Gautama Buddha Read online

  ROHINI CHOWDHURY

  Gautama Buddha

  LORD OF WISDOM

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Contents

  About the Author

  Map

  1: Reconstructing Buddha

  2: Birth 563 BCE

  3: Friends

  4: Renunciation 534 BCE

  5: Enlightenment 528 BCE

  6: Spreading the Word 528–508 BCE

  7: The Beginning of the End 508–483 BCE

  8: Nirvana 483 BCE

  Epilogue: After Buddha

  Trivia Treasury

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  : I am the history bug. Watch out for me in this book as I bring to you interesting facts and unusual trivia from the past.

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  GAUTAMA BUDDHA

  Rohini Chowdhury writes for both children and adults and has more than twenty books and several short stories to her credit. Her published writing is in both Hindi and English, and covers a wide spectrum of literary genres including translations, novels, short fiction, comics and non-fiction. Her most recent publication is the translation of the seventeenth-century Braj Bhasha text Ardhakathanak, widely regarded as the first autobiography in an Indian language, into modern Hindi and into English. Her first short story, Kosi, won the runner-up in the New Writer Prose and Poetry Prizes, 2001, in the UK. Her interests include translation, mythology, folklore, mathematics and history. Her forthcoming works include an exploration of mathematics in India from ancient times to the modern, and a translation of the Hindi novel Tyagpatra by Jainendra, into English. She also runs a story website at www.longlongtimeago.com.

  Rohini’s professional experience prior to moving into the writing and technology space was as a strategy consultant for five years. She holds a PGDM from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and an Honours degree in Economics from Jadavpur University, Kolkata.

  Other books in the Puffin Lives series

  Mother Teresa: Apostle of Love

  by Rukmini Chawla

  Jawaharlal Nehru: The Jewel of India

  by Aditi De

  Ashoka: The Great and Compassionate King

  by Subhadra Sen Gupta

  Rani Lakshmibai: The Valiant Queen of Jhansi

  by Deepa Agarwal

  Akbar: The Mighty Emperor

  by Kavitha Mandana

  Mahatma Gandhi: The Father of the Nation

  by Subhadra Sen Gupta

  Subhas Chandra Bose: The Great Freedom Fighter

  by Anu Kumar

  Guru Nanak: The Enlightened Master

  by Sreelata Menon

  Swami Vivekananda: A Man with a Vision

  by Devika Rangachari

  The 14th Dalai Lama: Buddha of Compassion

  by Aravinda Anantharaman

  1

  Reconstructing Buddha

  Even though he was one of the most influential men who ever walked the earth, very little is known about the life of Siddhartha Gautama, the man we call the Buddha. His teachings were followed for 1,500 years in India, and became the guiding principles of life for both rich and poor, high born and low-caste. Men and women from all walks of life followed the path he showed. From India his teachings spread to Tibet, Sri Lanka, South-east Asia, Korea, Japan, China and Central Asia, so that more than half of humanity came into its fold. His teachings form the core of the religion known today as Buddhism, and are still followed by almost 400 million people around the world. Given that his teachings led to one of the world’s most extraordinary religious and cultural movements, it is both ironic and frustrating that we know almost nothing about him, and what we do know has to be gleaned from scattered references in Buddhist texts and scriptures.

  One reason for this lack of information is the Buddha himself. The Buddha believed that no man should be revered above another, for to do so would distract one from the path to enlightenment. He did not allow anyone, including his disciples, to worship him—it was not his life that was important, but his teachings. As a result, even the Buddhist scriptures contain very little about his life. The first historical mention of Buddhism occurs in the inscriptions of King Ashoka, who ruled India from 269 to 232 BCE, some two hundred years after the Buddha’s death. This lack of information led Western scholars in the nineteenth century to question the existence of the Buddha as a real, historical person. But modern re-readings of the Buddhist scriptures show beyond a doubt that the Buddha did exist. It is now most commonly accepted that Siddhartha Gautama was born in 563 BCE and died at the age of eighty in 483 BCE.

