Any person can attain Buddhahood. Every person is a potential Buddha. Most of us deny it; we are trained to perceive God as something outside of ourselves. And most of us enjoy denying it as we race through this insane world we have created for ourselves with its economy based on materialism and its social structure based on the wielding of power based on possession or might. What better excuse for irresponsibility than that God is over there and I'm only a poor sinner?
Buddha is a title given to Siddhartha Gautama who lived from approximately 563 to 483 BCE in India. There were Buddhas before and after Siddhartha Gautama. Buddha was unique only in that he has had the strongest influence on our culture.
As happens in any religion, many myths have been created around this man who found a solution to mankind's misery. Religion takes on a life of its own to aggrandize the source of the enlightenment and, unfortunately, usually has very little to do with the process of enlightenment itself. To attract the average Joe (or Jo) to the religion and then to keep him in line, usually through some threat of eternal damnation, or, in the case of Buddhism, eternal recycling through a life which most people find close to unbearable (samsara), this marketing scheme loses sight of the common foundations that lie at the core of most religions and becomes a Frankenstein monster of its own creation. One must usually scratch very deeply through layers of guilt-inducement, denial, mythos, elitism, and cash procurement to catch a faint gleam of these universal Truths usually reserved, not for the clergy whose job it is for the most part to propagate the myth, but for the Mystics of the religion. Religious wars are created by the Fundamentalists of any religion who reside in the convoluted trappings of that religion and deny the root sense of love of the commonality of mankind that lies at the core of their religion.
The Chinese Taoist based Buddhism, Ch'an (Zen in Japan) has found favor with me in that it seems to be the most stripped down of the religions. There is plenty written about it but in the purer aspects of it, it relies on individual growth based on personal experience rather than on dogmatic stricture. We all know the Truth but we must recognize the Truth within ourselves and become One with the Truth. Enlightenment, satori, comes when we allow the Truth to come within us and push all of the lies that we love to cling to out of ourselves. It is something we must let happen for even in seeking it, we push it away by separating it from ourselves.
As I have found with most things Oriental, it is deceptively simple on the surface but incredibly complex. That is, it's very easy to do, but allowing it to happen is extremely difficult.
On the question of whether Buddha is considered God, there is an interesting expression which arises. The expression is, "Kill the Buddha." What this means is that if you are trying to imitate the Buddha then you are not being true to your own being and therefore, failing in your attempt at enlightenment. It does not presume that you are equal to or more important than the Buddha or that your ego is the most important entity on the face of the Earth. It means that you are a unique individual with your own set of problems and will therefore have your own Path to the Godhead. Kill the image of Buddha within your mind and allow yourself to blossom forth.
Kill the Buddha? In the West we only kill and abuse those whose lives most reflect the teachings of the one we refer to as our Savior.
Perhaps Buddha said it best. When asked if he was God, he replied, "No." He was then asked, "Then what are you?" to which he responded, "Awake!" |
