The full moon day in April- the moon of Chaitra (Aries'full moon) - is a day of remembrance among the devotees of the Lord Buddha. His day represents symbolic the day that he took the Great Vow, that he made the resolve to set out for the One great quest to try to pierce the great mystery that is thrown over the worlds aand to find its secre, its meaning.

According to the legends he was kept in a kind of magnificent isolation within the palace groundsuntil he was 29 years old, and he was there in a continuous state of happiness if we may call happiness a life with comfort but without much exertion. Before his birth it was prophesized that he would be either a Chakrawarti (a great King) or a buddha ( an elightened One.

Chakra means wheel as the great symbol of power. So he was to become a great King and ruler and to run his chariot unopposed in a universal kingdom, or He would become a buddha, a Lord of Mercy. The choice was His.

The legend says: When He was 29 years old, a great Deity appeared to Him in four forms: first in that of an old man stricken with all the infirmities of old age, crippled and weak, In the second place the deity projected himself into the form of a diseased man strivken with some corruotion: in the third place the Prince came across a decaying corpse, a disintegrating body. The contrast with his surroundings was of course most striking because in the precincts of the palace of his father , aking, everything was beautiful, every form was beautiful, that of His wife, his Father, of all his surroundingsm of Channa his charioteer and counsellor and of his horse. Finally he was the dignified vision of a hermit; no doubt there was a certain beauty in that figure , it was dignified in a way, but the hermit did not look at the real thing the sorrow and the imperfections in the world: he sat there meditating and perhaps lost in some glorious heaven of his own. So there was stagnation in that dignified figure of the hermit, meditating on some lofty objects of his own.

Having seen these four apparitions the Lord took the great resolve the great oath, the great Vow as it is called. There is nothing compulsory in th taking of this vow. He who has seen the terrible suffering in all its aspects and all its phases cannot do otherwise. he must face it and must find a solution.; he cannot find it in himself, it is the great problem of the world, of the universe, that is to be solved. This is one of the meanings of the Opening of the Doors in Buddhistic religious systes, although one of the meanings only.

So hettok the great vow and set out on the great quest, the great voyage, determined to find a solution or to perish, which is the other way. He made the great renunciation and left his home, He left the future of of the glory and the power of an Indian Prince and ruler and went into the world as a mendicant, as a beggar, homeless, penniless and in the beginning despised as such.

After much suffering and great exertion Enlightenment came to him; He saw the meaning of it all and he saw the cause of the suffering. The first sermon he preached is considered by all who know about the oldest documents as rather authentic. Also the Chinese scriptures about Buddhism and the Pali scriptures, which otherwise show great differences , in this respect tally with each other. There are also other reasons to assume that in the Dammachaka Pawatana Sutta, in that sermon, are contained the main teachings of the Lord. However , we must not forget that many of the Pali words have lost their meaning, the meaning that they had in that time and so much of the translations,much of the commentaries also differ from the original meaining of the words. Dammachaka Pawatana means the turningas it is called, of the wheel of righteousness. Dhamma is the Pali word for Dharma. We have no word for Dharma: it is translated mostly by the word law but then it must include part of the writtenla and also the whole unwritten divine law; but it also means the substance of law that is what we call an aspect of Truth. Ans so Dhamma means as well truth as law, divine law. Pawatana mans to commencing an action that has to be continued, so we might translate the whole term, as it has been done by Rhys Davids, namely to set rolling the wheels of the royal chariot of a universal kingdom of Truthand Righteousness, these last two words containigna beuatiful conception of Dharma.

Indeed that is what He did in His first sermon, it was not only preaching. The whole creation was as it were listeneing to Him, it was a formidable absolving deed.

In the old sciptures of Buddhism one finds several precepts, instructions given to the members of the Order and one of these five instructions are the five Bavanas as they are called, the five states of consciousness, and they are typical for the Lord Buddha's teaching. The first of them is to enter into a state of contact, sympathetic contact with the joyful aspect which is creation, in ma, in the laugh of children, in the smile of the wise and the pure, in the trees, especially in the flowers, in the singing birds, in the open air, in the rain , in the storm, at sea, all this is joy, pure joy, wherin join the Angels, and the vreatures of Mahat, the beings of Fire. There is this great joy in creation and we have to see it, we have to make contact with it and we have to work for the conditions , for the physical welfare of the world, we have to combat squalor, disease, and all this for the sake of that pure and glorious Divne Joy that is reigning throughout nature.

Then we come to the opposite, to a seeming absolute contrast, but it is only an opposite aspect of a glorious functional totality. We have to meditate on the suffering , the sorrow in the world, therefore on compassion, on pity but we have to see it from a special point: we now come in the human world because there is only suffering. Suffering is restricted to man's world because of the uniqueness of man. because of this uniqueness man carries the whole universe, there is nothing outside him, no being, no creature no atom.

It is the meaning of uniqueness that it has to find his own way, man must go through suffering and if you see the why, it is a glorious suffering, a creative suffering that must lead to some new essence, to something quite new, something that gives glory and a spontaneous beauy to the whole universe, something that makes the deep more profound, and the Silence more silent.

When the Deep becomes more profound,it can contain amore beautiful light to be born, to be brought out into world of the future. But the fact of that suffering is there and it has to be met. We must help, we must carry it, we must take it upon our shoulders; we must alleviate it ,we must soothe it, appeaseit when we can, take the burden of it, we cannot do otherwise and that pity, that compassion is then seen as acondition for the third state of consciousness, that again is opposite to the second state. It is a consciousness of a deep, deep happiness because that compassion leads to a speeding up, to an acceleration of becoming unique, to acquire that power-to-give, that which only unique mancan give without limitations

For then man becomes Charity itself, one has lost one's Self, one's I ., everything, even one's individuality because it si broken up in a deed of Chrity and lost. Therein lies the great happiness for man , for only thus - by suffering, by that creative suffering - one can come to happiness that transcends joy in many degrees,. iI is quite a different quality at all, quite a new field because you come into the essence of human powers. This happiness is correlative , it is concomitant with suffering in that aspect that I have tried to explain.

Then you come to the fourth state It is a very mysterious one. In that state one sees the hopeles suffering around one, but a different suffering which has no perspective , it is dying without more and a terrible dying and you see men, the suffering men who hold on to their "I", to their individuality, they die in their prisonhouse, it is the tension of selfishness, of self righteousness. All the time you see this everywhere. It must be met because every human is specific is universal, and must take the full responsibility for every other person and being. So one must die into their death, a complete death, and only by so dying you can bring the ferment , the germ of new life in the tension, in the prisonhouse, in the grave. By thus dying one enters into the fifth state of absolute and supreme serenity, into supreme bliss which the Lord Buddha with a Pali word called Nibbana (Nirvana in Sanskrit) . It is correlative with that state of perfect freedom, with a mercy that takes all the sins upon our shoulders, that state of being without sin.

Being of illimited tolerance one then bears all the infirmities, all the dying processes around on. It is one and the same thing, there is no freedom without its vesture of compassion, of commiseration, of fulfilling the mystery of the Vicarious Atonement. It is very simple, and unavoidable, it is more beautiful than we can perceive. It touches the very heart of man's message in the world