Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute evening talk, Ven Margaret McAndrew traces Buddhism’s origins through Buddha’s life story—his sheltered birth as Prince Siddhartha, his encounters with suffering, his departure from the palace, his rejection of asceticism and meditative absorption, and his enlightenment at thirty-two under the Bodhi Tree. She emphasizes how his teachings were revolutionary within their Hindu context: the rejection of caste distinctions, the centering of ethics on reason and non-harm rather than ritual purity, the emphasis on inner moral development. McAndrew then traces Buddhism’s spread under King Ashoka around 255 BC, including his support for monks and nuns who carried the teachings to Sri Lanka and beyond, showing a pattern that would persist: as Buddhism moved to new places, external forms adapted but essential teachings endured. She concludes by examining how Buddhist morality, rooted in human volition rather than divine decree, offered a fundamentally different worldview.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 55 BH O B 1998 10 09.mp3
UUID: aefeb77b-31d4-4f54-a43f-b4774c62a088
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-10-09
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.3 minutes
Words: ~5,311
So it’s really more of a history than a teaching, I suppose, but we can learn a lot from the history, particularly from the story of Buddha’s life and from the way Buddhism has spread and the events that took place in history. So we set our motivation anyway, thinking that we’re here to gain benefit not just for ourselves, not just thinking of our own happiness, but wanting to gain knowledge that will enable us to eventually reach the state of enlightenment and be able to bring about the happiness of others. Anyway, I’m not a historian, but the story of Buddhism is really an incredibly big story, and we can’t really go through a lot about it anyway in one session, but it’s a huge subject. So I just thought we could go quickly through some of the major events and finish up with the FPMT. So you can see how there’s been a pattern emerging of the way Buddhism has been transmitted from one culture to another, but the essence of Buddha’s teachings have remained a vital force, even though the externals have been changing in this process.
As Buddhism goes from one culture to another sometimes the external features of Buddhism can look very very different but you find that the same essential things are still happening at the core of the practice. Buddhism came into existence in the world with the Buddha’s enlightenment. The broad details that we know about well, we know already you will all be pretty well informed, or most of you will be pretty well informed about Buddha’s life already, and so I thought it would be enough to just fill in the broad details. He was born round about five sixty BC. And he, as you know, he was born as the son of a king.
At that time in this area there were many small kingdoms in the northeastern part of India and actually Buddha was born in what’s nowadays part of Nepal. In fact, when I visited there a few years ago it was a very isolated little spot miles away from anywhere but I believe that it’s now been made into something of a tourist place or perhaps a pilgrimage place would be a better expression. But the Indian Government is very aware of the number of Buddhist pilgrims that are likely to come to some of these places if it’s made more accessible, so they’re putting roads and so on. So I expect to find that it would be a bit more built up now. This place was where his father at that time was the king and expected, of course, that his son was going to follow after him.
And his son, Siddhartha, was already predicted to be likely to give up the palace and take up the wandering life if he at all going to make contact with religious things, religious thoughts. So his father was very keen that he should have an ordinary virtuous life but that he shouldn’t really be drawn into any sort of intensive religious practice because of his fear that his son would take up the wandering life and not become king after him. And of course that was what happened. So there’s many stories from Buddha’s life and these often seem to be perhaps having a sort of a legendary appearance. There’s certainly a lot of meaning to events of a great being’s life like Buddha.
So, the point of view of the Mahāyāna teachings, he was actually enlightened before that lifetime. But it’s said that he was actually enlightened in the Pure Land and then showed the aspect of coming and being born and having to go through the events of his life, the events of his early life, and then showed the aspect of attaining enlightenment, whereas the Theravadins literally accepted he wasn’t enlightened until he sat down under the Bodhi Tree and attained enlightenment during his meditation under the Bodhi Tree. So, there’s a number of events from his life. The first one is his descending from Tuśita Heaven, the Pure Land, where he spent his previous life as a great bodhisattva. If you take the literal explanation from the sutras.
At that stage his mother had a vision of a white elephant with six tusks entering her womb and there were other wonderful signs about his birth and had said that when he was born he took seven steps in each of the four directions and made a proclamation that he’d come to end the sufferings of the world, which and also he was supposed to have been born from his mother’s side and not in the usual way. So there’s a number of these stories which are impossible to confirm historically, but which are set out in the scriptures. And then we get on to events of his life which are a bit more routine. For instance, that he studied, well there are stories about his games with his playmates and so on, and also that he had to study and that he was a brilliant student and learned all that his teachers could teach him in a very short time. And then as a young man his father surrounded him.
