Psychology of Buddhism. Monograph

- Enough, Ananda! Do not cry, do not worry. Sooner or later we have to part with everything that is dear to us. Is there anything eternal on Earth? My dear, added he, turning to other followers, - Now Ananda knows everything about what has to be done after my death. Do as he tells you.

After midnight philosopher-Brahmin Subhadra came to Buddha to ask about something, but Ananda did not allow him to the sick teacher for fear that it could disturb him too much.

Buddha heard their voices and ordered to let Subhadra in.

Gautama gave the following answer to one of Subhadra’s questions:

- My teaching is known only to my twelve disciples. They will awaken the world from the sleep of indifference. Since the age of twenty-nine till this day I have been seeking pure wisdom. I have chosen the right path and I have reached nirvana.

He formulated the rule of the four-month trial that should be undertaken by people of other religious beliefs who wanted to enter Buddhist community. His last words were to love one another. In the morning he died.

Legends provide us with a detailed description of Buddha’s burial and distribution of his relics. It is said that Buddha died at the age of eighty in Kushinagar, not far from Lumbini, the place where he was born and raised. In accordance with Indian customs, his body was cremated with great ceremony.

According to one of the legends, Buddha’s followers managed to set the funeral pyre on fire only when his closest friend and disciple Mahakashyapa appeared at the ceremony.

The Teacher’s ashes were divided between eight of his followers, six of whom were sent by monastic communities. Each of the eight followers buried the ashes and erected a funeral pyramid (a stupa) over the place. The cult of stupas, built in different architectural styles, is still widespread in Buddhist countries.

Legends also say that one of Gautama’s disciples managed to snatch a tooth of

Buddha out of the fire. The tooth has become an object of cult, too. It always had a great value for Buddhists. In wartime it was transported from one country to another. Nowadays it is kept in the city of Kandy in Sri Lanka. There is a special Temple of the Tooth of Buddha, where a festival is held every year in its honor.

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1.3. The learned Buddha. A Man Searching for the Truth

It is not easy to write this section, as the majority of people see Buddha as a God on earth or a Great Teacher and not as a man searching for the truth.

No doubt, he was a Great Teacher. But I am sure that he managed to realize himself as a Teacher only because he was a humanist, an honest and a wise person.

He was a great scholar: he had his own teaching, singled out the subject of his study and achieved great success in its investigation.

And as all scientists, he had his own eureka moment, his own depression, his own anguish over the problem under study, his own ecstasy of understanding and his own sadness at the fact that not everyone could understand and accept him.

I think that it is particularly important to reveal the human nature of Buddha. A wild seeker of truth, he was extremely honest with the world and himself. He opened new horizons of knowledge, and in this his mission was similar to that of a scientist.

In my opinion, the ability to undergo total transformation, to die and to be reborn was the most distinctive trait of this outstanding personality. If we look at his life as a whole, we can distinguish four key moments, in which he undergoes a complete revival, - the four moons of revival. The first moon was marked by the death of a God from the highest lokas and the birth of a mortal man in the body of prince Siddhartha. With the second full moon died the future emperor, Prince Siddhartha, and the ascetic monk Gautama was born. The third full moon was marked by the death of monk Gautama under the Bodhi tree and the birth of the Buddha. During the fourth full moon Buddha died and sank into paranirvana.

We will not dwell upon the first full moon. Let us assume that even Buddha would have refrained from discussing it, since it is impossible to understand the mystery of birth.

The second, the third and the fourth moons are particularly interesting to us, as they can help a lot in describing Buddha’s personality.

Every great tradition, whether it is spiritual, philosophical or religious, was founded by the one who could be called the Creator of spirit.

Buddha is an example of such individuals, rare and unique, endowed with noble courage and clear vision, irrational madness and eternal rationality, able to jump into the

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depth of their psychic reality and penetrate the mystery of Self without getting lost in the labyrinths of their own being.

But in order to do this, they have to find themselves in certain life situations, when the radiant abyss, opening up before them, is not just a choice but the finger of fate and the call of Spirit.

Prince Siddhartha was lucky to be born in such a family. He received versatile education as a Brahmin and an expert in Vedic literature and ceremonies, he mastered the art of governing (which turned out to be very useful and helped him to organize his school and spread his teaching).

