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The Biography of Shakyamuni Buddha (Indian Thoughts During the Buddha’s Life)
The Biography of Shakyamuni Buddha -3- Indian Thoughts During the Buddha’s Life
The Indian Thought During the Buddha’s Life
India is a country with an ancient culture. Because of the self-respect of the heroes, the ideological circle is extremely developed. It should be known that the ideological circle in India three thousand years ago was just like the Spring and Autumn Period and Warring States Period in my country.
Although the Indian intellectual world three thousand years ago was very developed, it fell into a very chaotic state. Because Brahmanism regards the transmission of praise and rituals as a kind of exclusive thing, and the sentences are very detailed, and the meaning is very mysterious, forming a cumbersome and mysterious style. They always say that God does things, and every event contains a secret.
People’s knowledge always needs to be developed, so it is easy to break away from myths and move towards reason to explore. Later, there was the rise of the philosophy of the natural school, which explained the material aspects of the universe, such as the theory of earth, water, and fire; another school explained the abstract concepts of the universe, such as the theory of time, theory of squares, and theory of emptiness. .
Since then, various trends of thought have arisen one after another, extremely complicated, and ordinary people are even more confused by this. At this time, there is a great need for the ultimate truth of the universe to point out the way that life should go; at this time, there is a great need for a complete and innovative religion. Buddha was born at this time, like a drop of calm water, he clarified the Indian ideological world in a pond of muddy water and showed people wandering on the wrong path and a road to follow.
Because of the injustice of the class system at that time, people’s thoughts and lives were extremely unfree. Under this class system, weak-willed people lamented the misfortune of life experience and tended to be negative; Doubts arose, and reactionary thoughts secretly arose.
In addition, the Brahmins are domineering and violent, and they lose their hearts everywhere. Therefore, most people have embarked on two extreme thoughts, one is to follow the world for pleasure, and the other is to recluse from the world and practice asceticism. The material optimism of following the world and enjoying pleasure tends to have; the spiritual world-weariness of reclusive asceticism tends to be empty.
This was a contradiction in the ideological world at that time. The Buddha was born at this time, seeing the abnormal development of this ideological world, he tried his best to reject these two kinds of left-right and right-wing thoughts. After the Buddha became enlightened, his teachings about life were neither material nor spiritual but came from a kind of thought in the middle way of dependent origination. This kind of thinking evolved into teaching, which saved India at that time, and it also saved us thousands of years later.
