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Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8: Part I. Buddha's Life

Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8

Language
English

Contents

Part I. Buddha's Life

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BUDDHA'S LIFE.

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THE CHARACTER OF TRADITION—LEGEND AND MYTH.

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THERE is no lack of current legendary narratives which the Buddhists relate concerning the founder of their faith. Can we learn anything of the life of Buddha from them? Some have gone farther, and have asked: has Buddha ever lived? Or at least, as Buddhism must have had a founder: has that Buddha ever lived whom those narratives seem to present to us, though in a superhuman form and in miraculous surroundings?*

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That ingenious student of Indian antiquity who has occupied himself most closely with this question, Emile Senart,† answers it with an absolute NO. A Buddha may have lived somewhere at some period, but that Buddha, of whom Buddhist tradition speaks, has never lived. This Buddha is not a man: his birth, the struggles he undergoes, and his death, are not those of a man.

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And what is this Buddha? From the earliest age the allegorical poetry of the Indians, like that of the Greeks and the Germans, treats of the destinies of the sun-hero: of his birth from the morning-cloud, which, as soon as it has given him being, must itself vanish before the rays of its illuminating child; of his battle with and victory over the dark demon of the thunder-cloud; how he then marches triumphantly across the firmament, until at last the day declines and the light-hero succumbs to darkness.

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∗ In the second Excursus at the end of this work the chief authoritative sources relative to Buddha's life are collected from the sacred Pâli texts and discussed. † Senart, "Essai sur la légende du Buddha," Paris, 1875.

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Senart seeks to trace step by step in the history of Buddha’s life, the history of the life of the sun-hero: like the sun from the clouds of night, he issues from the dark womb of Mâyâ; a flash of light pierces through all the world when he is born; Mâyâ dies like the morning-cloud which vanishes before the sun’s rays. Like the sun-hero conquering the thunder-demon, Buddha vanquishes Mâra, the Tempter, in dire combat, under the sacred tree; the tree is the dark cloud-tree in heaven, round which the battle of thunderstorm rages. When the victory is won, Buddha proceeds to preach his evangelium to all worlds, “to set in motion the wheel of the Law;” this is the sun-god who sends his illuminating wheel revolving across the firmament. At last the life of Buddha draws to a close; he witnesses the terrible destruction of his whole house, the Sakya race, which is annihilated by enemies, as at sunset the powers of light die away in the blood-red tints of the evening clouds. His own end has now arrived: the flames of the funeral pile, on which Buddha’s corpse is burnt, are extinguished by streams of water, which come pouring down from heaven, just as the sun-hero dies in the sea of fire kindled by his own rays, and the last flames of his divine obsequies die out on the horizon in the moisture of the evening mist.∗

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∗ Cf. Senart’s work already referred to, especially the *resumé*, p. 504, seq.

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In Senart's opinion, Buddha, the real Buddha, did exist, it is true: his reality, he admits, is a logical necessity, inasmuch as we see the reality of the Church founded by him; but beyond this bare reality there is nothing substantial. The fancy of his followers attached to his person the great allegorical ballad of the life of the sun-god in human guise, the life of the man Buddha had been forgotten.

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One cannot read the ingenious efforts of Senart without admiring the energy with which the French scholar constrains the Veda as well as the Indian epic, the literature of the Greeks as well as that of northern races—no small constraint was here necessary—to bear witness for his solar Buddha. But one is astonished that this so extensive reading has not availed itself, when dealing with the legends of Buddha, of one field, which would have presented not less important sources of information than the Homeric hymns and the Edda: the oldest available literature of Buddhism itself, the oldest declarations of the body of Buddha's disciples regarding the personality of their master. Senart bases his criticism almost wholly on the legendary biography, the "Lalita-Vistara," current among the northern Buddhists in Tibet, China and Naipal. But would it be allowable for any one, who undertook to write a criticism on the life of Christ, to set aside the New Testament, and follow solely the apocryphal gospels or any legendary works whatsoever of the Middle Ages? Or does the law of criticism, which requires us to trace back tradition to its oldest form, before forming an opinion on it, not deserve to be as closely observed in the case of Buddhism as in that of Christianity?

