Buddha, It's Your Birthday. And Rebirth Day. Happy Wesak 2012!

Bodhisattva Siddhartha Gautama determines that if he's really going to attain enlightenment, the bowl will float upstream. And so it does... He subsquently attains enlightenment that very night. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The birth, enlightenment, and death (or parinirvana) of Siddhartha Gautama, a.k.a. Shakhyamuni Buddha, or to most in the western world, simply the Buddha. Celebrating all of these at once obviously makes Wesak (or Vesak) an important Buddhist holiday, filled with candles, lanterns, offerings, prayers, and the like as suitable for any major religious festival.

And like any proper major religious holiday, it contains a deeper significance than the outward observances. Wesak is about transition and rebirth, the acknowledgement that everything in the phenomenal realm is always in motion, impermanent, and dependent. It calls for meditation and reflection on this insight--that the movement of the phenomenal realm is related to the movement of mind--and the virtues it inspires.

If we follow this reflection and if we recognize that what we take as the real world is largely a projection of our own internal perspective and personal psychology (keeping in mind that all of our perceptions, impressions, thoughts, and the like take place in the dark, lightless cave inside our crania), and that we and others are often trapped in delusions of our own making, this shared experience and the realization that our actions and reactions toward others are often more about us (and theirs about them) is a foundation for the development of compassion, loving-kindness, equanimity, and empathetic joy.

Have a meaningful and beneficial Wesak, whatever your views on religion or Buddhism.

Happy Vesak/Buddha Day 2009!

The celebration of the anniversary of the birth of the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama...

Yeah, this picture would be more appropriate for the holiday in December which celebrates the enlightenment of the Buddha, but I didn't have any pics that are the equivalent of the Buddha's nativity scene. The reason he looks skinny is because at this point in the story of his life he has spent years studying every spiritual practice he could find, every method of earning salvation, every trick for attaining liberation. This included the idea of extreme fasting and mortification. But none of it worked. He mastered every religious ritual, every liturgy, but he still couldn't practice his way into enlightenment. He has just given up fasting and all such methods in the days prior to this image, but he is still emaciated from these techniques. It isn't until he finally lets go, until he finally realizes all his efforts are just expressions of his self-centered worldview, that he cannot ever "achieve" salvation, that he finally has his epiphany. The smile of serenity indicates this has moment has already occurred, so the painting represents the period right after he becomes the Buddha.