Spiritual Forum

Beautiful chant!

Imee Ooi is a Chinese-Malaysian record producer, composer, and singer who composes and arranges music for classic Buddhist chant, mantra, and dharani. She performs her compositions in Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, and Mandarin.

http://www.bcc.ca/buddhism/sakyamuni.html

The Life of Sakyumuni Buddha

Before Buddha's Birth
The religious life of India previous to the Buddha's birth was in a state of terrible confusion caused by the coexistence of a degenerated Brahmanism and the most diverse philosophical and pseudo philosophical tendencies. The Aryan conquerors of India, already established along the lower slopes of the Himalayas and in the fertile valley drained by the Ganges River, had during their long history developed a remarkable religion and philosophy. However, a sad deterioration was taking place. The Vedic hymns, the lofty poetry of the Rig-Veda, and the religions, which produced them, already lay in the distant past, forgotten by the people in general and known only to the Brahman priest. The philosophical ideas of the Upanishads were adulterated with much that was inconsistent with them; its' monotheism comprised with Vedic polytheism.
The Vedic literature was the religious scripture, and the Brahmanical teachers taught that the Gods might be appeased by the singing of hymns, the sacrifice of animals, offerings of prayers and by fasting. Many of these teachers had private esoteric paths of their own for which each claimed superiority over those of their rivals. The Indians who followed the Vedic literature had innumerable gods and believed that these gods could be moved to grant petitions by means of certain ceremonies, which only the priests could perform. Under this system a sinner was he who failed to pay for praise, prayer and sacrifice. The priestly cast, therefore, gained social supremacy and wielded immense power over its followers.

While the early Aryan race was entirely free from the caste system, society gradually became more complicated and professions more specialized, until a custom developed through which certain families had the monopoly of particular professions or trades and so, slowly by degrees, the four main castes of priest, warrior, artisans and menial were formed. Far from attempting to reform this social injustice the Brahmans found a moral justification for its creation.

Thus, Brahmanism, which had already reached its zenith, now was beginning to lose the true religious spirit and its authoritative power, at least among the thinking people. As the result of the dissatisfaction with traditional Brahmin conceptions new schools of thought began to flourish. Amongst them were philosophical schools that developed from the Upanishad, such as the Sankya system and the primitive forms of Yogi. Some of the six systems of the Indian philosophy are said to have originated at this time.

In addition to these ancient Vedic doctrines and philosophies these were, many new metaphysical theories springing upon all sides not only independent of, but rather in protest against the ritualistic Vedic religions. The Buddha mentions some sixty-two diverse sects of speculative philosophies, which indulged in questions about the permanency, or transitoriness of the world. The old questions of the existence or nonexistence of a soul, of its continuation or its destruction after death were debated again and again. Hair splitting metaphysicians, logicians, pantheists, polytheists, monotheists, materialists, fatalists, eternalists, agnostics, skeptics, optimists, pessimists, nihilists, and positivists were going to and fro, each proclaiming his views as the best.

The popular aspects of their theories of the origin of the world may be classified under three heads; fatalism, creationism and occasionalism. There were absolute materialists who believed in an after life, heaven or hell, giving themselves up to hedonistic ideas. On the other extreme were the ascetic philosophers who believed in a permanent soul, which transmigrated from the body of a man into that of the other beings. Believing that the soul could be freed by the annihilation of the physical sense they devised various means of self-mortification.

These two types of philosophies were leading many either into immorality or to absurd and unnatural practices while superstition dominated the ignorant masses. To the Indians of the Vedas, religions consisted of the chanting of hymns in which natural powers were personified and to whom sacrifices were offered. To the Indians of the Brahmans rites or ceremonies were the crux. They lived in terror of demons and spiritual gods; the worship of the creator god, Brahma, reigned as orthodox; prayer and sacrifices had become very common, and ample blood was daily being shed in the name of religion.

Amid conditions such as these when there was need for a great personality to show the true way of life, Prince Siddhartha Gautama, the future Buddha, was born.