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The most ancient traditions of Buddhism are those preserved in Ceylon and studied by the monks of that island up to the present day.

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While in India itself the Buddhist texts experienced new fortunes from century to century, and while the ceremonies of the original Church were vanishing continually more and more behind the poetry and fiction of later generations, the Church of Ceylon remained true to the simple, homely, “ Word of the Ancients ” (Theravâda). The dialect itself in which it was recorded contributed to preserve it from corruptions, the language of the southern Indian territories, whose Churches and missions had naturally taken the largest share, if not the initiative, in the conversion of Ceylon.* This language of the texts (“ Pâli ”), imported from the south of India, is regarded in Ceylon as sacred : and it is there supposed that Buddha himself, and all Buddhas of preceding ages, had spoken it. Though the legends and speculations of later periods might find their way into the religious literature produced in the island and written in the popular tongue of Ceylon, the sacred Pâli texts remained unaffected by them.

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It is to the Pâli traditions we must go in preference to all other sources, if we desire to know whether any information is obtainable regarding Buddha and his life.

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There we see first and foremost that from the very beginning, as far back as we can go to the time of the earliest utterances of Buddhist religious consciousness, there is a firm conviction that the source of saving knowledge and holy life is the word of a teacher and founder of the Church, whom they designate the Exalted One (Bhagavâ), or the Knowing, the Enlightened One (Buddha). Whoever proposes to enter the spiritual brotherhood, repeats this formula three times: "I take my refuge with Buddha; I take my refuge in the Doctrine: I take my refuge in the Order." At the fortnightly confession, the liturgy of which is among the oldest of all the monuments of Buddhist Church life, the monk, who leads in the confession, charges the brethren who are present, not to conceal by silence any sins which they have committed, for silence is lying, "And intentional lying, O brethren, brings destruction; thus hath the Exalted One said." And the same liturgy of confession describes monks, who embrace heresies, by putting in their mouths these words: "Thus I understand the doctrine which the Exalted One hath preached," etc. Throughout it is not an impersonal revelation, nor is it the individual's own thought, but it is the person, the word of the Master, the Exalted One, the Buddha, which is regarded as the source of the truth and holy life.

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∗ According to the Church history of the island which has attained a fixed canonical status in Ceylon, and which first meets us in texts of the fourth and fifth century after Christ, but which must be based on considerably older memoranda, Mahinda, the son of the great Indian king Asoka (circ. 260 B.C.), was the converter of Ceylon. The tradition is in some essential parts obviously a concoction ; how much or how little truth it contains, cannot for the present be determined with certainty.

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And this master is not regarded as a wise man of the dim past, but people think of him as of a man, who has lived in a not very remote past. A century is said to have passed from his death to the council of the seven hundred fathers at Vesâlî (about 380 B.C.), and it may be taken as a fact that the great bulk of the holy texts, in which from beginning to end his person and his doctrine are the central points, in which his life and his death are spoken of, had been already compiled before this council of the Church assembled: the oldest components of these texts, such as the liturgy of the confession to which we have referred, belong in all probability much rather to the beginning than to the end of this first century after Buddha's death. The period, therefore, which separates the deponent witnesses from the events to which they undertake to depose, is short enough: it is not much longer, probably not at all longer, than the period which elapsed between the death of Jesus and the compilation of our gospels. Is it credible that during the lapse of such a time in the Church of Buddha, all genuine memory of his life could be extruded by ballads of the sun-god, transferred to his personality?—crushed out in a brotherhood of ascetics, in whose circle of ideas, according to the evidence of the literature which they have bequeathed to us, everything else possessed a higher value than these very ballads of nature?

