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| Samsara means the "continued wandering on" |
"Inconceivable is this continued wandering through rebirths [samsaric cycling through the Wheel of Life and Death]. No beginning, no first point is evident, when beings, hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving, began birth and this endless repeated cycle of wandering on.
"So long has it been that it is not easy to find a being who has not already been one's mother in the past... one's father... one's brother... one's sister... one's son... one's daughter...
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| The pig chases the bird chases the snake. |
"Long enough have we all experienced pain, experienced disappointment (dukkha, suffering), experienced loss, swelling the cemeteries, long enough to become disillusioned, long enough to become disenchanted, long enough to become dispassionate toward all things [dependently originated phenomena, formations, constituent assemblages, fabrications], long enough to finally be free."
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| The Buddha had three mothers in his final rebirth: Maya, Pajapati Gotami, and one more.* |
- *Another mother? In a fascinating incident in the Buddha's life, one day he was touring around proto-India with monastics when an elderly couple approaches him. Her name in this episode may only be given as Mata ("Mother"). They address the Buddha as "Son" (putta, putra), which shocks the monastics who all know the Buddha's biological mother (Queen Maya) passed away a week after his birth and her sister (Pajapati Gotami), co-wife of her husband (King Suddhodana), raised the prince as her own son, passing her two children (his half-siblings brother Nanda and sister Sundari Nanda) onto nurses to raise. The Buddha does not correct the couple but instead calms the monastics by explaining that for 500 (a number that just means "many") lifetimes, for so many lifetimes that she was justified in regarding him as "son." The old was complaining that he had not visited them in such a long time then gave the karmic prescription for a couple being reborn together life after life. Such is this wandering on (samsara) that with just about everyone we meet we have already shared all relationships. While that seems impossible, it only goes to show how incredibly long this Wheel of Life and Death has been turning with no end in sight (no final end possible other than enlightenment and nirvana).
The context for this sutra is as part of a series of descriptions intended to give rise to disenchantment and dispassion toward samsara, the endless cycle of rebirth from which Indian spiritual traditions seek liberation (moksha). This is the goal, yet only the Buddha seems to have found actual safety, actual freedom, actual emancipation. He called it nirvana, but both moksha and nirvana are used by other traditions to describe inferior accomplishment that do not really amount to a final solution to the problem of endless rebirth and suffering.
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