How did the Buddha find His Dhamma? And ultimately His Supreme Perfect Enlightenment?
It is said that Gautama Buddha is Perfectly Enlightened, a Samyaksambuddha, finding Dhamma on His own. I am curious, how much help did He receive on His behalf to find the Dhamma by Way of His Practice? He discovered the Unsurpassed Law, but what relationship, if symbiotic or uniquely merging or constitutional, and ultimately Awakening and Enlightened did Buddha have when He was attaining Enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, to the Dhamma?
If one sees the Teaching, it is said one sees the Buddha. Often some say there is a Buddha in all of us. Some say we can only hope to attain Nibbana and Arhatship, and then a new end and beginning in Nibbana. All is fine and well with that. But the Buddha must have had a unique strive.
So for incalculable time, over many lifetimes, the Buddha practiced as a Bodhisattva, learning from fellow practitioners and many Buddhas of His day in those lifetimes, cherishing the Bodhisattva ideal. We could say that He was a powerful Bodhisattva, striving towards full Enlightenment. He met Kassapa, and even honoured Dipankara Buddha in person eons ago.
My main question is how much of the Pali Canon contains information of the Buddha Gautama meeting other Tathagatas, fully Enlightened Buddhas, in His past lives, and what relationship does this have with Shakyamuni, Gautama Buddha, in eventually finding the Dhamma on His own to become the Perfectly Enlightened One, to whom we owe so much to today?
Forgetting seems to be one of aspects of ignorance, so it may lead to reasoning that if meeting with the Buddha isn’t associated in the arising of the right view, there is no direct relationship with the future arising of the eye of Dhamma. One simply dies as puthujjana, and the encounter with the Buddha is forgotten.
However orthodox position is that one cannot arrive at the right view independently, there are to conditions for the right view, so one need another ariya and only with his help one can arrive at the right view. While it is sometimes assumed that the Buddhas are exceptions, it not necessarily be so.
Before Bodhisattva was born in devaloka, he was according to Sutta a bhikkhu during the Buddha Kassapa time.
And Suttas describtions of the three knowledges start always from the recollection of the past lives. And precisely such memories can provide the information from the outside, which is necessary for the right view.
While if it is so we must also accept infinite regression of Buddhas, without the first Buddha as one who discovered the truth independently, it’s consistent with the idea of samsara as not having any visible starting point.
But whether it is so, we cannot be sure since Suttas don’t state things explicitly
Of course on the lover level meeting with Buddhas could be very fruitful in the terms of making merit, but as far as arising of the right view I don’t see any other possibility as that just mentioned.
