Published by First, in order to understand Buddhism, you need to know the facts. It was never intended to be a religion, though it acquired religious trappings. It goes deeper than loving everyone, and meditating all day is not a requirement. No Buddha was not really a fat man with a sack of coins.
Buddhism is a philosophy that originated in India with a prince named Siddhartha Gautama. The story goes that his father had wise men come to the palace to give a reading of the boy’s fate at his birth. Three of the four wise men said that he would be a great and powerful king, the fourth said that he would either be this king or a Buddha. Buddha was really a title that meant ‘enlightened one’, but we think of Siddhartha as The Buddha, because he is historically, the first person to really ‘preach’ the tenants. Siddhartha’s father, feared that his son would renounce his throne, and so tried to keep him in lavishly comfortable seclusion, where nothing but the best and most beautiful would surround him. No one was allowed to be sick around him, the aged were kept from him, and for years he knew nothing of the nature of death or suffering. This all changed one day as he was moving from one palace to another with the change of the seasons, and though the villages along the way had been cleared, saw sickness, poverty, suffering, and death. Learning of these things, he felt that his lavish, wealthy, and pampered life was noticeably empty.
Buddha left his palace and renounced his throne in order to find the mysterious quality that would fill the void in his life. He studied with mystics, Sufis, and stoics. He fasted, and scourged himself, and went without. But this was not the answer. He realized that all he was doing was hurting himself, and that the pain and discomfort was not an answer, but a substitute for what he was seeking. He, in essence, was merely distracting himself from the world, not understanding it. So, he went to a place that was known as The Deer Park and sat beneath a bodhi tree, swearing he would not move until he found the truth. Forty-nine days later he achieved the most profound understanding, enlightenment.
Buddha walked the lands of India, converting any who willingly came to hear his words, called the Dharma or law, and trying to get others to understand what he had learned. The most basic tenant of Buddhism, called Buddha Dharma by practitioners, is this: There is suffering in this world. This suffering comes from our attachments to the things we perceive to be real. Our attachments to these things lead us to want more, to place undue importance on them, and to believe that they are all important. This suffering keeps us grounded here, in the never-ending cycle of birth and death, and can only be broken by following the Dharma and the Eight Fold Noble Path.
Buddha walked the Gangetic Plain for around forty five years preaching to kings and killers alike. He ate but one meal a day, before noon, as he said that he would take nothing that was not freely given to him, including food. In fact, when in the woods or fields, he would not even pick fruit off of the tree, but instead would only eat what had already fallen to the ground. Since the sangha, the brotherhood of monks in Buddhism, were dependent upon the generosity of the lay people for their food, Buddha placed the one meal a day restriction on them as a way of avoiding overtaxing the people. He preached that we should realize that objects and things of worth are only things of worth in this life, and only if we make it so ourselves. He tried to show others that possessions and wealth were hollow things, that compassion and love were everlasting. But, at the age of 80, Gautama Buddha passed from the world after eating a meal offered to him, containing poisonous mushrooms. The sangha which he had formed, fractured into many different schools, and the dharma slowly started to become a religion instead of remaining a pure ideal.
