one day he grew so sick of his cosseted, uneventful existence that he ventured outside the palace. And what he saw shook him to the core: there was Old Age (an elderly man), Illness (a leper or someone with an obvious disease), Death (a decaying corpse) and—spot the odd one out—an ascetic.
Gautama was profoundly depressed by three of these sights, and so decided that the only way to defeat Old Age, Illness and Death was to follow the ascetic’s example and become a monk, disowning his inheritance and trying to understand how he could overcome suffering through meditation.
And meditate he did, on his own and with other hermits and monks; but still this didn’t give him satisfaction. So off he roamed around India, where he decided to try and gain ‘Enlightenment’ through depriving himself of all creature comforts, including food.
After nearly perishing of starvation, Gautama decided that starving himself wasn’t really such a good idea. He instead chose what Buddhist’s refer to as the ‘Middle Way’: neither over-indulging nor denying himself something to the extent that this denial became physically harmful. Aged thirty-five, Gautama decided to sit beneath a bo tree, and not stand back up until he’d achieved Enlightenment. Which, to cut a long story short, is eventually what happened.
Ignorance was the principal course of human suffering, he realised, and he had the Four Noble Truths (which are really a bit too deep to go into here) or ‘steps’ that anyone could follow to defeat ignorance and thus become Enlightened.
To bring this story to a rather abrupt conclusion, Buddha (as he was now known) spent the last forty-five years of his life travelling extensively and gaining many followers. He died aged eighty, having fallen ill after eating a meal of what is commonly believed to have been pork. Exercising true benevolence, however, he refused to blame the man (named Cunda, a blacksmith) who’d given him the meat dish.
‘All composite things pass away. Strive for your own salvation with diligence,’ were Buddha’s final words before dying.
What’s important to point out here is that Buddha didn’t claim to be any sort of god. Nor was he unique; he was merely the last in a long line of people who could also be called Buddha, people who’d also gained Enlightenment. In fact, according to my brother-in-law Taigi, who is the Buddhist head-priest of a temple belonging to the Jodo—‘Pure Land’—sect of Buddhism, there are (and this is a direct quote, including the pluralising of the word ‘Buddha’) ‘…as many Buddhas as there are grains of sand in this world…’
I suppose it just so happens that because he was the last of all these trillions of ‘Buddhas’, the Buddha who was previously SiddhĚrtha Gautama is the one getting all the attention. In other words, it’s been rather a long time since anyone new became a Buddha.
Failing to gain Enlightenment, humans are instead endlessly reincarnated, moving among the Six Realms that are Ten (basically heaven, which can’t be all bad), Ningen (which is the world as we know it, Jim), Chikusho (inhabited by animals), Shura (described by Taigi as being filled with an ‘everlasting anger’), Gaki (where you suffer from a general dissatisfaction and want of everything) and, finally, Jigoku (hell).
One of these days, then, someone will succeed in gaining Enlightenment and will thus break this vicious circle, thereby creating a new Buddha. In the meantime, Buddhists do their best to stay out of the ‘lower’ Realms by filling their lives with selfless acts of charity.
BUDŦ
The ‘umbrella’ term given to all types of Japanese martial arts. BudŦ itself is a compound of two Japanese words: bu meaning ‘war’, and dŦ meaning ‘way of’. BudŦ best describes the myriad fighting skills a samurai warrior would have needed to master in order to survive the battlefield. He (not many female samurai in feudal Japan, though check the Naginata entry for the inevitable exception) would have been highly skilled in not only archery and swordsmanship—from which come kendŦ and iaidŦ—but also in striking and grappling.
Hence the martial art jujutsu (there are various spellings of this word, but my Japanese laptop recognises only this one, so that’s the one I’ll use), which was born on the battlefields of ancient Japan. Jujutsu was then—and sometimes still is today, depending on where, and from whom, you learn it—a comprehensive fighting system, with the violent, ‘anything goes’ philosophy that you’d expect from a martial art that was learned very much ‘on the job’.
BURAKUMIN
In a country that remains as obsessed with a person’s ‘roots’ and family history as Japan, coming from burakumin stock can still cause someone some serious prejudice. The word itself means ‘people of the hamlet’—which is a nice way of saying that feudal-era burakumin were confined to an almost ghetto-like existence, forbidden to associate with non-burakumin to the extent that they were even required to have their own temples and shrines, so that they should live as isolated a life as possible.
In fact, burakumin were commonly known then as eta, or ‘full of filth’, and endured pretty much the same existence as the ‘untouchable’ class in India. They did the sort of jobs that were wholly necessary yet at the same time were considered unclean—think undertaking, tanning, and really anything that involved dead flesh and bodies—all the while being informed by Shinto priests that they were contaminating themselves with the impurities created by death. In fact, for sheer revulsion, their occupations were ranked equal to the crimes of bestiality and incest. Hence the reason why they were forbidden to associate with anyone of a ‘higher’ position than themselves in the feudal caste system—and they were right down there at the bottom.
Anything between 1—3 000 000 burakumin descendants live in Japan today, some (like the Ainu) doing their best to disguise their background, while others continue to live in the—mainly rural—areas where burakumin have traditionally had their ‘hamlets’.
BUSHIDŦ
Or ‘Way of the Warrior’ (literally ‘Warrior’s Way’, though that doesn’t sound half as good), encompasses the typical ‘manly’ characteristics, such as self-control, perseverance, courage, honesty, loyalty and so on.
Inazo Nitobe, in his famous book imaginatively entitled BushidŦ (it would probably have to be called Fighting Techniques of Japan’s Deadly Flying Samurai Ninja Warrior Monks of Death to succeed in today’s market) observed that the samurai’s code of practice wasn’t that different from the Western knight’s chivalric code, and most fighting forces dating from the beginning of time would probably claim to possess the above attributes.
BushidŦ expected the samurai to readily meet his own death at a moment’s notice—a death he was often required to mete out to himself through the act of seppuku, or the cutting open of his own belly with a short sword. This was thought to release the samurai’s spirit in the most dramatic way possible (I’d have to agree with that), and was the only way to escape defeat on the battlefield or to avoid some other source of great shame.
Naturally, seppuku was extremely painful. Hence the usual presence of another samurai, armed with a long sword with which to cut off his friend’s head and end his suffering the moment the act was completed.
BUSHUSURU
