Buddhism: Day Of Buddha’s Enlightenment  

By Shakti Maira

Twenty-five years ago, in the light of a full moon, I sat facing the lying Buddha in Polonnaruwa in central Sri Lanka. It was Buddha Purnima . I noticed the Buddha’s smile as he lay dying, and the concern on his disciple, Ananda’s face, standing before him.

Buddha’s last words were: “Be lamps unto yourselves”. As he left us, the Sakyamuni did not ask us to pray to him or believe in him as a messiah. Unfortunately, over time, his life and teachings have become encrusted in layers of religiosity.

The Jatakas present Buddha as an extraordinary person with hundreds of incarnations. Buddhist iconography credits him with miraculous powers. Somewhere, we’ve lost the essence of the universal human problem he faced, and the solution he found and offered.

What made Siddhartha discontented? What did he find? We are told that he went for a walk, and seeing a sick person, an old person and a corpse, woke up to the suffering of human life. This is represented as the pivotal moment when he realised the first noble truth, that life is dukkha.

What I imagine really happened is this: despite his princely life, beautiful wife, loving parents and good looks, Siddhartha was not fully happy. He wondered what the meaning of life was, and suffered the ennui and angst most of us experience, usually in our late teens.

By hinging dukkha on the inevitable suffering of sickness, old age and death, we have twisted the Buddha’s journey into a life-negating one. In this context, we know that he didn’t find a solution, for he grew old, fell sick and died. The problem he was really looking at and found some answers for, is the problem we all have: Of lack of meaning and fulfilment.

When we experience this, we can either take refuge in entertainment, pleasurable consumption, and achievement, or turn to religion and spirituality. Neither solves the problem. The Buddha, too, had the same options. The first wasn’t too meaningful as he pretty much had all the pleasurable things.

So he took the other and spent many years trying to solve the problem using tools offered by religion and spirituality. It didn’t work. And then he left all to sit under a tree near Gaya. He decided to be a lamp unto himself and found insights into the nature of dukkha , its cause, and how to deal with it.

The four pillars of Buddha’s teachings emerged from that intense contemplation: There is dukkha or discontentment, and its cause is craving. Dukkha can be got rid of through eight skills, also called the Eight-fold Path  . While most of us experience discontentment, few understand its cause.

According to the Buddha, we live constantly in a state of craving. We crave what we find pleasurable, physically, emotionally and psychologically and reject what we do not. This constant craving, grasping and rejecting is our restlessness, our state of discontentment and is caused by lack of understanding of three key truths - that everything, including us, exists interdependently; that everything is constantly in change; and that the way out of dukkha is neither increasing consumption nor abstaining from it.

The first skill in the Buddha’s Eight-fold Noble Path , is Right Understanding. There is something in the quality of the light of the full moon of Buddha Purnima that epitomises the Buddha’s realisation - no extremes of materialism or spirituality, understanding rather than belief, kindness in speech and action, avoiding harm to others, finding peace through calmness and clear insight.

We face the same problems that Buddha did; and we can exercise the same choice that Buddha did in order to solve these: which is, through better human skills.

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See also: Buddhism, God and Religion, Peace on Earth, Peace of Mind, Love and Happiness, Life and Beyond, Body Mind and Soul)