Lee Hyebin
PhD Candidate, University of Oslo
Death is our inescapable destiny; yet nobody wants to accept that. Mankind has always questioned death, and immortality has been a wish for a long time. We can find many examples to overcome our inevitable destiny in the religious scriptures, as well as historiography, literature and the arts.
The epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest poems written in the Akkadian during the late second millennium BC, is about the journey of the heroic king of Uruk, Gilgamesh, looking for immortality. This epic has been an inexhaustible source for classical and modern literature around the world. In this epic poem, after witnessing the death of his beloved friend, Gilgamesh tries to find a way to have a long life from his demigod ancestor. When his journey comes to failure, he stops all endeavors to get an immortal life, and finds the answer not in the individual, but in the community.
The Dhammapada, which can be translated into “the words of the doctrine”, is one of the oldest pieces of Buddhist literature complied at a very early period. The scripture, based on the widely used Pāli Dhammapada, is composed of 423 verses in 26 vaggas. The contents of verses are not the Buddhist doctrine, but are “gnomic verses”. This text has been transmitted into most Buddhist traditions, such as Theravāda, Mahāyāna and Tibetan Buddhism.
This presentation will compare the answer of seeking long life in the Epic of Gilgamesh with that of the Dhammapada. Gilgamesh could get the answer from the outside, while Buddhism encourages people to achieve their answers from the inside. In particular, I will present some verses in the Dhammapada that give us the teaching of a long life by dividing into three categories: the axiom, the way to reach immortality and the true meaning of immortality.
(Presented in the 2018 Chulalongkorn Asian Heritage Forum : Culture of Longevity, 15-16 August 2018, Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Bangkok, organized by Institute of Thai Studies, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, College of Population Studies, Chulalongkorn University)