Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches In History - Plot & Excerpts
“And with what are these on fire? With the fire of passion, say I, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of infatuation…” The Buddha is a title—The Enlightened One, or The Awakened One—given a prince named Siddhartha Gautama, born about the year 563 B.C. in a kingdom on the border of what today is Nepal and India. At twenty-nine he became an ascetic, then searched for a “middle way” between the hedonist’s self-indulgence and the ascetic’s self-mortification. Seated cross-legged under a banyan tree, he achieved what Buddhists call the great Enlightenment: the central truths are that mankind’s life is filled with suffering; it is caused by craving; and there is freedom from such craving that is called the state of Nirvana, a cool and liberating detachment. To a gathering of one thousand ascetics in the region of Uruvela, the Buddha delivered a sutra, or discourse, known as the “Fire Sermon.” It is one of the basic scriptures of one of the world’s great religions, driven by a drumbeat of repetition of key words and the evocation of all the senses.
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