A History of Indian Literature v2.c21.7

v2.c21.7

nebulous, of an ancient conception of the deity," "perhaps of the philosophical conception of the pantheistic divinity," perhaps a form of this divinity, which was especially associated with trees. How improbable and how baseless is this hypothesis compared to the assumption that Gotama Buddha is an historical personage, who enjoyed such great veneration that myths and legends were woven around him! True, we know very, very little about the real life of Gotama. On the other hand, tradition and even monuments afford us a few facts which there are no grounds to doubt. *Oldenberg* (*Reden des Buddha*, p. xx f.) is right when he says that there is no reason to doubt the accounts that Buddha belonged to the Sakya race and was born at Kapilavatthu, in all other respects so insignificant a place. At any rate this tradition was already so firmly established in about 250 B.C., that king Aśoka went on a pilgrimage to Buddha's birthplace, and recorded the memory of this pilgrimage in an inscription on the column found in 1896 near the Nepalese village of Paderia. The inscription reads: "When King Piyadasi had been anointed 20 years, he came here in person and paid his devotion here, because the Buddha, the sage born of the Sakya race, was born here."