  The Buddhist scriptures, scanty in detail though they are, remain our best source of information about him. They consist of a huge number of texts compiled after the Buddha’s death; many of these texts are in the local language of the region or country in which they were composed—Tibetan, Chinese, Burmese and so on. The oldest texts are in Pali, an ancient form of spoken Sanskrit once used in northern India. These texts, which are generally referred to as the Pali Canon, are considered by scholars to be the most useful when trying to understand the life of the Buddha.

  The Pali Canon was composed very soon after the Buddha’s death, upon the initiative of the monk Mahakashyapa, his chief disciple. The Buddha passed away in the small north Indian town of Kushinagara. As the funeral flames burnt away the Buddha’s mortal remains, his monks had been overcome with grief, and kings and princes had threatened to go to war with each other for the honour of possessing his ashes. Only Mahakashyapa had remained clear-eyed and calm. He had told the grieving monks, ‘The Buddha is now cremated, but we are not concerned with his relics—kings, ministers, the rich, and all his lay followers will preserve them and do them honour. Our concern is with his teachings. We must collect all his sayings, so that we can pass them on to future generations. We must not allow the world to say that now that the Buddha is no more, his word too has vanished like the smoke.’ And he had called upon the monks to gather together at the Satpanni Cave in Rajagriha, the capital city of the powerful kingdom of Magadha in northern India. This gathering is known to history as the First Buddhist Council. The Council had the support of Ajatashatru, Magadha’s strong and dynamic ruler, and a follower of the Buddha.

  At the Council, the Buddha’s teachings, which had been committed to memory by his disciples, were recited, verified and classified. The texts were set in verses such as the Buddha himself may have used, in a style that involved much repetition, and this made the texts easier to remember. The texts were then memorized by the monks and passed down orally through the centuries. This compilation is known as the Pali Canon. Its oral transmission through the ages is considered to be remarkably accurate, despite the changes and modifications that would have occurred through the years. About a hundred years after the Buddha’s death, the Second Buddhist Council was held. It is believed that by this time the texts of the Pali Canon had reached the form in which they are available to us today. The Pali Canon was finally written down in the first century BCE, in Sri Lanka.

  The story of Siddhartha Gautama, as told in the Buddhist tradition, is familiar to many of us. It is the story of a spoilt young man, the son of a king, who lived in luxury, quite unaware of life’s miseries. One day, while outside the palace walls, he saw a sick man, an old man, a corpse, and a monk. These four sights so shocked him that he gave up his life of luxury, became a monk, and after six years of penance attained enlightenment and became a Buddha. He then spent the rest of his life as a monk, wandering from place to place, preaching his path to enlightenment. He died at the age of eighty, having reached Nirvana, or freedom from the cycle of birth and rebirth.

  Interestingly, the Pali Canon tells a story that is quite different in its details. Gautama’s father is not
a king, but a relatively minor vassal of the king of Kosala. The story of the four sights, though told by the Buddha himself in one of his discourses, is part of the story of another Buddha called Vipassi, who lived long before Gautama. Today we use the term ‘the Buddha’ to refer exclusively to the historical Siddhartha Gautama, but in ancient India ‘Buddha’ was a title given to anyone who attained enlightenment, and by his knowledge of the absolute Truth, became superior to all beings, human and divine. According to Buddhist tradition there have been twenty-five such beings, twenty-five Buddhas of whom Siddhartha Gautama was the last. In order to make sure that we do not confuse him with the other Buddhas, we will henceforth, as far as possible, refer to him by name.

  The Pali Canon does not offer us a complete or continuous account of the life of Gautama. The discourses are organized not chronologically, but according to their length or theme. Incidents from his life are scattered almost at random through the texts, and are mixed together with his teachings. There is almost no information about the early years of his life; the first major event that the texts relate in any detail is Gautama’s departure from home at the age of twenty-nine to become a monk. We also have no way of knowing which of the anecdotes about his life are true, and which have been made up later by his followers. Many of the stories have a symbolic, rather than a literal meaning and supernatural beings, gods and demons play a major role in many of the incidents, so that it often becomes difficult to separate fact from myth.

