Buddha By Karen Armstrong, reviewed by T. F. RIGELHOF

Buddha bio enlightens
T. F. RIGELHOF
1244 words
24 February 2001
The Globe and Mail
Metro
D10
English
"All material Copyright (c) Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved."

Buddha By Karen Armstrong Viking, 205 pages $28.95

'If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha!"

This, the command of a ninth-century Zen master to his disciples some 1,300 years after the death of the Buddha, is the quandary any biographer of Sidhatta Gotama must face. Throughout his life, Gotama, the man who became Buddha, insisted that it was his teaching that was important and that his teaching would not and could not be grasped by those who attended to his life and his personality. He believed that he had woken up to a truth, a dhamma, a fundamental law of life that rendered egotism obsolete. If people revered Gotama the man, they would distract themselves from following the path to immunity and peace in the middle of life's suffering.

A further 13 centuries after that Zen master spoke, Karen Armstrong, who has demonstrated that she understands so much so thoroughly in Judaism, Christianity and Islam throughout the past decade in a series of brilliant books that includes A History of God, Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths and The Battle for God, performs a wonderful sleight of hand in turning east to the Ganges plain of the fifth century before our era. She brings Gotama to life only to make the Buddha disappear back into his teaching: In the process, she enriches our understanding of just how autobiographical his philosophy is and how much more radical he is than those "positive thinkers" among us who "bury our heads in the sand, deny the ubiquity of pain in ourselves and others, and . . . immure ourselves in a state of deliberate heartlessness to ensure . . . emotional survival."

Although the Buddhist scriptures (the Tipikata or Pali canon) are faithful to the spirit of Gotama's teaching, they do tell us some things about the details of his life and personality that seem reliable, and a great deal more about North India during his lifetime that agrees with external evidence. The first Buddhists thought deeply about five key moments in their founder's life: his infancy, his renunciation of normal domestic life, his enlightenment, the start of his teaching career and his death -- and this becomes the template for Armstrong's Buddha. For his first followers, as for his latest biographer, the general contour of his life is both an inspiration and a model: "Like Jesus, Muhammad, and Socrates, the Buddha was teaching men and women . . . how to reach beyond human pettiness and expediency and discover an absolute value."

What's more, the mass of teachings assembled in the Pali canon, a century after his death, "has a consistency and a coherence that point to a single original intelligence. . . . It is not at all impossible that some of these words were really uttered by Sidhatta Gotama, even though we cannot be certain which they are." That said, "what is historical is the fact of the legend," not the facts themselves, and Armstrong perceives correctly that to understand any of the legend, it must be looked at in its fullness, complete with all its "signs and wonders."

Her previous work on the Torah and the Gospels has taught Armstrong that "miracle stories" are often cautionary tales that point to an obsession with "significance" that rivals our modern concern with "accuracy." So what we have within 200 pages of highly readable and penetrating prose is not the Buddha in full, but a fully Buddhist Gotama, a recreation of his life, teaching and legend that can be recommended both as the best available introduction for newcomers and as the clearest and most precise statement in English of familiar teachings for those long-practiced in the art of piecing them together from inadequately translated texts and commentaries.

Either a contemporary of Confucius (551-479 BC) or, as recent scholarship asserts as more likely, of Socrates (469-399 BC), Sidhatta Gotama was born in a period of rapid transition from rural to urban, agricultural to commercial, traditional to innovative, mythological to pragmatic culture. North India during the sixth and fifth centuries BC was gripped by political violence, corruption, anomie and a profound fear of the emerging mercantile order.

At the age of 29, Gotama walked away from a wife to whom he was attached, a son only a few days old and a very comfortable life as the son of one of the leading men of Kapilavatthu, because he had experienced no pleasure in the birth of his son. He cast off the whole of his life, shaved his head and beard, put on a yellow robe and joined a growing number of forest-dwelling ascetics who were pursuing a life of homelessness. He was an empiricist and he'd reasoned to himself that if there was "birth, aging, illness, death, sorrow and corruption" in life, these states must have positive counterparts in another mode of existence and that it was up to him to find "the unborn, the unaging, unailing, deathless, sorrowless, incorrupt and supreme freedom from this bondage." He called this wholly satisfactory state of being Nibbana -- "blowing out" -- and was convinced that it was entirely natural to human beings and could be experienced by any genuine seeker.

Gotama made his way to Vesali, where he was initiated in the dhamma of Alara Kalama, who taught a form of Samkhya-Yoga, which instructed its practitioners to find enlightenment anywhere and everywhere in this world. Armstrong is very good at showing what elements of Samkhya are retained in the Buddha's teaching and how the traditional yoga he practised was both very different from the various yogas generally promoted in Europe and North America these days, and how crucial its systematic dismantling of egotism was to the meditation that led Gotama finally to the enlightenment he experienced under the boghi tree in the grove now known as Bodh Gaya, some eight years after leaving his home.

Any book on the Buddha rises or falls not with a description of Gotama's enlightenment, but rather with the analysis of the method he began to teach and propagate in his first three great sermons -- a method that means nothing of what he intended if it's separated from its effects on the moral conduct of those who practise it. Armstrong's Buddha doesn't just rise -- it soars! -- when she delineates why the Buddha's Four Noble Truths appealed to so many, and precisely how they provided a compassionate offensive against the rampant self-centredness that had begun to prevail in a new society made aggressive by a market-driven economy.

In tracing the social changes the followers of the Buddha brought (and still bring) to cultures that have begun to cut off human beings from all non-materialistic impulses, Armstrong nimbly makes the case that what Gotama wished to promote is nowhere better expressed than in the Digha Nikaya:

Let all beings be happy! Weak or strong, of high, middle or low estate,

small or great, visible or invisible, near or far away,

alive or still to be born -- may they be entirely happy!

Let nobody lie to anybody or despise any single being anywhere.

May nobody wish harm to any single creature, out of anger or hatred!