His father was afraid that he might become drawn to what’s religious life if he was too aware of suffering, he surrounded him with all sorts of enjoyments and gave him palaces of his own to live in. I suppose they would have been like buildings within the compound of his father’s palace. He had this very luxurious sort of lifestyle and enjoyments and so on, entertainment. And he was married to a beautiful princess who eventually gave birth to a son. And for a while it seemed to be working but eventually the force that was pulling him towards working for others began to manifest and he left the palace on several expeditions.
And it’s explained that on these expeditions he saw various sights, particularly the sight of an old man, a sick man, and a dead person, a corpse, and that these sights caused him to become aware of the unsatisfactoriness of human life and the sufferings of the world. From that stage on he could never be contended in the palace and began to think of leaving. Of course his father was very disturbed at this and gave instructions for the gates to be locked up so that he couldn’t go out unattended and so on. So it’s said that he had this fantastic horse and that he actually jumped his horse over the palace gates which were very high and escaped the palace that way and followed the Indian tradition of going off into the jungle and taking off his rich clothes and ornaments. He cut his hair very, very short and went off to seek teachers who could show him what could be learned about the spiritual side of life.
And so he went to two great teachers at his time and they found him to be a very remarkable student. He very quickly learned all they had to teach. The first teacher was able to teach him a very advanced degree of meditative absorption. So at this time there was a strong interest among the spiritual people, among the religious people, in finding liberation from suffering. It wasn’t Buddha who had this thought first.
There were other teachers who claimed to be able to show liberation. First teacher was able to teach Buddha how to attain a very deep meditative trance, which was his teaching of liberation. Buddha or Siddhartha wasn’t satisfied with that He actually had more insight than the teacher could see that this wasn’t a final solution, that in actual fact rebirth would still occur, that after practicing this kind absorption, the person would be born in a realm which is described as being the realm of one of the worldly gods, where they would remain in this absorption for a long, long time in the future life, but they would eventually be reborn again into a more suffering sort of life form. So it didn’t lead to a cessation of this process of being born again and again and encountering suffering again and again. It was like a sort of holiday where you would have a nice life, a very peaceful life, very blissful meditation all the time, but that would come to an end.
And so he went to another teacher and this teacher taught him an even further degree of absorption. But the same thing happened that Siddhartha saw that this wasn’t a final end to suffering. It was just a particularly nice rebirth state. It just led to a particularly nice rebirth state that it wouldn’t These states would last for such a long time that the limited psychic powers of others saw them as being everlasting but they were not everlasting and they were really just a waste of time because they were just a diversion from the real job. So then he tried ascetic practices and this is a very strong strain in Indian religion that the body is the thing that keeps us from liberation, that the mind is pure spirit and that the body is something that drags our mind down and that the way to overcome this is to engage in very severe ascetic practices so that the body’s influence is overcome and that the mind is set free.
So Buddha or Siddhartha I should call him at this stage, or the Bodhisattva, engaged in these very severe ascetic practices and he finally came to the conclusion that not only was this not the way to liberation but it weakened the body so that it was impossible to actually engage in deeper meditation which he was sure was the actual route to liberation. And particularly a kind of meditation which he had spontaneously fallen into during his youth before he left the palace. At one stage he had gone out into the countryside and spontaneously fallen into a particular kind of meditation which he felt was leading him more in the right direction than any of his teachers or any of these traditional practices seemed to be taking him. And so he decided then to follow his own instincts and he started off by eating solid foods again, eating well, which disgusted the friends who were, or the colleagues who were practicing ascetic practices with him, who had regarded him as the foremost among them, the most likely to achieve the breakthrough they were all looking for and they saw him as just being a dropout, taking the easy way.
And so they just decided not to have anything more to do with him and he wandered off and eventually came to the place which is now called Bodh Gaya. Those days, nowadays it’s like a desert. There’s lots of farmland there but it’s pretty of bare and not many trees apart from the sugar palms that the farmers planted. But in those days it was jungle and there was a river. Well, river’s still there.
So he found a place there where there was a big tree growing. He sat under that tree and meditated through the night. By daybreak he’d seen, he had gained all the insights that he was searching for. He actually gained liberation, he gained the total cessation of all the different factors that bind us in Samsāra, that keep us going from rebirth to rebirth and suffering. And he actually attained a state of omniscience and full enlightenment which is the a state of perfect knowledge, perfect wisdom.
