By Boris Ilyich Gladkov Conversation One 1.

Man has never been able to reconcile himself to the idea that death is the end of his existence.

Comparing a living person to his corpse must have led even primitive people to the conclusion that, with the onset of death, “something” leaves the person, departs from him, and that with the departure of this “something,” all that remains of the living person is their body, which immediately begins to decompose, turning to dust.

But what is this “something,” where does it go, and where does it remain? This is the riddle that needed an answer.

And the first person to be perplexed by this riddle was undoubtedly Adam, weeping over the body of the murdered Abel.

The questions: What happened to Abel? Where is he? Where did “that” go that gave him the ability to move, see, hear, think, and speak?… All these questions crowded in the mind of the grief-stricken father; but he was unable to answer them.

And one must assume that these perplexities of the first man were resolved by an inspiration from above, a revelation from the God of Love.

And thus Adam learned that his Abel had not ceased to exist, but had only passed into another being, and that his soul, leaving his body lifeless, would live forever.

Yes, only such a revelation to Adam can explain the universal belief in the posthumous existence of the human soul, the belief in its afterlife.

But this faith, passed down from generation to generation, was subject to peculiar additions and even distortions, depending not only on the degree of development of the peoples who professed it, but also on the peculiarities of the countries in which they had to live.

However, no matter how the ancient peoples distorted the revelation about the human soul that reached them through tradition, they still believed that the most important component of man, his soul, lives on after the death of the body.

But where and how does it live? These are questions that either were not resolved by the original revelation, or the answers to them remained unclear to Adam himself, and perhaps even forgotten by his descendants.

Unable to imagine life outside the conditions of the material world, the ancient peoples had no idea of ​​the souls of the dead residing somewhere in the heavenly abodes; they believed that the soul of a deceased person rested in the same grave into which his body was lowered.

This belief was so strong that, at the burial of the deceased, his clothes, utensils, and weapons were lowered into the grave; They even killed horses and slaves and placed them in the same grave, fully confident that the horses and slaves buried with the deceased would serve him in the grave as they had in life.

Wine and food were also placed in the grave to sate the hunger and quench the thirst of the deceased; and after the burial, for the same purpose, food was placed on the grave and wine was poured over it.

The dead were considered sacred beings; they were treated with the same reverence as gods.

All the dead, without exception, were deified, not just heroes and great men.

Burial of the dead, offerings to them, and libations at their graves were considered obligatory.

And for such a reverent attitude toward the souls of the dead, these souls protected the living members of their families from various misfortunes, participated in their earthly affairs, and generally patronized them.

Worship of the dead was characteristic of all Aryans; With them, it also spread to India, as evidenced by the sacred books “Vedas” and “Laws of Manu”; the latter states that the cult of the dead is the most ancient in its origin.

But if the body of a deceased person remains unburied, then his soul, according to the ancients, having no home, remained an eternal wanderer; it wanders eternally, like a ghost, a phantom, never stopping even to rest, wandering eternally, finding no peace; embittered at people for depriving it of its underground home and offerings, it attacks the living, torments them, sends all sorts of diseases upon them, devastates their fields, and generally serves as the cause of many disasters.

Also, in ancient times, but somewhat later, the assumption arose that the souls of all deceased people live in a gloomy underground kingdom.

As for the question of the transmigration of souls, judging by the most ancient written monuments that have come down to us, we can say with complete confidence that primitive people and the peoples of ancient times had no idea about the transmigration of souls.

The most ancient people to have left behind written records are now considered to be the people known as the Sumiro-Akkadians.

This people, in the most ancient times, at least five thousand years before Christ, arrived in the plain of Shinar, located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and settled there.

They left behind numerous written records.

They wrote on wet clay tablets, which were then baked and thus survived to this day.

They were discovered in the last century during excavations at the site of the ancient city of Nineveh.

Thanks to this discovery, we have the opportunity to become acquainted with the worldview of a people who had reached a high level of development at least five thousand years before Christ.

We know of no books older than these.

From these books, it is clear that the Sumiro-Akkadians had no concept of the transmigration of souls.

These books speak of the creation of the world, of evil spirits, and the fall of the first humans; there is a lengthy account of the flood; they speak of the gods worshiped by the people; they also speak of an underworld inhabited by the souls of the dead; but there is no mention of the souls of the dead being incarnated into other bodies and continuing to live in them.

The sacred books of the Hindus, that is, the Aryans who migrated from Central Asia to India in time immemorial, are called the Vedas.

Their date of writing is estimated at approximately 1200–1500 BC.

