Vesak is the name of the month in the Indian calendar close to our month of May.  The holiday, Vesak, is celebrated on the first full moon in May. Vesak celebrates Buddha’s birthday, and his enlightenment and his death in one all-encompassing holiday.  It’s appropriate that only a single day would be devoted to celebrate all the significant events of Buddha’s life. The Buddha’s central message was always that it was not himself that should be venerated, but his teaching. Buddhists receive enlightenment only by walking the path for themselves that Buddha shows them. The Buddha is worthy of reverence because he had the skill to uncover the path to Nibbana and then because he taught what he had found so others could follow the path as well. It is not the details of Buddha’s life that have salvific effect for Buddhists, only the path. The holiday of Vesak is marked not by enacting scene of Buddha’s life, but by living out his teaching through acts of compassion, giving away food to strangers on the road, donating blood, and other acts of charity.

Indeed the person of the Buddha can even be a distraction for those who should be concentrating on the path. This is why a ninth-century master of Zen Buddhism told his disciples, ‘If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha!” It’s the dhamma, the teaching, that’s important, not the teacher. It is necessary that the teacher be born, receive enlightenment, and enter Nibbana, but his salvation will not save us. Celebrating all of Buddha’s life in one day is appropriately reverent for a great leader, without making too much of a life, which was after all just the life of a human person who accomplished for himself what we all must accomplish for ourselves.

Little is known of the historical Buddha. We know he was born about five hundred years before the Common Era, but we don’t know what year within a span of about a hundred and twenty years. We know Buddha was born in Kapilavatthu in Northern India in the foothills of the Himalayas. We are told his father’s name was Suddhodana, a wealthy merchant of the area. But we don’t know details of Buddha’s life, because the Buddha himself and his followers were more interested in what he had to teach, then who he was himself. Although the Buddhist scriptures are immense, preserving his teachings, sermons, rules of conduct, and so on, there is no narrative of his life parallel, for instance to the Gospels of Jesus. And the Buddha who is described does not have a personality the way Jesus does in the gospels. The Buddha teaches the illusion of self, so his self is absent from his stories.

Buddha was born during a time when writing was uncommon. His followers listened to what he said and preserved them by memory. To minds used to memorization, and made skillful through yogic practice this is not as impossible a task as it would be to us today. But it also must be admitted that this is an imprecise method of recording, and certainly open to mistakes and omissions and additions that reflect the prejudices and opinions of Buddha’s followers. About a hundred years after Buddha’s death his followers held a conference where they recited what they remembered and came to an agreed upon version of the teachings. This was done in the language of Pali and is thus called the Pali canon, or the Tipitaka, meaning three baskets, referring to the three collections of texts they formed. The Tipitaka is the core of the Theraveda school of Buddhism, the Mahayana canon coming somewhat later with additional texts. The Pali canon was first written down about three hundred years after that, in the first century before the common era. However the oldest existing copy of the Buddhist scriptures are only 500 years old, adding to our uncertainty about historical accuracy.

Buddha’s life is closely contemporaneous with several other important historical figures living in China, India, Iran, and the Eastern Mediterranean. These figures, taken together, represent the leaders of what historians call the Axial Age, a turning point in human culture. Other Axial age figures are Confucius, Lao Tzu, Mahavira (the founder of the Jains), Socrates, Plato, Zoroaster and the oldest Hebrew Prophets, Amos and Isaiah. They each represent a waking up to the human condition. They experienced and led others toward a new curiosity about the meaning of human life, and the possibility that there could be a deeper meaning available, and that human beings had the ability to discover that meaning. In religion they each helped move their cultures away from a magical relationship with nature where the powers that affect our lives, represented by gods are manipulated by our rituals and sacrifices, toward a sense of divinity as an underlying order with standards of morality and ethics. This new conception of divinity is not a status quo that human beings must accommodate themselves to, instead it is a divine process that participates with us in moving our lives toward some sense of improvement, and fulfillment. Part of this Axial change is defined by moving religion away from a secret knowledge held by an exclusive group of priests who alone could read and interpret texts and light the sacred fires, and putting religion into the hands and lives of all people who then serve themselves through morality and ethics.

