In India Gotama had an easier task than he would have faced in the
full-blooded and less thoughtful West. We Westerners do not need to be
convinced of the pain of life, we are now wide awake to it; but to the
Hindu of the sixth century before Christ a conviction of the emptiness
of life was something in the nature of an obsession. The bright,
naïve optimism of earlier ages, revealed, for example, in the
_Rig-Veda_,[9] had passed away; a combination of circumstances,
climate, speculative activities, disappointments and other causes, had
combined to make India pessimistic. Chief of these causes was
undoubtedly the belief in transmigration which has come more and more
to occupy a central position in Hinduism. It represents man as doomed
to wander from birth to birth, and to expiate every deed of his past.
It is impossible for us in the West to realise how firm a hold this
thought has upon India, or how great is the longing for a way of
escape. Gotama's resolute attempt to find such a way of escape, his
assurance that he had discovered it, and his enthusiastic preaching of
"the Way" brought Buddhism into the world as a new religion, and
became a veritable "gospel" to weary and jaded hearts.
4. It is a Practical Creed: Its Founder called Himself "A Physician of
Sick Souls."
Born the son of a chieftain in Nepal in the foothills of the
Himalayas, about 560 B.C., Gotama, the great founder of Buddhism, was
sheltered from the sights and sounds of suffering, as we are told in
the loving stories of Buddhist lore, until the gods, who had a higher
destiny in store for him than that of an Indian princeling, revealed
to him the facts of old age and decay and death. In a series of
visions--of the old man tottering down to the grave, of the leper
riddled with foul disease, of the corpse laid out for the burning, the
great fact of human suffering came home to him. It made so deep an
impression that he renounced his royal rights and went out as a
mendicant ascetic to discover some way of escape. He was then
twenty-nine years old. Not until he had reached the age of
thirty-eight, and had honestly tried the various accepted paths for
the attainment of holiness and the escape from the burdens of life
laid down by Hindu sages, did he find what he was seeking. Sitting
under the Indian fig-tree in the heat of the day, he meditated
patiently and long until the vision dawned upon him, or, as we should
say, until his sub-consciousness, which had long been working upon the
problem presented to it, sent a complete and satisfying solution into
the focus of his conscious mind. His solution, recognising the fact
that Hindu practices had vainly attempted to drug the aching nerve of
pain or to tear it out, offered a more positive remedy. The present
writer believes that the Spirit of God had much to do with this
discovery. There are, however, among missionaries, many who feel that
this is a grievous heresy, and are bitterly opposed to any such view.
In order to understand the solution which Gotama offered to the world,
which undoubtedly captured the enthusiasm of unnumbered millions of
weary pilgrims in India and other lands, it may be well to consider
Gotama's own description of himself as "a physician of sick souls."
Just as the physician must first diagnose the disease and recognise
the germ which is its secret cause, before he can give the right
treatment, so Gotama set himself to discover the hidden cause of the
world's suffering. He thought that he had found it in that universal
clinging to life which he called _tanhā_, which means a "craving" for
anything less austere than _Nibbāna_. "From _tanhā_ springs sorrow;
he that is free from _tanhā_ is freed from sorrow and suffering."
This is the source of all the world's agony, says Gotama: and if we
face the facts we shall see that egoism of men and nations, a form of
_tanhā_, accounts for most of it! The modern world is full of
_tanhā_.