seventh world of chan buddhism - Zen Buddhist Order of Hsu Yun

sure to be reincarnated as males.) Jainism was clearly not for everyone. Yet, people
flocked to join it.
In the sixth century B.C., Jainist ranks swelled under the dynamic leadership of
another Kshatriya nobleman who preferred the purgations of asceticism to the sumptuous
board of his family's home. An adept of heroic accomplishments (hence his name,
Mahavira... Great Hero), he proselytized with particular success. And Jainism, bleak and
frightening as it was, became a formidable movement.
A few members of the Vaishya caste also managed to involve themselves in
religious matters. Inclined to see things from a materialistic point of view, these
merchants proclaimed that all metaphysical speculation was bunk. They developed the
Charvaka and Lokayatika schools which asserted that this world was the only world
anyone was ever likely to know and this life was the only life anyone was ever likely to
live and a person would have to be a damned fool not to take the cash in hand and spend
his profits on his pleasure. To them, unsecured promises of future payment had the same
degree of reliability in religion as they had in business. But hedonism, then as now,
requires a man to be able to afford all his pleasures and, if able to afford them, not to
exhaust their delightful novelty. Boredom is ever the enemy of extravagance. Both
schools of thought were largely unattended.
Those people who could or would not leave home and hearth behind to experience
fires in their bellies and sun and moon fusions in their brains, had to remain in their towns
and villages and, as means of securing the good life, choose between the voodoo of the
Brahmans, the dry intellectualism of the Samkhya, the fear and loathing of the Jains, and
the human sacrifice of the Shudras and Pariahs. For them, life continued without an
awful lot of spiritual hope.
Until, of course, in the year 563 B.C., in northeast India, there was born to King
Suddhodana and Queen Maya of the Shakya Clan of Aryans, a blonde son whose eyes
were "as wide and as blue as the lotus" (Suvarnaprabhasa Sutra). The royal pair, whose
family name was Gautama, named their heir Siddhartha, "All-prospering." Thirty-five
years later he would claim another identity: The Awakened One. The Buddha.
We know very little about him. He was an only child. His mother died soon after
his birth and the aunts who raised him spoiled him as doting aunts invariably do. "I wore
garments of silk and my attendants held a white umbrella over me..." he is said to have
confided, "and my perfumes were always from Benares."
Writing had probably not yet come to the kingdom. Beyond the hunting, drinking,
singing, dancing, and uninhibited lovemaking of life at court, there was little for an
introspective youth to learn. In what by this time must surely have been the fashion of
Kshatriya princes everywhere, he grew tired of all the fun, so that when, at nineteen, he
married his cousin Yasodhara, he doubtless was as jaded as a Turkish pasha and as bored.
CHAPTER 1 INDIA
S EVENTH W ORLD O F C HAN B UDDHISM
14