Everything about Angkor has this one all pervasive value called faith, permeating into everything. If you have faith, as has been mentioned in a different post, the God is there, else….
Buddhism was born out of such a feeling, an ehsaas called faith. A certain Siddhartha one day leaves his kingdom and his family; everything. There begins his search for faith, truth and indeed meaning of life. From India, he wandered around and people followed him. In time, Buddhism, an offshoot of Hinduism, became a faith a dharma and people saw a new meaning to their life. As is the wont of human beings, a change is always sought. A fresher change, that much better. Buddhism slowly found itself an acceptable way of life. People laid their faith and found change for better.
Today we have a certain Bill gates or a Mark Zuckerberg who lay down majority of their wealth for charity. Did anyone ordain that? Perhaps, NO. They have undertaken that noble cause all by themselves. A thousand or two thousand years from now, I wouldn’t like to claim that these gentlemen will not be called as omniscient. Or Gods. Nobody can state that for sure. Similarly, Buddha, when he renounced everything that he had, did not know, and never had he apparently claimed that he was God or a man or had omniscience or any such higher locations in life. It has been though, mentioned at a certain places that he had admitted that he could live until an Aeon, if he so desired. An aeon, incidentally is nearly 3.62 billion years.
There are numerous theories regards his period of life that lies somewhere between 563 BCE till about 400 BCE – tis large gap because people are not unanimous regards his exact time period, Similarly there are variants regards his leanings, the places he went to and what exactly his teachings were. But there is some kind of consensus regards his being a learned man of great wisdom, totally unattached to anything worldly and that all he learned was perhaps by his own inner self, some kind of self-awakening though he is believed to have had teachers of immense eruditeness in Alara and Kalama. Be that as it may, Buddha had left great influence over people wherever he visited.
A few hundred years later Emperor Ashoka too renounced everything in the wake of the battle of Kalinga that he won by killing numerous people of the opposing armies. His heart changed in just one stroke as was the case with Siddhartha turning into Gautam Buddha, Ashoka renounced everything. He had learnt of Buddha and began to spread his teachings as far as Indochina, Tibet and China.
to be contd…….