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Let us now examine more closely how far the collective picture of the age of which the sacred texts speak, bears on the question of Buddha’s personality. The Pâli books give us an exceedingly concrete picture of the movements of the religious world of India at the period in which Buddha, if he really lived, must have played a part in it; we possess the most minute details of all the holy men who, sometimes standing alone and sometimes surrounded by communities of adherents, with and without organization, some in more profound and some in more shallow terms, preached to the people salvation and deliverance. There are mentioned, among others, as contemporaries of Buddha, six great teachers, to the Buddhists naturally false teachers, the heads of six sects holding other faiths; and we find one of them, Nâtaputta, according to Bühler’s and Jacobi’s learned researches, mentioned in the texts of the Jaina sects, still numerously represented in India at the present day, as the founder of their faith and the saviour of these sects, with whom he occupies a place analogous to that which is given to Buddha in the Buddhist texts. As regards this Nâtaputta, we are, therefore, in such a position that we possess two groups of accounts—those of his own followers, to whom he is the holy, the enlightened one, the victor (Jina), the Buddha—the texts of the Jainas also use this last expression—and the statements of the Buddhists, who stigmatize him as an ascetic leader, teaching an erroneous doctrine—as a pretender, claiming the dignity which properly belongs to Buddha. The Buddhists, as well as the Jainas, casually mention the place where Nâtaputta died; both name the same place, the town of Pâvâ—a small but by no means insignificant contribution to the value of these traditions. The harmony of the testimony regarding a collateral fact of this description makes us conscious that we are here treading on the sure ground of historical reality.

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It is evident that Buddha was a head of a monastic order of the very same type as that to which Nâtaputta belonged; that he journeyed from town to town in the garb and with all the external circumstance of an ascetic, taught, and gathered round himself a band of disciples, to whom he gave their simple ordinances, such as the Brahmans and the other monastic brotherhoods possessed.

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I hold that, even under the most unfavourable circumstances, we can lay claim to the possession of this much at least of reliable information, as reliable as any knowledge of such things can ever be.

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But does all that we can gather end here? Are there not, in the masses of fable which tradition places at our disposal, some further, more specific traces of historical truth to be found, which contribute to give life to that first outline?

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In order to be able to answer this question, we shall next describe the aspect of the tradition as regards its details.

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Here it must be premised as a cardinal statement: a biography of Buddha has not come down to us from ancient times, from the age of the Pâli texts, and, we can safely say, no such biography was in existence then.[*] This is, moreover, very easily understood. The idea of biography was foreign to the mind of that age. To take the life of a man as a whole, its development from beginning to end, as a unified subject for literary treatment, this thought, though it appears to us natural and obvious, had not occurred to any one yet in that age.

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∗ This assertion is supported as well by what the Pâli texts contain, as by what they do not contain. They do not contain either a biography

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To this was added that in those times the interest in the life of the master receded entirely behind the interest attached to his teaching. It was exactly the same in the circles of the early Christian Church and in the circles of the Socratic

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of Buddha, or even the slightest trace of such a thing having been in existence before, and this alone is conclusive. The loss of texts, which were once possessed, and à fortiori the loss of all memory of them, is wholly unmentioned in the literary history of the Tipitaka. On the contrary, the texts contain here and there unconnected fragments of the history of Buddha's life, in a form which our Excursus II. will exemplify, and which cannot be construed as if the complete life of Buddha had at that time already found a connected literary exposition: Senart (p. 7, 8) has not overlooked the fact that in the sacred literature of the southern Buddhists there is no work like the "Lalita Vistara" in the north, in which there is a connected narrative of Buddha's life up to the beginning of his career as a teacher. But the explanation which the French scholar gives of this fact will scarcely gain acceptance with many. The legend of Buddha, with its popular character, he says, "a dû demeurer particulièrement vivace parmi les populations dont elle était réellement l'œuvre, et qui, dès le début, avaient activement collaboré à l'établissement et aux progrès de la secte nouvelle. À Ceylan au contraire, où le buddhisme, s'introduisit surtout par une propagande théologique et sacerdotale, des récits de ce genre n'avaient ni pour les prédicateurs ni pour leurs néophytes un intérêt si sensible ni si vivant." It will not be easy to prove this alleged difference between the dogmatic tendency of the Ceylonese, and the leanings of the northern Church to popular legend. In fact, the greater antiquity of the Pâli version of the sacred texts, compared with the northern editions, infected throughout by later literary currents, is the sole and completely satisfactory means of explaining the fact in question.

