BHAGAVAN BUDDHA AND OUR HERITAGE
SRI SWAMI RANGANATHANANDA
Vivekananda
has beautifully expressed his
conviction that modem India required to assimilate the great intellect of
Sankara and the great heart of Buddha, the great heart for which, somehow or other,
in the later development of philosophy in this country, we had practically
found no place. That the human mind can not only think high, but also feel,
deeply and work energetically from that high point of view was something which
was continually forgotten for centuries together, and it was Swamiji who
pointed out to us that the origin of almost all the social maladies in our
time, all those things which made us immobile as a people, leading to the
accumulation of all sorts of evils in our body politic - all these experiences of recent centuries can be traced back to the
banishment of the Buddha spirit, of the Buddha heart, from the thought and
practice of our country.
In the same breath, he
exhorted us to turn back once again to that great heritage, to call back Buddha
to our nation and to our hearts; and he also added that until we did that, our
country could never hope to develop that internal strength which we all wish
and pray for. This was the approach of all enlightened minds of India in recent
decades. This positive approach to Buddha and his place in our history has
gripped the minds of our people, so that today, after nearly sixty years of
education by Swami Vivekananda and other leaders, the nation feels a sense of
pride in owning Buddha as one of its glorious teachers and in being the
children of a country which produced a Buddha. That is the context in which we
are living and functioning
today.
In what sense can we say that Buddha is
intimate to us, that his contribution is of vital importance to us today? What
is his place in our national tradition? Unless we answer that question, we
shall not be able to accept him with that whole-heartedness with which we have
accepted the other great teachers who preceded and succeeded him. We have responded
with all love and enthusiasm and reverence to the celebration of his 2500th
birthday, and yet we are not Buddhists.
When we ask, ourselves
as to what are those traces of the teachings of Buddha in ourselves through
which we are slowly and imperceptibly discovering our kinship with this great teacher,
we, are led to the realization through
a study of his life and message, that he is closest to us in all the essential
teachings that he gave, in all the greatness and depth of the holy dedicated life that he lived. We may have forsaken the creed which developed out
of his teachings in later centuries as Buddhism; yet, even in the matter of
that creed, many aspects of it are akin to our own; but our interest in Buddha
today does not proceed from that source; it does not mean that we are going to
become Buddhists in the political or sectarian or credal sense. Whether to
become such a Buddhist or not is not a vital question with us; after all, if a
man or a group changes the label of his or its creed, it will only result in
removing his or its name from one column to another in the census register. It
does not result in the increase
of the moral or spiritual
strength of the nation. But if the nation as a whole or at least large numbers in it can inspire themselves
with the spirit of Buddha, can imbibe his spirit of love and compassion and
tolerance, can imbibe that spirit by which knowledge can flow into love and
service of the people. If that can be developed in us, resulting in a purer and
a nobler mode of life, certainly the whole nation stands to gain and to
benefit from that assimilation.
That is the line in
which the country has tried to understand Buddha, and that is the line in
which Swami Vivekananda taught it to
accept this great teacher, who, according to him, is the fulfilment of the
spiritual thought of the Upanishads which had preceded him.
Coming close upon the
age of the Upanishads, wherein the foundations of the subsequent developments
of culture and religion in India had been laid, Buddha stands closest to the
spirit of the Upanishads. In fact, it is not possible to appreciate the life
and teachings of Buddha adequately without understanding the spirit of the
upanishads. There are at least a few western scholars who appreciate this fact.
A large number of western scholars who have, written books on Buddha have
been unduly harsh on the prevailing Vedic religion, often confusing their
estimates of it with
post Buddhistic developments. It looks as if they sought the growth of the plant
of the Buddha movement at the cost of the soil in which it was raised and
reared, to trace its life development outside that soil and climate, but there
have, been, as I said, a few western scholars who have realized that Buddha
could not be understood except in the context of the spiritual soil and
philosophical climate provided by the sages
of the upanishads.
One such author whom I
would like to quote, one who has made a sympathetic study of Buddha, is Edmund
Holmes. In his book, The Creed of Buddha, he warns us that to understand
Buddha without understanding the Upanishads is to miss the significance of
Buddha and his teaching. The
understanding of the Upanishads is absolutely essential, for it is against that
Himalayan thought background that we can realize the significance of the new
advances that Buddha made in the thought and practice of that great philosophy.
Writes Edmund Holmes at the commencement of his fifth chapter entitled ‘A
Misreading of Buddha’ (The Creed of Buddha. p. 98)
“Those who have
followed me thus far will,
I think, admit that Buddha’s scheme of life coincides, at all its vital
points, with the scheme that I worked out by drawing practical deductions from
the master ideas of that deeply spiritual philosophy which found its highest
expression in the upanishads.’
Again (ibid., pp. 102-103)
The cumulative
evidence afforded by these facts, added to the internal evidence which has
already been set forth in detail, seems to point with irresistible force to one
conclusion, namely, that Buddha accepted the idealistic teaching of the Upanishads - accepted
it at its highest level and in its purest form - and took upon himself as his life’s mission to fill the
obvious gap in it, - in other words, to make the spiritual ideas, which had hitherto
been the exclusive possession of a few select should, available for the daily needs of mankind. If this
conclusion is correct, we shall see in Buddhism, not a revolt against the “Brahminic”
Philosophy as such, but an ethical interpretation of the leading ideas of that philosophy - a following out of
those ideas, not into the word-built systems of (so-called) thought which the
metaphysicians of the day were constructing with fatal facility, but into their
practical consequences in the inner life of man.’
(Extract from
‘Bhagawan Buddha and our Heritage’ published by the Rama Krishna Mission, Institute of Culture, Calcutta)