Siddhartha was a warrior by birth. The spirit of struggle and the ability to face challenges was firmly instilled in him. The Shakyas were Kshatriyas, Aryan warriors, who conquered India and ruled over its cultural, economical and political life. Mastering martial arts was an essential element of becoming a man at that time. Prince Siddharha not only absorbed the spiritual culture of his country, but also had the strength of a warrior.

What happened to Siddhartha at the age of twenty-nine, when he suddenly met illness, old age and death, can now be described as psychospiritual crisis. It was a powerful and fierce destruction of all the values of ordinary life.

Growing older, we all gradually go through the initiation into disease, old age and death. Eventually, in spite of the horror and grief that attend them, they become familiar companions of our existence.

The three ordinary life phenomena managed to destroy the basis of Siddhartha’s personality, the motivational core of his vital activity.

What was simple and familiar to ordinary people turned out to be extremely unusual and devastating to the prince.

Perhaps Shuddhodana should not have protected his son from getting acquainted with the phenomena of ordinary life. If Siddhartha had been accustomed to the presence of disease, old age and death in life from his childhood, the discovery would not have been such a shock for him and everyday life would not have lost its meaning.

The eyes of disease, old age and death, which he acquired, were the eyes of death of all the values of ordinary human life.

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Of course, there was another reason. Siddhartha did not have to worry about the usual burdens of earthly existence. He did not have to think about food, clothing, pleasure, security, power struggle or recognition. He led a life of perfect happiness in stone palaces with beautiful gardens and ponds, surrounded by courtesans, dancers and musicians, ready to bring him pleasure at any moment. He wore silk clothes, ate delicate dishes, wise Brahmins kept him company.

Life gave him everything. If Siddhartha had felt concern or dissatisfaction, if he had felt that he was not living a full life, then disease, old age and death would not have seemed so awful, they would not have totally engrossed his consciousness and personality.

The meditating ascetic he saw when he left the palace for the fourth time represented for him the possibility to solve his psychospiritual crisis. It gave him hope, a frail and vague hope, but the last and only one, similar to a sunrise after a nightmarish night.

Living through the darkest night of his life, he could not have chosen another path; he went in the direction of sunrise and became a hermit monk.

As Siddhartha’s biography shows, the life of a monk was not his only hope. A welleducated man, he believed in knowledge. His spiritual search (536-532BC) started with mastering philosophical traditions and yoga. In Magadha, after his meeting with Bimbisara, a powerful king in the Ganges valley, Siddhartha decided to go to a spiritual teacher named

Alora Kalama. He learnt Alora’s method of deep meditation, which led to a very high and refine dhyana of emptiness, but realized that it was of no value in getting a complete freedom from suffering.

Then he went to Udraka Ramaputra, from whom he learnt to get into the state of neither Perception nor Non-perception.

Having mastered the teachings and practices of the two great sages and Teachers of those times, Gautama realized that enlightenment during meditation (samadhi) did not lead to complete freedom and did not solve his koan of disease, old age and death.

He got even sadder when he realized that however great the Teacher was, there inevitably came the time when he had nothing more to say and he was not able to show you the way to solve your own problem.

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As Gautama was an honest man and researcher, he had to part with the teacher, his teaching and practices, the resources which he had exhausted, although it was not easy for him or the teacher himself.

Worst of all, he lost his faith in the outside sources of wisdom. He was destined to find his own way to the inner wisdom that was hidden in the depth of his soul.

He could have become a great teacher, Alora and Udraka in one, but no more than

that.

So Gautama left his teachers and experimented with extreme ascetic practices: he lived in full isolation, practiced self-torture (slept on a bed of thorns), fire meditation (meditation on bright afternoon sun with open eyes, sometimes in the middle of four fires), meditation on the moon and fasting. He tried all the practices of ancient yogic tradition, striving to calm passions, penetrate the secrets of life and solve his koan.

Finally his search for the utmost knowledge led him to extreme fasting.

