Siddhartha Gautuma
The Rev. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
Sunday, May 30, 2010


Reading From “Mara and the Buddha” by Thich Nhat Hahn

Message: Siddhartha Gautuma

Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. If you want to hear what was actually said, you can listen to sermon visit our website at www.uurockford.org. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2010.

Today is the third in a series of sermons I’ve preached this year,
about the great prophets of three of the world’s religions:
a few weeks before we celebrated the birthday of Jesus the Messiah,
we talked about the real human person, Joshua Ben Joseph,
upon whom the person Jesus Christ is laid.
Around the anniversary of the birth of the prophet of Islam,
we learned about the life of Muhammad ibn Adullah,
may peace be upon him.
Most Buddhists celebrated the birthday of the Buddha
about a week ago,
so today will learn something about the real human person,
Siddhartha Gautuma,
who became known as the Buddha.

When Buddhists talk about the Buddha,
they do not use the phrase “the life of the Buddha”
but instead, “the lives of the Buddha.”
Buddhism emerges from a Hindu culture,
and indeed for centuries after the life of Siddhartha
Buddhism is nothing more than one of hundreds of Hindu sects.
And like the Hindu’s,
Buddhists believe in reincarnation.
A person does not have one life, but many.
Each death is followed by a re-birth, a life, a death, and so on and so on.

This is important –
Siddhartha’s teachings do not make sense
without the idea of reincarnation.
You see, in the west, the existential anxiety
that produces much of religious thought is this:
we all die.
We are mortal.
The west creates a myth,
the myth of the garden of Eden,
to explain this fact,
and its various religious traditions
create a whole set of myths, rituals, rules, and doctrines
that explain how a person can avoid this fate,
the fate of death and the end of one’s individual being.

But Hindu’s and Buddhists do not worry over such a thing.
Death is part of the cycle of life,
the wheel of being, just as birth is.
And when Hindu’s or Buddhists say such a thing,
they do not mean in the cosmic or evolutionary sense,
they mean that we are each on the wheel,
and we each are born, live, die, born, live, die, born, live, die,
born, live, die and on and on and on.

It is not death, then, that worries the Buddha.
His philosophy is not designed to teach the followers how to avoid death.
It is designed to teach how to avoid suffering.
More on that in a moment.
First, the story of Siddhartha Gautama.

Siddhartha was born about five-sixty-six B.C.,
a hundred years before Socrates was born in Greece,
fifteen years before Confucius was born in China,
during the Jewish exile in Babylon when most of the Hebrew Bible was written down.
He was born, in other words,
at the beginning of a great flowering
across the world of religious and philosophical ideas.
Historians call this period the axial age,
because it is a point when things turn,
when some people in these places
begin to try to think in more universal or abstract terms
about what it means to exist,
to be human,
to live and to die,
and to be among others:
the great questions of philosophy and religion.

Siddhartha was born in the region of Lumbini,
along what is today the border between India and Nepal,
in the foothills of the Himalayas.
His father was Suddhodana,
and he was the ruler of the Sakyas,
the tribe that controlled the region.
Siddhartha, that is to say, was a prince.
Like Muhammad,
his mother died when Siddhartha was very young –
perhaps even in childbirth,
although we don’t know that for sure.
When Siddhartha was young,
the legend holds that Asita, a seer,
makes a prophecy to Siddhartha’s father
that the son will become either a great king or a great religious leader.
This is a common motif:
a similar prophecy is delivered to Jesus’ parents
and to Muhammad’s uncle.
Buddhist scriptures quote Asita, the seer,
as saying something like this to the father:

“He is born who shall discover the extinction of birth, which is so hard to win. Uninterested in worldly affairs he will give up his kingdom.
By strenuous efforts he will win that which is truly real.”

