I'm reading The Life of the Buddha edited from the Pali Canon by Nanamoli. (I didn't know that Nanamoli was 54 when he died. He only had 11 years to learn and create his books.)
Nanamoli mentioned an Italian friar I'd never heard of Filippo Desideri or Ippolito Desideri, who went to Tibet in 1712. This may be the first exposure to Buddhism by a European but he doesn't publish his book in his lifetime. He wrote books to try to convert them to Christianity. Back in Italy there was all kinds of sectarian conflict. Part of that got his report of his findings not published. I bet there are some pretty good stories in there.
Getting into the text of The Life of the Buddha, I find it amazing that the Buddha went to the two best teachers and learned everything they knew and was offered to take over, and in the second case to be the leader. The first one I think he realized the nothingness of everything, and with the second it seems like he went into the formless dhyanas, of neither perception nor non-perception. But I don't know.
The Buddha talks of subduing fear and dread while being in groves (not the forest or jungle). What I think this points to is a systematic increasing of difficulty, pushing himself harder and harder, but also understanding that certain tasks were necessary to get to the place to develop insight. This is not all he has to subdue.
He has 3 similes, and the first is that trying to make a fire with wet wood won't work. He thinks bodily and mentally yearn for sensual desire will lead to pain when striving in the spiritual life. Even if you withdraw one, and still have mental desire for sensual desire, you can't start a fire with a wet stick. It is only when you withdraw bodily and mental urges for sensual desire can you reach the higher levels of spirituality. There's a lot of talk of the guarding of the gates of the sense, and I find it interesting that you have to conquer desire before you become enlightened--I thought that was a result. But I think the point is that there is a gradual mastering before you can go to a higher level.
You can't subdue the mind with the mind, nor the body with the body. He tried to squash his mind in his jaws, he tried to not breath. These early attempts left him exhausted. Finding the energy didn't work with these methods. He sits by a fire and takes great heat. Then he tried not to eat. He became deathly ill starving himself, his hair fell out, he became emaciated, he probably got nutritional diseases like rickets, beriberi and scurvy. The search had to continue.
He is near the Lilajan River (Wikipedia), what the text says the Neranjara river (photo). Namuci comes to him. Namuci is called Rakshasa on Wikipedia, and he's an asura, or a mythical deity. Also Mara is there.
My feeling is it's another line of thinking, perhaps the commonsensical voice with Namuci. He says to live. Mara tells him to push on. Thus Mara can also be a voice of unhelpful asceticism. He does a kind of rope a dope of psycho babble from the times, to try to convince him to go on. Here we come on an interesting word, "accidy" which is an archaic word for torpor. He speaks of all these virtues with military metaphors Siddhartha would have understood, and suggests it is a virtue to die in battle. He's never met Falstaff.
That is when he thinks of the dhyana meditation he had with his father was doing a ceremonial first ploughing of a field, and he was sitting under a tree meditating. He berates himself for avoiding pleasure altogether. The pleasure of meditation is OK! He ate some boiled rice and bread. His 5 disciples of asceticism are disgusted and leave him. This is the 3rd spiritual community that he leaves or is rejected by. This is the first one that rejects him!
Once he finds enlightenment he will find them and they will overcome their disgust at him for abandoning asceticism and listen to him. Perhaps because of what they saw him do before he tried another path. But he didn't go off and tell them what he was up to. He just follow the thought that meditation was the path. But now he also was pretty good at not eating, so in a way I bet eating after not eating a lot, he felt health surging back into his body. He pushed himself to the brink of death, and it was there that he knew the limit. He could go that far this way. What I'm seeing is someone who did a lot of experimentation, trial and error. But there was an overriding idea that there was something there past what he could see--that is what amazes me.
Well, that's just in the first chapter and a little into the second one, with my thoughts, read the book it's pretty awesome.
Nanamoli mentioned an Italian friar I'd never heard of Filippo Desideri or Ippolito Desideri, who went to Tibet in 1712. This may be the first exposure to Buddhism by a European but he doesn't publish his book in his lifetime. He wrote books to try to convert them to Christianity. Back in Italy there was all kinds of sectarian conflict. Part of that got his report of his findings not published. I bet there are some pretty good stories in there.
Getting into the text of The Life of the Buddha, I find it amazing that the Buddha went to the two best teachers and learned everything they knew and was offered to take over, and in the second case to be the leader. The first one I think he realized the nothingness of everything, and with the second it seems like he went into the formless dhyanas, of neither perception nor non-perception. But I don't know.
The Buddha talks of subduing fear and dread while being in groves (not the forest or jungle). What I think this points to is a systematic increasing of difficulty, pushing himself harder and harder, but also understanding that certain tasks were necessary to get to the place to develop insight. This is not all he has to subdue.
He has 3 similes, and the first is that trying to make a fire with wet wood won't work. He thinks bodily and mentally yearn for sensual desire will lead to pain when striving in the spiritual life. Even if you withdraw one, and still have mental desire for sensual desire, you can't start a fire with a wet stick. It is only when you withdraw bodily and mental urges for sensual desire can you reach the higher levels of spirituality. There's a lot of talk of the guarding of the gates of the sense, and I find it interesting that you have to conquer desire before you become enlightened--I thought that was a result. But I think the point is that there is a gradual mastering before you can go to a higher level.
You can't subdue the mind with the mind, nor the body with the body. He tried to squash his mind in his jaws, he tried to not breath. These early attempts left him exhausted. Finding the energy didn't work with these methods. He sits by a fire and takes great heat. Then he tried not to eat. He became deathly ill starving himself, his hair fell out, he became emaciated, he probably got nutritional diseases like rickets, beriberi and scurvy. The search had to continue.
He is near the Lilajan River (Wikipedia), what the text says the Neranjara river (photo). Namuci comes to him. Namuci is called Rakshasa on Wikipedia, and he's an asura, or a mythical deity. Also Mara is there.
My feeling is it's another line of thinking, perhaps the commonsensical voice with Namuci. He says to live. Mara tells him to push on. Thus Mara can also be a voice of unhelpful asceticism. He does a kind of rope a dope of psycho babble from the times, to try to convince him to go on. Here we come on an interesting word, "accidy" which is an archaic word for torpor. He speaks of all these virtues with military metaphors Siddhartha would have understood, and suggests it is a virtue to die in battle. He's never met Falstaff.
That is when he thinks of the dhyana meditation he had with his father was doing a ceremonial first ploughing of a field, and he was sitting under a tree meditating. He berates himself for avoiding pleasure altogether. The pleasure of meditation is OK! He ate some boiled rice and bread. His 5 disciples of asceticism are disgusted and leave him. This is the 3rd spiritual community that he leaves or is rejected by. This is the first one that rejects him!
Once he finds enlightenment he will find them and they will overcome their disgust at him for abandoning asceticism and listen to him. Perhaps because of what they saw him do before he tried another path. But he didn't go off and tell them what he was up to. He just follow the thought that meditation was the path. But now he also was pretty good at not eating, so in a way I bet eating after not eating a lot, he felt health surging back into his body. He pushed himself to the brink of death, and it was there that he knew the limit. He could go that far this way. What I'm seeing is someone who did a lot of experimentation, trial and error. But there was an overriding idea that there was something there past what he could see--that is what amazes me.
Well, that's just in the first chapter and a little into the second one, with my thoughts, read the book it's pretty awesome.
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