Ebook253 pages5 hours
The Buddha: An Alternative Narrative of His Life and Teaching
By Mukunda Rao
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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Traditional religious discourses have failed to account for the biological process involved in the attaining of Nirvana. Drawing from sources as varied as the Pali canon, Mahayana texts, Zen Buddhism, J. Krishnamurti, Ramana Maharshi, U.G. Krishnamurti, Nietzsche, postmodernist thinkers and biological sciences, The Buddha retells the story of the Buddha and discusses his teachings in physical and physiological terms. This radical new reading turns most of the central spiritual concepts on their head, and hopes, in the course of time, to put an end to the rivalry between science and religion and, indeed, among the various religions.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherElement
Release dateMay 10, 2017
ISBN9789352644216
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IJ
5.0 out of 5 stars A treasure trove...Reviewed in the United States on 4 May 2020
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An insight into what actually might have happened to Siddharth Gautama on his flowering to a “Tathagatha” . This books retells the story of how Gautama became a Buddha in the language that today’s world can grasp in contrast to the various Buddhists metaphysical texts which are always difficult to understand ...
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J D
5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful BookReviewed in India on 20 July 2023
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What a beautiful book? I loved every word of it. The author explains esoteric concepts in a lucid, unconventional manner. Recommended.
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Ninoslav R.
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book!!!!Reviewed in the United States on 31 October 2019
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Well-written, inspiring and informative book on all relevant aspects of Buddhism. Anyone who sincerely wants to study Buddhism this book will be valuable for all the right reasons.
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Sb
5.0 out of 5 stars Very informative. Well written. Approach it like a spiritual novel.Reviewed in India on 28 October 2022
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I really enjoyed reading this book. Rao is threading through and weaving together a lot of human wisdom history from the Buddha to UG. Never an easy task. I particularly enjoyed the deep dives into what the Buddha thought/said. Thank you Rao. Sb
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Sandeep
4.0 out of 5 stars An essential readReviewed in India on 31 August 2017
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The title aroused curiosity in me. As the title suggests this is really an alternative narrative about Buddha. Probably years of research, learning and insightful thoughts are distilled to form this book. Considered reading too as a journey. When started there was a multi storeyed building, author slowly dismantles it floor by floor with turn of pages. The core of Buddha's /enlightened ones teaching is touched upon with sincerity.
Divulging any other details would be a spoiler.
Happy reading!!
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Pendyala Jayakumar(JK)
5.0 out of 5 stars ExcellentReviewed in India on 31 December 2017
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This book gives the gist of real understanding of what we all call as spirituality.
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Muralidharan
5.0 out of 5 stars Five StarsReviewed in India on 26 May 2017
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Excellent book !!! Go for it.
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Satish
2.0 out of 5 stars PassableReviewed in India on 10 December 2023
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It's more of a documentary. The title Buddha should be appended with the names of other great sages like U.G. Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharishi as there quotes are equally highlighted and explained as Buddha's. A lot of open questions without solution/explanation.
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David Guy
7 books · 33 followers
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July 12, 2018
I agree with the basic premise of this book. The Buddha’s life is exemplary, not strictly factual, and we can fill it in any way we want. (Thich Nhat Hanh, to mention one more “biographer,” created a much larger story.) Mukunda Rao is knowledgeable about religion and spiritual practice, and has some interesting things to say about both. He focuses on the body, a bias which I share. But by the time we finish this book we have the feeling that he was really writing a biography of U.G. Krishnamurti, the subject of three other books that he has published. He just dropped the details into the story of the Buddha.
U.G. is the man I think of as the “other” Krishnamurti; it’s as if he’s J. Krishnamurti’s evil cousin (the two men met, but were not related). But while J. Krishnamurti sometimes got a little grouchy as he got older, perhaps because he kept saying the same thing again and again and nobody got it—as if he were talking to an overgrown moron called The Human Race and the guy just kept looking at him with a dull expression on his face, drooling a little—U. G. Krishnamurti seemed to become grouchy at the moment of enlightenment. He had a spiritually transformative experience and came out of it saying, Get away from me, I have nothing to talk about, there’s no message, it’s all a lot of horseshit. In a way other spiritual teachers had similar reactions. But no one with as much vehemence as U.G.[1]
I was glad that Rao did away with a number of the details of the early years. Apparently the Buddha came from a well-off family, was sheltered from many of the exigencies of life, had some extreme experience of impermanence right after his first son was born and decided he had to leave his family, wandered among spiritual practitioners for a number of years, trying one thing and another. All of that makes perfect sense, including the story that he learned to go into very deep states of meditation but believed they weren’t what he was looking for. It was after he went too far in an ascetic direction that he decided to do something more moderate, and then made the discovery that would answer his questions and lead to his teaching.
Rao has a theory that everyone who becomes enlightened has some kind of near death experience. He cites Ramana Maharshi, Sri Aurobindo’s the Mother, and U.G. himself; he could have mentioned various other people, including Eckhart Tolle, whose awakening was preceded by a dark night. Weirdly enough, though, instead of mentioning that the Buddha nearly died from his ascetic practices, Ray regard his near-death experience as the meditative experience that came before that, when he was young and sat under a tree in a field and experienced a feeling of peace. That was an important moment, but it hardly sounds near death. Rao then says—rightly, I think—that we don’t really know what happened to the Buddha under the Bodhi tree. There are teachings, but they don’t describe an actual experience.
