In a Buddhist circle of my acquaintance, where I find many of my respected friends, a genuine question was raised: In Buddhism, what happens to an Enlightened being after death? In reply, many learned fellows quoted from brilliant and adequate ready-made answers, or from Wiki, worthy of our best Buddhist theologians. In brief, the question is logically and theologically unanswerable, thus irrelevant. Here was, in the guise of knowledge, a pseudo answer referring back to the supremacy of the Buddhist way over life and death. Why would one bother about such trivialities as the death of an enlightened being? Indeed, the death of common folks could prove to be just as relevant. But.... Unsatisfied, I devised an answer that could hold valid even beyond the Buddhist sect: Just for the fun of it... to think beyond the priests and their books: Here is another approach, maybe less in tune with your text books, but probably more in tune with history (not to be confused here with paramartha satya). After his death, an enlightened beings body is burnt to ashes. Then people start fighting for his ashes. Stupas and such reliquaries are erected to receive his ashes, who were either stolen or bought at high price or what not; the community starts to argue over the correct interpretation of the teachings, till it eventually splits into competing groups, everyone claiming to be right; legends are formed, new rules laid down, cults are organized in honour of the far gone One; new authorities are devised, power struggles emerge. The dead sage is now a national symbol on which much wealth is spent while the believers toil under the sun for crumbs... The teaching spread far and wide under all form of guises, until they becomes a university discipline in foreign lands where their every word will be dissected and analyzed, as if it was a dead body of some dinosaur, or a mere artifact of the past... or better, a mere intellectual curiosity.... Finally, as the Buddha said, or is supposed to, the teachings vanish... and once they are out, nowhere to be seen, then for sure the enlightened one is gone and no one remains to ask where to, for no one knows even his name. Once the teachings are gone, all that mattered about the enlightened guy has vanished into vanity. Then some say that he, or one of his buddies, comes back, to start this bewildering wheel of events anew. This is called a descent into samsara, the common flow of things. This flow is the only thing that one can talk about.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 19:27:41 +0000
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