In India this Axial transformation had already begun by the time of Buddha’s birth. The old religion, described in the scriptures called the Vedas, had been brought with the Aryan invaders 500 years earlier. The Vedas spoke timeless, unchanging truths.  The Vedic gods are manifestations of powerful natural forces led by Agni, the god of fire. The human role is to honor the gods, and thus manipulate nature, through the lighting of the sacred fires. The role of religion is simply to keep the world going. There is no progress, no development, no deeper understanding, no goal. And of course, natural forces cannot be manipulated by sacred fires, thus the rituals failed as often as they worked, and people became dissatisfied.

The Upanishads, developed shortly before Buddha’s birth, present themselves as commentaries on the sacred Vedic texts but are actually a radical transformation, moving the divine aspect of the universe from the exterior to the interior. Brahman, the word for the divinity that stands behind and through all existence is said to be identical with Atman, the deepest Self within each person. The Hindu religion now emerged with a problem and a goal, to overcome this ignorance about our true selves and to discover our interior divinity. Although Hindu popular religion continued with hundreds of gods and priests and sacred rituals, Hindu esoteric religion could dispense with all this, because we all carry divinity within us. The work required is the transformation of our own lives and personality, not the priestly work of sacrifice and ritual.

This was entirely typical of Axial Age thinking. Lao Tzu hypothesized a divinity flowing behind and through all existence. Confucius emphasized our personal moral responsibility to self, family, and government. Amos and Isaiah preached that God despised our religious festivals and was honored by our charity and justice. The Greek philosophers spoke of a human community fallen away from divine order and told us that we could use our own powers of reason to regain what we had lost. 

Buddha, born into this kind of thinking, would found his religion on these notions of a meaning and an order lying hidden behind a fallen world, and the individual ability of each person to find within themselves the path to that peace and joy.  The Buddha also inherited a religious world that included other notions central to what would become Buddhism. Following the Upanishads, many religious men, and some women, had become sanyasin “gone-away” who had left their domestic lives in search of a route to discover this inner Self, the Atman. The sight of the mendicant monk would have been common on the roads of North Eastern India. So too, would have been the monks gathering together around a guru who promised an effective teaching. Buddha also learned the doctrine of reincarnation, called samsara, meaning “keeping-going.”

Samsara was seen as a horrifying prison wherein all humanity is stuck in an endless cycle of birth followed by the sorrows of old age, illness and death, only to be reborn and suffer again. The doctrine of kamma was also already understood, whereby our actions during life have consequences that must be played out in this life or a life to follow. It hardly mattered whether our actions were good or bad. Good kamma would lead to a better reincarnation, but even the most comfortable life is not immune to the suffering of illness and death, and would never provide a final escape from samsara. Because any action binds one to reincarnation many concluded the way out of samsara must be to not act at all. Thus they left the demands of family and city life and took to independent lives in the forest.

The Buddha was 29, when he left the comfort of his father’s home and became a monk, about the same age that Jesus was when he began his ministry. Buddha joined the many other monks looking to find a teacher who could show the way out of samsara. Thus he was seen as were all the monks, as a kind of heroic warrior, doing battle against the terror of reincarnation, and if successful, opening a path for all to be saved.  Buddha first assumed, as the Upanishads taught, that the problem was our ignorance of our deepest divine self, and he was determined to wake up to this goal.

Buddha was always an empiricist in religion. He never trusted on faith alone what someone else claimed to have discovered. Knowing intellectually, that the Brahman is the Atman, was not sufficient. He needed to experience the truth directly. The Buddha began by following a skillful teacher who taught Buddha the practice of Yoga, learned from the ancient Aryans.

Yoga means “yoke.” As we yoke together two oxen to pull a plow, yoga attempts to bind together the practitioner and the inner Self, so that they experience themselves as one. The Buddha, we are told, was an excellent student of yoga, and was quickly able to attain the deepest levels of janna, or understanding. But in doing so he discovered what he saw as a fatal flaw in the Hindu practice. It is the mundane self that meditates, and thus it is the mundane self that achieves even the highest states of meditation. The experience of the deepest self, if achieved, is thus created by the mundane self. This isn’t good enough. It doesn’t free the meditator from the mundane world, which is the object.  And when the session is concluded the meditator finds themselves embedded again in the world of dukkha, or suffering.

