The Buddha Friends,
The subject that I have chosen for this evening is ‘The Buddha’.
Who is a Buddha? A Buddha is one who has attained bodhi. By bodhi is meant an ideal state of intellectual and ethical perfection which can be attained by man by purely human means. In order to make clear how the Buddha attained bodhi, let me narrate a brief summary of the Buddha’s life.
About 623 years before the Christian era, there was born in Lumbini Park in the neighbourhood of Kapilavatthu, now known as Padaria in the district of modern Nepal, an Indian Sakyan prince, Siddattha Gotama by name. To mark the spot as the birth- place of the greatest teacher of mankind, and as a token of his reverence for him, the Emperor Asoka in 239 b.c. erected a pillar bearing the inscription, ‘Here was the Enlightened One born’.
Gotama’s father was Suddhodana, king of Kapila vatthu, the chief town of the Sakyan clan; and his mother, who died seven days after his birth, was Queen Maya who also belonged to the same clan.
Under the care of his maternal aunt, Pajapati Gotami, Siddhattha spent his early years in ease, luxury and culture. At the age of sixteen he was married to his cousin, Yasodhara, the daughter of Suppabuddha, the king of Devadaha, and they had a son named Rahula.
For nearly thirteen years Siddhattha led the life of a luxurious Indian prince, seeing only the beautiful and the pleasant. In his twenty-ninth year, however, the truth gradually dawned upon him, and he realized that all without exception were subject to birth, decay and death and that all worldly pleasures were only a prelude to pain.
Comprehending thus the universality of sorrow, he had a strong desire to find the origin of it, and a panacea for this universal sickness of humanity.
Accordingly he renounced the world and donned the simple garb of an ascetic.
Wandering as a seeker after peace he placed himself under the spiritual guidance of two renowned brahman teachers, Alara and Uddaka.
The former was head of a large number of followers at Vesali, and was an adherent of Kapila, the reputed founder of the Sassata system of philosophy, who laid great stress on the belief in atma, the ego.
He regarded the disbelief in the existence of a soul as not tending towards religion.
Without the belief in an eternal immaterial soul he could not see any way of salvation.
Like the wild bird when liberated from its trap, the soul when freed from its material limitations would attain perfect release; when the ego discerned its immaterial nature it would attain true deliverance.
This teaching did not satisfy the Bodhisatta, and he quitted Alara and placed himself under the tuition of Uddaka.
