Tuesday, May 24, 2011

The uniqueness of Gautam Buddha

Being a creative social innovator, Siddhartha had a remarkable novel idea that he created on the top of his synthesis of his “Middle Path” based on the Hindu philosophy. This idea was his rejection of the concept of Atman/God. Unlike what he had read about and had been taught by his senior Hindu counterparts, he considered human to be a conglomerate of psychological propensities – like – joy, pain, love, hatred, jealousy, hunger, craving, etc. He always propagated the idea of meditation as a way to calm down these psychological pushes and pulls and knowing one’s own real self. The idea was to create peace for oneself by reducing the entropy in consciousness, by letting these temperamental disturbances settle down. This obviously causes an increase in perceptive and cognitive abilities.
Instead of preaching his ideas strictly as a series of sermons, Siddhartha invited his followers to go through their personal journey of self realization by doing meditation. This is very close to the western outlook of the science of psychology. The beauty in the thought process of Siddhartha was that he was disruptive in the sense that he felt that the need for the Hypothesis of God was not required to present a discipline for attaining Nirvana. For him Nirvana was not the attainment of the union with a Hypothesis of God. Rather it was about going to the depth of ones own self, knowing one better and better.
By abandoning the Atman concept, Siddhartha produced a change in the Hindu outlook, making it more akin to the contemporary scientific view. Siddhartha never invokes a Deity concept to explain the causes of Dukkha, indeed, of anything in the universe.
This was I guess a very important step forward towards a scientific and evolutionary outlook of life. I am not going to the correctness or in-correctness of the philosophy of Siddhartha. It is just that it was a disruptive innovation in the discipline of thought – in an attempt to explain life. Something as disruptive as the explanation of solar system to Napoleon, by the 19th century French astronomer – LaPlace – without the need of the Hypothesis of the presence of God, for any role to be played in creation of the solar system.
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