Buddha, therefore gave up his meditative practice for a time, and tried the path of the ascetic. Ascetics reasoned that if action leads to kamma, which leads to samsara, then a life of inaction, may be the path to escape samsara. The Buddha himself noticed that action follows from desire. It is because we desire something that we act to achieve it.  The Buddha wanted to try living with nothing, freeing himself from creating new kamma by desiring nothing, and burning away his old kamma, through physical deprivation and pain.

The Buddha thus moved into the forest accompanied by five fellow ascetics, where he lived for several years. It is said he reached the point where he could feel his spine through his belly. But the Buddha did not discover the path away from suffering in the ascetic life; instead, he only increased his suffering.
At last the Buddha gave up. He began to take nourishment and nurse himself back to health. This disappointed his fellow ascetics who thought he had failed from weakness. They abandoned him. Buddha felt there must be some other path. He decided that he would sit down beneath a tree and he would not rise again until he had figured it out. He chose a Bodhi tree and the legend tells us it was exactly the same Bodhi tree chosen by all the previous Buddhas from the distant ages. He even chose the exact same spot beneath the tree, the immovable spot about which the world turns.

The Buddha sought a Middle Way, beneath the self-indulgence he had known in his youth, and the asceticism he had tried recently, both of which led to dukkha. Sitting beneath the Bodhi tree, the Buddha suddenly remembered sitting beneath a different tree when he was a child, a rose-apple tree, when he had spontaneously had a feeling of rapture and release from suffering. He had been watching his father’s laborers plowing up a field for planting. As they worked close to where he was sitting he saw that the plow turned up a great number of insects that were broken by the plow and exposed uncomfortably to the sun. The Buddha felt deep compassion for the insects, and then his compassion moved him away from his preoccupation with self-interest and he was instantly filled with great peace and joy. Instinctively, perhaps remembering a past life, the child Buddha moved into the yoga lotus position and through meditation was able to sustain the feeling the rest of the day. When his nursemaids returned that afternoon to bring him home, they discovered that the shadows of all the other trees had moved but the shadow of the rose-apple had stayed where it was, protecting the young Buddha from the sun so as not to disturb his meditation.

Remembering this, beneath the Bodhi tree, the Buddha realized that the peace and joy he sought must be a natural part of human nature. He also saw how our own peace and joy are linked to the extinguishing of our selfish desires through the feeling of universal compassion, feeling with all forms of existence, even insects. The Buddha saw that yoga could be a useful practice with a goal not of discovering a divine Self, beyond our humanity, as the Hindu’s tried, but as a way of exploring our deep human nature, and discovering what was useful in our humanity in achieving the natural human state of peace and joy. The Buddha called this awareness of human nature, mindfulness. He saw that some aspects of human nature are helpful and others are unhelpful. The path to peace and joy, therefore, would partly consist of talking, acting, and working in the right ways, and avoiding the wrong ways. These became the first three steps of his eight-fold path. Practicing meditation in his new way, being aware of our human nature through constant mindfulness, and concentrating on the path, became steps four through six. The final two steps include understanding the Buddha’s teaching, or dhamma, intellectually, and then integrating the dhamma directly into every aspect of life.

Beginning with three noble truths, that Dukkha exists, that our desire is the cause of Dukkha, and that Nibbana exists as a mode apart from dukkha, the Buddha then added his eightfold path as a fourth Noble Truth, that a path from Dukkha to Nibbana had been found. The Buddha claimed that he had not invented the Dhamma, only that he uncovered it. He saw it as an ancient, but forgotten path, always available to human beings, but requiring a Buddha to reveal it.

Thus the Buddha achieved enlightenment.

But what did he achieve? He did not, immediately under the Bodhi tree release himself from samsara. He did not die. He lived another 45 years. During that time he continued to feel pain and sorrow. He also eventually experienced a painful death. The Buddha’s enlightenment was simply his self-knowledge that he had figured it out. He had discovered the means by which the cycle of death and rebirth would be broken. During the remainder of his life he would burn out the residual kamma he had developed over his previous lives, but he would not add any new kamma that would necessitate another life. The Buddha used the example of someone who had been suffering from a fever and is suddenly healed. His life became cooled. In a parody of the three ritual fires burned by the Vedic priests, the Buddha said that his enlightenment had extinguished the fires of greed, hatred and delusion. He often compared the process of reincarnation to someone who uses the light from one candle to light a second candle. It is not the first flame that burns on the second candle, but the first flame causes the second flame. Enlightenment had extinguished the Buddha’s flame. Though he would continue to live, there would be no fire remaining after his death to light a new life fire.
When the Buddha achieved enlightenment, so the legends tell us, “all the worlds of the Buddhist cosmos were convulsed, the heavens and hells shook, and the bodhi tree rained down red florets on the enlightened man” (Armstrong 92-93). Every flowering tree suddenly burst into blossom and every fruit tree hung heavy with sudden fruit. The blind and deaf were made to see and hear, the lame walk, and the prisoners lose their shackles. Even the ocean was said to lose its salty taste.