Rao believes that enlightenment involves a physical change. It’s not something that happens just to the mind; it happens to the body. Again, he cites the Mother, Ramana Maharshi, U.G. Krishnamurti (he could just as easily have mentioned J. Krishnamurti, who went through something that he called The Process for much of his life, also involving severe physical pain). He gives the most space to U.G., perhaps because he knows his teaching the best. Here is how he describes that physical transformation.
“His skin turned soft, and when he rubbed any part of his body with his palm, it produced a sort of ash. His eyes stopped blinking and his senses started functioning at the peak of their sensitivity. He developed a female breast on his left side. And the hitherto dormant ductless glands such as the thymus, pituitary and pineal, referred to as chakras in kundalini yoga, were reactivated. On the eighth day, he ‘died.’”
Rao goes into much more detail about this “death,” which lasted for “about” 48 minutes (?). Supposedly his heartbeat slowed down and his hands and feet grew cold. “All thoughts, all experiences undergone by humanity from primordial times, whether good or bad, blissful or miserable, mystical or commonplace—the whole ‘collective consciousness’—were flushed out of his system. He . . . was reborn in the state of ‘undivided consciousness’, untouched by thought. It was a most profound journey and a sudden great leap into the state of primordial awareness without primitivism[2]’.” U.G. preferred to call this the natural state, rather than enlightenment.
I make it a practice not to contradict someone who says something or other happened to them. If someone tells me they had an enlightenment experience, or they saw the truth of all things, or they had an experience of God, I don’t sell all I have and give the guy the proceeds, but I don’t say No that didn’t happen to you. In this case, however, I’m biting my tongue to keep from contradicting the man or bursting into laughter. Especially that part about the left breast. What was that all about?
I can see how that might have made him grouchy. Though it would make auto-eroticism a lot more interesting.
What Rao seems to be saying about all these people is that a physical transformation takes place that wipes away the process of thinking. They don’t sit around having thoughts the way you and I do. They can think if they want but otherwise their minds are blank. That’s what he says happened to the Buddha, and to various other great beings throughout history, including Jesus. They become a different kind of being. Their slate is wiped clean.
That is Mukanda Rao’s central thesis, which contradicts my experience (hardly a reason not to believe it) but also contradicts a number of teachers—including the great Kosho Uchiyama—who say that no such thing ever happens, and that hoping for such a thing, or waiting for it, ruins the act of meditation and makes it just like any other human activity. You’re sitting there wanting things to be other than they are. You’ve turned spiritual practice into suffering.
Rao continues with a number of other chapters with such titles as “Is there a Middle Path?” “Where is the Mind Located?” “Is there a Soul?” but his answers to those questions, though interesting, all seem speculative. By the end of the book he’s completely reductive, seeming to say that there’s no validity in religion or any spiritual path whatsoever; his final chapter, entitled “The Way,” takes incoherence to a new level.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing to re-interpret the life of the Buddha. But you don’t need to turn it into a life of U.G. Krishnamurti.
[1] If I may refer to him thus informally. I have no idea what these letters stand for.
[2] This final phrase, though it sounds deep, is also rather vague. What the hell is primordial awareness with primitivism?
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Srikanth
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March 2, 2018
A nice and refreshing approach to the life and teachings of Buddha without any glorification or suppression of information.
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Sumit
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March 19, 2018
This book is truly a different narrative of life and teachings of Buddha. The author is disciple of U G Krishnamurti and hence each and every chapter reconcile U G teachings with Buddha's teachings.
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Chandrashekar BC
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November 11, 2017
"Physical vision is central to understanding mind and spirituality. This is what many previous spiritual theories have failed to understand," says author Mukunda Rao.
The author in his current book "The Buddha - An Alternative Narrative of His Life and Teaching"- Pali, Mahayana, Zen Writings, J. Krishnamurthy, Ramana Maharshi, U. G. Discusses the Buddha and his teachings through biological foundations, surveying the foundations of Krishnamurti, Aurobindo, Nietzsche and modern thinkers. The reasons for the many decisions he may have taken are found in the same ground of thought. What was Buddha like? How could he be different from other priests? Is he a superhuman? Maharshi? Avatar? A strict person with no sense of humor as described by the Buddhist scriptures? A yogi? Does he believe in reincarnation? Or is the meaning of 'rebirth' different from what he said? Is he the construction of Bhikshu Sangha? Motivated to convert? Many such questions are discussed in this book.
Through the enlightened thoughts of Talasparshi studies of Buddhism, science and philosophy, Mukund Rao presents here many ideas of Buddha from different perspectives. Apart from just Buddhism, meditation, yoga and food practices, which are well-known in today's times, have gained importance in different ways in the religions of the past, and how every religion and philosophy has used them to achieve their goals. Also, in the eyes of today's modern spiritual thinkers, the Buddha and his religion have been reexamined in the light of a scientific attitude. Scientism provides grounds for possibilities to respect spirituality. The ideas here give solid hope to many lay people who are trying to incorporate spirituality into their lives. !!
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