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Why Gautama became an itinerant
beggar
Buddhist
legend has it that Gautama, who later claimed to have been fully awakened,
was an only son, spoilt rotten by doting parents. He was indolent and given
to daydreaming. Having led a life
of unrestricted hedonism he eventually married and had a child. Then, at 30,
he encountered, indeed was sucked into the black hole of death (and from
which he never escaped). Most people encounter death at that age, and,
considering the whole picture (i.e. the awesome miracle of life), shrug off
(indeed, deny) the experience. But not
Gautama. Wholly unprepared, he was severely traumatised and had a nervous
breakdown, and from which he never recovered. Without a
goodbye, without showing any remorse, indeed any heart feeling (he later
dissociated completely from his feelings), he dumped his wife and child, and
his parents, and dropped out to become an itinerant beggar. In other words,
he became, like so many beggars one sees sleeping rough in cardboard boxes, a
(social) loser. To the
traumatised Gautama, death made life, that is to say, the strivings of life,
vain, indeed absurd. Moreover, the attachment to life, so fleeting and
imperfect, and which now meant to him attachment to death, for life was death
in the making, resulted in suffering (Pali: dukkha). The solution
he found was simple, namely: disown life, i.e. dissociate from the surface appearance (i.e. the persona) that defines real-time existence. In short, he (the would
become perfect escapist) reasoned: “The real-time ‘I’ experienced by me is
not my true ‘I’, consequently must be discarded”. In short, ‘dump life and
which is death, and recover deathlessness!’ So how did
Gautama, the loser, become the Tathagata, the winner? He simply
became the best (i.e. most perfect) loser of all time. And he achieved the
goal of being the very best by making everyone aware that they were ‘death
(Pali: mata = mara) getting ready to happen’. In short he persuaded
(indeed enchanted) his followers to believe that what they thought and
experienced as true was actually false (because subject to death), that,
therefore, their lives were absurd and that they too were losers because they
would lose (and suffer) in the end. Note: if you
substitute ‘sin’ for ‘loss or failure’ (i.e. ‘loser’) (Greek: hamartia)
you find pre-empted St Augustine’s Original Sin theory, first suggested by
Paul (who probably got it from Buddhists). Quite
obviously, Gautama had a point, true with absolute certainty in the long run,
often true under special circumstances, but overall wholly absurd (as his
Vedanta competitors tried, in vain, to make clear with the equation atman
= brahman = praja-pati). For, the
Tathagata’s point of view, i.e. his dhamma, represented the almost perfect
rationale of the wandering beggar, of the parasitic homeless loser incapable
of coping with life (and its inevitable decline towards death). And that
dhamma is still irresistible to loser who choose to drop out. Note: Round
about 500 B.C., dropping out to become an itinerant wisdom teacher became
fashionable (as it would in ancient Greece). In India, the fashion eventually
culminated in the jivan mukta (i.e. ‘released while still alive’) ideal.
Individuals at the top end of the society were expected to drop out
voluntarily to seek release (i.e. from the horrors of samsara, i.e. from the
endless return of death), at the latest (i.e. in the 3rd & 4th
stages) after they had performed their duty to family and society. The 8 characteristics of life = death
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