Buddha Poem by Praveen Kumar In Shobha Priya

Like the milky glow of Buddha Poornima,
He soaked darkness with soft light
Of knowledge, reason and experience;
Buddha scattered clouds, spread the life's truths
From the infinite depths of the spiritual light.


Compassion moved his sensitive soul,
Decays and despairs unsettled his whole,
Illusions and ignorance soured his heart
To reach upward and know the world
To liberate life from the shackles of pain.


He wove with reason an exquisite fabric
From the warps and woofs of ancient thoughts;
He rose from the ruins of vedic rituals
Like a glorious rose in an unkempt garden
With the fragrance of the joy of deliverance.


The pain of transience and the despair of decay
Begged Siddhartha for light and peace;
Illumination came thro' dedicated meditation,
Wisdom dawned in solitude's calm
And dharma chakra opened horizons.


He tore the skin of complacence
To dip into human experience;
He probed sufferings and fleeting joy
Thro' the rare world of contemplations
And illumed human mind with the pure light of sacred knowledge.


He renounced cravings and affectations
In pursuit of peace and permanence
And stumbled on ultimate deliverance,
In overcoming flux by eight-fold path
That brings soul nearer to eternal goal.


He left his wife, he left his child,
He left palace and love and ease;
For, he loved them all, he loved the world,
He loved comforts, peace and ease,
Free from transcience, for all human race.


Tathagatha, the pith of truth and discipline,
The brimful bowl of sacred wisdom,
The fount of all liberated arhattas,
Strung Indian thoughts to a compact diamond strand
To still the struggle of spirit and mind.


His concerted thought, his detached spirit
Pierced grim subtleties of the cosmic order;
In clear doctrines, in suspended judgements,
Buddha illumed the dark secrets of life
And laid the path of liberation.


He dug sufferings, found decay and change,
Billows of change and yawning death;
He dug transience, found causation,
The wheel of law and fatalistic life;
And shed the light of spiritual dawn.


The lamp of soul is a chain of little sparkles,
The self, like a sea, is a succession of waves,
Life is a stream of endless becoming
From birth to death with the miseries of flux
In cycles of causation that hold us in leash.


Living and nonliving, life and being,
Mind and the nature and time and space
Evolve to new forms in continual flux;
Nothing is constant, nothing is permanent,
Change is what the cosmos is all about.


Buddha encountered the sad dance of void
‘Neath the sheath of complacent ignorance;
Nothing is real, nothing is forever,
All is fleeting impressions like midnight dreams,
Like a sea, we fancy the fleeting waves.


Buddha sought to withstand the gust of flux,
He saw himself in the middle of a gulf
That caused the present to surface a chain of futures
In succession of sorrows and pains of decay;
He cried for a halt of the kindless wheel.


For the cessation of the ceaseless chain of change,
In nirvana, he found, the supreme tool;
He attained awareness, he sought all his life;
Gouthama, the sakyamuni, found abstinence,
The cure for all the pain and sorrow.


He suffered for all, sacrificed all,
To find the path of deliverance;
He sought and lit the spiritual light
That illumed and liberated self and world
And cast gentle rays on the human race.