Word: gautama
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Nirvana & Dharma. Buddhism consists of three spiritual components, two traditions, and a multiplicity of sects. The first of the three components, common to all Buddhists, is the legendary life of a handsome Indian prince named Gautama, who, about 600 years before Christ, abandoned his luxurious existence after seeing four facts of life for the first time: a sick man, an old man, a dead man and a holy man. He fled to the forest to seek enlightenment, tried and abandoned the ways of the hermit and the ascetic, and, after meditating under a sacred Bodhi tree for 49 days...
...Gautama's teaching, the second chief component of Buddhism, is summed up in the Four Noble Truths: 1) man suffers all his life, and goes on suffering from one life to the next; 2) the origin of man's suffering is craving-for pleasure, for possessions, for cessation, of pain; 3) the cure for craving is the practice of nonattachment to everything-even to the self; 4) the way to nonattachment is the Eightfold Path-right views, right intentions, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right meditation. The Buddha said nothing about...
...hands, and in the 6th century-before gasoline-monks who decided to immolate themselves completely would eat waxy and fatty foods for a couple of years so they would burn better. Theoretically Buddhism does not permit suicide, and the word is carefully avoided in favor of "sacrifice." One of Gautama's testaments, the Lotus Sutra, as interpreted by monks in Saigon, calls for all Buddhists to sacrifice themselves if their religion is in danger. One early Buddhist martyr, it is said, took his life by first punching his body full of holes and sealing them with oil, then setting...
Japanese Moviemaker Masaichi Nagata takes a ride down the old De Mille stream and soon finds himself up Spectacular Creek without a paddle. This footless, episodic epic on the life and teachings of Gautama Buddha tries to crowd everything in Buddhist literature into one elephantine moving picture. The parallels between Japan's first bid for a slice of the supermovie market and the Biblical pageantry of Samuel Bronston and Dino de Laurentiis are numbing: skyscraper temples to sinister gods, unseen choirs zum-zumming on the sound track, corps of nimble nautch dancers in every other reel. And when...
...When Gautama Buddha's body was cremated, tradition has it, some parts of it failed to burn. Joan of Arc's heart is said to have survived her burning at the stake and been thrown into the Seine. When Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned off Italy in 1822, three literary friends -Lord Byron, Edward John Trelawny and Leigh Hunt-cremated the corpse on a pyre of driftwood. The job almost done, Trelawny suddenly thrust in his arm and snatched out the heart, which, although fiery hot, was strangely unconsumed. In Oscar Wilde's fairy tale, The Happy Prince...