They speak of the gods worshiped by the Hindus, the first man, the flood, the immortality of the human soul, and much more; but again, there is no mention of the transmigration of souls.

The oldest book of the Egyptians, the first part of the “Book of the Dead,” believed to have been compiled nearly two thousand years before Christ, speaks of the immortality of souls and their sojourn on the Isles of the Blessed, in the distant West; but again, there’s not a word about the transmigration of souls.

The books of Moses and other Old Testament books of the Bible also say nothing about the transmigration of souls.

It thus turns out that the sacred books of the four most ancient peoples say nothing about the transmigration of souls; this proves that neither the Sumiro-Akkadians, nor the Aryans who migrated to India, nor the Egyptians, nor the Jews believed in the transmigration of souls.

If all the peoples inhabiting the earth, or a significant portion of them, believed in the transmigration of souls, then it could be said with certainty that this belief was inherited from their forefathers, and that its original source could have been divine revelation to the first man.

But since, I repeat, we do not find the slightest trace of a belief in the transmigration of souls in the sacred books of the most ancient peoples, and we notice its first appearance only in comparatively later times, and then only among certain peoples, we must conclude that this belief is not based on revelation, but is an invention of men.

According to Bettany (see his “Great Religions of the East”), the sacred books of the Hindus, the Vedas, as well as the collection of rules on sacrifices known as the Brahmanas, did not sufficiently ensure the dominion of the priestly class over the people; and so, in addition to them, new books appeared under the name of the Upanishads; They were compiled by priests, and they contain the first discussions of the transmigration of souls.

Having migrated from the monotonous Central Asian plains to India, this truly fabulous wonderland, observing the life of the world in this new environment, listening, so to speak, to its pulse, Indian philosophers came to the conclusion that the entire world lives a single life and constitutes a single body, animated by a single spirit.

And this new view of the world was expressed in priestly philosophy by the recognition, in place of the many previous gods, of a single Spirit, Brahma, the first cause of all that exists.

Believing that in the beginning there was only Brahma and that the world was in him, Indian philosophers believed that Brahma is the undeveloped world, and the world is the developed Brahma, and that, consequently, Brahma and the world are one: God is nature, and nature is God.

Preserving the revelation transmitted from the first man about the fall of the spirits created by God, Indian philosophers taught that Brahma, evolving into the existing world, first separated spirits from himself.

All spirits emerged from Brahma pure; but some, under the leadership of Magazura, fell away from him.

Then Brahma, continuing to separate the world from himself, created various bodies for the fallen spirits, in which they were to repent and purify themselves.

After enduring 88 transformations, the fallen spirit is incarnated in a human body, in which it can ascend to a state of primordial purity and reunite with Brahma, as a river unites with the ocean—that is, become depersonalized.

But the soul, having not yet purified itself in its temporary abode, naturally cannot merge with Brahma, and therefore is incarnated into a new body, and so on, until it achieves complete purity and merges with the world soul, Brahma.

The doctrine of the transmigration of souls, which developed gradually, was finally developed by the time the collection known as the “Laws of Manu” was compiled, sometime around the 9th century BC.

The Laws of Manu state that the soul of a deceased person appears before the judgment of the dead in the underworld to give an account of its deeds.

Sinful souls are temporarily subjected to the torments of hell, and then inhabit new bodies, albeit lower than those in which they previously lived.

Depending on the gravity of their sins, the soul inhabits either the body of a person of a lower caste, or that of an animal, or even an inanimate object.

They enter new bodies not by choice, but under duress, in accordance with the deeds of their previous incarnation.

The Laws of Manu specify for what sin and into what body the soul must be incarnated.

For cruelty, the soul passes into a predatory beast; for stealing meat, into a vulture; for stealing bread, into a rat, and so on.

Thus, human souls constantly wander and migrate; they all suffer, and with their suffering, they pay for the sins of their previous existence.

Developing the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, Indian philosophers asserted that the souls of humans and animals are identical, differing only in their temporary bodily form.

A soul, for example, trapped in a worm, can eventually inhabit a human body, and conversely, a human soul can be sent for sins into the body of a worm, a frog, or a snake.

This is why Indians see every animal as their own kind and treat them kindly, try not to kill them, and abstain from animal food.

According to the Laws of Manu, for killing an animal and eating it, the perpetrator will suffer violent death in their new incarnations as many times as there are hairs on the head of the animal they killed.

In general, according to the Laws of Manu, the human soul is doomed to countless transmigrations, in some cases reaching up to ten thousand million times, that is, almost to infinity.

Thus, the transmigration of souls, instead of saving the soul from torment and leading it to union with Brahma, itself became endless torment.

