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| Ethics for Living and the Veneration of the Buddha | ||
| 作者 | Leggett, Trevor |
|---|---|
| 出處題名 | The Middle Way: Journal of the Buddhist Society |
| 卷期 | v.79 n.1 |
| 出版日期 | 2004.05 |
| 頁次 | 27 - 37 |
| 出版者 | The Buddhist Society |
| 出版者網址 | http://www.thebuddhistsociety.org/ |
| 出版地 | London, England, UK [倫敦, 英格蘭, 英國] |
| 資料類型 | 期刊論文=Journal Article |
| 使用語言 | 英文=English |
| 摘要 | The Transcendental Nature of the Buddha's Teaching In the Jaataka, the Buddha tells a parent sorrowing over the loss of a child, 'Do not grieve. All things are passing. What must be destroyed, is destroyed.'(FN1) At first glance this ruling out of grief at the passing of a child is an unpleasantly rational reply lacking all human feeling and only increasing the sense of loss. A certain spiritual practitioner (the bodhisattva, i.e. the Buddha in a previous birth) did not grieve when his wife died. 'When she was alive, she was something to me. Now that she has gone to another world, she is even not anything at all to me. All that has happened is that she has gone among other people. For whom should I grieve?'(FN2) This is the thinking of an élite. At the death of a wife, to turn away saying 'She is no longer anything to me' or 'For whom should I grieve?' is far removed from the feelings of ordinary people. Still, when we reflect, we see that a body which has died does not return to life. To forget the self in vain sighs and tears, to plunge into the pain of separation does nothing. The fact is that unless the reality of death is confronted unflinchingly and grief is transcended, no peace of heart can be found. And so also for the élite of Hinduism, whose sacred text the Bhagavad Gita says: 'Verily what lives must surely die; what has died must surely live again. Over what is thus unavoidable, what grief should there be?'(FN3) In the framework of the cycle of reincarnation, the élite of both Buddhism and Hinduism found a way to accept the fact of death as it is and yet to go beyond death. In a nutshell, the teaching of the Buddha is not to be whirled about by passion, to see what is passing as passing, to see that this self which is not-I really is not-I. The human self, by directing itself to controlling the working of the passions, seeks to discover its own true nature and to live in a world of peace. But the whole life of the ordinary man is established and supported on the workings of an egocentric I which sees what is not-I as I and what is passing as permanent. If we call this 'worldliness', then the realization which is the basis of Buddhism is to go beyond it, and that we can call transcendence (lokottara). When the Buddha attained realization under the Bodhi Tree, it is said that he felt this truth was 'so profound and against the stream of the world' that surely no one would be able to comprehend it. At this the god Brahma appeared, to say that in the world there were those of pure heart who would be able to understand and then he urged the Buddha to teach. This earnest request by the god Brahma is made one of the highlights in the legendary biography of the Buddha, and the Buddha's awareness that what he had realized was 'against the stream of the world' shows the transcendental nature of Buddhist practice. Transcendence as Moral Living The ideal daily life taught in Buddhism is based on this transcendental realization. The words and actions of one who has controlled the individual self and opened the eye of realization conforms naturally to reality and, consequently, manifests as the Middle Way. This life, which for him naturally 'is', is for people in general only an object of imitation and study, a model of how life 'ought to be'. This too is to be sought by way of control of desires, and the moral life taught by the Buddha is, properly speaking, on the level of transcendence. Although it is the same for bhikshus, it was especially for lay followers that the Buddha and Buddhism showed a pattern which, when followed, would become naturally the right style of life. The Noble Eightfold Path is one model for it in concrete terms, and behind this is the idea of sila, morality, as the basis of Buddhist ethics. It was never understood as something imposed by another, as a command backed by force. It meant that when one voluntarily tries to conform to the Dharma, or Truth, li |
| ISSN | 00263214 (P) |
| 點閱次數 | 887 |
| 建檔日期 | 2009.09.30 |
| 更新日期 | 2020.11.04 |
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