Buddha Carita, Essay Example

The Buddha Carita is a poetic representation of the life of the Buddha.  Written by Asvaghasa sometime in the first century CE in India, this epic poem was written in Sanskrit and was likely intended for an audience of Buddhists to teach them about the life of Buddha in what was likely a mostly illiterate society; in essence, in likely functioned in much the same way that medieval morality places functioned for European Christians in the Middle Ages.  This particular translation is by E.B. Cowell.

The basic question that this text seeks to answer is: what is the nature of a God who becomes Man, a God incarnate?  From the beginning of this poem, with his miraculous conception “assuming the form of a huge white elephant….he entered the womb of the queen of King Suddhodana, to destroy the evils of the world” (1, 20) and his miraculous birth: “her son was born for the welfare of the world, without pain and without illness” (I, 25), the reader sees the beginnings of the journey of a God who is made Man.  It is obvious to all that the Buddha is something extraordinary; the sage who the king speaks to after the Buddha’s birth predicts that he will show “the way of deliverance for those afflicted with sorrow” (I, 80). This poem goes on to explore the extraordinary nature of his childhood and adolescence, where “the young prince learned in a few days the various sciences…which generally took many years to master” (II, 24) and we also learn that the king, trying to distract him from the ascetic life which he is frightened that his son will one day turn to, gives him a beautiful wife and allows him to lead a life of pleasure.  The nature of Buddha, however, is such that he cannot ignore his divine nature in favor of his earthly one forever, in spite of his father’s manipulation: in Book III, when he goes out on his pleasure parties, he comes in to contact with old age, sickness and death, and this is a turning point in his life.  He goes to a nearby forest “longing for peace” (II, 5) and eventually tells his father of his desire to lead the life of an ascetic.  His father tries to distract him again, and eventually the Buddha is forced to break ties with much of his human life – his father, his wife and son, his kingdom – in favor of his divine life, the life of meditation and contemplation that he longs for. When he arrives at the hermitage, he announces, “I have entered the ascetic wood to destroy old age and death” (VI, 15); during his journey, he is tempted by his father’s deputies, the king of Rajagrha, and even Mara, “the enemy of the good law” (XIII, 1), but he resists the temptation every time, sitting beneath the Bodhi tree until he achieves enlightenment and announces, “I have obtained this perfect path which was travelled for the sake of the ultimate reality” (XIV, 85). Throughout the whole text, the reader sees the conflict between the life of the Man – i.e. pleasures in various forms – and the life of the God – i.e., the desire for enlightenment—and how the answer to this conflict is for the godly side of the Buddha to triumph.

The text bases this answer – the turning away from the earthly pleasures in favor of achieving enlightenment – on decrying the transitory nature of pleasure throughout the text and of its sometimes horrific consequences. For instance, in Book XI as Buddha is responding to the king, he repeatedly asks “What man of self-control could find satisfaction in these pleasures?” The significance of this is answer and its basis is that it is meant to break the cycles of birth and re-birth – and their ensuing anguish – and achieve an enlightened afterlife that is finally free of worldly distractions and also of worldly pain.

I was surprised by my emotional response to this text, and as I read, I could not help but compare the story of the life of Buddha with the story of the life of Christ.  The New Testament, like the Buddha Carita, also seeks to explore the nature of an incarnate God. Christ, too, has a miraculous birth (in this case to a virgin), and was a product of both a human and a godly parent.  The lines from the Buddha Carita about the young Buddha mastering knowledge so quickly is reminiscent of the young Christ in the Temple, debating complicated matters of theology with the rabbis there, amazing them with his wisdom even though he is still just a child.  Even when the Buddha turns away from his father and wife and kingdom, it is a reminiscent of Christ talking about a man leaving his father and his mother to follow him.  Both Buddha and Christ ultimately do turn away from their human natures in favor of their Godly natures: Buddha does this by becoming an ascetic and achieving enlightenment; Christ does this by his death and consequent resurrection: both acts are meant to stop the cycle of life and death that humans are trapped in.

There are some important differences to consider when contemplating the differences between these two incarnate gods.  Firstly, Christ seems to be aware of his godhood from the beginning, whereas Buddha, distracted by the life of pleasure that his father has made for him, does not start to contemplate mortality and the limits of human life until he accidently comes across a sick man, an old man and a dead man in his excursions from the palace.  Secondly, the idea of sacrifice is different between these two deities: Buddha sacrifices his privileged place in society, his future kingship, his family, to achieve enlightenment; Christ ultimately sacrifices his life to save others.

The answer that Christianity gives to this question – what is the nature of the incarnate God? – ultimately is based on a long line of prophecies from Jewish sages in the Old Testament who made predictions that a Messiah would eventually come along whose sacrifice would break the cycle of sin and punishment that was the lot of human beings since the Fall and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden; the sacrifice would be a final one, and make the sacrifice of livestock like heifers or lambs (common practice among the Jews in Biblical times) obsolete.  The significance of this is essentially the same as it is in Buddhism: it essentially rests on the idea of conquering death.  The fact that stories like this are told all over the world with infinite variations on the same theme should reinforce who strong these stories are, and how important they are to humanity.

Works Cited

Asvaghasa.  Buddha Carita. Cowell, E.B., translator. eBooks Publication. 2010. Web. 23 April 2014.