Buddha was the name given to the Indian prince Gotama, 563-483 B.C., when after six years of strenuous spiritual struggle he awoke into the infinite Light in the radiance of his Light he gave us words of wisdom and love, words that have helped travelers in times past, that help us now, and hat shall help men in times to come. Because whatever an imaginable future may bring to man in ages unborn, the teat words of his spiritual leaders shall be for ever his Light; and the words of Jesus give expression to this truth: 'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away'. what has been a Light for a few shall be in time a Light for all.



Buddha was a prince and was born to be a king, but he felt the vanity of earthly kingdoms and longed for a kingdom of heaven, Nirvana.

In the poetical story of Buddha's childhood and youth we re told that his father, the king, in fear that his only son light one day leave his court and become a mendicant ascetic, as it was foretold at his birth, decided to surround the prince with all kinds of pleasures, built for him three palaces for the three Indian seasons and arranged that his son might never see an old man, a sick man, a corpse, or a mendicant ascetic. As fate decreed, the young prince in time saw the four, and the mystery of the sorrow of life did not allow him to rest. He felt the longing for something real behind the transience of things.

The young prince did not know, but he was longing: he was not happy in the established conventions of his time. He felt that in order to find something higher he had to cut a path through the jungle of desires and fears, of illusions and contradictions. He knew that power and pleasures only mean a little life and a little death. His 'arrows of desire' impelled him, in the words of the Upanishad, to travel from darkness to Light, from the unreal to the Real, from death to Immortality. He must leave the palace and his lovely wife and baby son. He must first find salvation and then return for the salvation of all men, for the salvation of those he left in the palace. How touching is the description of the departure of the future Buddha from his wife and his baby son Rahula:

Now the future Buddha, after he had sent ChaMa on his errand, thought to himself, 'I will just take one look at my son-; and, rising from the couch on which he was sitting, he went to the suite of apartments occupied by the mother of Rahula, and opened the door of her chamber. Within the chamber was burn. ing a lamp fed with sweet-smelling oil, and the mother of Rahula lay sleeping on a couch strewn deep with jasmine and other flowers, her hand resting on the head of her son. When the future Buddha reached the threshold, he paused, and gazed at the two forms where he stood.

'If I were to raise my wife's hand from off the child's head, and take him up, she would awake, and thus prevent my departure. I will first become a Buddha, and then return and see my son.' So saying, he descended from the palace.

After a long journey tradition tells that when Buddha found Nirvana under the Bodhi tree he poured out his joy of liberation in the two famous verses of the Dhammapada:

I have gone round in vain the cycles of many lives ever striving to find the builder of the house of life and death. How great is the sorrow of life that must die!

But now I have seen thee, house builder: never more shalt thou build this house. The rafters of sins are broken, the ridgepole of ignorance is destroyed. The fever of craving is past: for my mortal mind is gone to the joy of the immortal Nirvana.

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