THE BODHI TREE

...In the beginning of no beginnings and the end without endings, was the Creator (some call Him Brahmin). As the World Soul, He had the power to preserve (a.k.a. Vishnu) and destroy (Shiva), because whatever He identified it, that's what it was. He decided to make something He could see, relate to and experience as real, not just theorize about, so He made Man (Manu) or man-i-festation. He man-i-fested His World view with them. If He could not make their experience completely believable, it would be no fun, so He apparently contracted himSelf as them to experience them with all the tones of reality and unreality.

...So through King Sudhodanna (pseudo-dawn) and Queen Maya (illusion), He gave birth to himSelf in four castes - physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually and named himSelf Siddhata Gautama, the embodiment of All Being through experience, specifically of what is not, in order to fully realize himSelf, in a first person singular, individual and therefore, indivisible way.

...With the Law of Imagination Creates Reality, He gave himSelf anything His heart desired. On His day of birth, He even gave himSelf a wife, also of God-like lineage, to be His playmate.

...But as in all things, while absorbed in the good stuff of life, he failed to see the bad stuff of life, until one day, He wandered out too far to the extreme boundary of His good kingdom and found bad or evil. What a shock! His parents hadn't told Him about that. They preferred that He only experience the good, as all good parents do. But like all children, Siddhata became determined to experience this other side of life, too. He felt without that experience as well, He could not experience true happiness (i.e. wholeness or hol-I-ness).

...So against His Father's wishes, Siddhata ran away to experience the other or opposite side of Life. He gave away all the clothes and belongings of his now former identity as son of a good and wealthy King and donned the rags of poverty and suffering. Since He still kept the Law with Him, "Imagination Creates Reality," this life, too, took on all the tones of reality by His agreeing to give His Life to it.

...What a life it was: starvation, deprivation, begging for food, being mocked and derided as a fool, scorned and prejudiced. Pretty soon, He was pretty mortified in body, mind and emotions, and slowly began to realize this couldn't possibly be It either. He still was not happy and found that He, like any common drunk, was somehow only escaping reality - He knew He wasn't living It - True Reality seemed to elude Him.

...Siddhata sat down between the two extremes of His life at the foot of the Bodhi Tree. He vowed to stay there until the Real Truth dawned on Him (no more pseudo-dawn). And, of course, It did, from this Middle position, where He stopped aspiring and striving for something He already was. He called this The Middle Path and stayed there for 7x7 days (49 or 4+9=13, the completion of the cycle of Maya -12- and the beginning of new and Divine Life called Nirvana).

...Of course, He'd come to realize worshipped multiplicities of persons, places and things, alive or dead, was idol worship. There was nothing outside of Consciousness or God, so therefore, nothing outside to worship. But like Siddhata, now known as Buddha (the Enlightened One), His students seemed destined to find this out through their own experience, even though Buddha told them not to worship idols.

...He told them not to worship Him either, but, of course, they did. He told them 8 do's and 5 don'ts to follow - simple, but not easy.

...Three things Buddhist monks who followed Him required themselves to follow were poverty, inoffensiveness and celibacy. Between the 8 do's of right action (personal will in action) and the 5 don'ts of abstinence, we clearly have a set up to teach each student the Middle Path between these opposites, found from experience. This is called Life, the Teacher, Awakening from what is not into That Which Is.

© 1993 Tirza S. Ericson