The Context of the Buddha, Written for Sixth Graders

Before exploring the Buddhas story and his teachings, I wanted to establish the basic historical context of his life.  I wrote this piece for that purpose, as always, loving the challenge of compressing a rich and complex history into a hopefully thought-provoking half a page.  Students had just finished studying the Aryans and Brahmanism, and this reading begins with and extends their newly acquired knowledge of that subject. It was accompanied by a PowerPoint with maps which I used to show the location and movements of the Aryans and "Siddhartha's people", a term I used just because Siddhartha was born into an extremely diverse society with no single name.  

For those interested in knowing more about the context described here, I highly recommend Geoffrey Samuel's "The Origins of Yoga and Tantra", and Greg Bailey's "The Sociology of Early Buddhism".  "Origins" has incredible up-to-date references for those interested in Indian religion and culture. 

What was happening during the Buddhas time?  

The Aryans settled in northwest India.  Siddhartha, who became the Buddha, was born in the northeast.  The two lands were very different, and the Aryan way of life was very different from the lives of Siddhartha's people.  The Aryans lived in a land of great plains, where they constantly moved around grazing cattle.  Because they moved so often, they did not build cities.  The Aryans were made up of many tribes, who often fought with one another.  Because of this, they worshiped many gods of war.  The people the Aryans conquered became part of the lowest caste.  

Siddhartha's people were very diverse. Because they lived close to large rivers, people from far away came to trade and to live.  Merchants from many cultures came to the land Siddhartha was born in, and they later took the Buddhas teachings back to their homelands, which is one reason why the religion was so successful.  Instead of moving around like the Aryans, the people living in Siddhartha's land had farmed for many generations.  Their population had grown, and by the time Siddhartha was born, they had built large cities.   Because they were farmers, they worshiped goddesses of fertility – the ability to create and nurture life.  This busy, diverse society did not have a caste system.

Shortly before the Buddha was born, the Aryans started trading more with the people of northeast India.  Believing that the priests of the Aryans, called the Brahmans, were experts in communicating with the gods, people began to hire them to conduct religious rituals, and even to pray for them.  Because of this, Aryan ideas started to spread throughout Sidhartha's society.  Many people were upset.  A spiritual movement started that was critical of Brahmanism and of the caste system.  The movement taught that people should not rely on Brahman priests to pray for them, but should develop their own spiritual practice.  The Buddha became a great leader of this movement.   

In the boxes below, list the differences between the Aryans in the northwest and Siddhartha's people in the northeast. 

Aryans	Siddhartha's People

Which of these differences do you think are the most important, and why?  

Which differences might lead to tensions between the Aryans and Siddhartha's people?  Please explain why tensions might arise.  

The Buddhas Life, Written for Sixth Graders

Note: This lesson was preceded by an activity designed to historically contextualize the Buddha's life.

A few months ago, I spent one week teaching a group of sixth graders about the origins of Buddhism in India.  I looked at a number of resources describing the Buddhas life, and judging them inadequate to my goals, decided to write my own version.  I broke Siddhartha's life into four stages and attempted to tell the story so that both the historical context and the spiritual meaning could be explored by twelve year olds.  

I accomplished this in part by describing spirituality as the sincere attempt to become as calm, as loving, and as wise as possible, and by framing the events in his life as either facilitating or not facilitating those goals.  I realize that in doing so, I have taken some historical liberties.  I felt the approach was justified because these goals do indeed reflect the goals of the bodhisattva path (the Buddhist devotion to helping all beings attain liberation), and because students can relate to the experience of and desire to be calm, loving, and wise.  I feel this frame brought the Buddha down to earth, out of the clouds of abstraction.  It created an opportunity for students to be deeply introspective, proving to me, once again, that students of all ages crave the chance to reflect deeply on life. 
 

The Buddhas Story

Part 1: As a prince, Siddhartha thinks he has all he could ever want.

The Buddha was born as a prince ruling over a tribe of warriors.  His name was Siddhartha.  Siddhartha’s mother had a dream while she was pregnant with him, and a priest interpreted it as meaning that her son would either come to rule the world, or would give up all worldly possessions and become the wisest of all men and a great spiritual teacher.   

When Siddhartha’s father heard this interpretation, he was worried.  He wanted his son to rule the world, not become a great spiritual teacher.  And so, he decided to teach Siddhartha to love material things.  Siddhartha’s father hoped that if he was raised to love things that his culture valued, such as fine horses and beautiful clothing, that Siddhartha would not choose to give these things up.  In fact, his father hoped that if Siddhartha came to love these things, he might try to rule the world in order to get more of them.