So Well, it is taken literally in Buddha’s case because from the Mahāyāna point of view he was actually already enlightened. Actually from the Mahāyāna point of view it really isn’t taken literally because it’s taken as being a show. That he had already attained his enlightenment previous lifetimes in this Pure Land, Akanishta. And then he appeared on Earth to show this path to others at a time when the karma of the beings, the readiness of the beings at that time was suitable for the path to be accepted by them. So, from the other point of view, the Sūtra view point, is that this is actually meant to be taken literally and there’s nothing remarkable in that really because you think that he actually had gone through all those previous lifetimes of preparing.
And all the scriptures except that he had gone through these various lives and that he had completed the accumulation of merit and wisdom and had been a very very high bodhisattva in Tuśita before his descent to this world. It’s explained in terms of descent because Tuśita is one of the God worlds which is traditionally regarded as being literally higher than the human world somewhere up on Mount Meru. Whereas from our point of view we could just look at it as being a different realm of existence, a different perhaps vibrational level, something like that. So, you can say that an ordinary person couldn’t start off from scratch not having done any practice before and attain enlightenment in that short period of time. But with Buddha, that period of meditation, even if you don’t accept the Mahāyāna explanation, if you look at it from the literal viewpoint, he was in such a state of readiness that it only required that sort of happening on the right meditation and entering into that deep meditation to bring all these insights.
So Then after that, his life mainly consisted of showing the teachings to others. I think he was thirty two years old when he was enlightened. Does anybody know that? I think he was about twenty five when he left the palace and after looking around for about eight years that he attained enlightenment at the age of thirty two. It was something like that anyway.
So he was still quite a young man and he lived until he was about eighty. He just continued wandering and bringing the Dharma to others until he finally passed away. And teaching is divided into what’s called the three main turnings of the wheel. Anyway, the fact is that he was teaching he taught many many people over a long period of time. And his teachings became very widespread in North East India during his lifetime, and several kings became his followers.
In actual fact his first followers became monks. His first followers were actually the colleagues that he’d left behind when he was practicing asceticism. He went back to them first and taught them. And They realised that something had happened, that he wasn’t the same person who had they done when he was with them before, who had seemed to them to be just an ordinary aspirant like themselves. They saw that something very special had happened and so they listened to what he had to tell them.
Then they began to because they were also quite spiritually advanced, they quickly gained insights. And They were the first to become monks and they followed him. Shortly after that, there were many other people who followed him and became monks. He also acquired lay disciples. These kings and important people were also wealthy merchants, all sorts of important people in the community, even well-to-do courtesans and so on became his supporters.
These people were very influential actually and it’s a very big feature of Buddhism but it’s always had this interaction between the lay people and the Sangha community. But there’s always been this sort of strong Sangha community maintaining these stricter disciplines and you have also had this absolutely essential support and help from the laypeople. The laypeople have themselves been practitioners also. Also another point that is very important about Buddha was that he didn’t accept any differences of caste or of social status or whatever. He treated everyone alike.
Everyone was free to join the Sangha. As long as they were prepared and able to follow the disciplines of the life, then they could join, they could become monks, and then later on also the Order of Nuns was established. And the followers were able to whatever their social status, they were able to invite him to come and have dinner with them or whatever. He used to just go to dinner whoever invited him first, regardless of whether they were an important person or somebody of less prestige. So he didn’t discriminate.
But of course these wealthy and important people were able to be very helpful in supporting the Sangha communities as they developed. But they used to go around begging and eating food and they would go and not only beg in the well-to-do parts of the town where they would get good food but they would also go and beg in the poorer parts of the town where they might only get a little bit of rice and dal or whatever, because it was important that the lay people should be able to accumulate merit by giving to the monks and that it should be equal. So all these things were pretty revolutionary because this is in the background of Hindu society where caste differences were tremendously ingrained, important, something that people not only regard as being important, but had very strong emotional feelings about. So it’s quite amazing actually that Buddhism should have brought him this sort of attitude. So, anyway, Buddha was driven to renounce the palace and to take up the religious life because of his great compassion and his awareness of the universality of suffering.
And he just felt that it wasn’t enough to just keep on living an ordinary life. It wasn’t enough to want to become a king and to try to rule wisely because this was such a limited way of helping others. So he didn’t want to just escape suffering himself, but he wanted to find the way that could be shown to others. Well, they didn’t do anything productive in the sense of producing material things. The whole point of their life was that they would, by being supported by the laypeople, they were able to spend their life in meditation and teaching.
So they were actually, as they were trained, would teach others. And that’s how the lineage has come down to the present day. You get the impression that at first they might have been thought a little bit weird, but pretty soon they were very much respected. There was one story that Buddha had trained his monks in meditation so thoroughly that they were actually very very strong meditators. The local people used to have the custom that when there were monks or wandering, what they were nowadays called sadhus, I suppose, or teachers or holy men of any kind in the vicinity that on the full and new moon days they would go and receive Darshan or listen to teachings from them or whatever.
