gokulkr 1 Report post Posted May 4, 2004 THE STORY OF TWO BUDDHA´S, THE AVATAR AND THE ATHEIST by Isa das Amarsinglia compiled many Buddhist scriptures and books. Many of these fell into the hands of Shri Shankaracharya, save and except "Amarkosba", he burnt all other books. The book preserved by him incorporates the details about Buddha, we are gathering them for your information : -sarvajnah sugato buddho dharmarajah tathagatah -samanta bhadro bhagawan marajit lokajit jinah -sadabhijno dasablo advayavadi vinayakah -munindrah shrighanah Sasta munih -shakyamuni tu yah sah shakyasimhah sarvarthasiddha -sauddhodanah ca sah -gautamah carkabandhuh ca mayadevisutah ca sah' Above sloka contains eighteen names of Buddha, from the word 'Sarbajna' to 'Muni', from 'Sakyamunistu' to, Mayadevisutascha sah' meant for Shakyasingha Buddha. The aforesaid Buddha with eighteen aliases and subsequent Buddhas with seven aliases are not the same Buddha; on this point we may refer to the commentaries written by Shrila Raghunath Chakraborty. We shall try to convince the reader by quoting the required portion, those three slokas were divided by Raghunath Chakraborty in two parts, first portion till Muni, remaining portion e. g., till the word Muni. 'Astadash Buddha' means from 'Sarbaina Munih' to Buddha. So, Sugata also means Vishnu Buddha, and the commentary of `Ete sapta Shakyabangshabatirneh Buddhamuni bisheshe" i. e., that is from Shakyamuni till "Mayadevi Sutashca" from Shakya dynasty. From that sloka and commentary it appears, clearly that Sugata Buddha and Shakya Singha Buddha are not the same person. Q. Do other Buddhist books discribe two Buddhas A. Besides, Shri Shankaracharyas favorite 'Amarkosha' many other Buddhist scriptures like Prajnapiramita Sutra, Ashtasahasrik Prajnaparamita Sutra, Shatasahasrik Prajnapdramita Sutra, Lalita Distara and others give proof of three classes of Buddhas. Human Buddha, Bodhisattwa Buddha and Adi Buddha. Among human Buddhas, Goutam is one. He came to be called as 'Buddha' after the attainment of Bodhi. Saihanta Bhadra is mentioned among Bodhisatwa Buddhas. Besides, eighteen names of Buddhas as incarnations of Vishnu, we find the mention of other Buddhas in the above books. Q. Do the Veda's predict Buddha's incarnation? A. In the Srimad-Bhagavatam there is a list of the avataras, and there is mention of Lord Buddha's name. This Srimad-Bhagavatam was written five thousand years ago, and it mentions different names for future times. It says that in the future the Lord would appear as Lord Buddha, his mother's name would be Anjana, and he would appear in Gaya. So Buddha appeared twenty-six hundred years ago, and the Srimad-Bhagavatam, which was written five thousand years ago, mentioned that in the future he would appear. Q. Is there more than one avatar incarnation of Buddha? A. This incarnation of Lord Buddha is not the same Buddha incarnation we have in the present history of mankind. According to Srila Jiva Gosvami, the Buddha incarnation mentioned in the Vedas appeared in a different Kali age. In the duration of life of one Manu there are more than seventy-two Kali-yugas, and in one of them the particular type of Buddha would appear. Lord Buddha incarnates at a time when the people are most materialistic and preaches commonsense religious principles. Such ahimsa is not a religious principle itself, but it is an important quality for persons who are actually religious. It is a commonsense religion because one is advised to do no harm to any other animal or living being because such harmful actions are equally harmful to he who does the harm. But before learning these principles of nonviolence one has to learn two other principles, namely to be humble and to be prideless. Unless one is humble and prideless, one cannot be harmless and nonviolent. And after being nonviolent one has to learn tolerance and simplicity of living. One must offer respects to the great religious preachers and spiritual leaders and also train the senses for controlled action, learning to be unattached to family and home, and enacting devotional service to the Lord, etc. At the ultimate stage one has to accept the Lord and become His devotee; otherwise there is no religion. In religious principles there must be God in the center; otherwise simple moral instructions are merely subreligious principles, generally known as upadharma, or nearness to religious principles. Q. Can you explain the basic points of Buddhist philosophy? A. Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura states that according to the Buddhist cult there are two ways of understanding philosophy. One is called Hinayana, and the other is called Mahayana. Along the Buddhist path there are nine principles: (1) The creation is eternal; therefore there is no need to accept a creator. (2) This cosmic manifestation is false. (3) "I am" is the truth. (4) There is repetition of birth and death. (5) Lord Buddha is the only source of understanding the truth. (6) The principle of nirvana, or annihilation, is the ultimate goal. (7) The philosophy of Buddha is the only philosophical path. (8) The Vedas are compiled by human beings. (9) Pious activities, showing mercy to others and so on are advised. No one can attain the Absolute Truth by argument. One may be very expert in logic, and another person may be even more expert in the art of argument. Because there is so much word jugglery in logic, one can never come to the real conclusion about the Absolute Truth by argument. The followers of Vedic principles understand this. The first Buddhist principle is that the creation is always existing. But if this is the case, there can be no theory of annihilation. The Buddhists maintain that annihilation, or dissolution, is the highest truth. If the creation is eternally existing, there is no question of dissolution or annihilation. This argument is not very strong because by practical experience we see that material things have a beginning, a middle and an end. The ultimate aim of the Buddhist philosophy is to dissolve the body. This is proposed because the body has a beginning. Similarly, the entire cosmic manifestation is also a gigantic body, but if we accept the fact that it is always existing, there can be no question of annihilation. Therefore the attempt to annihilate everything in order to attain zero is an absurdity. By our own practical experience we have to accept the beginning of creation, and when we accept the beginning, we must accept a creator. Such a creator must possess an all-pervasive body, as pointed out in the Bhagavad-gita (13.14): sarvatah pani-padam tat sarvato-'ksi-siro-mukham sarvatah sruti-mal loke sarvam avrtya tisthati "Everywhere are His hands and legs, His eyes, heads and faces, and He has ears everywhere. In this way the Supersoul exists, pervading everything." The Supreme Person must be present everywhere. His body existed before the creation; otherwise He could not be the creator. If the Supreme Person is a created being, there can be no question of a creator. The conclusion is that the cosmic manifestation is certainly created at a certain time, and the creator existed before the creation; therefore the creator is not a created being. The creator is Param Brahman, or the Supreme Spirit. Matter is not only subordinate to spirit but is actually created on the basis of spirit. When the spirit soul enters the womb of a mother, the body is created by material ingredients supplied by the mother. Everything is created in the material world, and consequently there must be a creator who is the Supreme Spirit and who is distinct from matter. It is confirmed in the Bhagavad-gita that the material energy is inferior and that the spiritual energy is the living entity. Both inferior and superior energies belong to a supreme person. The Buddhists argue that the world is false, but this is not valid. The world is temporary, but it is not false. As long as we have the body, we must suffer the pleasures and pains of the body, even though we are not the body. We may not take these pleasures and pains very seriously, but they are factual nonetheless. We cannot actually say that they are false. If the bodily pains and pleasures were false, the creation would be false also, and consequently no one would take very much interest in it. The conclusion is that the material creation is not false or imaginary, but it is temporary. The Buddhists maintain that the principle "I am" is the Ultimate Truth, but this excludes the individuality of "I" and "you." If there is no "I" and "you," or individuality, there is no possibility of argument. The Buddhist philosophy depends on argument, but there can be no argument if one simply depends on "I am." There must be a "you," or another person also. The philosophy of duality--the existence of the individual soul and the Supersoul--must be there. This is confirmed in the Second Chapter of the Bhagavad-gita (2.12), wherein the Lord says: na