Buddha

Buddha, the name or rather the title of the founder of the religious system called Buddhism. According to the Buddhist books, Siddhartha, the son of an Indian prince, in the fifth century B.C., had a tendency to a life of asceticism. His father, with a view to weaning him from such an untoward fate, married him early and surrounded him with pleasure and luxury. The prince, finding this life insufficient to satisfy the longings of his soul, escaped, and after trying Brahminism with indifferent satisfaction, he gave himself up to six years' asceticism. This too proved to be vanity and vexation, and finally he found in contemplation and abstraction the true counsel of perfection and realised in his own person that this divine "contemplation teaches that existence with all its evils comes from ignorance, and that it is possible to emerge from ignorance and existence, and so reach the perfect state. This knowledge he arrived at as he sat in the seat of intelligence beneath the Bo-tree, or tree of intelligence, and it is in commemoration of this fact that he is represented in his images in a position of cross-legged contemplation. This same Bo-tree was found 1200 years after Buddha's death and after his tenets had begun to lose sway in India, by a Chinese pilgrim, and its place is supposed to be marked near Lava in Bengal by some ruins, especially of a temple, in the courtyard of which is a tree said to be the descendant of the original tree of intelligence.

The name Buddha is from a root meaning "to awake," and seems to signify "the enfranchised one - the man set free from ignorance and existence." He was also called by his family name of Sakya, and by his tribal name of Gautama, sometimes Gautama the Ascetic. Of course, Buddha, like most other half-traditional, half-historical characters, has been credited with being a solar myth, but there seems little reason for doubting his existence. Assuming him to have existed, he taught in Benares, or "turned the wheel," as was said by a confusion of the literal with the secondary meaning of the word for "monarch," and from this "wheel" is thought to come the practice of employing the praying wheel in the: Buddhist monasteries of Thibet. He is thought to have travelled through North India, and to have taught the people for about 40 years, dying at Oude at the age of eighty, and being burnt, and finally passing into his already realised Nirwana.