Therefore, alongside the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, arose the doctrine of deliverance from this torment.

According to Indian philosophers, the cause of sin is not the abuse of free will, but the human body itself; within it, within the body, resides all evil, all sin.

Therefore, to be freed from sins and, consequently, from transmigration into new bodies, one must free oneself from all attachment to one’s body and consider it an enemy, preventing one from achieving union with Brahma.

One must abandon it without any attention or care and, in general, treat it in such a way that the soul can leave it at any time without the slightest regret.

On this basis, the priests preached the necessity of self-torture and mortification of the flesh; and one who, while receiving various impressions, experienced neither joy nor disgust from them, was considered to have conquered the flesh.

While establishing rules of self-torture and mortification, the priests who constituted the Brahmin caste also instituted mandatory sacrifices at every new moon and every full moon, as well as numerous rituals performed with the indispensable participation of Brahmins.

By making the performance of all sacrifices and rituals absolutely obligatory for everyone, the Brahmins exempted only themselves.

They demanded special respect from everyone and presented themselves as saints, spoken from the lips of Brahma himself.

They also served as judges, and their verdicts in criminal and religious cases further exalted their authority.

In short, the endless and painful transmigration of souls, strict rules of self-torture and mortification taken to extremes, and slavish submission to the Brahmins drove many to despair and forced them to seek liberation from both transmigration and the rule of the Brahmins.

And so, as a protest against Brahmanism, Buddhism emerged.

The founder of Buddhism, according to legend, was Siddartha, a king’s son from the Sakya clan.

He was also known as Sakya-Muni, meaning the sage Sakya, as well as the ascetic Gautama and Buddha, meaning the awakened, the knowing, the perfect one.

According to legend, Siddartha once saw a helpless old man, then a leper, and finally a dead man.

He pondered the miseries of human life, left his home, donned the garb of a wandering monk, and wandered for a long time, seeking to understand the cause of suffering.

He wandered as a mendicant monk, subjecting himself to self-torture and all manner of hardships, but neither conversations with various teachers and wandering monks, nor his desire to mortify his flesh, led him to understanding the cause of suffering.

Finally, sitting one day under a tree, which has since become known as the tree of knowledge, he was lost in thought.

And it was then that he learned the secret of the transmigration of souls and the four truths about suffering.

Having thus become enlightened, the ascetic Gautama ended his wanderings and began preaching his teachings.

His teaching on the transmigration of souls differed significantly from that of the Brahmans.

The Brahmans taught that the soul transmigrates into different bodies as punishment for a previous life and for the purpose of correcting it, so that it after a long series of transmigrations, she was cleansed of sins and returned to her original source, Brahma, for a final union with him.

Gautama never spoke of Brahma; and when his disciples asked him where this world came from, he said the question was idle and irrelevant.

And when asked whether the soul exists after reincarnation, he replied that knowledge of this does not contribute to the achievement of holiness.

In general, he taught only how to free himself from suffering and disliked being asked about God, the origin of the world, eternity, or the immortality of the soul.

To all such questions, he replied: “What is not revealed by me, leave undiscovered.” By recognizing the futility of all discussions of God, Gautama thereby proved that he did not believe in His existence.

Rejecting God, he naturally could not agree with the Brahman teaching that the human soul is a fallen spirit, which, through a long series of reincarnations, must be cleansed of sin and merge with its original source.

Rejecting God, he was forced to reject prayers, sacrifices, and, in general, all the religious rites established by the Brahmans.

While preaching complete atheism, Gautama did not reject the transmigration of souls; he explained this transmigration as a kind of slavish attraction of the spirit to the body, to form; and he found that man can free himself from such attraction and subordination only through his own efforts.

Only by severing all ties with the body will the soul be freed from the need to incarnate into new bodies and pass into Nirvana, that is, into an extinct existence.

Only then will it attain the bliss of non-existence.

According to Gautama’s teaching, life is a continuous series of sufferings.

“What do you think,” he asked his disciples, “is greater than all the water contained in the four great seas, or the tears you shed when you wandered on your journeys, weeping and crying because you were given what you hated and were denied what you loved? The death of father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter, the loss of loved ones, the loss of property—you have experienced all this during this long period.

Yes, more tears have been shed than all the water contained in the four great seas! All life is one suffering.” And this is the first truth Gautama understood.

The second truth concerns the origin of suffering, that is, its cause.

The cause of suffering is the thirst for life, attachment to it, to the body; it is our desires and sensations.

The satisfaction of desires produces a sensation of pleasure, while dissatisfaction produces a sensation of sorrow.