The world rejoiced at the Buddha’s accomplishment. The Buddha’s enlightenment offered the possibility of more life, more abundance, more joy, in the world. The world rejoiced not because the Buddha had saved the world, but because the Buddha had discovered the dhamma, the teaching, by which the world could save itself.

What the Buddha discovered is that within the natural states of human existence their exists a condition called Nibbana. Nibbana literally means “blown out” or “Extinguished” but the Buddha cautions against trying to define the Nibbana state. While our consciousness is embedded in the mundane world of sorrows and desires and egotism we can not imagine what Nibbana is actually like, and even having experienced it, as the Buddha did, words are not available to convey its essence.

Nibbana, is the goal of Buddhist practice. If Nibbana were only extinguishing, it would not make for an attractive goal. Few people are interested in annihilation. Even the small pleasures we have in life, even when averaged with the painful and sad experiences seem more satisfactory than a permanent nothingness.
What the Buddha discovered was the annihilation of selfishness, not the annihilation of self. Enlightenment destroys the selfish desires that lead to greed, hatred and delusion. The Buddha compared enlightenment to being cured from a fever.  Suddenly he felt cooled, and clear-headed. What one becomes after a fever, or after enlightenment, is not a new person, or a non-person, but the selfless self that exists underneath our desires, unmasked by the fever taken away.           

The Buddha also used the analogy of a flame on the end of a candle. One candle lights another, creating a second flame that burns because of the first flame. In this way the fires of greed, hatred, and delusion that burn during one life, light a second life after our death. Although the Buddha continued to live after he reached nibbana under the Bodhi tree, he knew that he had become an Arahant, an “accomplished one” who had extinguished the fires of his life. Having extinguished his candle there would be no flame at his death to ignite a next life. When the Buddha finally died, 45 years after his enlightenment, he would enter paranibbana, literally final extinguishing, but remember again that no words available really can describe the experience.

The Buddha is a human being not a god. Nor is he a Christ-figure. The Buddha does not save us vicariously; instead he provides an example by which we work to save ourselves.

The Buddhist religion has often been called atheist although that is not strictly the case. The Buddhist scriptures are filled with gods, however, the Buddhist gods, though a different species from human, are portrayed as bound into the same system of death and rebirth, and sorrowful existence, that we are. The Buddhist gods along with all existence rely on the Buddha to show the dhamma that leads to nibbana.
Aside from these sorts of gods, it’s true that Buddhism does not speak of a god similar to the God of the monotheistic religions. Buddhism specifically denies that a god created the world. In the Buddhist cosmology the universe creates itself through a 12 step cycle of natural cause and effect that begins with ignorance, leading through consciousness, to sensation, then desire, attachment and existence.

However it would be better to say that Buddhism is agnostic, than atheistic.  Aside from denying a creator god, Buddhism does not speak of God either to affirm or deny. God is irrelevant in the Buddhist system but not excluded. The Buddha refused to talk about any philosophy or answer any questions about ultimate reality that didn’t directly relate to the task at hand, releasing oneself from samsara. By example he once picked a few leaves from a simsapa tree and told his disciples that what he taught was as these few leaves compared to all the leaves on all the trees in the grove.  God’s existence or non-existence changes nothing about the problem or Buddha’s solution and thus should be ignored. The Buddha once said to a man who pestered him with philosophical questions that he was like a man who had been wounded but who refused to be treated until he had learned the name of his attacker. What matters are the wound and the healing, nothing else.

Buddhism’s foundational principle is selflessness, and the compassion that follows naturally from thinking beyond the boundaries of the self. The Buddhist compassion is remarkable and beautiful. Of course, thinking outside the boundaries of the self and feeling compassion toward others is a hallmark of all the world religions, though not always evident in practice.

