(5 of 10)
He spent the rest of his life, some 45 years, walking from town to town in India imparting his vision. One of Buddha's sermons dealt with a starving man who had long had a pet rabbit. The rabbit jumped into a fire in order to provide food for his master, and, as the flames flared up, was transformed into a vision of the Buddha—a vision the Vietnamese monks were to borrow for their own purposes. Accompanied by his favorite monks and nuns, Buddha was content to be fed by local admirers and once scandalized his band by eating in the home of a courtesan. His last incarnation completed, at 80 Buddha lay down in a sola grove to die, passing out of the endless cycle of life into the great nirvana.
The Five Rules. Buddha was the rare mystic able to chalk out clearly to others the signposts leading out of reality, in the form of easily remembered shorthand formulas. The essence of his ethic came down in "Four Noble Truths": 1) Existence is suffering; 2) suffering springs from desire or craving; 3) the cure for suffering is extinction of desire; 4) to achieve the desired absence of desire there is an Eightfold Path of conduct to follow: right views, right effort, right mindfulness, right intentions, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood and right concentration. As a definition of rightness, Buddha merely offered "Five Moral Rules" of conduct: 1) Let not one kill any living being; 2) let not one take what is not given to him; 3) let not one speak falsely; 4) let not one drink intoxicating drinks; 5) let not one be unchaste.
Basic Buddhism is thus less a religion than a body of ethics. Buddhism recognizes nothing even remotely resembling a personal god or even a supreme being; there are no supernatural powers that concern themselves with the individual, and in strict Buddhism one prays not to anyone in particular but merely as an exercise to purify the mind. In this sense, Buddhism is atheistic.
Buddha dismissed the ultimate philosophical questions, such as the finiteness or infinity of the world, as profitless speculation. But he took over from Hinduism the concept of the endless cycle of life, in which a man might be reincarnated as anything from a noble elephant to a lowly spider—depending upon the merit of his previous life's deeds. As a kind of cultivated escapism for the individual who masters the drill, Buddhism has been dismissed by some Westerners as Freudianism in reverse: a systematic elimination of the ego so that anxiety has no place to roost. Originally, Buddhism was an otherworldly path leading each man deeper into himself—and certainly not into the political arena.
But in the intellectually promiscuous Asian world, the crystalline unity of Buddha's thought had scant chance of escaping the taint of temporal power.
Buddhist Constantine. Within 200 years after Buddha's death, historians noted 18 different varieties of Buddhism. When the Emperor Asoka, who about 250 B.C. created an Indian Empire not surpassed in extent until the British conquests, felt a surfeit of slaughter after killing 100,000 people, he turned to the new religion and became Buddhism's Constantine. He not only made Buddhism India's state religion, but his missionaries implanted the faith in Ceylon, fanned out through the rest of Asia, even Africa and Europe.