tv evaham jatu nasam na tvam neme janadhipah na caiva na bhavisyamah sarve vayam atah param "Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor all these kings; nor in the future shall any of us cease to be." We existed in the past in different bodies, and after the annihilation of this body we shall exist in another body. The principle of the soul is eternal, and it exists in this body or in another body. Even in this lifetime we experience existence in a child's body, a youth's body, a man's body and an old body. After the annihilation of the body, we acquire another body. The Buddhist cult also accepts the philosophy of transmigration, but the Buddhists do not properly explain the next birth. There are 8,400,000 species of life, and our next birth may be in any one of them; therefore this human body is not guaranteed. According to the Buddhist's fifth principle, Lord Buddha is the only source for the attainment of knowledge. We cannot accept this, for Lord Buddha rejected the principles of Vedic knowledge. One must accept a principle of standard knowledge because one cannot attain the Absolute Truth simply by intellectual speculation. If everyone is an authority, or if everyone accepts his own intelligence as the ultimate criterion--as is presently fashionable--the scriptures will be interpreted in many different ways, and everyone will claim that his own philosophy is supreme. This has become a very great problem, and everyone is interpreting scripture in his own way and setting up his own basis of authority. Yata mata tata patha. Now everybody and anybody is trying to establish his own theory as the ultimate truth. The Buddhists theorize that annihilation, or nirvana, is the ultimate goal. Annihilation applies to the body, but the spirit soul transmigrates from one body to another. If this were not the case, how can so many multifarious bodies come into existence? If the next birth is a fact, the next bodily form is also a fact. As soon as we accept a material body, we must accept the fact that that body will be annihilated and that we will have to accept another body. If all material bodies are doomed to annihilation, we must obtain a nonmaterial body, or a spiritual body, if we wish the next birth to be anything but false. How the spiritual body is attained is explained by Lord Krsna in the Bhagavad-gita (4.9): janma karma ca me divyam evam yo vetti tattvatah tyaktva deham punar janma naiti mam eti so 'rjuna "One who knows the transcendental nature of My appearance and activities does not, upon leaving the body, take his birth again in this material world, but attains My eternal abode, O Arjuna." This is the highest perfection--to give up one's material body and not accept another but to return home, back to Godhead. It is not that perfection means one's existence becomes void or zero. Existence continues, but if we positively want to annihilate the material body, we have to accept a spiritual body; otherwise there can be no eternality for the soul. We cannot accept the theory that the Buddhist philosophy is the only way, for there are so many defects in that philosophy. A perfect philosophy is one that has no defects, and that is Vedanta philosophy. No one can point out any defects in Vedanta philosophy, and therefore we can conclude that Vedanta is the supreme philosophical way of understanding the truth. According to the Buddhist cult, the Vedas are compiled by ordinary human beings. If this were the case, they would not be authoritative. From the Vedic literature we understand that shortly after the creation Lord Brahma was instructed in the Vedas. It is not that the Vedas were created by Brahma, although Brahma is the original person in the universe. If Brahma did not create the Vedas but he is acknowledged as the first created being, wherefrom did Vedic knowledge come to Brahma? Obviously the Vedas did not come from an ordinary person born in this material world. According to Srimad-Bhagavatam, tene brahma hrda ya adi-kavaye: after the creation, the Supreme Person imparted Vedic knowledge within the heart of Brahma. There was no person in the beginning of the creation other than Brahma, yet he did not compile the Vedas; therefore the conclusion is that the Vedas were not compiled by any created being. Vedic knowledge was given by the Supreme Personality of Godhead, who created this material world. This is also accepted by Sankaracarya, although he is not a Vaisnava. It is stated that mercy is one of