The Lotus Still Blooms Read Free Page A

understand them and perhaps change your life.
    So let us begin at the beginning.
    This beginning of Prince Siddhartha’s life-changing journey would
    When the Buddha was still known as Prince Siddhartha, he journeyed for the first time outside the protection of the palace walls and saw what is called “the four sights of the Buddha.” What he saw was:
    1. An elderly man. The Prince had no knowledge of aging, be it a person, animal or flower, since he had been totally sheltered from all perceived negativity by his father, the King.
    2. A sick man. He was stunned when he saw him and asked his companion Chonna, “What is wrong?” Chonna explained, “It is the law of nature that we are all prone to sickness. Poor, rich, ignorant or wise, we are all creatures with bodies and so susceptible to disease.”
    3. A dead man. The Prince had never witnessed death. Explained Chonna, “He who begins life must end it.”
    4. An encounter with a monk who had a begging bowl. Again Chonna, “He has understood that beauty will turn to ugliness, youth into old age, life into death. And he is looking for the eternal, looking for that which does not die.”
     
 
turn his world upside down, as it has done for the millions who have followed the Buddha’s teachings through the aeons. The Buddha vowed, as he sat in meditation under a bodhi tree, that he would not arise until he achieved enlightenment, the supreme state of absolute transcendence and clarity. And that is what occurred.
    After achieving enlightenment, the Buddha rose from under the bodhi tree and in a serene spot delivered his first message to a small band of future followers. This has come to be known as the Deer Park Sermon, where the first turning of the wheel of the Dharma (the body of spiritual teaching) took place. This is where the Buddha first taught what would become the essential teachings of Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths.
    Many have allowed the first Noble Truth, “Life is suffering,” to frighten them and have been unwilling to look further. When properly understood and taken within the context of the entire four, it is not frightening, it is enlightening. Here are the four:
     
THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS
    1. Life is suffering.
    2. The cause of suffering is our own grasping and clinging, our attachments to our desires.
    3. Cessation of suffering is possible.
    4. Presentation of the Eight-fold Path that leads to the end of suffering and promotes well-being.
     
The wise and scholarly have noted that the 84,000 teachings found within Tibetan Buddhism can be summarized by the Four Noble Truths. It takes real willingness to look at the first Noble Truth in order to become aware of another way and to recognize that this spiritual truth is your reality. Life contains suffering. Many are experiencing suffering at this very moment. Pick up any newspaper, turn on the evening news, look deeply at the lives of those around you, look deeply into your own life. Suffering will be found at every turn, because suffering is an inescapable fact of life, because life and its pleasures and ills are impermanent.
    In magical thinking we wish the good and pleasurable aspects of life would last forever, just like the noble prince’s father, the King. Nothing on our bodies would ever sag or wrinkle, our children would always adore us, our parents would never grow old and die. Nor would we grow old and die.
    The entire subject of impermanence is often ignored by metaphysicians, somehow caught up in the magical thinking that—if we do not look at the unsettling aspects of life such as disease, aging and death as the Buddha saw on his first journey beyond the palace walls—undesired events will not occur in our lives. This is not a psychologically sound way to approach life, yet many are caught in such upside-down thinking.
    The Buddhist teaching is that our attempt to avoid all aspects of life is the cause of our suffering. By acknowledging the full spectrum of our human experiences, we