2,500 years ago,nestled in a fertile valley along the border between India and Nepal,a child was born who was to become the Buddha.
The stories say that before his birth,his mother, the queen of s small India kindom had a dream.A beautiful white elephant offered the queen a lotus flower,and then entered the side of her body.
When sages were asked to interpret the dream,they predicted the queen would give birth to a son destined to become either a great ruler or a holy man.One day, they said, he would either conquer the world or become an enlightened being -- the Buddha.
People like stories. It is one of the ways we learn.The story of the Buddha's life is an archetypal journey,but it is a means to an end. It is not an end.
Within 10 months, as a tree lowered a branch to support her,a baby boy was born, emerging from her side.
7 days later, the queen died.The world is filled with pain and sorrow.The Buddha would one day teach.But I have found a serenity, he told his followers,that you can find, too.
Everybody understands suffering.It is something that we all share with everybody else.It's at once utterly intimate and utterly shared.
So Buddha says,
That's a place to begin. That's where we begin.No matter what your circumstances,you will end up losing everything you love.You will end up aging, you will end up ill,And the problem is that we need to figure out.How to make that all be all right .
What he actually said was that life is blissful.There's joy everywhere, only we're closed off to it.His teachings were actually about opening up the joyful or blissful nature of reality.But the bliss and the joy is in the transitoriness.
The Buddha can shine out from the eyes of anybody.Inside the buffeting of an ordinary human life.At any moment,what the Buddha found, we can find.
In southern Nepal, at the foot of the Himalayas,is one of world's holiest places, Lumbini.
Where, according to the sacred tales, the Buddha was born
Today Buddhist pilgrims from all over the world,make their way here to be in the presence of the sage.
Whose life story is inseparable from centuries of anecdotes and legends.There are countless stories of the Buddha.Each tradition, each culture, each time period has their own stories.
We have lots of visual narratives and artwork from all over Buddhist Asia.
The first biography, say, of the Buddha ,really, we don't see that before about 500 years after his death.For the first few centuries, Buddhist narrative was oral.Historically, it is based on something certainly that happened.There must have been someone who corresponded with Gautama Buddha.But we don't know.We don't know how much of it is pure fairy tale.And how much of it is historic fact.But it doesn't matter.It touches something that we all basically know.The relevance of it is in the message of the story,the promise of the story,like any good story, it has a lot to teach.
So the story of his life then is a beautiful way of telling the teaching.He who sees me sees the teaching, the Buddha said.And he who sees the teaching sees me.
Born some 500 years before the birth of Jesusm,the Buddha would grow to manhood in a town vanished long ago.For nearly 3 decades, he would see nothing of the world beyond.