And so, Siddhartha grew up surrounded by riches, and was given anything he could possibly want.  When he became a teenager, Siddhartha was given the finest clothes, a fast chariot, and was surrounded by beautiful women.  As a man, he was given a beautiful wife.  Siddhartha was also a great athlete, and was given great respect.  He had everything a man could ever want.  Or did he?  

Part 2: Siddhartha confronts suffering, and realizes there is more to life than being rich, famous, and respected.  

One day Siddhartha was riding his Chariot through the city.  His father, in order to make sure that Siddhartha was always surrounded by pleasant things, ordered his soldiers to hide the old and sick people.  But one day, the soldiers missed an old man, and Siddhartha stopped to look at him.  On this day, Siddhartha realized that all people become old.  He realized that one day, he would become old, and could not enjoy many of the things he loved. 

On another ride, he saw a sick man, and realized that all people also become sick.  He wondered, what was the point of being rich if your body was in pain?  He wondered if he could enjoy all of his nice things if he was sick.  Could he be happy even if he was in pain?  Finally, on another ride, he saw a dead man lying on the road.  He began to think about what it means to die.  Can we be happy even if the people we love grow old and die?  Can we accept our own death? 

As Siddhartha started thinking about these things, he realized that life was about a lot more than just being rich... and even more than being famous and respected.  A rich, famous, and respected person could still suffer and be very unhappy.  How could a person find happiness in a life where we can't escape old age, sickness, and the deaths of those we love, and of our own selves?  Siddhartha was determined to find out.  Realizing that all of his wealth and power would not bring him happiness after all, he secretly left his kingdom one night, giving up his possessions and power, his family and identity. 

Part 3: Siddhartha searches for the deeper meaning of life. 

Siddhartha joined a large spiritual movement that rejected the growing influence of Brahmanism and the caste system.  Leaders in the movement taught that power and wealth often led to suffering, because they fooled people into thinking they had found happiness.  These leaders were ascetics, meaning that they had given up all the pleasures of the world, including taking pleasure in food, sex, respect, family, friendship, conversation, and other things that bring people joy.  

Why did ascetics make this painful choice?  They thought that, just as there is a huge outside universe to look at, there is also a huge universe inside of ourselves that is even more important to understand.  For them, caste did not matter, because all human beings were infinitely deep. They thought that, as long as we took pleasure in the outside world, we would not be able to see this infinite depth, this universe inside of ourselves.  They also thought that it would be hard to see the inside world if the outside world caused us pain.  According to them, both pleasure and pain were distractions that should be overcome.

Siddhartha joined a group of ascetics living in the middle of the forest.  They supported each other in trying to overcome this world and discover the universe inside of themselves.  They ate only enough to survive and wore only rags.  They learned to overcome emotional and physical pain, and to overcome all desires.  They even learned to stop their thoughts.  In this way they were totally undistracted by the outside world.

Part 4: Siddhartha rejects asceticism 

After six years of practicing, Siddhartha fainted from hunger.  A young woman found him while walking through the forest. Worried that he was going to die, she begged him to eat some rice.  At this time, Siddhartha realized that his path was too extreme.  It was so extreme he was killing himself.  He needed to walk what he would later call the middle path, of not taking too much and being greedy, but not taking too little and hurting oneself.  Understanding this, he accepted the rice. 

Siddhartha wondered if he was also being extreme and hurting himself in other ways.  Thinking about this, he realized that rather than forcing his mind to be silent and have no thoughts, he needed to pay attention to his thoughts, and to his feelings as well.  It was too extreme to totally ignore all of his thoughts and feelings: he decided he needed to be honest about them, to face them and see them clearly so that he could understand himself.

Siddhartha left his companions, and went to sit by himself under a tree, promising himself he would not move until he understood himself.  He vowed that he would sit still, and notice everything about his mind and his heart.  He vowed that he would find complete peace with everything about himself. 

Under this tree, now known as the Bodhi Tree, meaning “Tree of Wisdom”, Siddhartha came to a great realization that has influenced the lives of billions of people over 2,500 years.  Next, we will look at what he figured out. 

The Great Depression, Emasculation, and the Crackdown on Queer Culture

I recently found some notes I had taken two years ago while reading George Chauncey’s “Why Marriage: The History Shaping Today’s Debate Over Marriage Equality”.  In a future post, I hope to revisit that book and tell that history in a two-page article, accessible to middle-school students, clearly describing the historical contexts of shifting understandings of marriage since the 1850's.  For now, here is some interesting history that shows, among other things, that history is not always a story of progress, but simply of continuous change; that understandings of gender are sometimes intimately connected to politics and propaganda; and that hard times often lead to fear, which often leads to prejudice.   

