The Buddhist Path to Enlightenment (study)
by Dr Kala Acharya | 2016 | 118,883 words
This page relates ‘Introduction’ of the study on the Buddhist path to enlightenment. The Buddha was born in the Lumbini grove near the present-day border of India and Nepal in the 6th century B.C. He had achieved enlightenment at the age of thirty–five under the ‘Bodhi-tree’ at Buddha-Gaya. This study investigates the teachings after his Enlightenment which the Buddha decided to teach ‘out of compassion for beings’.
Introduction
Before any religion was up-in-coming in the world what did the people believe? Initially, the thing what we have to do is that to take a glance in the emergence of religions. Rivers, trees and mountains were revered and taken refuge. In gradual improvement, people personified elements of nature and worshipped them with faith, sometimes also because they were afraid of them. As they believed, they worshipped and paid respect to them. They trusted that prayer offered to them would result in fulfilling their desires.
All human beings want to be happy and seek happiness. Man’s search for happiness is going on from age to age but it can never be found in the way it is sought in merely adjusting the conditions of the external world and ignoring the internal world of mind. Social, economic, legal and political reforms, however well-intentioned and well-calculated they might have been, have never brought complete and genuine happiness to man. Why? When one set of unsatisfactory conditions that have appeared has been eliminated, another rears its head, and when that is eliminated yet another appears. This appearance and re-appearance, this rise and fall is of the essence of all mundane things and conditions. There can never be any mass production of true happiness. It is something personal and individual. It comes from within and not from without. It is not so much the external world that one has to explore in the search for happiness as the internal world of mind.
Nowadays many religions have appeared in the world. Man must choose a rational and meaningful religion according to his conviction without depending on mere beliefs, traditions, customs, and theories. No one has right to force him to accept any religion. No one should exploit poverty, illiteracy or arouse human emotional feelings to induce him to accept a religion. Religion should be a free choice. Man should be free to choose his own religion according to his liking and intellectual capacity. All religions aim at peace. Buddhism is a preeminent religion.