Buddhism -- Burma; Burma -- Religion; Burma -- Social life and customs
Nothing is more clear than this: that to the Buddhist his teacher was
but a man like himself, erring and weak, who made himself perfect, and
that even as his teacher has done, so, too, may he if he do but observe
the everlasting laws of life which the Buddha has shown to the world.
These laws are as immutable as Newton's laws, and come, like his, from
beyond our ken.
And this, too, is another point wherein the parallel with Newton will
help us: that just as when Newton discovered gravitation he was obliged
to stop, for his knowledge of that did not lead him at once to the
knowledge of the infinite, so when he had attained the laws of
righteousness, Gaudama the Buddha also stopped, because here his
standing-ground failed. It is not true, that which has been imputed to
the Buddha by those who have never tried to understand him--that he
denied some power greater than ourselves; that because he never tried to
define the indefinite, to confine the infinite within the corners of a
phrase, therefore his creed was materialistic. We do not say of Newton
that he was an atheist because when he taught us of gravity he did not
go further and define to us in equations Him who made gravity; and as we
understand more of the Buddha, as we search into life and consider his
teaching, as we try to think as he thought, and to see as he saw, we
understand that he stopped as Newton stopped, because he had come to the
end of all that he could see, not because he declared that he knew all
things, and that beyond his knowledge there was nothing.
No teacher more full of reverence, more humble than Gaudama the Buddha
ever lived to be an example to us through all time. He tells us of what
he knows; of what he knows not he is silent. Of the laws that he can
see, the great sequences of life to death, of evil to sorrow, of
goodness to happiness, he tells in burning words. Of the beginning and
the end of the world, of the intentions and the ways of the great
Unknown, he tells us nothing at all. He is no prophet, as we understand
the word, but a man; and all that is divine in him beyond what there is
in us is that he hated the darkness and sought the light, sought and was
not dismayed, and at last he found.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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