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schools. Long before people began to commit to writing the life of Jesus in the manner of our gospels, there was current in the young communities a collection of discourses and sayings of Jesus (λόγια κυριακά); to this collection was appended just so much precise narrative matter as was necessary to call to mind the occasion when, and the external surroundings amid which, the several discourses were delivered. This collection of the sayings of Jesus laid no claim to any historical arrangement or sequence whatever, or to any chronological accuracy. Similarly the Memorabilia Socratica of Xenophon. The method and manner of Socratic action are here illustrated by a rich profusion of the individual utterances of Socrates. But neither Xenophon nor any other of the old Socratics has given us the life of Socrates. What should induce them to do so? The form of Socrates was memorable to the Socratics for the words of wisdom which came from the lips of that great, eccentric man, not for the poor external fortunes of his life.

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The development of the traditions of Buddha corresponds as closely as possible to these parallel illustrations. His disciples had begun at an early date to fix those discourses which the great teacher had preached, or at any rate, discourses after the method and manner in which he had delivered them, and to deliver these to the Church. They did not omit to note where and to whom he had uttered or was supposed to have uttered each word; this was necessary in order to fix in concrete the situation, and thereby to place the authenticity of the respective words of Buddha beyond all doubt. But, when Buddha said so and so, they did not ask. The narratives begin: At one time—or: at this time the exalted Buddha was tarrying at such and such a place; as far as dates go, this is worthless. People in India have never had any organ for the when of things: and in the life of an ascetic, such as Buddha was especially, year after year rolled by so very uniformly that it must have appeared to them superfluous to ask: When did this or that happen? When was this or that word uttered?—provided any one had ever thought at all of the possibility of such a question arising.*

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Special events in the course of his wandering life, meetings with this and that other teacher, with this and that worldly potentate, were associated with the memory of one or other authentic or invented discourse; the first stages of his public career, the conversion of his first disciples, and then again the end, his farewell address to his followers, and his death, stand out, as may be readily understood, most prominent of all in the foreground of these memories. Thus there were biographical fragments, but a biography was compiled from them for the first time at a much later period.

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Comparatively few are the memoranda preserved in the older authorities regarding the early life of Buddha, the years preceding the beginning of his professional career, or, to put it as the Indians are wont to do, the period prior to the attainment of the Buddhahood, when he had not yet acquired, but was still seeking, that saving knowledge, which constituted him the teacher of the worlds of gods and men. That we hear less of these days than of others, is explicable. The interest of the Church was fixed not so much on his worldly character as the child and heir of the Sakya house, as on the person of the “exalted, sacred, universal Buddha.” People desired to know what he had uttered from that time forward, when he had become the Buddha; behind that vanished the interest in everything else, even the interest in this struggle for the Buddhahood.* It is later centuries which have built up a history of Buddha with wonders piled on wonders on a scale quite different from older times, and which first devoted themselves with special zeal to surrounding the form of the blessed child with the extravagant creations of a boundless imagination.

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∗ At a later time, indeed, this question was actually put, and then obviously there was no embarrassment felt for a moment in answering it. Then were drawn up those great lists of what Buddha had said and done in the sixth, seventh, eighth, etc., year of his Buddhahood (e.g., vide Bigandet, “Life of Gaudama,” p. 160, etc.). The utter worthlessness of these later-produced lists is obvious, when we bear in mind the absolute silence of the sacred texts as to matters of chronology.

