Never had the Buddha claimed that He was the
son or a messenger of God.
The Buddha was a unique human being who was
self-Enlightened. He had no one whom He could regard as His teacher. Through
His own efforts, He practised to perfection the ten supreme qualities of
generosity, discipline, renunciation, wisdom, energy, endurance, truthfulness,
determination, goodwill and equanimity.
Through His mental purification, He opened
the doors to all knowledge. He knew all things to be known, cultivated all
things to be cultivated, and destroyed all things to be destroyed. Indeed, no
other religious teacher was comparable to Him in terms of cultivation and
attainment.
So special was He and so electrifying His
message, that many people asked Him ‘What(not so much as Who) He was’.
Questions on ‘Who He was’ would be with
respect to His name, origin, ancestry, etc., while ‘What He was’ referred to
the order of beings to which He belonged. So ‘godly and inspiring was He that
even during His time,
there were numerous attempts of others to
turn Him into a god or a reincarnation of god. Never did He agree to be
regarded as such. In the Anguttara Nikaya, He said: ‘I am not indeed a deva,
nor a gandharva, nor a yaksa, nor a manusya. Know ye that I am the Buddha.’
After Enlightenment, the Buddha could no longer be classified even as a
‘manusya’ or an ordinary human being. He belonged to the Buddha Wangsa, special
race or species of enlightened beings, all of whom are Buddhas.
Buddhas appear in this world from time to
time. But some people have the mistaken idea that it is the same Buddha who is
reincarnated or appears in the world over and over again. Actually, they are
not the same person, otherwise there is no scope for others to attain
Buddhahood. Buddhists believe that anyone can become a Buddha if he develops
his qualities to perfection and is able to remove his ignorance completely
through his own efforts. After Enlightenment, all Buddhas are similar in their
attainment and experience of Nibbana.
In India, the followers of many orthodox
religious groups tried to condemn the Buddha because of His liberal teaching
which revolutionized the Indian society. Many regarded Him as an enemy when
increasing numbers of intellectuals as well as people from all ranks of society
took up the religion. When they failed in their attempt to destroy Him, they adopted
the reverse strategy of introducing Him as a reincarnation of one of their
gods. This way they could absorb Buddhism into their religion. To a certain
extent, this strategy worked in India since it had, through the centuries,
contributed to the decay and the subsequent uprooting of Buddhism from the land
of its origin.
Even today there are certain religionists who
try to absorb the Buddha into their beliefs as a way of gaining converts among
Buddhists. Their basis for doing so is by claiming that the Buddha Himself had
predicted that another Buddha would appear in this world, and that the latest
Buddha will become even more popular. One group named a religious teacher who
lived 600 years after Gautama the Buddha as the latest Buddha. Another group said
that the next Buddha had already arrived in Japan in the 13th century. Yet
another group believed that their founder came from the lineage of great
teachers(like Gautama and Jesus) and that founder was the latest Buddha. These
groups advised Buddhists to give up their old Buddha and follow the so-called
new Buddha. While it is good to see them giving the Buddha the same status as
their own religious teachers, we feel that these attempts to absorb Buddhists
into another faith by misrepresenting the truth are in extreme bad taste.
Those who claim that the new Buddha had already arrived are obviously
misrepresenting what the Buddha had said. Although the Buddha predicted the
coming of the next Buddha, He mentioned some conditions which had to be met
before this can be possible. It is the nature of Buddhahood that the next
Buddha will not appear as the dispensation of the current Buddha still exits.
He will appear only when the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path have been
completely forgotten. The people living then must be properly guided in order
to understand the same Truth taught by the previous Buddhas. We are still
living within the dispensation of Gautama the Buddha. Although the moral
conduct of the people has, with very few exceptions, deteriorated, the future
Buddha would only appear at some incalculable period when the Path to Nibbana
is completely lost to mankind and when people are ready to receive Him.
