The Japanese Meditation Center of Japan, Tokyo, had a Dhamma talk led by Ven. Dr. Pongsak Thaniyo about “the biography of Lord Buddha” in Japanese. Before the Dhamma talk, the teaching monk led the participants to meditate in order to purify their body, speech and mind for 30 minutes before giving some explaination about Lord Buddha, an additional teaching from the last class in regards to Prince Sidhartha. Prince Sidhartha saw dangers of anility, illness and death, which ignited an extreme world-weariness in his mind and made him realize that it was time for him to search for the way to release himself from the circle of sufferings. Eventually, Prince Sidhartha made a strong determination to sacrfice his comfortable life and everything else behind to search for the greater thing, i.e. the liberation from sufferings. Though confronting obstruction attempts by Mara, he faced nothing that could eliminate this strong determnation from his mind.
Finally, Prince Sidhartha entered the monkhood. That time of his life was serene and was spent to search for the way leading to the liberation from Samsara. At first, he searched for a teacher who could give him a guidance. However, after studying everything from those teachers, he still discovered nothing that could lead him to the liberation, so he politely bid farewell and searched for the correct method on his own and discovered that the mortification was popular among ascetics at that time. He, as well, mortified himself to the fullest for 6 years until he almost lost his life; therefore, he eventually gave up on that method and searched for the middle way.
From that era, 2,500 years ago until this present time, have we ever received the genuine teachings? What did Lord Buddha teach us about? How can we apply those teachings to our lives? To be continued.
