The Sermon at Benares · Class 10 English · First Flight: 60 flashcards
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1. What was the Buddha's name at birth, and what was he?
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Siddhartha Gautama, a prince in northern India.
2. What are the dates given for the Buddha's life?
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563 B.C. to 483 B.C.
3. What happened when Siddhartha was twelve?
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He was sent away for schooling in the Hindu sacred scriptures.
4. What happened four years after he was sent away to study?
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He came home to marry a princess, had a son, and lived ten years in the style his rank required.
5. How old was the Prince when he saw the four sights?
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About twenty-five, having been until then kept away from the suffering of the world.
6. What was he doing when he saw the four sights?
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He was out hunting, and chanced upon them.
7. Name the four sights in order.
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In order: a sick man, then an old man, then a funeral going past, and last a monk with his begging bowl.
8. What did the four sights make him do?
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They moved him so deeply that he left home immediately, to find out what could be understood about the sorrows he had seen.
9. How long did the Buddha wander before sitting under the tree?
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Seven years.
10. What did he vow under the peepal tree?
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To stay there until enlightenment came.
11. How long did he sit before enlightenment came?
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Seven days.
12. What did he rename the peepal tree, and why?
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The Bodhi Tree — the Tree of Wisdom — because he had been enlightened beneath it.
13. What does 'Buddha' mean?
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The Awakened, or the Enlightened.
14. By what other name does the stranger in the story call him?
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Sakyamuni, the Buddha.
15. What did the Buddha begin to do after his enlightenment?
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He began to teach and to share his new understandings.
16. Where did the Buddha preach his first sermon?
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At the city of Benares, the the holiest of the bathing places along the Ganges.
17. What does 'dipping places' mean?
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Bathing places on the river.
18. What does the chapter say the sermon reflects?
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The Buddha's wisdom about one inscrutable kind of suffering — that is, suffering which cannot be understood.
19. What is a sermon?
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A religious or moral talk.
20. What does 'chanced upon' mean?
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Came across by chance — which is how he met all four sights while out hunting.
21. Who was Kisa Gotami, and what happened to her?
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A woman who had an only son, and he died.
22. What did Kisa Gotami do first in her grief?
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She took the dead boy round to every neighbour she had, asking each of them for medicine.
23. What did the neighbours say about her?
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'She has gone out of her mind — the boy is dead.'
24. What did the man she met at length tell her?
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'I has no medicine for her child, he tells her, but he knows of a healer who can' — and then, 'Go to Sakyamuni, the Buddha.'
25. What did Kisa Gotami ask the Buddha for?
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She begged him for the medicine that would cure her boy.
26. What did the Buddha ask her to bring?
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A handful of mustard-seed.
27. What condition did the Buddha attach to the mustard seed?
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That it must be taken from a house where no one had lost a child, husband, parent or friend.
28. How did Kisa Gotami react when the Buddha first asked for the seed?
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In her joy she promised to procure it — 'procure' meaning to obtain.
29. Did anyone refuse her the mustard seed?
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No. The people were sorry for her and said, 'Here is mustard-seed; take it!' It was the condition, not the seed, that could not be met.
30. What question did Kisa Gotami ask at each house the second time?
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Whether anyone in that family — a son, a daughter, a father, a mother — had died.
31. What answer did the households give her?
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That their dead far outnumbered their living, and that she should not make them speak of the loss again.
32. What does the text say about the houses she visited?
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Not one household in the city was without its dead.
33. Where did Kisa Gotami sit down, and in what state?
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At the wayside, weary and hopeless.
34. What did she watch from the wayside?
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The lights of the city, flaring up and being put out again, until the whole place was dark.
35. What comparison did she draw from the lights?
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She thought about how men’s lives end — catching for a moment and then going out, as the city lamps had.
36. What did Kisa Gotami say to herself at the wayside?
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She calls her own grief selfish, says death spares nobody, and adds that whoever gives up all selfishness can find a path out of that valley of sorrow.
37. What does 'valley of desolation' mean?
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An area which is filled with deep sorrow.
38. Why did Kisa Gotami understand only the second time?
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The first time she was asking for a cure and could not hear anything said to her; the second time she asked a question, and every household answered it with its own dead — facts rather than opinions.
39. How did the Buddha change her understanding?
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He never argued with her. He accepted her request, set a task whose failure would teach her, and chose one that would take her into other people's grief, so that the insight, when it came, was her own.
40. What does 'repaired to' mean in this text?
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Simply 'went to' — an old-fashioned, stylistic use.
41. How does the Buddha describe the life of mortals?
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'Troubled and brief and combined with pain.'
42. What does the Buddha say about avoiding death?
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Nobody who has been born can escape dying; old age ends in death, and that is simply what living things are.
43. What is the image of ripe fruit?
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That ripe fruit is in danger of falling from the moment it ripens — and men are in danger of death from the moment they are born.
44. What is the image of earthen vessels?
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That every pot a potter turns out will end up broken, and a human life goes the same way.
45. Who falls into the power of death, according to the sermon?
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'Both the young and the grown, the foolish and those who are wise' — all are subject to death.
46. What does the Buddha say about a father and his son?
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'A father cannot save his son, nor kinsmen their relations.'
47. What is the image of the ox?
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That the dying are taken away one by one while the family stands by helpless — the Buddha compares it to an ox being led off to be killed.
48. What does 'Mark!' mean in the sermon?
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'Note this' or 'Pay attention' — the one place where the Buddha directly commands attention.
49. What conclusion does the Buddha draw from the universality of death?
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That the world is worn down by death and decay, and therefore “the wise do not grieve”, knowing what the world is like.
50. What does 'afflicted with' mean?
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Affected by suffering, disease or pain.
51. Why, according to the sermon, does weeping not help?
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Weeping and grieving bring nobody peace of mind; they only sharpen the pain and wear the body down, and the dead are no safer for them.
52. What is the arrow of lamentation?
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The Buddha's image for grief: 'Whoever wants peace should pull out 'the arrow that is made of wailing, complaining and sorrow'.'
53. What does the sermon promise to one who draws out the arrow?
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Peace of mind, release from sorrow, and blessing — for whoever has drawn the arrow out and grown steady again.
54. What does 'be composed' mean?
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To be calm and settled in oneself.
55. Rephrase 'give thee medicine for thy child' and 'Pray tell me'.
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'Give you medicine for your child'; 'Please tell me'.
56. Rephrase 'there was no house but someone had died in it'.
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There was no house in which somebody had not died.
57. Who are 'kinsmen'?
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Relatives.
58. What feelings does the modern guide list as common in grief?
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Sadness, anger, guilt and self-reproach, anxiety, loneliness, fatigue and disbelief.
59. What does Amitai Etzioni say about the stages of grief?
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That there is no set form for grief and no 'right' way to express it — he was, and is, angry, and rejects the psychologist's claim that the proper first stage is denial.
60. What consolation does Etzioni find?
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'Focusing on what people do for one another is the only comfort anybody can find' — following the maxim 'We are not to ask why, but what'.
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