  Despite these difficulties, the Pali Canon does contain reliable information that has been possible to verify with other sources. For example, they mention Bimbisara, king of Magadha, and his son Ajatashatru; these were real people whose existence has been proven by historians and archaeologists.

  The Pali Canon is also called the Tipitaka, or ‘Three Baskets’ because when the texts were written down they were divided into three sections. These are the Sutta Pitaka, i.e. the sermons given by Gautama, the Vinaya Pitaka or the rules of the Buddhist Order, and the Abhidhamma Pitaka which consists of philosophical discussions and analyses of Gautama’s discourses. Only the first two sections contain information about Gautama’s life.

  Buddhism, like Hinduism, believes in reincarnation. Included in the Sutta Pitaka are the Jataka tales, some 550 stories and anecdotes that tell of the earlier incarnations of the Buddha. These tales were added between 300 BCE and 400 CE, several centuries after Gautama’s death. They are interesting from the point of view of understanding the Buddhist vision of the Buddha. They also provide us with some biographical information about Gautama.

  Since Pali was the language in which the Buddha’s teachings were preserved and passed on, it also became the common language of the Buddhist monks all over India. Interestingly, Pali has no script of its own. When the Pali Canon was first written down in Sri Lanka, it was written down in the Sinhalese script. Wherever the Pali Canon has been written down, it has been done so in the script of that region or country. When it was transcribed in the West, it was done so in the Roman script.

  The link between Pali and Sanskrit is quite evident. For example, consider the word Nibbana used in the Pali scriptures to describe the Buddha’s freedom from the cycle of birth, death and rebirth; this is nothing but the Pali form of the more familiar Sanskrit word Nirvana. Or take the word dhamma, the Buddhist term for Gautama’s teachings; the better known Sanskrit form is dharma. In the case of the Buddha’s own name, we are more familiar with the Sanskrit ‘Siddhartha Gautama’, rather than the Pali ‘Siddhattha Gotama’. In the Pali texts, the Buddha is referred to as ‘Gotama’, which was his clan name; his first name ‘Siddhattha’, is never used. Gautama, when referring to himself, calls himself ‘Tathagata’, the term used for an ascetic or monk. His followers also called him ‘Bhagavat’, or ‘Lord’.

  Pali was very closely related to the dialect known as Magadhi—the language the Buddha himself may have spoken, and the names as preserved in the Pali texts are probably as they were actually spoken in the Buddha’s time. Therefore, while relating the story of the Buddha in the following chapters, we will refer to the Buddha as ‘Siddhattha’ or ‘Gotama’, i.e., using the Pali version of his names rather than the Sanskrit version; we shall do the same for names of the other people and places in his story. The glossary at the end lists all Pali names and terms as they appear in the book, and also gives their Sanskrit forms.

  In the centuries after Gautama’s death, Buddhists monks did attempt to write chronological and detailed accounts of his life. Two such accounts are the Sanskrit Lalitavistara Sutra, written in the third century CE, and the Pali Nidana Katha, written in the fifth century CE. both, however, deal only with the early life of Gautama; they are silent on the years he spent teaching and preaching his doctrine. They also glorify Gautama to the status of a divine being, and therefore give him superhuman powers and splatter his life with supernatural events. However, scholars believe that these texts are based on an ancient, but now lost, account of Gautama’s life and therefore do contain some authentic material about Gautama’s childhood and youth.

  Hopelessly confusing though all this seems, and impossible though it may be to put together all the details of Gautama’s life, the Buddhist scriptures do tell us about certain key events in his life: his birth, his renunciation of normal life, his enlightenment, the beginning of his life as a teacher, and his death. Stephen Batchelor, a Buddhist scholar, has attempted a chronological re-reading of the Pali Canon. He has reconstructed many details of the life of the Buddha, particularly of the forty-five years he spent teaching his doctrine to the world.

  Let us bring together these various sources—the ancient Pali Canon, the Jataka tales, later biographies of Gautama, and the work of modern scholars such as Stephen Batchelor—and attempt our own reconstruction of the life of the Buddha.