Anyway, would go and make offerings and make contact with these holy people and that was custom. They would expect to receive a sermon and have a bit of religious input. So they would go along to where Buddha and his monks were sort of camping in the grove or wherever and they would go there and find that they were all just sitting in deep meditation in total silence and not moving and they just sit like this for hours and hours and so the laypeople were quite disappointed because they wanted to hear some holy words and so they’d go to Buddha and complain: Oh look here, all your monks do is just sit there silently meditating and we want to hear some religious instruction. So then Buddha said that the monks should instruct the lay people. So there’s a lot of stories like this from the early days because it was like they were just sort of feeling their way and from time to time the various rules would be brought in as the need for them became apparent.
Well, after a while, as he got more numbers of monks, they wouldn’t all be with him at the one time. They would go off wandering in different directions and they would particularly seem to get together at the time of the rains retreat. A wealthy person had given a grove where they probably had some little huts or something built that they could stay in and they would spend the rains retreat there without wandering around and at that stage they must have been supported. They would have gone into the town begging but they wouldn’t have been able to spread out over the whole country so they have had quite a bit of support from wealthy people at that time. Otherwise they would just disperse all over the place and actually take the teachings over quite a wide area.
Buddha actually wandered over quite a large part of the country during the course of his lifetime. If you go to visit the pilgrimage places you have to do quite a lot of bussing around. So anyway Buddha had been cultivating these qualities in previous lifetimes and there is actually a series of stories called the Jātaka stories, which are describing in a rather mythological mythological sort of way about Buddha’s previous lives. Anyway, we accept that he had many previous lives and that he worked during that he was actually originally just like us and that at one particular point in time he made the resolution of working for enlightenment, of working to gain this goal of completely removing all the obscurations and becoming able to lead others and that he worked for this over a number of lives and particularly cultivating compassion and love for others. So when he was born in this world he couldn’t just rest, he had to help others because of his great compassion.
And he taught for all these years. Once he attained enlightenment, it’s said that for a little while he actually hesitated as to whether people were actually capable of appreciating his teachings. But really there couldn’t have been any doubt that he would teach because that was what he had been working for all that time. And he saw that there were many who were the expression was that they only had a little bit of dust on their eyes. And so it was seen by him that there were suitable people there to receive his teachings, who would be able to receive his teachings and attain the path by following them.
Anyway, his teachings had many many different facets, but they can be summarized in the four noble truths. Does anybody here remember what the four noble truths are? Good. Right. Can you all hear that?
So anyway, yes, so it’s all to do with the cessation of attaining that cessation of suffering for everybody. And this is referring essentially to the whole of cyclic existence because while we are being born again and again in cyclic existence, the very nature of cyclic existence is that it is a state of being subject to suffering. So what Buddha taught was the attainment of liberation. In actual fact from a Mahāyāna viewpoint he also he actually taught not only that Hīnayāna teaching of the attainment of liberation, but also the Mahāyāna teaching of the bodhisattva’s path. So Buddhism continued to spread and round about two fifty five BC, after Buddha had passed away, it continued to flourish.
Round about two fifty five BC the spread of Buddhism received a great impetus when the very powerful monarch Ashoka became a Buddhist. He converted to Buddhism. He’d been an expansionist king. He’d been fighting wars of conquest and he became disgusted by all the bloodshed and suffering that was going on in these wars and started to turn towards spiritual things. And after looking at various different religious paths, he found that Buddhism was the one that gave him what he was looking for.
And he became apparently a very sincere Buddhist. And He tried to rule according to Buddhist principles. He supported the Sangha and he encouraged the spread of the teachings to other places, to other countries, including sending a son and a daughter who were a monk and nun to Sri Lanka. The nun actually took a cutting or a little sucker of the Bodhi tree to Sri Lanka which is still there, it’s still surviving there today. It’s a very famous tree.
It’s grown into a very huge tree by this time. So this process continued and Buddhism spread to quite a number of other countries. Buddhism, of course, had originated against the background of the ancient Indian beliefs of Hinduism. What we call Hinduism, which isn’t really just one religion, but it’s a whole complex of different traditions which have certain things in common, which really are associated with that part of India which grew up and developed in that part of India, and have always been more or less prevalent in that part of the world. So there seems to be two main elements in this very complex religious system.
