The Buddha by John S. Strong

Author:John S. Strong
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2011-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

6

Daily routines, miracles, and distant journeys

Throughout the next forty years and more of his career, the Buddha continues to live in Northern India, visiting and revisiting different communities, preaching the Dharma, converting beings of all sorts, and settling doctrinal and disciplinary questions that arise. I shall not attempt a chronological account of his many activities during this period, but instead will focus on what might be called the gradual “settling down” of the Buddha, i.e. the growth of monasticism in those periods when he was not traveling, and his own opting, after twenty years, for a more or less permanent place of residence in Sravasti. In particular I want to look at his establishment at the Jetavana monastery in Sravasti, which became his permanent pied-à-terre, so to speak, for much of the latter portion of his life. At the same time, I want to give some sense of how the tradition imagined his daily monastic life there. This is interesting because it tells us something not only about the way Buddhist monks later imagined the Buddha’s mode of being in the world, but also it reveals something about their own monastic routines. Then, I would like to consider in some detail a sequence of important biographical events, the first of which, in fact, occurs in Sravasti. This is the great miracle display he puts on in order to defeat the heretical masters. This leads directly into a second important biographical event: the rains-retreat he spends in the Trayastrimsa Heaven preaching to his mother who has been reborn there. This in turn ends with a third episode, also involving a miracle: his descent from that heaven in the town of Samkasya. Finally, I will examine some conversions that the Buddha makes on a number of his so-called “apocryphal” journeys to distant lands. The Buddha is sometimes called, in relatively late sources, a “world wanderer,” an epithet reflecting the tradition that he made numerous “missionary trips” to establish Buddhism in lands beyond India. More specifically, I want to look at three of these: a tour he makes (in a single night) to the whole Northwestern region of the continent, to parts of what are now Kashmir, Pakistan, and Afghanistan; another journey (one of three) to the island of Sri Lanka, off the southern tip of India; and another to a land called Sronaparanta, which has been situated in Southeast Asia in what is today Myanmar (Burma).

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