The Spirit of Vesak

Somewhere along the process of evolution human developed the faculty of thinking and the capacity for self-awareness. Since then man had began to wonder about the natural world that he lives in and its effect on his awareness. He had strived to understand and make sense of the many natural phenomena that he experiences around him and their impact on his consciousness. In the process of doing so man had come out with many different explanations for their common experience of these phenomena.

But there are two things that many among the human race share in common as a result of their attempt to understand their experience of the world. Firstly, they realized that the world is plagued with suffering and is unsatisfactory; and, secondly, they share a feeling or a sense of something beyond their experience that is greater than themselves, something that is ever present, that transcends and is untouched by the unsatisfactoriness of their world. This something, they believe, they must seek, and finding it, they believe, will deliver them from the unsatisfactoriness, the suffering, of their earthly existence. This belief had given birth to many of the world’s major and minor religious and spiritual traditions that we have today.

Rituals and the Practice of the Dhamma

In so far as the teaching of the Buddha deals primarily with the training and disciplining of the mind in order to achieve mind’s liberation from the shackles of dukkha, it is a spiritualistic rather than a ritualistic teaching.

There is little that is ritualistic in the teaching of the Buddha. Although there are certain recommended procedures and guidelines given in the Vinaya for carrying out certain function of the Saṅgha, these are practical advices which are meant for the Saṅgha to use in a very real world of human beings, to address very real human problems and needs. They are not ritualistic procedure that must be rigidly adhered to, and the failure to do so does not entail a violation of some sacred ceremony or ritual purity that may incur the wrath of some unseen being.

But after the Buddha’s passing away his teaching gradually became institutionalized into a religion called Buddhism (Buddha – ism). And together with this came the accompanying rites and rituals that usually adorn religions. Simple teaching of the Buddha such as going for refuge and observing the precepts which was originally recommended as personal spiritual undertaking, forming part of the foundation of the training on the spiritual path leading to liberation from dukkha, was turned into religious rituals to be carried out by the assembled devotees in every religious ceremony and meeting.