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| | | Book Name: The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 8 | Previous Next | |
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energies to the family life: make a house, create a big business, earn money, raise children. And then the third is called vanprastha. Vanprastha means "facing towards the forest." Now prepare yourself to leave the world -- prepare for twenty-five years! Live still in the house, but turn towards the forest. Slowly slowly, disconnect yourself. Go on giving your responsibilities to your children, who will now be coming back from the university.
And the fourth stage -- after seventy-five years -- the last twenty-five years, you become a sannyasin. This was the routine, accepted, conventional thing in India.
In the first place, people don't live a hundred years, and particularly in those days not at all. All the scientific research that has been gone into proves that people in Buddha's time lived at the most an average of forty years; forty years was the average life. And it does not seem too bad because even now in India, thirty-six years is the average life. With all the new medicine, medical help, hospitals, if India has only thirty-six years as average age, then in those days, with no science, with no medical facilities, if people lived forty years average they were doing perfectly well! So people were not living for a hundred years. By the time one was seventy-five, one was gone. So for the majority of the people, the time for sannyas will never come.
It seems it was just an effort to postpone it. And even if somebody lived after seventy-five -- a few people lived, Buddha himself lived for eighty years -- if a few people lived after seventy-five, their life will be almost without energy. They will be dead, walking corpses. They won't have energy enough to meditate, to rise to the highest peaks of consciousness. They will not be able to transform their beings into buddhahood; that will be impossible for them.
Buddha brought a great revolution and India has never forgiven him for that. He destroyed the whole nonsense idea of stages. It is nonsense, because there are a few intelligent people who can be sannyasins even while they are young, and there are a few superintelligent people who can be sannyasins even while they are small children.
Shankaracharya
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