Week 11 Reading Diary A: The Buddha Learns Tough Lessons

Myth-Folklore Unit: The Life of Buddha

The Encounters, Laotian temple painting

Today I'm going to write about my favorite episodes in this week's readings, which were about the young Buddha. My favorite part that I might write about in the storytelling was the chapter The First Encounter (and also its sequel, Two More Encounters). When Siddhartha was growing up (Siddhartha was the young Buddha), he decided he wanted to go on a visit outside the kingdom but the king was frightened that he might see something that would cause him to not want to be king anymore and to fulfill the prophecy, so he had all of the streets cleared of beggars and sick and old people so that his son wouldn't see them. Everything that the prince has is bedecked in gold, he is really very spoiled if you think about it so it's a wonder that he didn't turn out a spoiled brat of a prince but instead was a selfless Buddha. The gods were jealous of the happiness of the city so they decided to upset Siddhartha's mind by setting an old man in the road in front of his chariot. The gods also muddled the charioteer's mind so that he answered truthfully Siddhartha's questions about the old man and he then learned about old age and that it would eventually happen to everyone in the world, including him. In the next chapter he decided to go out once more into the city but the gods put a diseased man in his path so he learned all about sickness and how it could happen to anyone, including him. He was greatly affected by the fact that men stay strong and courageous during life even though they are faced with such adversities as old age and possible sickness, so he ended his trip. The king was grieved at what had happened to his son despite his careful planning and punished the charioteer for it, though not too badly. At first he tried to keep Siddhartha more entertained than ever within the palace walls but when that failed he decided to let him go out one more time and once again had the streets cleared of everyone "unsavory." He even changed charioteers. The gods interfered again, however, and made a corpse being carried by four men and grieved by several people so Siddhartha learned all about death. 

Reading Review Week

So far this semester I have liked Narayan's Ramayana the best. I liked it most because it had Thataka's story in it, which is what gave me part of the idea for my storybook. I wasn't as in to Buck's version because it was really hard for me to get past that I'd already read everything that was happening in Narayan's version (except for a few different and expanded stories). I liked that it expanded on things like the beginning and Rama exhiling Sita, but I think that maybe the parts that really overlap should be excluded from the reading. I really liked that we got to read from the myth/folklore untextbook (though I don't have any reading diaries over this because I was having a rough time and didn't do any of my homework for a while, though I did do the readings eventually). I think it would be good to have more of these stories in place of the reading you would take out if you eliminated some of Buck's version or only read Buck's version instead of starting off with Narayan's version (then have a story in the untextbook that told Thataka's story since Buck doesn't tell it).

For the notetaking part, I've found that it works best for me to just pick my favorite part of the reading and do an in depth breakdown of it in my notes so that I can then use that story in my storytelling; so I do use my reading diary in connection with my storytelling assignment. The reading diaries do help me to recall what's been going on in that time period, except when I haven't done them because life was falling apart.

So far, I haven't done much extra reading for my storybook except a few wikipedia pages. I do read a lot for pleasure - it's one of my favorite things to do actually - but this reading is not really what I like to do usually, though it's not boring or anything. This class doesn't really overlap with any of my other classes because classes like literature and history I took ages ago since I'm about to graduate. All that I have left are psychology courses and one biology course.

The only suggestion I have about improving the reading in this class is what I mentioned in the first paragraph: that I'd like the idea of having only one or the other of the Ramayana stories (preferably keep Buck's because it's more detailed) and then having short excerpts from the other book that detail stories that aren't included in the one you keep (like Thataka's story if you kept Buck). In place of this loss, it would be nice to have a lot more required reading in the other things about India that come from the untextbook. I would recommend to new students that they always do the reading at least two days before the post is due (or at least start it) because fifty pages is a lot to cover in one evening of work.

Here is an image from an earlier post. I picked this image because I really enjoyed the story behind it and I liked writing about it in my reading diary and I thought this image really embodied that story well.

Image Source: Wikipedia. Vishnu on Garuda.