Vesak and a Brief Life of the Buddha

So tonight I wanted to talk about Vesak and the brief life of the Buddha. So on May 1st, we had the first full moon of May, and this is the Friday night that some number of our sanghas started their retreat with Jonathan Woodside.

And the first full moon of May is usually celebrated in Buddhist circles as Vesak, also known as the Buddha’s birthday.

However, this May has two full moons. There’s one on the 1st and one on the 30th. So some countries celebrate on the 1st, some on the 30th. And so in Buddhist history, it said that the Buddha was born on the full moon of May, that he was enlightened on the full moon of May, and that he died on the full moon. And so this holiday of Vesak celebrates all three of those events: birth, enlightenment, and parinibbana, his death.

So with that in mind, I wanted to give a brief walk through the life of the Buddha. You may not have heard some of this stuff before, and there are people all over the world who are kind of doing some of that, celebrating these things, talking about them.

So the Buddha was born somewhere around the city of Lumbini, which I think is in modern-day Nepal now, somewhere around 500 BC plus minus maybe 50 years, say.

So about 2,500 so years ago.

And he was born into at least a local noble family, and his mom was traveling back to the town where her family was from and gave birth to the Buddha on the trip back to their as headquarters for their little local kingdom or principality. And there’s usual mythology around a birth like that. He like pops out of the side of her body and walks and talks and does cool stuff., but his mom dies several days after his birth.

And when the Buddha’s little baby is brought back to the palace, he ends up being raised by his mom’s sister. His mom Maya and her sister Pajapati.

And again, it’s a local royal family, local noble family, so they have a nice little palace. They have some good stuff. And he gets raised being quite good. And there’s a fortune that his father gets a fortune teller to divinate about what’s going to happen to this little baby boy. And it comes back that he’s either going to be a world-ruling monarch or he’s going to be an enlightened sage.

His father, the king, very much preferred having a world-ruling monarch as the divination for his son, and asked this diviner, “What should I do to make sure we get that path and not this other path?” And because of that, decides for all the Buddha’s childhood to seclude him in the palace, to keep him away from anything that would stir up his interest in the sufferings of the world. So he gets all the best food, all the best entertainment, all the best things.

This is the birth of the Buddha occurs.

And so this goes on until he’s in his mid-late 20s. And as an adult, while he’s still an unenlightened bodhisattva, he decides, “I think I really need to get out of the palace and see what’s outside of this place.” And he convinces his charioteer to sneak him out of the palace in the evening and go and take the chariot around the town outside the palace.

And as he goes around in this chariot, he sees for the first time what are called the Four Heavenly Messengers. He sees someone who’s very old, very, very old. He sees someone who’s incredibly ill and suffering from their illness.

He sees a body lying by the side of the road, dead.

And then he sees an ascetic, a wandering monk, walking by, offering this promise of what could be a different way of living than this world of hedonism that he kind of has been raised in.

And so after being brought back to the palace, he vows— he’s encountered this incredible suffering and it causes him to question his kind of set path, his path he was raised on.

And he gets a little sense of what might be coming down the road for him, for everything that he sees. And he vows that he needs to leave the palace and discover the end of suffering.

So he escapes by night from the palace and decides that he needs to go find that wandering ascetic that he saw.

And tries, you know, figure out, well, what’s that guy doing? What are they doing? What can I learn from them? And that monastic takes him to his teacher, and that becomes the Buddha’s first teacher. And the Buddha stays with him for several years and learns various concentration practices, various meditation practices that take him through some of these very blissful concentration states.

And it gets to the point where the teacher tells him, you’ve learned everything I can teach you to learn. You know it very well. Here, stay with me and teach with me and, and, you know, be, be here as part of this community. And the Buddha’s like, well, these, you know, these states are very pleasant, but that doesn’t come to the end of suffering. And so he’s like, I have to go, I have to go seek, I have to go find another teacher, I have to leave.

And so he leaves and he does find another teacher, and this teacher knows further blissful states beyond what the first teacher knew. So he stays and practices with them thinking that, you know, these further blissful concentration states will get him to what he needs. And same thing happens. He is able to attain these states of mind, states of peace. And the second teacher also tells him, okay, cool, hey, you got it, good job, you can stay here and teach.

Be part of this community. Well done.

And it was like, well, I’m, I’m still not there. I still, you know, what, what about old age, illness, and death? Like, what, what do we— what about suffering that occurs? Cool, I can get into this state, but then I pop out of it. Now what?

And so he and a group of friends that are with the second teacher decide that they’re going to go out and try a different method. You know, they’ve been, you know, really getting into these very blissful meditative states, so they decide that what they need to do is go and punish the body. Maybe they need to purify the body to get rid of suffering, and they take on these severe aesthetic practices. You know, eating one grain of rice a day, going underwater and staying underwater with a little straw up to the surface and staying there all day long under the water.

You know, letting their body just get scorched by the sun, be out with very little clothing. And in some Buddhist countries, I actually think there’s a statue like this at the American Bodhi Center. There’s this kind of emaciated looking Buddha. Where he’s like, you can just see the rib cage and, and the gaunt face.

So each of these things, there, there’s 6 years of this wandering between these first two teachers, wandering with these friends, practicing these severe ascetic practices. And it gets to the point where the Buddha’s about to die from the intensity of his, the asceticism.