the qualities of a Buddhist, but mercy is a relative thing. We show our mercy to a subordinate or to one who is suffering more than ourselves. However, if there is a superior person present, the superior person cannot be the object of our mercy. Rather, we are objects for the mercy of the superior person. Therefore showing compassion and mercy is a relative activity. It is not the Absolute Truth. Apart from this, we also must know what actual mercy is. To give a sick man something forbidden for him to eat is not mercy. Rather, it is cruelty. Unless we know what mercy really is, we may create an undesirable situation. If we wish to show real mercy, we will preach Krsna consciousness in order to revive the lost consciousness of human beings, the living entity's original consciousness. Since the Buddhist philosophy does not admit the existence of the spirit soul, the so-called mercy of the Buddhists is defective. Q. How did Buddhism spread in India? A. A great emperor, Asoka, patronized Lord Buddha and therefore practically all Indian population turned to be Buddhist, with few exceptions. Q. Why did Sankaracarya want to establish the differences between of Buddhism and Hinduism? A. Lord Buddha is accepted as incarnation in the Srimad-Bhagavatam. So practically the whole of Far East, including India, all over, the Buddhism was broadcast and everyone become Buddhist. The whole of India, practically, became Buddhist during his time. But later on, after Sankaracarya's drive against Buddhism, Buddha-ism... Sankaracarya wanted to establish the difference of Buddhism and Hinduism. Lord Buddha did not accept Vedic authority. He did not accept Vedic authority. But according to Hindu culture, if somebody does not accept the Vedic authority, then he's not an authority. There are different parties in India. Generally, two parties: the Mayavada philosophers and the Vaisnava philosophers, or the impersonalists and the personalists. Otherwise, there is no difference. Ultimately, the Mayavadi philosophers they say that God, the Supreme Absolute Truth, is impersonal, and the Vaisnava philosophers, they say in the ultimate end, the Absolute Truth is Person and He is the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Krsna. Krsnas tu bhagavan svayam. There is little difference, and they stick to their position and they fight. Fight means by philosophical arguments. That is going on since a very long time. But both of them belong to the sanatana Hindu dharma because both of them will talk on the Vedanta philosophy. They give different interpretations, but they cannot say that "We don't accept Vedanta." Then it is at once rejected. So one must give an interpretation on the Vedanta philosophy; then he'll be accepted as acarya. Three things: Vedanta philosophy, Bhagavad-gita and Srimad-Bhagavatam. One must be able to explain these three books. Then he'll be accepted acarya. These are the principles. So very recently... The impersonalists, they also accept avatara. They accept Krsna. Sankaracarya accepted Krsna. Krsnas tu bhagavan svayam. Sa bhagavan svayam krsna. Specifically... People may misunderstand that Krsna may be some other Krsna because, as the present followers of Sankaracarya, they are interpreting in that way. But Sankaracarya, just to specify Krsna, devaki vasudeva jatah. This means Krsna who appeared Himself as the son of Devaki and Vasudeva, that Krsna. That Krsna. Just like Sankaracarya has a nice prayer of Krsna, the present followers of Sankaracarya, they say... They cannot say that this is not composed by Sankaracarya. It is very famous. bhaja govindam bhaja govindam bhaja govindam mudha mate prapte sannihite kale marane na hi na hi raksati dukrn-karane So there is a very famous prayer made by Sankara... Sankaracarya has made many prayers about Krsna, especially about His Vrndavana lila, he has made. He has worshiped Krsna in many ways. And last, this is his last composition of poetry. Bhaja govindam bhaja govindam bhaja govindam mudha mate: "You fools, you mudha mate..." Mudha mate means "you fools." He was addressing the whole world, "you fools." Bhaja govindam: "Just become devotee of Krsna. Just become Krsna consciousness." Prapte sannihite kale marane na hi na hi raksati dukrn-karane: "You are philosophizing. You are talking on grammar and this way and that way." Because these people, they want to establish impersonalism from Bhagavad-gita by strength of grammar. Such a nonsense they are. They want to understand