Buddhism provides an entirely naturalistic system in its worldview and teachings.  Nibbana consists of a natural state fully present in every human being discovered by our own power without the supernatural assistance of a god, or the Buddha. The Buddhist scriptures do describe miracles but they are not integral to the Buddhist system, the way for instance that the miracle of Christ’s resurrection is required for the orthodox Christian salvation system to work.

Buddhism, like all the world religions is an exclusivist religion. Buddhists feel that they have the truth about the world and that the Buddhist path to salvation is the only effective path. Buddhism is not an evangelizing religion like Christianity or Islam, but only because Buddhists believe that non-Buddhists will continue to be reborn until they arrive at a life where they are able to join the Buddhist path.

Buddhism believes in reincarnation. The entire Buddhist system is founded on the doctrine of reincarnation, which the Buddha adopted from the prevalent belief in his culture. Reincarnation is the problem Buddhism is designed to overcome, thus for many in the west Buddhism offers a solution to a problem most of us don’t recognize.  Reincarnation has become a popular belief in new-age personal spirituality.  What’s interesting is that for these people reincarnation provides a past and future life alternative to the Heaven and Hell that they can’t believe in. In other words, for them, the thought of being reborn is an improvement on the alternative. Whereas in Buddhism reincarnation, or samsara, is seen as the ultimate horror. For Buddhists the basic fact of life is suffering. Being reborn means facing another round of suffering, growing old, becoming sick, dying. Buddhist reincarnation is not a happy feature allowing for life after death, it is the very problem Buddhism tries to overcome.

Also difficult for westerners is the essentially passive relationship between Buddhism and the world. Although the Buddhist stance is balanced by deeply felt compassion; Buddhist beliefs support an acceptance of injustice. Buddhism begins with a worldview that says existence is dukkha, or suffering. Suffering is part of life under any conditions. It cannot be fully relieved it can only be escaped from. For Buddhists not injustice but existence itself is the cause of suffering. Existence is not inherently good, it is inherently sorrowful. We should work to ease the suffering of others however possible, but final peace is only attained by removing oneself from this existence, not in transforming the world into something it cannot be. The Buddha was not a social reformer or a political critic the way that Amos, Isaiah, Jesus, and Muhammad were. Buddhism finally, is not really a set of beliefs, but a practice, requiring hard work and commitment. The Buddha stresses in his teaching that the dhamma is a path to be followed but that even the dhamma must be abandoned once it has served its usefulness, like a raft which is left behind after the river has been crossed. You experience Buddhism. The fundamentals of Buddhism cannot be described or taught, they must be done. The Buddha refuses to even talk about metaphysics, theology, or philosophy, as those are distractions from living the dhamma.

Buddhism demands that we accept nothing on faith that we haven’t experienced for ourselves. After The Buddha achieved his enlightenment he had to be coaxed into sharing the dhamma he discovered with anyone else. The Buddha assumed that once heard the dhamma would not be understood, and if understood, people would not willingly undertake the arduous yogic work and moral discipline required. The legend tells us that the god Brahma himself intervened and when the Buddha saw how selfish he would be keeping the truth of nibbana to himself he agreed to try and teach it.

He began by finding the five men with whom he had taken to the forest when he tried the ascetic path. They were living in the Deer Park in Varanasi. To them the Buddha preached his first sermon outlining the four noble truths and the eightfold path he had discovered. All five became sotapannas “stream-enterers” upon hearing his words, which means they joined the stream that would now lead them inevitably to enlightenment.

The next convert was Yasa , the son of a wealthy merchant, who, like the Buddha, had suddenly awakened to the horrible sorrow of existence and left the material comforts of his father’s home in search of a way out. He came to the Deer Park and found the Buddha who taught him the dhamma. Yasa then returned with the Buddha to his father’s house and the next converts became Yasa’s father and mother, a servant, Yasa’s wife whom he had left as the Buddha had left his wife, and fifty of Yasa’s friends. Then the Buddha sent all 60 of the new Buddhists out into the world to preach the dhamma.

