A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS28.THE LIFE OF GAUTAMA BUDDHA
But now we must go back three centuries in our story to tell of a great teacher who came near to revolutionizing the religious thought and feeling of all Asia. This was Gautama Buddha, who taught his disciples at Benares in India about the same time that Isaiah was prophesying among the Jews in Babylon and Heraclitus was carrying on his speculative enquiries into the nature of things at Ephesus. All these men were in the world at the same time, in the sixth century B.C. - unaware of one another. This sixth century B.C. was indeed one of the most remarkable in all history. Everywhere—for as we shall tell it was also the case in China—men’s minds were displaying a new boldness. Everywhere they were waking up out of the traditions of kingships and priests and blood sacrifices and asking the most penetrating questions. It is as if the race had reached a stage of adolescence—after a childhood of twenty thousand years.
The early history of India is still very obscure. Somewhen perhaps
about 2000 B.C., an Aryan- speaking people came down from the
north-west into India either in one invasion or in a series of
invasions; and was able to spread its language and traditions over most
of north India. Its peculiar variety of Aryan speech was the Sanskrit.
They found a brunette people with a more elaborate civilization and
less vigour of will, in possession of the country of the Indus and
Ganges. But they do not seem to have mingled with their predecessors
as freely as did the Greeks and Persians. They remained aloof. When
the past of India becomes dimly visible to the historian, Indian
society is already stratified into several layers, with a variable
number of sub-divisions, which do not eat together nor intermarry nor
associate freely. And throughout history this stratification into
castes continues. This makes the Indian population something different
from the simple, freely inter-breeding European or Mongolian
communities. It is really a community of communities.
Siddhattha Gautama was the son of an aristocratic family which ruled a
small district on the Himalayan slopes. He was married at nineteen to
a beautiful cousin. He hunted and played and went about in his sunny
world of gardens and groves and irrigated rice-fields. And it was
amidst this life that a great discontent fell upon him. It was the
unhappiness of a fine brain that seeks employment. He felt that the
existence he was leading was not the reality of life, but a holiday—a
holiday that had gone on too long.
The sense of disease and mortality, the insecurity and the
un-satisfactoriness of all happiness, descended upon the mind of
Gautama. While he was in this mood he met one of those wandering
ascetics who already existed in great numbers in India. These men
lived under severe rules, spending much time in meditation and in
religious discussion. They were supposed to be seeking some deeper
reality in life, and a passionate desire to do likewise took possession
of Gautama.
He was meditating upon this project, says the story, when the news was
brought to him that his wife had been delivered of his first-born son.
“This is another tie to break,” said Gautama.
He returned to the village amidst the rejoicings of his fellow
clansmen. There was a great feast and a Nautch dance to celebrate the
birth of this new tie, and in the night Gautama awoke in a great agony
of spirit, “like a man who is told that his house is on fire.” He
resolved to leave his happy aimless life forthwith. He went softly to
the threshold of his wife’s chamber, and saw her by the light of a
little oil lamp, sleeping sweetly, surrounded by flowers, with his
infant son in her arms. He felt a great craving to take up the child
in one first and last embrace before he departed, but the fear of
waking his wife prevented him, and at last he turned away and went out
into the bright Indian moonshine and mounted his horse and rode off
into the world.
TIBETAN BUDDHA
TIBETAN BUDDHA
Gilt Brass Casting in India Museum, showing Gautama Buddha in the
“earth witness” attitude
_India Mus._
Very far he rode that night, and in the morning he stopped outside the
lands of his clan, and dismounted beside a sandy river. There he cut
off his flowing locks with his sword, removed all his ornaments and
sent them and his horse and sword back to his house. Going on he
presently met a ragged man and exchanged clothes with him, and so
having divested himself of all worldly entanglements he was free to
pursue his search after wisdom. He made his way southward to a resort
of hermits and teachers in a hilly spur of the Vindhya Mountains.
There lived a number of wise men in a warren of caves, going into the
town for their simple supplies and imparting their knowledge by word of
mouth to such as cared to come to them. Gautama became versed in all
the metaphysics of his age. But his acute intelligence was
dissatisfied with the solutions offered him.