But in human life, even the most essential desires are rarely satisfied; and this dissatisfaction of desires constitutes the fundamental cause of suffering.

Having thus identified the cause of suffering, Gautama moved on to contemplating the destruction of this cause; and he discovered the third truth: the cessation of suffering… If the cause of suffering is the sensation of displeasure from the dissatisfaction of desires, then, to end suffering, one must destroy not only all desires, not only the thirst for life and attachment to the body, but also the very sensation of dissatisfaction of desires; one must sever, while still alive, all connection with the body and, through it, with the entire sensory world; one must reach a state where the senses perceive nothing.

Only with such complete detachment from the world is the liberation of the spirit from the body, the cessation of further incarnations, and the transition to blissful nothingness possible.

If the soul has even the slightest relationship with the external world, then this relationship requires that it be in a corresponding material form.

Therefore, the liberation of the soul from transmigration, complete freedom from matter and all evil, and therefore complete bliss, occurs only when a person detaches himself from the external world, when his soul casts off its shackles and, as it were, emerges from its material form.

Only under these conditions does the onset of death free the soul from the need to re-enter into connection with any body; only then does it cease all relationship with the external world and will never be reborn: “the body of the perfect is cut off from the force that leads to origination.” Having thus discovered three truths—about suffering, about the origin and cessation of suffering—Gautama turned to the question of how to end suffering, how to achieve a complete break with the matter that envelops the soul; and he discovered the fourth truth: the path to the cessation of suffering.

Honesty, introspection, and wisdom—according to Gautama, this is the path to the end of suffering.

Honesty consists of strictly following five rules: 1.

Do not kill any living being.

Do not trespass on another’s property.

Do not touch another’s wife (and for monks, complete chastity).

Do not tell lies.

Do not drink alcoholic beverages.

Moreover, Gautama demanded from his followers non-malice and a friendly disposition towards the whole world; for, “Enmity is never pacified by enmity; it is pacified only by non-malice.” Non-resistance to evil is carried to the extreme.

He who is scolded by evil people should say: “They are kind, they are very kind, that they do not beat me.” If they beat him, he says: “They are kind that they do not throw stones at me.” If they kill him, he says: “There are disciples of the Exalted One, to whom body and life cause torment, grief and disgust, and they seek a violent death.

And such a death I have found without seeking it.” The sage is indifferent to everything, and no actions of people touch him.

He is not angry at the injustice done to him, but he does not suffer from this injustice.

His body, against which his enemies commit violence, is not he himself; It is something foreign, alien to him.

The sage is the same with those who have caused him grief as with those who have brought him joy.

He who strives for perfection must be ready to give everything, even that which is most dear to him.

But charity should be given not to the poor, but to a monk.

The gift that a monk, out of kindness and compassion, allows people to give to him, brings the benefactor the richest fruits.

In fact, according to the teachings of Gautama, called the Buddha, that is, the perfect one, only the life of a mendicant monk can be a holy life, and only he can attain the bliss of non-existence.

Gautama himself was a mendicant monk and founded a community of such monks.

They were parasites in the truest sense of the word: they did not bother themselves with any labor, did not cultivate the land, did not engage in any craft, and earned all their means of living solely by begging.

They truly led a strictly ascetic life: they ate only once a day, going out before midday to beg for alms; they dressed in rags, donated or collected from scraps along the road; they lived in huts and subjected themselves to all manner of deprivations.

They spent all their time in self-absorption, striving through self-hypnosis to detach themselves from all sensations and even to reach a state where even the mind ceases to reason.

Thus, all of Buddha’s moral rules demand negative virtues from their followers.

As for positive virtues, and especially love for others, those striving for perfection must not forget that any attraction of the heart to other beings binds a person to the material world, from which they must free themselves.

“All sorrows and complaints, all suffering, arise from a person loving someone or something; where there is no love, there is no suffering.” Therefore, only those people who love nothing and no one are free from suffering; whoever strives for a place where there is neither sorrow nor grief should not love.” Thus, the fundamental rule of Buddhist morality is the narrowest self-love, taken to its extreme.

Meekness, mercy, and non-resistance to evil are based not on selfless love for one’s neighbors, but on a narrow self-love, on the desire to quickly renounce everything sensual and material, to forget those closest to oneself and to free oneself from all obligations to them.

Gautama told his disciples about his penultimate incarnation.

He was a king’s son, but was unjustly deprived of the throne.

Renouncing all possessions, he walked into the desert with his wife and two children; there he lived in a hut he built from leaves.

But one day, a beggar came to him and asked for his children.

Gautama smiled, took both children, and gave them to the beggar.

When he gave up his children, the earth trembled.

