January 24, 2025
The Life of Sakyamuni Buddha (8)
By Rev. Shinkai Oikawa
9. Sakyamuni’s Manhood
(5) The Invocation of the King of the (3) Brahma Heaven
A god called the King of the Brahma Heaven appeared and said to Sakyamuni, “Great Buddha, it is a pity that you will die without preaching what you attained by enlightenment. So would you please preach it to the people?” Although the god encouraged Him to do so three times, He was not willing. This is called “the invocation of the King of the Brahma Heaven.” He was perplexed.
Sakyamuni knew very well that this world is multifarious (consists of numerous aspects). He understood the dominant principle and various laws of the world. But He did not intend to preach because He did not want his present peace of mind to be disturbed by listening to the people before He preached. So He was at a loss for a response.
Although Dr. Nakamura said that the Buddha was embarrassed because He could not speak clearly, I think that the Buddha understood everything because He was entirely enlightened and truly became the all-knowing, omniscient and omnipotent Buddha (Awakened One, Enlightened One) then.
Sakyamuni went on a journey in order to preach about the “enlightenment” He attained under the Bodhi tree. He traveled throughout the country to the end of His life for forty-five years from the time when He attained enlightenment at the age of thirty-five to the time of His death at the age of eighty.
He preached sermons suited for each occasion and person. These are called “sermons according to the occasion and person.” Therefore, there are a great number of Buddhist doctrines.
Reading these remaining sermons in later years, people thought out various Buddhist theories such as “the 37 kinds of practices for attaining Nirvana,” “the four noble truths,” “the eight-fold noble path,” “the twelve link of cause and effect,” and so on. However, if you study, you will find that He did not preach “Buddhist theories” but sermons suitable to the occasion and person, that is, “improvised sermons.”
He kept on giving answers quite suitable for what people wanted most. What did He preach then? To tell the truth, there are some parts we cannot understand, because they are not systematic coherent ways of preaching. But I am going to tell you what we know about how He thought and what He preached.
(6) The Substance of Enlightenment
Such religions as Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, are called monotheism, preaching that there is a god who created the heavens and the earth, dominates human beings, and that everything is decided by the will of this god. Therefore in these religions there is only one god, that is, the absolute existence, to whom we can pray for everything good or evil. We can find there was this kind of absolute existence everywhere in the past. In India, too, there was absolute existence called the King of the Brahma Heaven, Bon or Bonten in Chinese, who dominated India.
However, Sakyamuni denied the god. All human beings depend on “inga” or “cause and effect.” In our modern language it means that every action has a cause and an effect. As for myself, I was not created by the god. The Buddha taught us that “the Sun Goddess” did not make us. We were made by our parents and confined in our mother’s womb for about ten months, and were brought up by our parents’ love.”
Thus effects come after causes, and the world is made up of cause and effect. This is a very important point. We can find only our father and mother, or our grandfather and grandmother. But of course we know we have many ancestors because we are in this world. What is more, I think we will have our children and grandchildren in the future.
Sakyamuni is supposed to have kept sitting under the Bodhi tree thinking like this at night. Then it is written, He could completely “remember” His “past life,” how He was born and each successive life since then.
We cannot know such things. People at the time of Sakyamuni often used “rinne” or transmigration. We are born and we die, and we are born and we die again and again continuously. They thought that we were turning around and around ceaselessly in circles.
As for myself, I do not know where I am going after my death. According to the ways of transmigration, it may be said, “Since he is always doing something wicked and talking glibly, he will be reborn something like a mynah bird.” On the other hand, good people are said to be born in a beautiful heaven where gods live without exception.
To tell the truth, I do not want to be born in heaven because it is too beautiful to be good. There is no distinction between the sexes there. There are beautiful ladies, but they all look sexless. So I do not want to go to a place like this. Clear distinction between the sexes is more favorable for me. Therefore, I prefer to be born in the world of human beings. The human world is really wonderful. I want to be born again in this world. But we do not know whether it is possible or not.
I am afraid that I will be born in the world of animals or hungry demons, or what is worse, hell. I never want to go down to hell at all because it is supposed to give us a great deal of torment. We sometimes hear about boiling in a caldron. Criminals are put into boiling water. It is strange that they are living with torment without dying instantly. It is quite cruel anyway.
I am now translating “the Sariputra Abhidharma Sutra” of the Southern Buddhism. Some scholars made mistakes in the old translation of the sutra, because they did not know about hell. For example, we can find “an iron skewer” in the sutra. What do you think it was used for? It was used for punishment. Since the scholars did not think it was used for punishment, they translated it into “an iron bar.” They wrote it as if a gymnast were hanging from the horizontal bar and turning a somersault. It is not correct.
It was used for punishment. A criminal was put on the top of the skewer from the buttocks first. And then the criminal went down little by little. At last the skewer came out of the top of the head. The criminal must have felt excruciating pain. So I think hell is the last place that I want to go to.
Hell, the worlds of hungry spirits, animals, asura, and men, and heaven are called the six worlds (rokudo). They are the six worlds where we must go after death. We say “rebirth in the six worlds.” It is inevitable that the worst criminals go to hell.
While Sakyamuni was meditating like this, His senses came to be finely sharpened and He received the power to see through people’s past, which is called “Shukujuchi.” What is more, He is said to have received the power to see through people’s future a few hours later at midnight, which is called “the divine eye.”
(Trans. by Rev. Kanshu Naito)
(to be continued)