Buddha’s greatness has always laid, rather in his quality as a human being. He was a man of rich human sympathy. His friendliness to all who came to him was unfailing. Yet he was also one of the greatest thinkers the world has known; he has been referred to as one of the giant intellects of human history. Buddhism is one of the few great religions in the world that is deliberately and systematically based on a rational analysis of life. Buddha never claimed to have received a special revelation and discarded appeals to the authority of tradition. His teachings stood as they were conceived, on the basis of common sense and human experience. As such, he is a great deal to say to us and can inspire our devotion as Unitarian Universalists.
To understand the life and teachings of Buddha, it is helpful to have some familiarity with the religious environment into which he was born. It is almost impossible for us to comprehend the religions of the East: they are based upon different geographic and social conditions, even upon different conceptions of reality.
The religion into which Buddha was born and from which Buddhism eventually sprang was Hinduism (also known as Brahmanism), the oldest religion in the world that has survived to the present day as a major faith. Hinduism is a religion greatly concerned with suffering. In a part of the world where famine is common and disease frequent, this is not surprising. Thus, the perspective of reality is different from our own. People are conceived much less romantically; life presents a much less promising prospect. In a land where people lie dead in roadside ditches as leaves lie in our gutters, a concept such as the supreme worth of human personality seems out of place. Life is not always nice, and often hopeless.
Therefore, a task of Hinduism is in part to repudiate life and escape from the world. This is accomplished in several ways: by extreme forms of mysticism, such as the trances of Yogi, in which the self is subjugated. The world and all its inequities are considered unstable, transitory, illusory. A person’s final escape through death holds the promise of a literal reincarnation, the next time as a higher form of life if one is lucky. An elaborate caste system of social strata was established and fervently observed. The idea would be to reach the final state of Nirvana, in which an individual would not have to be born again into the world. Because life was conceived as repetitive, time came to be thought of as circular, which differs radically from the Western idea of linear time that does not repeat itself.
It was into this world and religion that Gotoma Buddha was born in the fifth or sixth centuries B.C. As would be