Attachment and celebrity

Great program last night about the history of India. There's been a lot of these lately as you may have noticed, and this one was presented by historian and Alexander the Great enthusiast Michael Wood. He dealt with the period of and immediately following the Buddha - 500BC onwards. It put a few things in a new perspective for me about the Buddha and Buddhism. For one, I hadn't really considered what was so revolutionary about his deceptively simple core message: life is suffering, and suffering is caused by being attached to things. Even if it seems tough to put into practice, we can all at least understand that. We're all aware of the suffering of wanting what you can't have, or can't have yet, and that if we weren't quite so materialistic life would be more relaxing.

Of course, India already had a long tradition of ascetics who renounced the material world - the Buddha himself started out as one. The really challenging part is that this extends to gods - you can be attached to gods and what they promise, just as much as to possessions. Given that India is a country of 33 million gods, it becomes plain that the Buddha was the daddy of all iconoclasts.

I also hadn't considered quite how modern buddhism feels. It almost appears odd to me that it originated in the Iron Age. It seems strange that a time so far before industrialisation and the modern world could have had anything like our need for buddhism's message of detachment. In particular perhaps, detachment from the cult of celebrity and fame that Princess Diana's memorial service is such a symbol of.

Maybe it could be said that we live in a time of 33 million celebrities.