Gautama, the awakened one, or Buddha, who died in 545 BC, lived at a time when the major
 Upanishads were already in existence, and their philosophy must be seen as the point
 of departure for his own teaching. The Buddha was acting in full accord with this tradition
 when he became a rishi, or forest sage, who had abandoned the life of the householder
 and divested himself of caste in order to follow a way of liberation. For the Indian
 tradition, even more than the Chinese, specifically encourages the abandonment of the conventional
 life at a certain age, after the duties of family and citizenship have been fulfilled.
 Relinquishment of caste is the outward and visible sign of the realization that one's
 true state is unclassified, that one's role or person is simply conventional, and that
 one's true nature is no thing and no body. This realization was the crux of the Buddha's
 experience of awakening, bodhi, which dawned upon him one night as he sat under the celebrated
 bow tree at Gaya, after seven years of meditation in the forests. From the standpoint of Zen,
 this experience is the essential content of Buddhism, and the verbal doctrine is quite
 secondary to the wordless transmission of the experience from generation to generation.
 For seven years Gautama had struggled by the traditional means of yoga and tapas to penetrate
 the cause of man's enslavement to maya, to find release from the vicious circle of clinging
 to life, trisna, which is like trying to make the hand grasp itself. All his efforts had
 been in vain; the eternal Atman, the real self, was not to be found. However much he
 concentrated upon his own mind to find its root and ground, he found only his own effort
 to concentrate. The evening before his awakening he simply "gave up," relaxed his ascetic diet,
 and ate some nourishing food. Thereupon he felt at once that a profound change was coming
 over him. He sat beneath the tree, vowing never to rise until he had attained the supreme
 awakening, and, according to tradition, sat all through the night until the first glimpse
 of the morning star suddenly provoked a state of perfect clarity and understanding.
 This was anuttara-samyak-sambodhi, unexcelled complete awakening, liberation from maya and
 from the everlasting round of birth and death, samsara, which goes on and on for as long
 as a man tries in any way whatsoever to grasp at his own life. Yet the actual content of
 this experience was never, and could never, be put into words, for words are the frames
 of maya, the meshes of its net, and the experience is of the water which slips through. Thus,
 so far as words are concerned, the most that may be said of this experience are the words
 attributed to the Buddha in the Vajra-kedika. "Just so, suputi, I obtained, not the
 least thing from unexcelled complete awakening, and for this very reason it is called unexcelled
 complete awakening." Thus, from the standpoint of Zen, the Buddha never said a word, despite
 the volumes of scriptures attributed to him. For his real message remained always unspoken,
 and was such that when words attempted to express it, they made it seem as if it were
 nothing at all. Yet it is the essential tradition of Zen that what cannot be conveyed in speech
 can nevertheless be passed on by direct pointing, by some nonverbal means of communication,
 without which the Buddhist experience could never have been handed down to future generations.
 In its own tradition, Zen maintains that the Buddha transmitted awakening to his chief
 disciple, Maha Kasyapa, by holding up a flower and remaining silent. The traditional story
 which the Zen school gives of its own origin is that it arrived in China in 520, with the
 Indian monk Bodhidharma, twenty-eighth of a somewhat fanciful list of Indian patriarchs,
 standing in a direct line of apostolic succession from Gautama. Bodhidharma arrived in Canton
 from India, and proceeded to the court of Emperor Wu of Liang, an enthusiastic patron
 of Buddhism. However, Bodhidharma's doctrine and his abrupt attitude did not appeal to
 the emperor, so that he withdrew for some years to a monastery in the state of Wei,
 and spent his time gazing at the wall, until at last he found a suitable disciple, who
 subsequently became the second patriarch of Zen in China.


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.64 sec
Decoding  : 0.40 sec
Transcribe: 386.76 sec
Total Time: 387.80 sec