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Let us now examine the tradition, meaning, of course, the older tradition continued in the sacred Pâli texts, to define accurately of what kind are the fabulous elements contained in them.

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It is obvious that the appearance of the deliverer of the world on earth, must have presented itself to the believer’s mind as an event of incomparable importance; to the Indian, who was and is accustomed, in the most trivial incidents of his own daily life, to pay attention to concomitant omens, it would have been the most impossible contingency if the conception of the exalted, holy, universal Buddha had not been already announced by the mightiest wonders and signs, and if the whole universe had not joined in its celebration. An inconceivably bright flash of light pierces through the universe; the worlds quake; the four divinities, who have in their protection the four quarters of the heavens, combine to keep guard over the pregnant mother. The birth is attended by wonders in no less a degree. The Brahmans possessed lists of bodily signs which import good and bad fortunes to men; the infant Buddha must obviously bear on his person all auspicious marks in the highest perfection, in the same perfection as a world-ruling monarch; the soothsayers declare: “if he choose a worldly life, he will become a ruler of the world; if he renounce the world, he will become the Buddha.”

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∗ Moreover, there is in the external form of the Sûtra, and Vinaya texts a point which essentially contributes to explain this receding of narratives of Buddha’s youth. Inasmuch as these texts, with inconsiderable exceptions, do not contain arbitrary communications, couched in a freely chosen form, but always an instructive speech of Buddha or an ordinance prescribed by Buddha for his disciples, it was only occurrences in his career as Buddha which could be chosen for the introductory narratives on the occasions which called for these utterances of Buddha; his youth could only be touched on in occasional allusions or by putting in his own mouth communications regarding that period of his life.

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We need not cite any more fabulous embellishments of this description: their character cannot be mistaken. As it seemed to the Christian Church an obvious necessity, that all power and excellence, which the prophets of the Old Testament possessed, must have dwelt with enhanced glory in the person of Jesus, it was in the same way natural that the Buddhists should attribute to the founder of their Church all wonders and perfections, which, in the Indian mind, were attributed to the most powerful heroes and sages. Among the foundations, on which Indian intuitions rest, regarding that which pertains to an all-powerful hero and conqueror of the world, the ancient nature-myth, the original signification of which had long since ceased to be understood, is obviously not wanting; and thus it is not a matter of surprise, if one and another of the traits which were mentioned in the circles of monks and lay-disciples as indicating the nobility of Buddha, comes at last through many media to be connected with that which many centuries before, among the herdsmen and peasants of the Vedic age, and much earlier still among the common forefathers of the Indian, Grecian, and German stocks, popular fancy had associated in song with the sun-hero, the beaming type of all earthly heroism. This is the element of propriety which cannot be denied to Senart's theory of the solar Buddha.

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As regards another group of legendary touches, it may well be in part doubted whether we have not in them historical memories. The elements of the tradition regarding Buddha hitherto mentioned flowed from the universal belief in Buddha's all-overpowering might and nobility, but the much more important and more prominent characteristics, of which we shall now have to treat, have their origin partly in the special theological predicates which Buddhist speculation affirmed of the holy, knowing, Delivered One, and partly in the external events which regularly occurred in the life of the Indian ascetic, and which consequently, according to an inference so naturally drawn by legend, cannot have been wanting in the life of Buddha, the ideal ascetic.

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What makes a Buddha a Buddha is, as his name indicates, his knowledge. He does not possess this knowledge, like a Christ, by virtue of a metaphysical superiority of his nature, surpassing everything earthly, but he has gained it, or, more strictly speaking, won it by a struggle. The Buddha is at the same time the Jina, *i.e.*, the conqueror. The history of the struggle for the Buddhahood must therefore precede the history of the Buddha.