Imagine yourself in the father’s shoes: this is not good news.
Here you are, with one son, your wife now dead, and a kingdom to pass on.
But the son will give up the kingdom.
This is not good.
So as Siddhartha entered first his teenage and then young adult years,
his father took action.
I want to read to you what happened, according to Buddhist scriptures:

“The monarch . . . decided his son must never see anything that could perturb his mind, and he arranged for him to live in the upper stories of the palace, without access to the ground. Thus he passed his time in the upper part of the palace, which was brilliantly white as rain clouds in autumn, and which looked like a mansion of the Gods shifted to the earth. It contained rooms suited to each season, and the melodious music of the female attendants could be heard in them. . . . Soft music came from the gold-edged tambourines which the women tapped with their finger-tips, and they danced as beautifully as the choicest heavenly nymphs. They entertained him with soft words, tremulous calls, wonton swayings, sweet laughter, butterfly kisses, and seductive glances . . . and it did not occur to him to come down from the palace to the ground . . .”

It did not occur to him to come down.
No kidding.
Who would leave gold-edged tambourines and “wonton swaying”
for plain old everyday life?

This is Siddhartha’s world,
a world of young and beautiful women,
a world of softness and comfort.
Siddhartha’s father arranges a marriage, and Siddhartha has a son.

He has everything, but he has not lived.
He cannot value it, for he does not know pain or loss.
He has no knowledge of suffering.
He is living in a fantasy world.

I’ve never been confined to the upper rooms of the palace
with wantonly swaying tambourine players
and I suspect none of you have either.
But that doesn’t mean we aren’t living in a fantasy world, too.

When put the suffering of the world’s poor out of our mind –
that’s a fantasy we need to wake up from.
When we don’t think about climate change because,
after all, it won’t really be bad for a few more years,
that’s a fantasy we need to wake up from.
When we think that we can buy happiness,
that if we have enough stuff our life will be better,
that’s a fantasy we need to wake up from.
When we think that change will happen because we want it,
and we don’t have to roll up our sleeves and get to work,
that’s a fantasy we need to wake up from.

I use that term, wake-up,
because it is what happens to Siddhartha –
he becomes awakened.
How does this happen?

Well, the maidens make a mistake.
They, it seems, are a little tired of the upper floors,
of being cooped up inside all the time,
so they convince Siddhartha to travel with them
out of town into a forest glen.
Siddhartha’s father is nervous about such an idea,
but the forest should not disturb Siddhartha’s mind,
so he grants permission.
And he tells his men to clear the road to the forest,
to remove all the sick, all the poor,
anyone who isn’t young and beautiful.
He wants it to be like a Gap Ad.

And here is where things go wrong.
There are a couple of versions:
in one, Siddhartha and the maidens take a wrong turn,
in another, the gods create apparitions,
who knows.
But Siddhartha sees four sights on his trip:
an old and crippled man, a sick man, a beggar, and a dead body.

By the time they get to the body,
Siddhartha cannot take it anymore –
he realizes that his life has been a fantasy life,
and dedicates himself to the removal of suffering.

Remember, Siddhartha, like everyone around him,
believes in reincarnation.
The problem is not that we die,
the problem is that we suffer –
that, in particular, things do not last.
What is the point of being born, living, dying, over and over again?

So Siddhartha leaves the palace,
his arranged wife and child included –
this is something that Buddhists don’t really talk about but it is the reality –
and goes to join an extreme group of ascetics.
He is twenty-nine, the same age Jesus is when he begins his ministry.
Jesus will live only three or four more years,
Siddhartha more than fifty.
These monks go with almost no food,
they deny every impulse,
in order to purify themselves.
After following this path for years,
and not getting any closer to a way to eliminate suffering,
and realizing that he has become so thin that he cannot think straight,
Siddhartha gives up this path.

He eats some food, regains his health,
and under a tree in the city of Benares,
enters a yogic meditation.
Over the course of a single night of meditation,
Siddhartha awakens:
he sees all his previous lives
and indeed the whole cycle of birth and rebirth,
the wheel of being that Buddhists call Samsara.
And he sees how to leave this cycle of suffering.
This is very simple,
and it is based on something you probably have heard of:
the Four Noble truths.
ONE: All is Suffering, or Dukkha.
TWO: Suffering, Dukka is caused by attachment, by desire.
Mostly suffering is caused by our desire for things that are impermanent to be permanent.
THREE: By ceasing to desire things,
especially to desire that impermanent things become permanent,
we can avoid suffering.
FOUR: There is a way to avoid suffering and to cease our attachments and cravings. This way is the Eightfold path, which consists of Right seeing, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration.