His last ascetic experiment brought him to the threshold of physical death. This wandering between life and death in the state of near-unconsciousness, extreme weakness and exhaustion made him change his views on asceticism completely. He realized that if he did not stop he would simply die without reaching his goal.

Thus he formulated the principle of the golden mean, which meant that he turned away from the tradition. Great courage was needed to resolve to eat properly while being a shramana, as by doing so he immediately condemned himself to loneliness in the spiritual community of ascetics.

It happened exactly so. Gautama’s friends and disciples decided that he chose an easy life, turned their back on him and abandoned him.

We have to understand that Siddhartha did all he could to doom himself to cosmic loneliness, turning away first from the worldly life and then from the sacred one (or, at least, what was considered sacred in those times).

First, he sacrificed his material and social Ego, losing his kingdom, his clan, relatives, family, wealth, power and social recognition.

Then he sacrificed his spiritual Ego, turning away from all the ideas that were associated with spiritual life, and from all the people who belonged to the shramanic and

Vedic traditions.

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He sacrificed everything he could, his world became senseless and devalued, and at this utmost point he went to the Bodhi tree.

Was he a man when he was sitting under that tree?

No, he was not.

There was nothing human in him.

There was superhuman will, clear consciousness, free from any human feeling, and cosmic loneliness.

It is in the dance of these three forces that nirvana became possible.

And it opened.

Not to prince Siddhartha.

Not to hermit Gautama.

But to the Buddha, who awoke from the dream of human desires.

The full May moon of the year 532BC shone overhead.

It symbolized the fullness of Buddha’s life and knowledge.

I believe that he did not reach the climax of his spiritual development immediately after he sat down in the lotus position under the Bodhi tree. He put his hands on his knees in Maha mudra and closed his eyes.

First of all, he became a prey to doubts, he was haunted by vague and evident fears, vivid memories of the past, erotic fantasies, dreams and desires to indulge his weaknesses, which are always there (to lie down, to sleep, to eat, to walk around), but he did not let himself be carried away.

So they came and went away without distracting him. He contemplated the flow of his consciousness with a cold vigilance from the clear light of consciousness. At this moment Siddhartha and Gautama died inside of him. His mind gained superhuman calm and clarity.

This transpersonal clarity made his unengaged consciousness so calm, powerful and concentrated, that he gained the ability to get an insight into the fundamental mechanisms, creating and supporting the whirlwind of everyday life, samsara.

His awakened consciousness relived his countless past lives and different periods of the world existence, the eras of expansion and contraction. He saw billions and billions of living beings going through the cycles of births and deaths in accordance with the karma of

revenge and retribution. He saw the connection between actions and their consequences,

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between the moral quality of an action (karma) and its fruit (vipaka) and saw how this connection creates the desire to be reborn again and again.

Then he realized how he could uproot the cause of suffering, to eliminate “pollution”

(sensual desire, frustration, ignorance, etc.), and free himself.

He saw all the links in the chain of causal relationship and stopped the wheel of

Karma.

He realized that he was not Siddhartha or Gautama any more. He was not bound by conventions, by the social reality of everyday secular or spiritual life with its roles, status, games, rituals and connections, recollections and dreams, fantasies, plans, emotions and relationships.

Suddenly he discovered that in reality prince Siddhartha and shramana Gautama were fictional constructs, social projects. The scales fell from his eyes and he saw his true nature. It was boundless, infinite, immortal, open and unconventional.

He opened the gates of nirvana, which were outside of the Wheel of Life, outside of the duality of pain and pleasure, good and evil, space and time, light and darkness, life and death.

He saw his true nature beyond the limits of births.

Then he looked at the world of the animate and the inanimate with eyes full of mercy and decided to pass the perfect cup of wisdom on to people, gods and all living beings.

By doing this, not only he showed himself to be a great and noble man, but also proved that he was a scientist, able to gain knowledge and communicate it to others.

Thus, Gautama’s seven years spiritual search resulted in solving the koan of illness, old age and death. The conditions and circumstances which preceded nirvana were the basic constructs of the conception of reality and the ethic teaching, which was named after the father-founder Buddha.

It was extremely important that Buddha did not immediately set off to communicate the “eternal truths” to other people. Having experienced nirvana, he sat under the Bodhi tree and thought about what happened to him for seven days. I believe that the teaching about the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold path was formulated during this very meditation.

