The Religions of India c19.12

c19.12

Whether Buddha’s father was king or no has rightly been questioned. The oldest texts do not refer to him as a king’s son, and this indicates that his father, who governed the Çākya-land, of which the limits have just been specified,¹ was rather a feudal baron or head of a small clan, than an actual king. The Çākya power was overthrown and absorbed into that of the king of Oude (Kosala) either in Buddha’s own lifetime or immediately afterwards. It is only the newer tradition that extols the power and wealth which the Master gave up on renouncing worldly ties, a trait characteristic of all the later accounts, on the principle that the greater was the sacrifice the greater was the glory. Whether kings or mere chieftains, the Çākyas were noted as a family that cared little to honor the Brahmanic priests. They themselves claimed descent from Ikshvāku, the ancient seer-king, son of Manu, and traditionally first king of Ayodhā (Oude). They assumed the name of Gautama, one of the Vedic seers, and it was by the name of ‘the Ascetic Gautama’ that Buddha was known to his contemporaries; but his personal name was Siddhārtha ‘he that succeeds in his aim,’ prophetic of his life! His mother’s name Māyā (illusion) has furnished Senart with material for his sun-theory of Buddha; but the same name is handed down as that of a city, and perhaps means in this sense ‘the wonderful.’ She is said to have died when her son was still a boy. The boy Siddhārtha, then, was a warrior rājput by birth, and possibly had a very indifferent training in Vedic literature, since he is never spoken of as Veda-wise.¹ The future Buddha was twenty-nine when he resolved to renounce the world. He was already married and had a son (Rāhula, according to later tradition). The legends of later growth here begin to thicken, telling how, when the future Buddha heard of the birth of his son, he simply said ‘a new bond has been forged to hold me to the world’; and how his mind was first awakened to appreciation of sorrow by seeing loathy examples of age, sickness, and death presented to him as he drove abroad. Despite his father’s tears and protests Siddhārtha, or as one may call him now by his patronymic, the man Gautama, left his home and family, gave up all possessions, and devoted himself to self-mortification and Yoga discipline of concentration of thought, following in this the model set by all previous ascetics. He says himself, according to tradition, that it was a practical pessimism which drove him to take this step. He was not pleased with life, and the pleasures of society had no charm for him. When he saw the old man, the sick man, the dead man, he became disgusted to think that he too would be subject to age, sickness, and death: “I felt disgust at old age; all pleasure then forsook me.” In becoming an ascetic Gautama simply endeavored to discover some means by which he might avoid a recurrence of life, of which the disagreeable side in his estimation outweighed the joy. He too had already answered negatively the question Is life worth living?