..续本文上一页 towards the entire world. One should cultivate an unbounded mind, above and below and across, without obstruction, without enmity, without rivalry.

　　Tiṭṭhaṃ caraṃ nisinno va‚

　　sayāno yāvatāssa vitamiddho.

　　etaṃ satiṃ adhiṭṭheyya,

　　brahmametaṃ vihāramidhamāhu.

　　Standing or walking or seated or lying down, as long as one is free from drowsiness, one should practise this mindfulness. This (they say) is the brahma state.

　　Similar delightful words are found at many places in the Pali literature. If this country had preserved only the Dhammapada, a tiny fraction of this huge literature, its scholars would not have mistakenly come to view the Buddha as a negative, pessimistic person.

　　The first two verses of the Dhammapada are:

　　Manopubbaṅgamā dhammā, manoseṭṭhā manomayā;

　　Manasā ce paduṭṭhena, bhāsati vā karoti vā;

　　Tato naṃ dukkhamanveti, cakkaṃva vahato padaṃ.

　　All bodily and vocal actions have mind as their precursor, mind as their supreme leader; of mind they are made. If one speaks or acts with an impure mind, suffering follows him as the wheel follows the hoof of the animal yoked to the chariot.

　　Manopubbaṅgamā dhammā, manoseṭṭhā manomayā;

　　Manasā ce pasannena, bhāsati vā karoti vā;

　　Tato naṃ sukhamanveti, chāyā va anapāyinī.

　　All bodily and vocal actions have mind as their precursor, mind as their supreme leader; of mind they are made. If one speaks or acts with a pure mind, happiness follows him like his shadow that never leaves him.

　　It is clear that whatever one does with an impure mind will be unwholesome and will definitely result in misery. Similarly, whatever one does with a pure mind will be wholesome and will definitely result in happiness. These two verses alone would have clarified to anyone that the Buddha”s teaching is not fatalistic and that he is stating truths about both suffering and happiness.

　　If one looks at the Dhammapada, one finds that there are twenty-six chapters on various aspects of Dhamma, which teach one to live happily here and hereafter. One such chapter is Sukha Vagga (Chapter on Happiness). We note that there is no chapter on misery! This should prevent anyone from saying that the Buddha was pessimistic or that he was lacking in a positive attitude.

　　Whenever the Buddha talked about suffering, he did so only to bring to light its root causes and to encourage people to eradicate these causes. Whenever the Buddha talked about happiness, he did so to bring to light its basis and to encourage people to develop it.

　　Instead of talking of the cause of misery and its eradication, if the Buddha had said:

　　There is only misery everywhere now, and there is going to be only misery everywhere in future; it is futile to even try to come out of it; one should not waste one”s energy on this endeavour-

　　then, he could be truly called a fatalist, a pessimist, and a cynic lacking positive attitude and promoting inaction. If so, certainly the Buddha would have been the cause of harm not only to this country, but also to the entire human society. In that case, it would have been commendable to end his teaching not only in India but in the rest of the world as well.

　　But the truth is that the Buddha never said, "There is no escape from misery." Instead, he gave a practical, here-and-now method to come out of all misery. We in India lost the experiential aspect of his teaching. Our repeated distortion of the theoretical aspect of his teaching deprived us of its benefit. Whosoever around the world preserved it, benefited from it. The time has come now for us to understand the real facts, to heed their manifest lesson and to follow the practical path taught by the Buddha.

《The Cause of Misery and its Eradication》全文阅读结束。