Shakyamuni mantra

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The Buddha’s biography: Teaching (Cont.)

The Buddha maintained his mission, continually wandering around India, teaching and practicing meditation, for the rest of this life. He taught householders and wandering ascetics. He taught men and women, and formed both a male and female monastic tradition. He taught commoners and kings. He taught lepers and outcasts. He debated teachers and followers of other traditions. He disdained the caste system and regarded all people as having the same potential for Awakening. He found innumerable ways to explain his basic insight and the way to attain it.

The Buddha, in the time between his awakening in his mid-thirties and his death at eighty, tirelessly walked from city to city in northern India and in the Gangetic plain, crossing and recrossing vast distances on foot. For the three months of the rainy season he stayed put, usually living in small, makeshift huts. For the remainder of the year he walked. He lived by going from door to door begging food, and eating whatever was put in his bowl. He generally lived near towns and cities so that he could live in relative solitude but still be available to teach the locals.

The Buddha taught profound philosophy but could also express himself in simple, direct language. He frequently in taught in metaphor to help people understand his teachings.

The Buddha never wrote, and may in fact have been illiterate, but this was at a time when writing was reserved for mundane activities and when the human memory was more reliable than texts, which were written on dried leaves and which were subject to fire, dampness, and the predations of insects. The Buddha’s disciples memorized the key points of his teachings and passed them on by word of mouth, giving early Buddhist texts their sometimes irritatingly repetitive form.

The Buddha established a spiritual community (Sangha) which persists to the present day and which has expanded worldwide. He founded a body of teachings that has found ever-knew ways of expressing the spiritual path as it has encountered new cultures and new times.

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