His next step was to spread and deepen his teaching.

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Buddha was a grateful pupil: when he discovered the cause of suffering and the path to liberation from it, he decided to share his knowledge with his teachers Alora Kalama and Udraka Ramaputra. But it turned out that they had already passed away.

So he went to the Deer Park by the city of Sarnath to see his five friends-ascetics. He wanted to see them not only to deliver a sermon to people with whom he went through six years of forest asceticism, but wanted to tell his closest friends that he had discovered a new path to immortality. Perhaps he went to Sarnath also because he wanted to see those who turned away from him when he needed their support most of all.

When he told them that he was not Gautama any more, that he was Buddha, he made the first step on his way back to the world of shramanic spirituality. Having delivered the sermon about the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path, he turned the wheel of Buddhist Dharma and began his return to the world of people. He left the world of cosmic loneliness and came back to social life. All five of the ascetics immediately became his followers. He found those who were ready to understand and accept his truth and his path.

Buddha developed a brilliant strategy for expansion of his teaching.

First, he established rules for admission, which were democratic and universal: men and women, hermits and laymen, representatives of all segments of population, in a word, everyone. Buddhism was for all human beings, as Buddha did not recognize caste religions and caste advantages. In his opinion, personal merits and virtues were the only true privileges that people could have.

Secondly, every year he prepared about sixty followers and sent them one by one to different parts of India, leaving by himself only some of the closest ones.

Thirdly, in spite of the general democratic character of his teaching, when Buddha preached, he was more orientated towards philosophers, hermits, Jains, Brahmanists and fire worshippers, i.e. representatives of well-developed spiritual communities, as well as wealthy and powerful people.

He visited various gurus in large spiritual brotherhoods, conversed with kings, Brahmins and Kshatriyas in palaces and all of them became his followers.

During rainy autumns he organized meetings for monks, which could be now called scientific conferences or refresher courses. These were real workshops, where participants

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could exchange experience, learn new psychotechniques and discuss burning issues of philosophy, morality, psychology and ontology of Buddhism.

Finally, when seven years after his awakening thousands of monks gathered at his retreat, he made the most brilliant move. He realized that he could not follow the guru’s tradition to communicate knowledge “from hand to hand” any more. So he delegated his responsibilities to sanghas, arguing that Buddha was in every monk, and gave them Vipassana practice as an independent and rapid way to progress from samadhi to Arhatship.

In a sense, he freed Buddhism from Buddha, though he stayed the unquestioned authority on complex theoretical and practical issues of the Dharma.

Buddha proved himself to be a consistent and impeccable scientist, able to gain new knowledge. Moreover, he managed to develop highly effective promotional strategies, because of which Buddhism became a spiritual, moral teaching and a new life philosophy.

My research supervisor, Professor Victor Vasilyevich Novikov, has always told me that a scientist has to live a long time if he wants to get recognition.

Buddha preached for forty-five years, till his dying day. He lived an extremely long life for those times. He managed to face both recognition and persecution with the skill and ease of the awakened one.

He met his death with equal dignity, as a self-actualized person. Having achieved the pure and perfect wisdom, he was ready to pass into paranirvana.

Thus prince Siddhartha of the Shakya clan showed great zeal and readiness to sacrifice everything for the sake of truth and became the awakened one, the Buddha.

Thus a mortal man experienced nirvana and got higher than Gods.

Thus a man became the God of Gods.

There is a beautiful legend about Buddha’s death. When came the time for him to pass into paranirvana, he went to Kushinagar, where he stood on a stone, facing the south.

The stone, a remembrance for future generations and an evidence of Buddha’s existence, still bears the impression of his foot. Stones with carved footprints of historical Buddha, sometimes reaching impressive sizes, are widespread in Buddhist countries. In accordance with the tradition, the imprint usually bears sacred Buddhist symbols.

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The man, who searched for the truth with such great zeal, who was ready to sacrifice the whole Universe for the sake of it, really left a trace on earth, a trace that neither people, nor Gods are able to erase...

For he was and he is beyond them.

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