Matrimony… according to Buddha
- Sunday, 19 February 2012 06:34
- Viên Minh
The Buddha’s teaching first and foremost emphasizes on Enlightenment for all sentient beings, however, while trying to achieve enlightenment, it also accentuates its foundation on how to guide human beings towards and bring happiness to our everyday’s life.
Marriage is the Love Connection
The Buddhist practitioners who opt to have their wedding vow taken in a Temple often are those who know the valuable guidance needed for their happy married life. The most basic recommendations in the Buddhist teachings can suggest ways to maintain love and further enhance and secure matrimonial relationship.
According to the Buddha, marriage is the beginning step in the mutuality between partners in their life together. It is the meeting point of two individuals who love one another, who jointly make effort in building their own family, their happiness and their marriage. If this mutuality can be highly reciprocated, their matrimonial happiness will become more solid and long lasting.
The Buddha not only sees marriage as a union based on cause and effect between people in connection with love and happiness, but it is also the opportunity for the individuals (both the husband and the wife) to be righteous themselves and perfect their lives.
The four virtues of: same faith, same precepts, same generosity and same wisdom, are seen as the basic conditions on which to build long lasting happiness in marriage. And marriage is seen as the first step in better oneself on the way to attain enlightenment.
At this beginning of making a vow to each other, they promise to journey together in love; to practice together their dharma, not only during this one lifetime, but in many karmic lives to follow, until both reach the utmost essence, which is enlightenment itself – this is according to the teachings of the Buddha found in the canons.
Let’s say both of these Buddhist partners are very generous in open up their hearts and contribute to charitable causes; let’s say they know how to develop and improve their knowledge and enlightened wisdom… that could be because they already possess the prior conditions to connect with each other in marriage from many, many previous lives that are inseparable.
Therefore, according to the Buddha’s teaching, marriage is the connected love toward righteousness. In it, the human mind will become more brightened, pure, gentle and kind; and human dignity is at its highest and most brilliant.
But it got to follow the ethical concepts
Marriage is the most ordinary function of life but to maintain this most normal process and make it work isn’t easy.
The Buddha never discourages non-monastic members to wed each other, but once entering into a marriage, He encourages the parties to live fully to the highest social standards in order to achieve happiness and peacefulness in life.
To have this happiness in marriage and in the family life, both husband and wife have to love one another; they have to possess mutual qualites in order to be deemed “fitted for each other” as in the Buddhist spirits.
If both husband and wife are of the same religion, equal virtues, and comparable intellectual and generosity, then they are more compatible in their life together as a family - now in this lifetime as well as if they want to reincarnate and meet again in their next life, they can as well do so.
There are numerous important factors that partners in a marriage proposal need to pay attention and ascertain before thinking about this union to start a family. To come to each other, to live with each other, one has to find one’s “other half” where it is most compatible.
Therefore most of us paints for ourselves the ideal woman or man we must find and marry. So how to measure these standards of this ideal person?
According to the Buddhist teachings the husband has five responsibilites toward his wife and vice versa.
Thusly, it is essential for both husband and wife to fulfill their obligations and responsibilites for each other in order to sustain and preserve their matrimonial relation in a most happy and peaceful way. And that is exactly what every couple wants and needs in their every day’s family and married life.
In marriage, there are always a multitude of deceptions and difficulties for both husband and wife, they need to lean on each other for love on the long road of righteous living that the Buddha taught; they have to willingly share and jointly work to build their happy family just as the teachings advocate, in order to be successful in maintaining happiness and for their love to be forever gracious and noble.
These are five responsibilities of a wife:
1. skillfully and beautifully uphold domestic works
2. respect and treat employees accordingly on behalf of her husband
3. refrain from adultery
4. safeguard her husband’s property and use money wisely
5. be clever, mindful, and assiduous in all aspects of life
There are also five responsibilites of a husband:
1. have respect for his wife
2. don’t show contempt for her
3. be faithful to her
4. let her be responsible and give her some power
5. buy her gifts and treat her nicely
Vien Minh Translated to English
Read Article in Vietnamese: Hôn nhân theo... Đức Phật - Bùi Hiền
