Relics Of The Buddha

Other world religions appeared much later: Christianity arose about five hundred years after Buddhism, and Islam - more than a thousand. Buddhism is considered to be a world religion on the same basis as the two other religions just mentioned: like Christianity and Islam, Buddhism in its spread across the globe resolutely crossed the ethno-confessional and ethno-state borders, becoming the religion of various peoples with completely different cultural and religious traditions. The Buddhist world stretched from Lanka (Ceylon) to Tuva and Buryatia, from Kalmykia to Japan, while the process of spreading Buddhism in Europe and America that began in the late 19th century continues. Buddhism has become the religion of hundreds of millions of people in Southeast Asia, traditionally associated with the homeland of Buddhism, India, and in the Far East, whose civilizations were shaped based on the traditions of Chinese culture; The citadel of Buddhism for a thousand years has been Tibet, where Buddhism brought Indian culture and to which it gave writing, the literary language and the foundations of civilization.

Buddhism originated in the northeastern part of India (the territory of the modern state of Bihar), where those ancient states were located (Magadha, Kosala, Vaishali) in which the Buddha preached and where Buddhism was widely spread from the very beginning.

At present, it is completely impossible to reconstruct the scientific biography of the Buddha. The simple cutting off of mythological plots and elements of a folk character is completely ineffective, and for a true biographical reconstruction, modern science does not have enough factual material. Therefore, modern man can only get a completely traditional life of the Buddha based on the synthesis of a number of Buddhist texts.

From the very beginning of its existence, Buddhism was conceived as a peculiar project of transforming a person from a being suffering and unhappy into being free and perfect. All is suffering. Four Noble Truths. Birth is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering. Connection with the unpleasant is suffering, separation of the pleasant is suffering. Truly all five groups of affection are suffering. The cause of suffering is desire, appetence, attachment to life in the widest sense. Although suffering permeates all levels of sansaric existence, there is nevertheless a state in which suffering no longer exists, and this state is achievable. This is nirvana. The path leading to the cessation of suffering is divided into three major stages: the stage of wisdom, the stage of morality, or observance of vows, and the stage of concentration, that is, psychopractice. The first stage includes two steps, the rest - three, for a total of eight steps.

For hundreds and hundreds of lives, the Bodhisattva (bodhi - awakening, enlightenment; sattva - being; here - future Buddha) performed countless feats of love and compassion, gradually accumulating merit and approaching the state of a sage, who learned the truth and emerged from the tormenting wheel of alternation of births and deaths - Buddha. Finally, the time of his last birth has come.

Tradition claims that the first Buddhist "gathering" occurred shortly after the Nirvana of the Buddha, when all the disciples of the Buddha gathered and three of them - Ananda, Mahakashyapa and Mahamaudgalyayana reproduced everything the Buddha taught - the norms and rules of the monastic community, the "disciplinary regulations" of the sangha (Vinaya), the preaching and teaching of the Buddha (Sutra) and his philosophical doctrine, "super-Dharma" (Abhidharma). Thus arose the Buddhist Canon - Tripitaka (Pali - Tipitaka), that is, the "Three Baskets" Teachings (in ancient India they wrote on palm leaves that were worn in baskets).

The Sanskrit Tripitaka has not survived to our time: the Muslim conquest of the Palov state in Magadha (Bihar) and Bengal (the last stronghold of Buddhism in India) in the XIII century led to the mass burning of Buddhist monasteries with their libraries and the death of many Sanskrit Buddhist texts. So now we, unfortunately, have only a very limited number of Buddhist texts in Sanskrit.

Buddhism as a world religion is one of the most ancient, and it is not in vain that there is an opinion that without an understanding of its fundamentals, it is impossible to feel all the richness of the culture of the East. Under its influence many historical events and basic values of the peoples of China, India, Mongolia and Tibet were formed. In the modern world, Buddhism, under the influence of globalization, has found even a few Europeans as followers, spreading far beyond the area where it originated.

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