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Battle involves an enemy, a victor the vanquished. The Prince of Life must be opposed by the Prince of Death. We have seen how the Indian mind had settled for itself the identity of the kingdom of death, and the kingdom of this world. We call to mind the *rôle* of the Death-god in the Vedic poem of Naciketas, to whom he promises long life and fulfilment of all desire, in order that he might abandon the pursuit of knowledge. So also there comes to the ascetic seeking Buddhahood, as his opponent, Mâra, Death, the lord of all worldly desire, which indeed is nothing else than veiled death. Mâra follows his enemy step by step, and watches for a moment of weakness to overpower his soul. No such moment comes. Amid many failures and desperate fights within, Buddha remains throughout unshaken.

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When he is on the point of reaching the saving knowledge, the purchase of all his efforts, Mâra approaches him to divert him by tempting words from the path of salvation. In vain. Buddha attains the knowledge "that bringeth salvation" and the supreme peace.

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We choose the narrative of this last struggle and victory, to illustrate by it the difference between Senart's and our conception of the nature of these legends.

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How does the primitive Church narrate the history of the attainment of the knowledge which "maketh free?" What are the real facts of the occurrence as accepted by them? This, and only this, that Buddha, passing through a series of stages of esctasy, sitting under a tree through the three watches of a certain night, obtains the threefold sacred knowledge, that his soul becomes free from all sinful taint, and he becomes partaker of deliverance with a knowledge of his deliverance.* These purely theological elements far transcend in importance, in the opinion of the primitive Church, the struggle with Mâra; wherever in the sacred Pâli texts the attainment of Buddhahood is described, there is not a word spoken of Mâra.

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Some few passages in the texts† narrate distinct encounters of Buddha with Mâra : sometimes they are referred to a time not long before and sometimes to a time not long after the attainment of Buddhahood. Mâra endeavours by seductive speeches to turn him from the path of holiness; mention is also made of temptresses, who, when the tempter has given up all for lost, renew the fight; the daughters of Mâra, named Desire, Unrest, and Pleasure. Buddha remains unmoved in his peaceful quietude.

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∗ *Vide* references to the sacred texts in Excursus II. † The texts compiled in a verse form are here especially referred to, in which the legendary element as compared with the purely dogmatic always

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These are the unadorned representations of the primitive Church. The simple thoughts, from which these have been constructed, are, it seems, so very evident, that it would be no easy task even for the keen intellect of Senart, to show that this is the old myth of the victory of the sun-hero over the cloud-demons. Senart does not even attempt this, but he leaves this cast of the legends wholly untouched.

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He bases his criticism instead on that romance of wonders into which the grotesque tastes of later ages have transformed this primitive story.* Buddha sits down under the tree of knowledge with the firm resolve not to rise until he has attained the knowledge which “maketh free.” Then Mâra advances with his forces; hosts of demons assail him (Buddha) with fiery darts, amid the whirl of hurricanes, darkness, and the downpour of floods of water, to drive him from the tree; Buddha maintains his position unmoved; at last the demons fly.

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Whoever wishes to give a complete picture of Senart’s mythological fancies, must reproduce the history of this struggle of Buddha and the demons in much greater detail

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comes more into the foreground, than in the prose Sûtras. *Vide* references in Excursus II.

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∗ The chief sources of this later form of the legend, wholly foreign to the sacred Pâli texts, are the commentary of the “Jâtaka” (i, p. 69, seq.) and the “Lalita Vistara” (cap. 19, seq.).

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than I can make up my mind to do for this wild and coarse tableau of miracles and sensations, wholly foreign to ancient Buddhism. I shall confine myself to the discussion of a few characteristic points.

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The tree under which Buddha sits. Mâra is determined to drive him from it, i.e., naturally, he will defeat his resolve not to rise until he has attained deliverance. The demon says: "this place does not belong to you, it belongs to me."

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Thus, Senart concludes, the true object of the fight is the tree. The tree belongs to Mâra: Buddha has taken possession of it. Contesting with him the possession of the tree and contesting with him the possession of deliverance are the same. How does the tree come to have this importance? What is the tie which connects the possession of the knowledge that brings deliverance, to which Buddha's efforts are directed, with the possession of the tree?

