Buddha Revisited

Dear bloggie,

Just readed this article.

To summarize the whole article (since I know some MFR as so slacking lazy to even bother reading this long winding article), it entails the findings of a researcher, Batchelor on Gautama Buddha.

His findings seem to break the illusion we all have on Buddha (or rather misconception due to historical manipulation). What do our history books and elder teaching preach to us about Buddha? I for one know this much:

He's a prince of a Kingdom in India. He saw suffering for the first time and got freak by it. He left his kingdom, father, wife and son to seek a mean to avoid this suffering. He meditated under a tree and fasted till one day he achieved enlightenment. He spread his teaching and now his legacy now lives as a religion called Buddhism.

We all probably know or heard before the above tale. Now here's the kicker... What happen after Buddha got his enlightenment? Most of us have the beautiful glass stained illusion that Buddha with his now divine understanding of karma and life, manage to easily convince the people the suffering of their everyday way of life and hence easily spread his religion across the world and lived happily ever after till his end. Now that I think about it, it does sound a bit odd doesn't it?

It seems Buddha happy ever after ending wasn't so happy after all. According to Batchelor,

"In the last 10 months of his life, the Buddha, old and ailing, saw his two main disciples die, one of them brutally murdered, and was forced to flee with a handful of loyalists from all the three political bases he had spent a lifetime building up, until he was possibly poisoned to death by one of his many rivals, leaving a pretender to take over the community after an intense power struggle."

Cut the long story short, Buddha seems to be having problem containing with his supposedly allies, kings of nation that took his religion in and his relatives in his attempt to spread his teachings. He was caught within a web of deception, lie and manipulation which ended with him probably being murder via poison (Buddha was said to suspected something was amidst with the pork (Bah Kut Teh!? I hope tis puts an end to the dispute tat monks can't eat meat which is a f*cking myth) offered to his monks and him, hence he served the pork to himself and other dishes to his disciple monks). Buddha's death also marked the start of a power struggle for the rightful successor spot as an outsider priests tries to claim the religion to obtain control and power.

Funny really, how even the great Buddha himself, the enlighten one can get screwed by a bunch of greedy, selfish, manipulative man...