The first time I encountered the thriving world of 1920’s LGBT culture was as an 18-year old completely obsessed with the European avant-garde.  However, I didn’t stop and wonder, “wait a second, these public displays of homosexuality were accepted?”  I had to wait to wonder this until I was 27 and spent a summer immersed in Hemingway, who described in homophobic terms the gay men he ran into in 1920’s Europe.  (Hemingway remains one of my favorite authors: while a misogynist and homophobe in many ways, he also loved Gertrude Stein, who wrote that during their many conversations they often talked about homosexuality.  He was a complicated man). 

A year later I was reading the incredible literature of the Harlem Renaissance, which is filled with gay characters.  It was clear that not only the European night life but urban American life in the 1920’s was far more accepting of queer culture than what I had been led to believe by my knowledge of how gays were treated during the postwar years.  During the Jazz Age Americans from many walks of life had openly enjoyed the fruits of queer cosmopolitan culture: not only were some of the most popular entertainers of the day quite flamboyant, there was a general acceptance in some cities of drag queens and kings.  What had happened?

In 1927, a year in which a wildly popular lesbian drama was on Broadway, New York banned all portrayals of homosexuality on the stage.  The law was part of a wider crackdown on homosexuality stimulated by a crisis of masculinity experienced during the Great Depression.  Across the country, men who were no longer able to support their families fled in shame.  It was not rare for men in this position to take their own lives.  When the New Deal was implemented in 1933, it entered the emasculation crisis by firing working women who were married in order to open up spaces for men.  The first major New Deal program, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), was a direct attempt by the government to offer men their masculinity back: the propaganda for the CCC showed tough, determined men engaged in physical labor, and it's slogan was "We can take it!"  Over 9 years, 2.5 million men participated, receiving 30$ a month, as well as the psychological benefit of feeling masculine once again. 

On the surface, such a program seems to have nothing to do with demonizing gay men.  But from the notes I took on Chauncey, it appears that the masculinization projects of the Great Depression had this effect, either purposefully or as a by-product of looking down on effeminate men..  During the Jazz Age, the effeminate man and the gay man were not publicly perceived as posing a threat to masculinity or to straightness: straight men mingling with queer men was not considered unusual or problematic.    

I would like to know more about how that perceived threat to masculinity arose, as well as more about the psychology of that threat, especially considering that I see it all the time in the homophobia in the communities and classrooms I work in.  I find it fascinating that historical shifts can so easily throw society into fits of fear and prejudice... or into openness.  I sometimes feel that there is a proliferation of lessons examining the contexts in which fear and oppression arise.  It would invaluable for students to analyze moments where great openness occurs as well.  The history of how gay marriage came to be conceivable, and then possible, would be an analysis of both moments. 

"We can take it!" A photo from the CCC propaganda campaign by Wilfred J. Mead.  

Blog Introduction

This blog is a space for me to reflect on, develop, and share experiences and thoughts that I find meaningful.  I have attempted to write with clarity and conciseness - and I hope with compassion as well - because such writing forces me to develop deeper understandings, and because I sincerely hope that others will find my writings helpful.

Please consider everything here a work in progress.  None of these writings represent my finished thoughts or final products.  They simply represent the understandings that I had at the time of writing.  They will surely evolve.

As a teacher, I see everything I do, without exception, through the lens of care.  I am passionately devoted to continuously deepening my understanding of critical and historical thinking because I think that is the caring thing to do.  I strive to deepen my content knowledge for the sake of care.  The same is true for understanding how to promote literacy or for understanding adolescent psychology and development.  As teachers we are involved in these endeavors for the sake of supporting our students in every way possible.

We are also involved in supporting each other.  I hope this blog is a strong step in that direction as well. 

With much warmth,

Lynn Burnett

My MA Thesis Presentation

In the 14 minute video below, I present my thesis on the importance of contextualization skills and contextualizing prejudice in history classes, with a focus on ancient civilizations.  I discuss a wide range of topics, most of which deserve a lecture of their own.  A few could use an entire workshop.     

I would be happy to send the thesis to anyone who would like to read it.  The abstract reads,

This study analyzes the historical thinking skill of contextualization and argues that contextualization is the optimal tool for helping students understand prejudice.  It is argued that contextualization alleviates the natural psychological tendency to read one’s own social world into the past and into other cultures.  This natural psychological tendency inhibits the ability to recognize the perspectives of others, which is necessary for the development of empathy.  Contextualization is then linked to the psychological literature on the development of prejudice in childhood and adolescence, and framed as a way to help alleviate prejudice as well as understand it.  The study closes with an analysis of a lesson structured to help sixth graders learn to contextualize prejudice in ancient China.