The Buddha’s next converts were two friends Sariputta and Moggallana who become the founders of the two main branches of Buddhism, Theraveda and Mahyana respectively, and who became the Buddha’s chief disciples. Both disciples were converted by the Buddha on the same day and equally praised, showing that both schools are equally valid. Theraveda Buddhism is the more austere and intellectual path. It emphasizes monastic living and the responsibility of each person to attain enlightenment for themselves. Theraveda Buddhism is dominant in Southeast Asia. The Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh is its most well known follower. Mahayana Buddhism is the more popular form. It stresses compassion. Mahayana Buddhism contributes the idea of the Boddhisatta, the person who has attained enlightenment but from compassion remains in the world to help others attain enlightenment. Mahayana Buddhism is the dominant form in China and Japan, and the Dalai Lama is its most well known figure. The Buddha also returned to his family and converted his father and his son, and a cousin named Ananda who became his companion later in life, and his brother-in-law, Devadatta who would later betray the Buddha.

Quickly, through the teachings, a sangha, or community, gathered around the Buddha. They traveled the roads nine months of the year, living outside, subsisting off the free will offerings they receive from villagers. They received gifts of land from wealthy patrons. During the monsoon season they camped more permanently in a single location. The sangha becomes one of the three refuges of Buddhism, the others being the Dhamma, and the Buddha himself. This stated importance of the community even while following what is a necessarily private spiritual path is another similarity to Unitarian Universalism.

In Buddha’s old age, Devadatta asked the Buddha to place the sangha under his control, which the Buddha refused to do. So Devadatta decided to take it by force. He created an alliance with a princely friend Ajatasattu, son of King Bimbisara. He saw that if he could wrest control of the religious power, and his friend of the political power, then they could rule the country. Ajatasattu attempted to kill his father the king but was arrested. King Bimbisara, a disciple of Buddha told his son that if he wanted the kingdom he could have it, so Ajatasattu took the kingdom and then imprisoned Bimbisara and starved him to death.

Devadatta meanwhile sent assassins to kill the Buddha but when they came before him they were converted and become his disciples. So Devadatta attempted to crush the Buddha with a boulder, but only grazed his foot. Then Devadatta attempted to have the Buddha trampled by a rogue elephant but the elephant was overcome by Buddha’s love. Seeing this demonstration, Ajatasattu the king, became a disciple of Buddha. 
Finally Devadatta attempted to steal Buddha’s disciples by criticizing their laxity and by publishing five more severe rules for behavior, which the Buddha refused to adopt. This seemed to work. Five hundred monks left the Buddha and followed Devadatta. The Buddha sent Sariputta and Moggallana to win them back.

Devadatta, assuming that these two were also deserters, let them preach to the monks and all five hundred quickly returned to the Buddha. The story ends with Devadatta giving up and killing himself.

The 45 years of Buddha’s life between enlightenment and death are filled with these sorts of stories. He travels with the sangha among the villages of North Eastern India. He converts many people wealthy and poor. He preaches. After some convincing the Buddha allows women to join the sangha on an equal level with the men but under more restrictions on their behavior. The Buddha continues to feel pain and sorrow, both compassion for others and personal pain, but he experiences it with a post-enlightenment equanimity where it does not affect him. The Buddha is described as a magnetic figure drawing people by his peace and stillness. But he does not appear in the scriptures as a character, for instance the way Jesus does in the gospels. Post-enlightenment the Buddha teaches the illusion of the self, annatta; thus he comes across as a featureless, everyman, who is charismatic through the dhamma not through his personality.

The Buddha died after eating poisoned food served by the son of a blacksmith named Cunda in the town of Pava. The stories leave unclear whether the poisoning was an accident or a deliberate act. In either case the Buddha instructed Cunda to bury the leftovers without letting anyone else eat from the bowl. The Buddha saw he would die but had several days remaining in which to plan his death. He made funeral arrangements. He gave several final teachings. He comforted his beloved disciple Ananda and chastised him for grieving over his imminent death when he of all people should have learned of the impermanence of all things. The Buddha even had time to choose where he would die, a small village deep in the jungle called Kusinara. His followers urged him to return to Varanasi or some other big city where his death could be witnessed by thousands. Instead he chose a village nearly off the map, symbolizing how unimportant is the death of one man, and how important is the mission he left to his followers: to spread Buddhism to all parts of the world.

The Buddha then sat in a grove of sala trees with Ananda and a retinue of monks plus a crowd of gods. He spoke his final words; “All individual things pass away. Seek your liberation with diligence.” And he died.

Bibliography:  Armstrong, Karen, Buddha (Penguin Lives) Viking Penguin, New York, 2001