We call him Lord Buddha, he used a common Sanskrit word to refer to himself:
Sanskrit, which is 4,000 years old (some say its 6,000 years of age), used to be the language of the classics in India. Until now, Sanskrit is still an official language in the Indian Peninsula despite its limited use as an everyday language.
Sanskrit first appeared in 2000 BC and hailed as the gods’ language.
The Buddha, the founder of the great religious philosophy of Buddhism, lived in North India over two thousand and five hundred years ago and was known as Siddhattha.
Buddha in Sanskrit means the ‘awakened’ or the ‘enlightened’ one.
According to Buddhist texts, Gautam Siddhartha received this title after gaining the universal enlightenment under the Bodhi tree
(Siddhartha = one whose purpose has been achieved).
Gotama (Sanskrit= Gautama) was his family name.
Lord Buddha, Siddhartha Gotama’s father, King Suddhodana, ruled over the land of the Sakyans at Kapilavatthu on the Nepalese frontier. His queen was Mahamaya, a princess of the Koliyas.
On a full-moon day of May, when the trees were laden with leaf, flower and fruit, and man, bird and beast were in a joyous mood, Queen Mahamaya was traveling in the state from Kapilavatthu to Devadaha, her parental home, according to the custom of the times, to give birth to her child.
But that was not to be, for halfway between the two cities, in the Lumbini grove, under the shade of a flowering Sal tree, she brought forth a son. Lumbini or Rummindei, the name by which it is now known, is 100 miles north of Varanasi and within sight of the snowcapped Himalayas.
At this memorable spot where Prince Siddhattha, the future Buddha, was born, Emperor Asoka, 316 years after the event, erected a mighty stone pillar to mark the holy spot. The inscription engraved on the pillar in five lines consists of ninety-three Asokan (Brahmi) characters, amongst which occurs the following: ‘Hida Budhe jate Sakyamuni’, ‘Here was born the Buddha, the sage of the Sakyans’. The mighty column is still to be seen.
The pillar, ‘as crisp as the day it was cut’, had been struck by lightning even when Hiuen Tsiang, the Chinese pilgrim, saw it towards the middle of the seventh century after Christ.
What are the Core Principles of Buddism!
The basic doctrines of early Buddhism, which remain common to all Buddhism, include the four noble truths.
Existence is suffering (dukkha );
suffering has a cause, namely craving and attachment ( Trishna );
there is a cessation of suffering, which is nirvana ;
and there is a path to the cessation of suffering, the eightfold path of right views, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. Buddhism characteristically describes reality in terms of process and relation rather than an entity or substance.
Buddhism Religion: Basic Beliefs and Practices
Experience is analyzed into five aggregates ( skandhas ).
The first, form ( rupa ), refers to material existence;
the following four, sensations ( vedana ), perceptions ( samjna ), psychic constructs (samskara ), and consciousness ( vijnana ), refer to psychological processes.
The central Buddhist teaching of non-self ( anatman ) asserts that in the five aggregates no independently existent, immutable self, or soul, can be found.
All phenomena arise in interrelation and in dependence on causes and conditions, and thus are subject to inevitable decay and cessation.
The casual conditions are defined in a 12-membered chain called dependent origination ( pratityasamutpada ) whose links are: ignorance, predisposition, consciousness, name-form, the senses, contact, craving, grasping, becoming, birth, old age, and death, whence again ignorance.
With this distinctive view of cause and effect, Buddhism accepts the pan-Indian presupposition of samsara, in which living beings are trapped in a continual cycle of birth-and-death, with the momentum to rebirth provided by one’s previous physical and mental actions. The release from this cycle of rebirth and suffering is the total transcendence called nirvana.
From the beginning, meditation and observance of moral precepts were the foundation of Buddhist practice. The five basic moral precepts, undertaken by members of monastic orders and the laity, are to refrain from taking life, stealing, acting unchastely, speaking falsely, and drinking intoxicants. Members of monastic orders also take five additional precepts: to refrain from eating at improper times, from viewing secular entertainments, from using garlands, perfumes, and other bodily adornments, from sleeping in high and wide beds, and from receiving money. Their lives are further regulated by a large number of rules known as the Pratimoksa. The monastic order (sangha) is venerated as one of the three jewels, along with the dharma, or religious teaching, and the Buddha. Lay practices such as the worship of stupas (burial mounds containing relics) predate Buddhism and gave rise to later ritualistic and devotional practices.
I began learning about Buddha in 1990 after several near-death experiences. I “felt” LOVE in every sense when HE was with me.
I didn’t know LOVE and so I began searching for it in Religious Studies at LSU and Loyola Marymount University in New Orleans!
In the Parking lot of LSU Medical School with my sister, Dr. Summer Khan! About 1995 -We were both in Medical School at the time!
Gautama Buddha/Quotes
Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.
Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.
In my near-death experiences, he helped me connect to and understand the life force in trees!
I belong to LOVE and when I connect to trees I remember:
“Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind. To be happy, rest like a giant tree in the midst of them all”