Excerpts
From:
The
Buddha Turns the
Wheel of Dharma
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- - - - - -
by
Judith Simmer-Brown
After
the awakening, a radiant Buddha remained seated under the
Bodhi tree for seven weeks, enjoying the bliss of emancipation.
According to legend, the Indian god Brahma was concerned that
he would pass into oblivion and appeared to the Buddha, supplicating
him to teach what he had discovered. But the young Shakyamuni
hesitated—the truth that he had found was “deep,
difficult to see, difficult to understand.” How could
he possibly communicate his insight into the nature of reality
in a way that could be helpful to others? The divine Brahma
continued his request—if the Awakened One did not attempt
to teach others the way to awakening, the entire world would
be left in the grip of despair and torment. How could the
awakening be complete without the Buddha’s compassion?
Moved
by the supplication of the great god, Shakyamuni resolved
to share his experience with others and to lead them to awakening.
Remembering five companions with whom he had practiced austerities,
Shakyamuni arose from his seat and set out to find them. He
journeyed one-hundred thirty miles west to Sarnath, “deer
park,” a hermitage outside the city of Varanasi. When
the five yogins noticed his approach, they grumbled, still
deeply disappointed with his abandoning the path of asceticism,
saying, “Here comes the ascetic Gautama, that slacker,
that greedy one, that fallen one….None of us must go
to meet him nor rise before him nor help him with his robe
and his begging bowl. Let’s just ignore him.”
Nonetheless
as Shakyamuni approached their hermitage, the five were stunned
by his radiant appearance, his noble carriage, his confidence
and magnetism, and they had no choice but to spontaneously
arise respectfully. One stepped forward to take his robe and
begging bowl, another brought a seat, and another brought
water to bathe his feet. Together they greeted him warmly,
welcoming him, and reverently asked about the radiant glow
of his complexion, his serene demeanor, the certainty in his
eyes. And he then proclaimed, he was now awakened, Buddha,
completely beyond fear and torment. If only they would receive
his guidance, they also could become free. Under a moonlit
night they sat together in the hermitage grove, and the Awakened
One reversed the cosmos with his teachings.
The events
that night are said to have been so monumental that the ineluctable
pattern of suffering and confusion was reversed forever. The
prevalent Indian symbol for the progression of events was
the wheel, turning in a pattern of cosmic predictability.
Beings are born, they die, and then are reborn, re-enacting
an ancient pattern of karma. According to the prevailing traditions,
the only escape from the repetitive cycles of the wheel was
to see the entire progression as illusory display and to discover
the hidden, unborn self. The Buddha presented a different
option that night, and called his teaching the “setting
into motion the wheel of truth,” the inauguration of
a completely new way of life which saw the true nature of
reality resorting neither to indulgence nor asceticism.
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