  * * *

  Jataka

  The Jataka tales, literally ‘birth-stories’, are fables and anecdotes depicting the previous incarnations—both animal and human—of the Buddha. These 547 tales, added to the Pali Canon several centuries after the Buddha’s death, were used by monks and lay preachers to explain the Buddha’s teachings. Some of these tales are very old and are found in the Vedas, which were composed more than a thousand years before the Buddha. Others have been drawn from folklore, still others can be found in the Sanskrit Panchatantram, which was probably composed in the third century BCE.

  With the spread of Buddhism, the stories spread around the world, to places like Indonesia, Thailand, Burma, Cambodia. In the second century BCE, Buddhist missionaries to Sri Lanka used these stories to spread the Buddha’s word. In the sixth century CE they were translated into Persian upon the orders of the Persian king Khusro I. The Persian translation was later translated into Greek, Latin and Hebrew, and the tales found their way to Europe. Some of the tales are found in the ancient Greek collection of stories known as Aesop’s fables. They also appear in later Indian collections, like the eleventh century Katha Sarit Sagara by Somadeva. We also find some of these tales in medieval European literature, for example, in the works of Chaucer in England and Boccaccio in Italy.

  Many of the tales are set in or near Varanasi; according to the Pali Canon, the Buddha gave his first sermon at the nearby town of Sarnath. The Jatakas in the Pali Canon are all in verse, but it is probable that right from the beginning, these verses were accompanied by prose commentaries that were also passed on orally. These commentaries later evolved into the work known as the Jatakatthakatha.

  The Jatakatthakatha contains all the verses of the Jataka, and gives in prose the stories connected with the verses. At the beginning of each story is given the circumstances in which the story was first told, and at the end, an identification of the main characters with the Buddha and his contemporaries. The work is in Pali, and is believed to have been composed by Buddhaghosa in the fifth century CE.

  * * *

  2

  Birth: 563 BCE

  The exact year of his birth is still dispute
d. Though most scholars now accept that Siddhattha Gotama was born more than 2,500 years ago, most probably in the year 563 BCE, some say that he was born a century or more later. The Buddhist scriptures tell us that he was the son of Suddhodana, head of the warrior Sakya tribe, and his wife, Maha Maya. Maha Maya was the daughter of the chief of the Koliya clan, another people whose land adjoined that of the Sakyans. The Sakyans and the Koliyas believed that they were descended from a common ancestor. Though constantly at war with each other, they also regarded each other as kin, and intermarriage between them was common.

  Since Gotama belonged to the Sakya tribe, he is also called ‘Sakyamuni’ or ‘the sage of the Sakyans’. Within the Sakya tribe were several clans, or gotta. The Buddha belonged to the Gotamagotta—thus ‘Gotama’ was his clan name, and used much like a surname is today.

  The land of the Sakyans lay in the north of India, across the foothills of the Himalayas. Though most Buddhist sources say that Suddhodana was a king, the ancient Pali scriptures show that he was really a provincial governor. The Sakyans followed the republican form of government, which means that their chief was an elected leader, not a hereditary king. The Sakyans were not an independent people; they were vassals of the powerful king of Kosala, who ruled over a kingdom that stretched from the northern bank of the Ganga river all the way up to the Himalayan foothills. The capital of the Sakyas was Kapilavatthu, a busy market town on the banks of the river Rohini. Though Gotama grew up in Kapilavatthu, he always called himself a Kosalan, and throughout his life remained loyal to the king of Kosala.

  Buddhist scriptures give us the story of Gotama’s birth in detail. It is said that one full moon night, as Maha Maya lay asleep, she had a strange and wonderful dream. She dreamt that she was carried away by the gods to a lake high up in the Himalayas. There she bathed, and was dressed by the gods in fine clothes and costly jewels. A white elephant, holding a white lotus in its trunk then appeared, and circling her three times, entered her womb from the right side. Next morning, she related the dream to her husband Suddhodana, who asked some wise men to explain it to him. The wise men, who were skilled at reading such signs, declared that Maha Maya’s dream meant that she had conceived a son, who would either be a great king or a Buddha.