Afterward, a Brahmin came to him and asked for his wife, virtuous and faithful.

Then Gautama joyfully gave him his wife, and the earth trembled again.

Concluding this story, Gautama added: “I did not think then that by this I had attained the qualities of Buddha.” Gautama said that the earth trembled twice when he gave his children and wife to passersby.

And how could the earth not tremble, how could the stones not cry out at such self-satisfied hypocrisy from a heartless man! And yet there are those who dare to say that our Lord Jesus Christ borrowed all His moral teachings from Gautama the Buddha! I have deliberately dwelt in some detail on Buddhist morality to demonstrate the gulf that separates it from Christ’s teaching of selfless love, the love that compels a person to sacrifice their life for the good of others, without any consideration of personal gain.

In His farewell address to the Apostles, Christ said, “This is My commandment, that ye love one another as I have loved you.

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:12-13).

And Buddha said, “Only he who loves nothing and no one can be saved.” So, to be freed from suffering, according to Buddha’s teaching, one must first of all be an honest person, that is, embodying all the negative virtues within oneself, without, however, becoming attached to anything earthly, loving no one and nothing.

But this is not enough.

One must purify oneself by constant immersion in oneself, in one’s “I.” Solitude, the solitude of the forest, is best for self-immersion.

Retreating to the forest, the follower of Buddha would sit on the ground, legs crossed beneath him, hands clasped, and remain completely still.

Gradually detaching himself from the surrounding world, the seeker thus lost the ability to feel anything and slowed his breathing so much that one could mistake him for a lifeless, frozen being.

Sometimes the seeker would fix his motionless gaze on a single object, a single point on it; he would stare intently at this point, sometimes closing and sometimes opening his eyes.

Practicing this contemplation for a long time, he would begin to see the object he was contemplating not only with his eyes open but also with his eyes closed; in short, he resorted to the same techniques that all hypnotists now employ.

Fixing his vision on a single point, he entered a state of hypnotic sleep, when the human organism actually loses all sensitivity and the will becomes completely suppressed.

Fixing his thought on a single word, for example, the word “forest,” he tried to concentrate all his attention on this word and think of nothing else.

Repeating this word countless times without thinking of anything else, he reached such a state that he could no longer think of anything else; and it seemed to him that nothing existed but the forest.

Then, he tried to distract his thought from this image and concentrated it on the image of infinity.

Long and motionless, immersed in contemplation of spatial infinity, he reached the image of absolute emptiness, the realization that the world does not exist.

And such a state of numbness is considered, according to the teachings of Buddha, close to redemption, to the bliss of non-existence.

The third condition necessary for liberation from suffering is wisdom, that is, knowledge of the Buddha’s teachings, knowledge of how to attain Nirvana.

But the Buddha himself said that redemption from suffering, and therefore from reincarnation, is only available to a mendicant monk.

And one cannot disagree with him, because only completely idle people, those who have renounced the world and, moreover, are confident that others will provide for their food and clothing—that others will work for them, even though they do nothing—can perform all these techniques of self-absorption and self-hypnosis.

Having rejected God and, as a result, finding no consolation for man, the Buddha saw only grief, suffering, and evil everywhere and in everything; and all his efforts were directed exclusively toward freeing man from suffering.

Having created a godless religion of despair to achieve this goal, the ascetic Gautama recognized, however, that his teaching could not endure for long.

He said to his beloved disciple, Ananda: “The teaching of truth will not last long; it will exist for five hundred years.

Then faith will disappear from the earth until a new Buddha appears.” If the ascetic Gautama had considered himself truly perfect, knowing the truth, he would have no reason to expect another, more perfect One; but Gautama foresaw His appearance.

And the Perfect One, Knower of the truth, Christ the God-Man, indeed appeared almost at the very time Gautama had predicted—that is, five hundred years later—and brought a divine teaching, before which the philosophy of Buddha pales, as a wax candle pales before the light of the midday sun.

The teaching that rejected God did not survive even five hundred years.

The followers of Gautama Buddha deified him and worshiped him as a god.

Modern Buddhism, however, having borrowed heavily from nearly every other faith, is very far removed from the teachings of the ascetic Gautama and “appears to be a mixture of all sorts of superstitions with witchcraft, sorcery, idolatry, and fetishism.” I have focused so much on the fundamental principles of Gautama Buddha’s teachings because it is timely for those unfamiliar with them to become acquainted with his teachings.

Buddhism is popular in Western Europe; Count Leo Tolstoy was also fascinated by it.

Perhaps it will also be popular here in St.

Petersburg, where the Temple of Buddha is being built, and where the....