A BURMESE BUDDHA
A BURMESE BUDDHA
Marble Figure from Mandalay, eighteenth century work, now in the India
Museum
The Indian mind has always been disposed to believe that power and
knowledge may be obtained by extreme asceticism, by fasting,
sleeplessness, and self-torment, and these ideas Gautama now put to the
test. He betook himself with five disciple companions to the jungle
and there he gave himself up to fasting and terrible penances. His
fame spread, “like the sound of a great bell hung in the canopy of the
skies.” But it brought him no sense of truth achieved. One day he was
walking up and down, trying to think in spite of his enfeebled state.
Suddenly he fell unconscious. When he recovered, the preposterousness
of these semi-magical ways to wisdom was plain to him.
THE DHAMÊKH TOWER
THE DHAMÊKH TOWER
In the Deer Park at Sarnath. Sixth Century A.D.
_(From a Painting in the India Museum)_
He horrified his companions by demanding ordinary food and refusing to
continue his mortifications. He had realized that whatever truth a man
may reach is reached best by a nourished brain in a healthy body. Such
a conception was absolutely foreign to the ideas of the land and age.
His disciples deserted him, and went off in a melancholy state to
Benares. Gautama wandered alone.
When the mind grapples with a great and intricate problem, it makes its
advances step by step, with but little realization of the gains it has
made, until suddenly, with an effect of abrupt illumination, it
realizes its victory. So it happened to Gautama. He had seated
himself under a great tree by the side of a river to eat, when this
sense of clear vision came to him. It seemed to him that he saw life
plain. He is said to have sat all day and all night in profound
thought, and then he rose up to impart his vision to the world.
He went on to Benares and there he sought out and won back his lost
disciples to his new teaching. In the King’s Deer Park at Benares they
built themselves huts and set up a sort of school to which came many
who were seeking after wisdom.
The starting point of his teaching was his own question as a fortunate
young man, “Why am I not completely happy?” It was an introspective
question. It was a question very different in quality from the frank
and self-forgetful _externalized_ curiosity with which Thales and
Heraclitus were attacking the problems of the universe, or the equally
self-forgetful burthen of moral obligation that the culminating
prophets were imposing upon the Hebrew mind. The Indian teacher did
not forget self, he concentrated upon self and sought to destroy it.
All suffering, he taught, was due to the greedy desires of the
individual. Until man has conquered his personal cravings his life is
trouble and his end sorrow. There were three principal forms that the
craving for life took and they were all evil. The first was the desire
of the appetites, greed and all forms of sensuousness, the second was
the desire for a personal and egotistic immortality, the third was the
craving for personal success, worldliness, avarice and the like. All
these forms of desire had to be overcome to escape from the distresses
and chagrins of life. When they were overcome, when self had vanished
altogether, then serenity of soul, Nirvana, the highest good was
attained.
This was the gist of his teaching, a very subtle and metaphysical
teaching indeed, not nearly so easy to understand as the Greek
injunction to see and know fearlessly and rightly and the Hebrew
command to fear God and accomplish righteousness. It was a teaching
much beyond the understanding of even Gautama’s immediate disciples,
and it is no wonder that so soon as his personal influence was
withdrawn it became corrupted and coarsened. There was a widespread
belief in India at that time that at long intervals Wisdom came to
earth and was incarnate in some chosen person who was known as the
Buddha. Gautama’s disciples declared that he was a Buddha, the latest
of the Buddhas, though there is no evidence that he himself ever
accepted the title. Before he was well dead, a cycle of fantastic
legends began to be woven about him. The human heart has always
preferred a wonder story to a moral effort, and Gautama Buddha became
very wonderful.
Yet there remained a substantial gain in the world. If Nirvana was too
high and subtle for most men’s imaginations, if the myth-making impulse
in the race was too strong for the simple facts of Gautama’s life, they
could at least grasp something of the intention of what Gautama called
the Eight-fold way, the Aryan or Noble Path in life. In this there was
an insistence upon mental uprightness, upon right aims and speech,
right conduct and honest livelihood. There was a quickening of the
conscience and an appeal to generous and self-forgetful ends.