And he realizes, I haven’t learned anything from any of that. This has been miserable. And I haven’t gotten anywhere.

And it’s at this point that he— they’re, they’re in this beautiful land. And he comes upon the Bodhi tree by the side of the river. And as people did, somebody came and offered him some food. As would happen with monastics at that time. And, he decides, I’m going to actually take the food that’s being offered to me and eat it.

What good has it done me to eat one grain of rice a day? I’m going to eat this food. I’m going to sit under this tree by the river, and I’m not going to move until I figure this out.

And his friends see him eat this food and are like, ah, he got soft, he gave in. And they leave, they abandon him and go off and do their own thing. And he sits there for 7 days and he goes back to a very calm abiding that he came upon when he was a child.

Sitting there watching his father’s plowman plow the fields and observing the plow. You can think of the plow with the oxen in front of it slowly moving back and forth across the field and just sitting under a tree and just watching this go back and forth.

And being aware, again, you can, you can see this being aware of what’s happening, present being, again, eyes open in this case, but just there, noticing, noticing, noticing, noticing. And he does this for 7 days, sitting there under the tree. And people from the nearby village continue to bring him food, but he just stays there under the tree, eats food, stays there in the tree, and continues to use practice. Until again the full moon of May comes back around and he begins to go in and start to gain some knowledge, knowledge of his past lives, knowledge of the way karma functions, and then getting into what we then know as Four Noble Truths, that this is— that there is suffering, this is the causes of suffering, craving By reducing that craving, we can reduce and eliminate the suffering, that this is the path and practice of doing that, and attains release.

And after that, there’s this 45 years of teaching he’s about 35 at this point, and he continues to teach for 45 years. And there’s some fun story in Vinaya of after his enlightenment, trying to figure out like, who should I even tell about this? Who would even want to hear that this is what— this is going to happen, how this works? And there’s a point where he, he sits there considers, well, you know, maybe I should just keep this to myself, practice like this, and I can be a hermit, and that’s good. And it’s so that out of compassion for the world, he decides to go and I’ll teach this to who is willing to hear it.

And maybe not everybody’s willing to hear it, but that’s okay. The people who are will benefit from it, and that’s worth it. That’s worth the effort. And so he goes out and he, he reaches the— he sees a, a cowherd walking down a path. He goes up to him like, I’m the enlightened one, and goes into this giant monologue.

And the cowherd’s basically like, sure, that could be, and then keeps walking with his cow.

And at that point, the Buddha decides, well, I need to go back and find my 5 friends. I need to find the friend, these people who practice with me. They, they will understand. And he goes back and finds the 5 of them who are admittedly apprehensive. Again, they had bailed on him for not following their ascetic practices.

And he lays out this, this idea that he— and this is in many Buddhist circles, this is setting the wheel of Dharma in motion— that this is First Noble Truth, that there’s suffering in this life, that the causes of suffering are craving. Crave for things to be a certain way. We want certain sense desires. We want to be this or that. We don’t want to be this or that.

And that creates all of this mental suffering, all of this clinging, craving, grasping. It spins us in circles.

And then if we’re able to let go of that craving, then we can let go of the suffering that results from it. And that by going through this Eightfold Path of skillful view and intention and speech and action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration, we can weaken the roots of greed and hatred and delusion that keep us grasping onto things.

So the Buddha teaches, like I said, for 45 years. He has a long life.

And he teaches this middle path. Again, he’s, he’s been in the hedonistic palace. He starved himself basically to death. And so this practice is— it runs down the middle. There’s some renunciation.

You look at Buddhist monastics, and I mean, they’re certainly not living a very eventful life. There’s, there’s definitely some things that get set aside, but it’s also not a life of hardship either.

But eventually, at the age of 80, he is given some bad food and he gets very sick and dies in Kunsara.

And there’s quotes from the suttas. There’s what’s called the Parinibbana Sutta that goes through his last month or two. He says, now I’m frail, Ananda, who’s his attendant cousin, old age, far gone in years. This is my 80th year and my life is spent. Even as an old cart, Ananda is held together with much difficulty.

So the body of the Tathagata is kept going only with supports. It is Ananda only when the Tathagata, disregarding external objects, with the cessation of certain feelings, attains to and abides in the signless concentration of mind, that his body is more comfortable.

So in the sutta, there’s monks surrounding him crying. They realize that their teacher’s dying. And he asked them, you know, why are you surprised? What have I been talking to you about for 45 years? What did you expect that’s going to happen?

Stop crying here and go be diligent in your practice.

Enough, Ananda. Do not grieve. Do not lament. For have I not taught from the very beginning That with all that is dear and beloved there must be change, separation, and severance? Of that which is born, come into being, compounded, and subject to decay, how can one say, ‘May it not come to dissolution’?

There can be no such state of things.

His last words are said to be, Behold now, bhikkhus, I exhort you, All compounded things are subject to vanish. Strive with earnestness.

And so, so these are— this is again a very broad arc. There’s many interesting things that go on in the life of the Buddha beyond this, but the— these three kind of touch points his birth and the resulting loss after that, his wandering from teachers and learning, and eventually, eventual enlightenment. And then the clarity that he brings in some of his last moments as he’s dying. It’s very, you know, an interesting, an interesting arc that’s traced and again is celebrated in this Vesak celebration that happens in the full moon of May each year., so I’ll say thank you everybody for your kind attention.