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The Veda mentions the heavenly tree which the lightning strikes down; the mythology of the Fins speaks of the heavenly oak which the sun-dwarf uproots. Yama, the Vedic god of death, sits drinking with bands of the blessed under a leafy tree, just as in the northern Saga Hel's place is at the root of the ash Yggdrasill.

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The tree is the cloud-tree: in the clouds the heavenly fluid is stored, and it is guarded by the dark demons; in the hymns of the Veda the powers of light and the powers of darkness fight their great battle for the clouds and the ambrosia which they contain: this is the identical battle of Buddha with the hosts of Mâra. In the cloud-battle the ambrosia (amṛita), which is in the clouds, is won; the enlightenment and deliverance, which Buddha wins, are also called an ambrosia (amṛita); the kingdom of knowledge is the land of immortality (padam amṛitam).

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This is Senart’s explanation.

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Would this acute scholar have ventured it, had he had before him the old account of the occurrence under the tree which is composed solely of dogmatic elements such as the description of the four ecstasies and the threefold knowledge attained by Buddha? If he had been aware that Buddha and Mâra in the older texts do not fight under the tree, still less for the tree? That the only reference we hear of, made to the tree of knowledge, the supposed cloud-tree and ambrosia-tree, is this, that Buddha sat at its foot, when he fell into those trains of thought, which led him to the highest knowledge?* Where else sat in India in Buddha’s time, where else even down to our days do ascetics, who have no sheltering roof, and all vagrant folk, sit, but at the foot of a tree?† We are not comparative mythologists and we cannot forget that, besides these cloud-trees which are shattered by lightning or uprooted by the sun-dwarf, there grow other trees also on the earth, and we go so far as to surmise, that the trees, at the foot of which Gotama Buddha was wont to sit and meditate, belonged to this latter, much less deep-meaning but more widely extended, class of trees.

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∗ It is exceedingly characteristic of the method of Senart’s criticism, that he quotes a text of the stamp of the “Saddharmapuṇḍa Rîka” (p. 247, note 1), to show the inseparability of the notions, Buddha and a tree of knowledge; he should have quoted the sacred Pâli texts to show the complete non-essentiality of the tree.

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† Buddha tarries seven days at the foot of the banyan tree Ajapâla (“Mahâvagga,” i, 2 and 5), and for the same length of time at the foot of the Mucalinda tree (i, 3) and the Râjâyatana tree (i, 4). On the way from Benares to Uruvelâ he leaves the street to sit down at the foot of a tree in a grove. Similarly the monk Kassapa (“Cullavagga,” xi, 1, 1). Ânanda, urged by Buddha to leave him alone for awhile, “set himself down at the foot of a tree not far off” (“Mahâ Parinibbâna S.,” p. 24). In a description of the ascetic exerting himself, it is said (in the “Cûlahatthipadopamasutta”): “He dwells in a lonely spot, in a grove, at the foot of a tree, on a mountain, in a cave, in a mountain grotto, in a burial-place, in the wilderness, under an open sky, on a heap of straw.” (Cf. also “Cullavagga,” vi, 1, 1.) The number of these instances of the tarrying of ascetics under trees may be multiplied ad libitum, if there be any necessity.

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Nor are we more successful in the effort to persuade ourselves of the mythical character of the remaining elements of the narrative,[*] than we have been in the case of the Tree of Knowledge. The demons, who make an assault on Buddha, fling mountains of fire, trees with their roots, glowing masses of iron, and "as if these so evident and obvious symbols did not suffice, rain, darkness and lightning complete the picture, and figure as the most characteristic touches of the whole scene."* It does seem to us as if nothing can be less characteristic than these very touches; nothing presents itself to the fancy as more natural or necessary for the assaults of bands of demons than the accessories of lightning, thunder and darkness.† Or are those spirits also, by whom Caliban is tormented on the magic island, thunder-demons?

