THE REAL BUDDHA..........

Gautama Buddha had left the grandeur and pompousness of palace to attain enlightenment and propagate religious teachings among the common people. He  had sacrificed worldly pleasures and abandoned his wife and son to seek truth... With no bindings of the family life and no complications to be handled on a day to day basis, it would have been little easier for him to follow the path that he had chosen.

It really makes me wonder who is the greatest ! The ordinary 'sansarik' person who faces myriad challenges that life throws upon him/her and still walks through the flame with  a smile or the great Buddha who had the calmness of nature surrounding him while he preached ! I don’t know about others but as far as I am concerned, there have been several such episodes when I have felt like leaving everything and go away somewhere where no one would be able to recognise me..just disappear. But one look at my son's innocent face and the thoughts would go back to their birthplace. This is the actuality of life, you simply cannot run away.

We are all answerable for our actions ,good or bad . We are human beings so humaneness cannot be taken away from us. We need love as much as we want to love, and the love which we think is right and makes our soul happy is often misconstrued by some individuals. This prompts some of us to either sacrifice the true love or live as an ostracized individual who is looked down upon. Does it mean we stop believing in love? Would this generate  hatred for the people who have achieved what they had set out to.... probably we will reach to the last breath of our life figuring out the answers..

We all struggle, every minute, every nanosecond to understand ,to fathom the secret of true love . Sometimes we even start following the teachings of great saints to attain temporary peace but that hardly helps. What will actually help us to attain absolute tranquility, moksha or nirvana is total detachment from the chores of life but I call that escapism... the day we start thinking less about our family and more about our inner peace, will be the day when the Supreme power will denounce us as the most self-centred individual on earth..

Therefore, the real Buddha according to me is the person who goes beyond his 'self' to achieve goodness not only for himself but also for others and despite the sea of predicaments and the demons of misfortune in his life, fights against the evils present in the lives of others. They become the examples, the inspiration and motivate others by their actions ,not by their words merely. They do not waste their energy in doing the math of ‘give and take’.. they rather give with a strong conviction that they will get more than what they have given but that barely ever happens.. For me, the real Buddha ("awakened one" or "the enlightened one"), is a person who sacrifices, sometimes without even questioning 'why' or for 'whom' and believes in ‘Karma’,in the relentless hardships in order to provide a comfortable life to those who depend on him/her.. He/she lives with the family , stays with it through the upheavals rather than leaving his/her family members on their own to face the society and the adversities …