We all suffer, not because of others but for our own wrongdoings.
It’s been less than a week we spoke and read about Gautama Buddha or Siddhartha Gautama Buddha on the occasion of Buddha Purnima. How many of us even remember what we read just a few days back? Inculcating the teachings of Buddha in our day-to-day life still remains a distant cry for most of us.
To understand life in its true sense, one has to once again pay attention to the teachings of Gautama Buddha and relate it to every single happening in our day-to-day activities.
If anyone who thinks only they suffer in life, Buddha says, suffering is common. According to Gautama, everyone suffers. He has also given the cause for the suffering of man and has listed them into four parts viz. self-obsession, greed, desire and ignorance. Even today most of the problems or sufferings arise due to the presence of these factors in us. Despite knowing the presence of these elements in our nature, we tend to pretend and ignore.
Teachings of Buddha not just makes us aware of the suffering within us, but also suggests how to get rid of them. Renunciation of greed and ignorance according to Gautama is the way to put an end to our suffering. He also encompasses the path to end our suffering by the correct way of living and following the ‘Eight Fold Path’ of life which is – Right Knowledge, Right Attitude, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Means of Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Awareness, and Right Meditation. Well, that’s what Buddha had to say.
We all are so intoxicated in our day-to-day tasks that we seldom give a thought in getting rid of at least one of these negative attributes from our lives. We don’t waste a single minute in finding faults in others, while we refuse to acknowledge the presence of any, within us. We are so self-obsessed that we cannot see anything beyond us. People tend to lose focus very fast from their main purpose and get entangled in; greed and personal prejudice.
Today, when most of us harp about religion, we rarely take a time out to understand the teachings of it. What we pass on to the generation next is only the tag of which religion he or she belongs to and not what it actually teaches us. We end up creating body without soul and competition without compassion.
We are often deprived of the right knowledge which in turn does not help build a right attitude. With the lack of these two, our speech is full of imperfections resulting into wrong actions. We are aware of these follies but tend to ignore; depriving us of the much-needed awareness. So how can we expect our sufferings to end? They shall not. Sufferings shall go on from generations to generations unless we don’t correct ourselves today.
Once the code word used by Indian Nuclear scientists for conducting India’s first nuclear test at Pokhran in 1974 was ‘The Buddha is smiling’ and the one conducted in 1998 was codenamed ‘The Buddha is still smiling’. Unfortunately, with regard to the correct way of living and following the ‘Eight Fold Path’ of life…Buddha is crying!