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Free from bonds; the Dhamma; Buddhism and relatives; visit to Kapilawastu

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22 March 2016 12:26 am - 0     - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

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The message that the Buddha had arrived spread in a few minutes all over in Kapilawattu like a whirl-wind, creating an  environment in and around King Suddodana’s  palace to assume a pleasing atmosphere as to welcome the Buddha.
Kaludai,  Buddha’s lay-life friend was successful in convincing the Buddha to set out from Rajagahanuwara to Kapilavasthupura with a large retinue of Bhikkhus, which led to four most significant events that happened on Medin Full moon day.  Buddha had to perform ‘Yama Maha Pelahera’, the twin miracle to counter the pride of senior relatives who were reluctant to pay respect.  
It was on this occasion that– the father of the Buddha - King Suddhodana worshipped the Buddha for the third time, followed by all the Sakyans.  The following morning  the Buddha went on an alms round from house- to- house. When the king protested saying it was an insult to the Sakya clan Buddha said,  “Yours is Sakya clan. Mine is the Buddha clan.” The Buddha along with Arhant Sariyuth and Mugalan went to see his former wife Princess Yasodhara at her chambers as she refused to oblige to a message sent by King Suddodana to come and meet her former husband— she fell prostrate by his feet and wept bitterly, for Buddha to warn others not to disrupt her emotional gesture. The Buddha responded by explaining to her, how she assisted him through eons in the Sansara until he became the Buddha.  

 

Buddha the  Psychotherapist Meets Yasodharavo, Rahula and Nanda


On the third day at Kapilawasthu,  Rahula, who asked for his inheritance from the Buddha was accompanied to the temple where the little one [Prince Rahula] expressed his interest to enter the sasana. The next day the Buddha handed over his bowl to Prince Nanda the step- brother as he was returning to the temple; Nanda, who was to marry Janpada-kalyani the next day was ordained too.  King Suddhodana and Queen Maha Prajapathi Gothami attained Sothapanna during Buddha’s stay, while Princess Yasodhara took refuge in the Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha. Freed himself of all bonds, the enlightened one sees the father, step mother, wife, son and cousin as just another being with no special attachment. The above incidents confirm the western psycho-analyst’s view as Buddha the most rational psychotherapist ever lived.  

 

Freedom from Bonds


How to free ourselves from bonds of life? We have to investigate ourselves – not someone explaining while we listen, agreeing or disagreeing, but taking a journey of discovery into the most deep corners of our minds. And to take such a journey we cannot be burdened with prejudices, opinions, and conclusions - all that we have collected for thousands of years and more.  Give up all you have ever thought about yourself; start as if you knew nothing, and begin to understand ourselves for the first time.


How can we be free to look and learn when from the moment we are born to the moment we die, our minds are shaped by a particular culture in the narrow pattern of the ‘I’`me’ and ‘mine’?  We have been conditioned for centuries by nationality,  religion, caste, language, class, custom, tradition, education, literature, art, convention and  propaganda of all kinds, the pressures, the climate we live in, the food we eat, our friends, our family,  our experiences -and therefore our reactions and responses to every problem are conditioned. You will never be free of it, and if you think, `I must be free of it’, you will fall into another form of conditioning. Even when you look at a tree and say, `That is a jak tree’, or `that is a mango tree’, the naming of the tree, which is general knowledge, it has so conditioned you that the word comes between you and actually observing the tree. 
So it is for us to decide whether or not we wish for complete freedom. If we say we do, then we have to understand the character and structure of freedom. Is it freedom when you are free from pain, free from anxiety? Or is freedom itself something completely different? You can be free from envy, resentment say, but isn’t that freedom a response and therefore not freedom at all? You can be free from doctrine very easily, by scrutinizing it, but the purpose for that freedom from dogma has its individual reaction since the desire to be free from a doctrine may be that it is no longer fashionable or opportune.

 


Silly Nationalistic Belief 
You can be free from patriotism because you believe in internationalism or because you sense it is no longer reasonably necessary to adhere to this silly nationalistic belief. You can effortlessly put that away. Or you may counter against some religious or political leader who has guaranteed you freedom as a result of restraint or revolt. But has such rationalism, such commonsense conclusion anything to do with liberty? If you say you are free from something, it is a rejoinder which will then become another reaction which will bring about another conventionality, another form of authority. In this way you can have a chain of responses and accept each reaction as independence. But it is not freedom; it is merely a link of a modified history which the mind adheres to.  All youth, are in revolt against the world, and that is a good thing in itself, but revolt is not freedom because when you revolt it is a reaction and that response sets up its own pattern and you get trapped in that pattern. You think it is something novel, but it is the old in a different mould. Any societal or political rebellion will inevitably slip back to the good old bourgeois frame of mind. 

 


 There are no guides, no teachers. There is only your relationship with the world - nothing else. When you understand this, what you feel, what you think, how you work, all self-pity goes. We will not thrive on blaming others, which is a type of self-pity.
What is imperative is not a philosophy but to observe what is in fact taking place in our daily existence, inwardly and outwardly. If you examine very closely what is taking place and observe it, you will see that it stands on a rational conception.  And when we look at what is happening in the world we commence to understand that there is no external and internal process; there is only one unitary process, it is a whole movement. To be able to stare at this seems to me all that is required, because if we make out how to look, then the whole thing turns out to be very clear, and to look desires no viewpoint, no teacher. Nobody need tell you how you should look. You just look.


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