Siddhartha Gautama’s Biography
During his journey, he was so overwhelmed by his findings that he left everything he had at the age of 29 and went to live an ascetic life. This lasted for six years. He followed all practices that this lifestyle demanded and eventually gained five followers who also followed the ascetic life. He quested for answers to life’s questions so much so that when he could not find them through his studying and meditation of religious teachings, he would starve himself and refuse water.
At one point though, he realized that this lifestyle was not letting him become a spiritually free man and so he left the ascetic ways, including leaving his followers, and then preached about living a balanced life instead of having extremes. This path he named the Middle Way. He established the Sangha, the society of monks, and dismissed barriers such as class, race, sex, and previous background because he believed that the desire for enlightenment was more important. For the next 80 years of his life, he traveled and preached his teachings, the Dharma, with his disciples in an effort to help others achieve this enlightenment also. His teachings included practices that were also a part of the Sramana movement that was prevalent in his region during the Mahajanapada era which was mainly ruled by forms of monarchies. He died in 300 BCE.
Buddha’s Teachings
The Dhammapada, originally incorporated in the sacred text of the Pali Tipitaka, is a widely known collection of verses said by the Buddha. It expresses Buddha’s teachings that inspires qualities like humility and reflection that is meant to improve the quality of life.
The three sayings I chose from the Dhammapada are “Better than a thousand hollow words is one word that brings peace”, “You are what you think. All that you are arises from your thoughts. With your thoughts you make your world”, and “The one who keeps company with fools will be sorry for a long time. It’s painful to live with fools, like being always with an enemy”.
These sayings are universal since they all can be used to gain a happier, more fulfilling life by anyone in any society. All humans have a desire for a happy and successful life and the Buddha really emphasized in his sayings that all have the power within themselves to obtain that. I think these verses were strange and hard to follow for some in his time because of how they went totally against what people have learned and known so far in their lives. Their morals reflected that better is the acting person and his/her character rather than the correctness of the action and consequences. Buddha taught, as seen in the first quote, that all words or actions are meaningless if they aren’t correct or have meaning to them. People during those ages really only focused on the question “what is the good life?” instead of “what should I/one do?” and the Buddha started asking that question, which paved the way for our modern thinking of morals. This is seen in the two other quotes where he focuses his questions on self, rather than a general picture of life. The values that seem to be present in these three quotes are that firstly, to make your actions and words have importance or value, that you have the ability and power to fix anything in your life through positive thinking, and lastly that bad association can ruin a good person and their good qualities.
I definitely think that those three sayings could lead to a good, happy life because they are showing the importance of what a person can do to change their life and their circumstances. Life is all about perspective, and as shown in the second quote, if you think negative about yourself or your life, you will perceive yourself and your life in a bad light. If you change that way of thinking, you change your quality of life. The same goes with the last quote; being around negativity will make you negative.