God by..., through grammar. God is so cheap that He can be understood through grammar. Therefore especially he specified, prapte sannihite kale marane: "When death will catch you, your grammar, dukrn, prata, this will not save you. You fools. You please become Krsna conscious, Krsna conscious." That was the instruction of Sankaracarya. And he has especially mentioned Bhagavad-gita and Ganges water. He especially mentions. "A little quantity of Ganges water and a little study of Bhagavad-gita will save you from many dangerous positions." So, because the symptom is bhagavan, so even Sankaracarya has accepted. But there are many people, they do not accept... Sri Yamunacarya, Sri Yamunacarya, a great devotee, he's supposed to be the spiritual master of Ramanujacarya. He was a great king, and later on he became a great devotee. He has written his Alavandaraya. Alavandaru... Amongst the Ramanuja-sampradaya, there are twelve great, I mean to say, acaryas, and he's one of them. So he has written a very nice verse: tvam sila-rupa-caritaih parama-prakrstaih sattvena sattvikataya prabalais ca sastraih prakhyata-daiva-paramartha-vidam mattais ca naivasura-prakrtayah prabhavanti boddhum Now he says, "My dear Lord, those who are asura prakrtayah..." Asura prakrtayah means the atheistic demons. Atheists are called demons. In the Vedic literature, those who are atheists, they are called demons, raksasas. Just like Ravana, he was a great scholar in Vedic philosophy. He was son of a brahmana, and he was very learned. And he materially advanced his kingdom so nice that his capital was called golden. He was so rich. Everything, he was, in every way, in education, in opulence, in power, everything was so great. Only fault was that he was atheist. Therefore he's called raksasa, asura. All the asuras that are mentioned in the sastra, their only fault is that they are atheists. Otherwise, from education point of view, from opulence, they are very much advanced. Q. Why did Lord Buddha reject The Vedas? A. His specific propaganda was to stop animal killing. So animal killing is recommended in the Vedic literature. Therefore people wanted to give him Vedic evidences that "In the Vedic literature animal sacrifice is recommended under certain condition. So how do you preach? You are Hindu and you are followers of Vedas. Why you are preaching nonviolence?" Therefore he had to give up Hindu religion. He said, "I do not care for your Vedas. It is my propaganda to stop animal killing. So if you follow me, then you must stop animal killing." Ahimsa paramo dharmah. Q. Can you explain further Ahimsa and Vedic animal sacrifice? A. Lord Buddha propagated ahimsa. Ahimsa. Because he saw the whole human race is going to hell by this animal killing. "Let me stop them so that they may, in future, they may become sober." Sadaya-hrdaya darsita: Two sides. First of all he was very much compassionate, that poor animals, they are being killed. And another side, he saw "The whole human race is going to hell. So let me do something." Therefore he had to deny the existence of the soul because their brain will not tolerate such things. Therefore he did not say anything about the soul or God. He said that "You stop animal killing." If I pinch you, you feel pain. So why should you give pain to others? Never mind he has no soul; that's all right. He did not talk anything about soul. So these people say the animals have no soul. But that's all right, but he's feeling pain when you are killing the animal. So you also feel pain. So why should you give pain to others? That is Lord Buddha's theory. Sadaya-hrdaya darsita-pasu-ghatam. Nindasi yajna-vidher ahaha sruti-jatam. He denied that: "I don't accept Vedas." Because in the Vedas there is sometimes recommendation, not for killing, but for giving rejuvenation to an animal. But killing, in that sense, is there for sacrifice. But Lord Buddha did not accept even animal killing in sacrifice. Therefore, nindasi. Nindasi means he was criticizing. Nindasi yajna-vidher ahaha sruti-jatam sadaya-hrdaya darsita. Why? He was so kind and compassionate. /images/graemlins/smile.gif Om Shri Dhuupa Theerthaya Namaha /images/graemlins/smile.gif Om Shri Guru Raghavendraya Namaha /images/graemlins/smile.gif Om Namo Venkatesaya Namaha /images/graemlins/smile.gif Jai Shri Krishna Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Guest guest Report post Posted May 4, 2004 A very nice read & post Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
