3,550 years ago…

by Manish Anand

Public memory will now be refreshed with a historical epoch that a man made. Exactly 3,350 years ago the man who changed the face of civilization and collectively uplifted the human consciousness was born in India’s neighborhood. Gautam Budhha who chose his own path and dawned en era of peace and prosperity in the kingdom of Magadh which was torn into intercine war with its neighbours was born in a peaceful and comfortable lap of Himalaya in the second century BC.

A historical lecture is not intended, rather a peep which is highly relevant in this age when the world is torn into a never ending wars and clashes, leading to the loss of too many innocent lives. The violent might of the invading army of Mohammad-bin-bhaktiyar Khilji snapped the last remnants of Budhha’s teaching and the torchbearer of his wisdom from the land of Buddhism in the 14th century. Many Budhhist monks fled to Tibet as history records, but there too they have met the might of communist China, which is hell-bent to end the last link to the Buddhist way of life.

Sri Lanka, which was converted to Buddhism by Ashoka’s son and daughter, has been witnessing an endless internal strife. The toll is being put in millions. But for what! Only to carve one’s own nation because Singhalese and Tamils can not live together. In Budhha’s time, Magadh too was locked in a bloody war with its neighbours like Vaishali and others but the teaching of mutual tolerance made them to call truce and live together. No one now can teach that art to the warring nations and to the domineering nations like the United States, China and others who are heading towards destroying the world with their intolerant political designs.

The land of Buddha too has forgotten him for all practical purposes. While Nepal suffers from a despotic king, India is yet to get back its pluralistic culture that it was proud of in ancient India. Remember in the Magdhan Empire or in the Gupta Empire or in the Upanishadic time, many streams of belief and faith lived together and prospered. Ashokan rock and pillar edicts depict that there was a mature civilization with multitude of streams of beliefs and faiths. India gave secularism to world when they were living in Dark Age. Irony is that in the same land intolerance runs high and deep with no one to moderate different beliefs into one living community.

Budhha must reborn and that too in large numbers as the world has turned into a higher mess that what he had faced 3,350 years ago.