What
Buddhists Believe
Venerable K. Sri Dhammananda Maha Thera
---o0o---
Was Buddha
an Incarnation of God?
Never had the Buddha claimed that He
was the son or a messenger of God.
The
Buddha was a unique human being who was self-Enlightened. He had no one
whom He could regard as His teacher. Through His own efforts, He practised
to perfection the ten supreme qualities of generosity, discipline,
renunciation, wisdom, energy, endurance, truthfulness, determination,
goodwill and equanimity. Through His mental purification, He opened the
doors to all knowledge. He knew all things to be known, cultivated all
things to be cultivated, and destroyed all things to be destroyed. Indeed,
no other religious teacher was comparable to Him in terms of cultivation
and attainment.
So special was
He and so electrifying His message, that many people asked Him 'What(not
so much as Who) He was'. Questions on 'Who He was' would be with respect
to His name, origin, ancestry, etc., while 'What He was' referred to the
order of beings to which He belonged. So 'godly and inspiring was He that
even during His time, there were numerous attempts of others to turn Him
into a god or a reincarnation of god. Never did He agree to be regarded as
such. In the Anguttara Nikaya, He said: 'I am not indeed a deva,
nor a gandharva, nor a yaksa, nor a manusya. Know ye that I am the
Buddha.' After Enlightenment, the Buddha could no longer be classified
even as a 'manusya' or an ordinary human being. He belonged to the Buddha
Wangsa, special race or species of enlightened beings, all of whom are
Buddhas.
Buddhas appear in this
world from time to time. But some people have the mistaken idea that it is
the same Buddha who is reincarnated or appears in the world over and over
again. Actually, they are not the same person, otherwise there is no scope
for others to attain Buddhahood. Buddhists believe that anyone can become
a Buddha if he develops his qualities to perfection and is able to remove
his ignorance completely through his own efforts. After Enlightenment, all
Buddhas are similar in their attainment and experience of Nibbana.
In India, the followers of
many orthodox religious groups tried to condemn the Buddha because of His
liberal teaching which revolutionized the Indian society. Many regarded
Him as an enemy when increasing numbers of intellectuals as well as people
from all ranks of society took up the religion. When they failed in their
attempt to destroy Him, they adopted the reverse strategy of introducing
Him as a reincarnation of one of their gods. This way they could absorb
Buddhism into their religion. To a certain extent, this strategy worked in
India since it had, through the centuries, contributed to the decay and
the subsequent uprooting of Buddhism from the land of its origin.
Even today there are
certain religionists who try to absorb the Buddha into their beliefs as a
way of gaining converts among Buddhists. Their basis for doing so is by
claiming that the Buddha Himself had predicted that another Buddha would
appear in this world, and that the latest Buddha will become even more
popular. One group named a religious teacher who lived 600 years after
Gautama the Buddha as the latest Buddha. Another group said that the next
Buddha had already arrived in Japan in the 13th century. Yet
another group believed that their founder came from the lineage of great
teachers (like Gautama and Jesus) and that founder was the latest Buddha.
These groups advised Buddhists to give up their old Buddha and follow the
so-called new Buddha. While it is good to see them giving the Buddha the
same status as their own religious teachers, we feel that these attempts
to absorb Buddhists into another faith by misrepresenting the truth are in
extreme bad taste.
Those who claim that the
new Buddha had already arrived are obviously misrepresenting what the
Buddha had said. Although the Buddha predicted the coming of the next
Buddha, He mentioned some conditions which had to be met before this can
be possible. It is the nature of Buddhahood that the next Buddha will not
appear as the dispensation of the current Buddha still exits. He will
appear only when the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path have been
completely forgotten. The people living then must be properly guided in
order to understand the same Truth taught by the previous Buddhas. We are
still living within the dispensation of Gautama the Buddha. Although the
moral conduct of the people has, with very few exceptions, deteriorated,
the future Buddha would only appear at some incalculable period when the
Path to Nibbana is completely lost to mankind and when people are ready to
receive Him.
-ooOoo-
Previous
page Contents
Next
page
---o0o---
Source: Buddhist
Study and Practice Group, http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/Clubs/buddhism/
---o0o---
Layout: Chan Duc - Nguyen Thao
Update : 01-11-2002
