RELIGST 2K03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Kushinagar, Sangha, Maurya Empire
2 Feb 2017
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The buddha died on his right side. Monks, do not break into lamentations after i am gone, for all karmically constituted things are subject to passing away. The buddha"s death is depicted as negative. He urges the monks not to break into lamentations. He basically tells you to always work towards your salvation untiringly. The buddha"s greatest achievement was figuring out the path and how to leave samsara, the earliest thing the community did was turn the path into a sort of program. What did he do in order to be born as the buddha and what to do to become it. The buddha biography combines the ordinary and the extraordinary very well. The questions the buddhist community had to deal with; is the buddha someone we can emulate or is there something about him that is extraordinary and instead of emulation maybe it calls for reverence.