Buddhism is a complicated system of levels and aspects,
meditations and practices,
but it all boils down to this insight that Siddhartha had under the Bodhi tree –
it is our craving for things which are false,
our attachment to things which don’t last,
which causes suffering.
If we really understand how life is,
and then speak, act, think, and live accordingly, we shall not suffer.
It is a matter of accepting the reality of life.
The ascetics, the self-deniers that Siddhartha has hung out with for years,
had it wrong:
they were too attached, perversely, to their self-denial.
Thus the path laid out by Siddhartha became knows as the Middle Way –
not too strict, not to loose. Juuust Right.

Under the Bodhi tree,
Siddhartha sees not just how to avoid suffering,
but something even more important:
he sees and understands how to leave the wheel of Samsara altogether,
to “extinguish birth” as Asita prophesied.
The Sanskrit term for this is a word you know: Nirvana.
It means “to snuff out” like a candle.
It’s more of a verb than a noun.
It is not heaven – for heaven is still part of the cycle of birth and rebirth.
Nirvana is a complete departure from the cycle.

Siddhartha sees, but does not go.
He returns from his meditation
and decides that he must share these insights with others,
help them move towards Nirvana and the right path.

This is a big deal.
If you discovered the secret of life,
the thing that would instantly take you to forever bliss,
would you return to the drudgery of living to share it with others?
Sure your instinct, and mine, is to say yes, but think about it really?
It wouldn’t be easy to come back.
But Siddhartha did.
And it is because of his inclination to help others and not just himself
that he stopped being Siddhartha and became the Buddha.

So he gathers disciples, preaches and teaches,
lives for decades more, and dies when he is in his eighties.
His small band of followers gather after his death
and begin to write down everything they remember him saying.
There is as yet no religion called Buddhism,
and will not be for another 200 years until a powerful King,
Asoka, who will unite most of modern India for the first time,
becomes a follower of the Middle Way –
he funds monasteries and many of his subjects convert –
after all, it is often wise to be the same religion as the king.
Buddhism will spread, to Southeast Asia, to China, to Japan,
and two millennia later, to the west.
On a survey of religion in American,
the rate of growth between 1990 and 2001 was faster for Buddhism
than for any other group of any significant size –
expect “none of the above.”
That growth leveled off in the last ten years,
but there are still more than a million Buddhists in the United States.
The middle way, a way of waking up to reality,
a way of being calm in the midst of chaos,
a non-theistic way, this way remains attractive to many people.

I am not a Buddhist.
Some Unitarian Universalists are.
Some of you are.
Buddhism and Unitarian Universalism are perfectly compatible.
Buddhists believe, as we do, in the unity of reality.
Buddhists believe, at least most sects of Buddhists believe, as we do,
that all people are worthy and in their language,
capable of reaching Nirvana.
Most importantly, Buddhists believe, as we do,
that religion is fundamentally about how you live,
your ethics and your ability to show kindness and compassion to others –
that is what the fourth noble truth, the eightfold path, is all about.
May we be filled with loving kindness.
You can be a Buddhist and a Unitarian Universalist, and many are.

I am not a Buddhist.
I do not believe the first noble truth, that all is Dukkha, suffering.
I don’t believe that.

But I do believe that we must awake from our fantasy land lives
and see things as they really are.

And I do believe that we must stop craving to make the impermanent permanent.

And I do believe that we must help others
on their spiritual journeys to wholeness and understanding.

That I agree with.
That we can all learn, Buddhist or not, from Siddhartha, the Buddha.

Thich Nhat Hanh says “Buddha is a living thing: Buddha is born, Buddha grows up, Buddha hides himself away, Buddha dies. But Buddhahood is there in us.”