You could say that there’s orthodox Brahminism and then there are various yogic schools which have been started by various individual teachers, sometimes ascetics living in the jungle. And some of these yogic schools can be very unorthodox and, for instance, this still continues up to the modern times. You’ve got the orthodox Brahminism and you’ve got traditions following various Gurus, which might be quite breaking away from the Orthodox teachings and yet somehow they still remain in the same basket. But they can do things such as denying the caste system. You still find this is happening.
Buddha was probably regarded in his time by the people who first encountered him and his monks as the founder of a new yogic school. But as Buddhism became widely known, actually took on the status of a different religion. It was really something which was pretty revolutionary and broke away in many respects from the orthodox Hindu traditions. Buddha didn’t require his lay followers to abandon Hindu practices. He actually advised them to support the ascetics and the holy men and holy women, I suppose, of all religions.
And so there was a lot of broadness there. When I say ascetic, I mean like the holy people who are wandering around us, because the religious mendicants, you might call them. The people who are wandering around sadhus. They didn’t seem to have used the term sadhus in Buddhist time, but the what they now call sadhu, monks and sadhu, sannyasins, I suppose you could say, yes. Anyway, these people who are wandering around and living this ascetic life in the sense that not of extreme asceticism necessarily, but he was still telling, you know, that they should support these people because one of his disciples wondered whether he should continue to support the Jains, who were very ascetic, extremely ascetic.
And Buddha said, yes, should, you know, they’ve got used to you supporting them, you should continue to support them. You must still feed them. So, there’s a sort of broadness. And actually, in a way, this is pretty typical of ancient India because there always has been this sort of tolerance, religious tolerance in India and it’s very shocking thing that nowadays, in recent years, there has been this religious intolerance because it’s not one of the sad things about it is that it’s not part of Indian tradition, particularly from the side of the Hindus, to be persecuting other religions. So, there are many things that were retained by Buddhism from the old Hindu background of beliefs.
One of the things is this worldview that we just described in our Mandala offering of Mount Meru and the Four Continents and the Sun and the Moon and so on. This comes from the old views of Hindu cosmology and that seems to have slipped into Buddhist scriptures a bit, that’s not a very important thing in itself. But the other things that are important are views of the So there is this view of the world coming into existence, coming into being, existing for a while, dissolving away. The beings on that world don’t cease to exist but they have to go after some other world which is coming into being. So it’s this worldview that’s really vast and has countless universes within it, countless world systems which are continually coming into being and going away, going out of existence again.
And also the teachings on continuing rebirth and karma, which is something that the Hindus have and which Buddhism also maintained. But unlike Hinduism, Buddhism doesn’t have gods as creators or rulers or supervisors over the universe. human volition is at the center of everything. It’s our morality isn’t something that was decreed by some god, and it’s not dependent externals. It’s not a system of taboos and ritual injunctions, which is so important to Hinduism, but rather everything has to be based on reason.
And the main The essential thing in Buddhism is the avoidance of harm, the avoidance of harm to others. So some Hindus also teach avoidance of harm, but in Buddhism you can see it has this really central importance. And so these things are very revolutionary. For instance, even nowadays, when you’re in India, if you want to go and have a vegetarian meal, you have to go to a separate vegetarian restaurant, and if your friend wants to eat meat, you can’t find vegetarian food in a restaurant that serves meat because the people who want to eat vegetarian food would never dream of eating their food in a place where meat was cooked because the pots are polluted by the fact that meat is cooked in them. So it’s not so much that they’re looking for some sort of essence of meaning, of the moral meaning for their vegetarianism, but rather they’re seeing it in terms of physical pollution.
It’s a question of avoiding these kinds of ritual pollution which are very important for the Hindus, and there’s such things as the importance of bathing in the Ganga to purify the sins and so on. So these things are very important in the Hindu system, and Buddha taught that these outer things are not what really matter and it’s the inner development of the person, their inner state of mind, what they manage to achieve within themselves that determines purity or impurity. So purity is something which we can only find by purifying our negative karma. We can’t find it by bathing in the Ganga or some other river. And at the same time, we can attain this purity because we have the capacity as human beings, as living beings, with human intelligence, we have this capacity within us and with the right guidance which Buddha provided and which is still provided nowadays by the lineage of the teachings, we’re able to gain access to this guidance and we’re able to gain this purity and remove our bondage suffering through attaining it.
So, any questions? So, I heard a lecture once by Gonsar Rinpoche, who’s a Tibetan historian and a Tibetan lama. He made an interesting point about how Buddhism has spread and flourished in various places. And he pointed out that wherever it flourishes, there seems to have been a preceding religion, which is a religion of high spiritual value, and which has, you could say, prepared the ground, civilized the people, made the people good, made their society a very sane society, so that these people were prepared and suitable, receptive to the teachings.