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∗ But not so regarding the mythological significance of the person of Mâra himself as a thunder-demon. It is entirely misleading to call up, in order to explain so simple and transparent a conception as that of Mâra, the whole host of Vedic mythology and symbolical conceptions from the first-born Kâma (Love) to the airy Agni and the demon Namuci. The original and prevailing idea which finds expression in the personification of Mâra, is that of death; the name indicates this clearly enough ("Mâra, in loc. Antaka;" cf. antea, p. 58, note). But that the prince of death is at the same time the ruler of the kingdom of earthly pleasure, the tempter to this pleasure, and is thus connected with Kâma, is adequately accounted for in the course of development, which pre-Buddhist as well as Buddhist speculation has taken (vide antea, p. 58). Least of all can it cause astonishment, when Buddhist poetry occasionally gives to Mâra, the evil enemy, the name of Namuci, a demon, who is named in the Veda as an enemy of Indra (the "Çatapatha Br," xii, 7, 3, 4, also observes in a discussion on Rig V. viii, 14, 13: pâpmâ vai Namuciḥ). The nature of the case forbids us seeking to draw mythological inferences from such uses of names as do not flow from the nature of the being of whom they are used, but are purely secondary. If we speak of the Titanic nature of a Faust, who would venture to build thereon mythological theories as to the origin of the Faust legend? The identity of the Buddhist Mâra with the Mairya (epithet of Ahriman, who tempts Zoroaster) of the Avesta is considerately waived by Senart (p. 244, note) and after his example by Darmesteter ("Ormazd et Ahriman," p. 202).

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The vanquished Mâra is compared to a trunk without hands and feet,‡ and precisely in the same way the cloud-demon Vritra, whom Indra crushes with his thunderbolt, is styled in the Veda "footless and handless." But what is thus said of Mâra is nothing more than one in a hundred similes used regarding him, and therefore means very little; and, furthermore, can one not lose hands and feet in any other battles beside the battle of the thunder-storm?

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But enough of these vagaries of the sunshine theory. We may say in a word: the components which go to make up the history of the attainment of the Buddhahood, and, we may add, countless similar narratives in the legends of Buddha, are not to be explained by reference to the mythology of the Veda, and still less to that of the Edda, but by the dogmatics of the Buddhist doctrine of deliverance and the external conditions and habits of Buddhist monastic life.

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One class of doubts, however, and this is evident, cannot be fully resolved by this method of explanation. In each individual instance in which we have succeeded in showing that occurrences narrated of Buddha are frequent, or even constant, events in the life of Indian ascetics generally, one may proceed to reason further in two different ways. Either, here we have before us credible memoranda, for we see that things were wont to take this course; or, here we have not credible memoranda before us, for, inasmuch as this course is the regular course which things took in the period succeeding Buddha's death, the legends of Buddha's life must have been concocted so as to suit this precise course of events and no other.

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∗ Senart, p. 200. † It is, perhaps, possible that one or other of these touches may have first received its concrete form in the fables of the battle of the clouds, and may thenceforward have kept its place before the fancy; but that would do very little for Senart's theory. ‡ Senart, p. 202.

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To decide with certainty which of the two lines of reasoning is proper to pursue in each case is absolutely impossible. He who has arrived at this stage of the investigation must unreservedly acknowledge the limits which are here placed to inquiry, or, at all events, he must acquiesce in making up his mind as to the greater or less degree of probability in the one or the other of the two alternatives, and, in doing so, it will be impossible, of course, quite to exclude the momentum of subjective feeling from the momenta determining this decision.

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If we now abstract from the traditions those of the categories indicated, which are wholly unhistorical, or are at least suspected to be of unhistorical character, we then have left as the very pith of these stories regarding Buddha a thread of facts, which we may claim to be a perfectly reliable, though it may be, a very meagre, historical acquisition.

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We know about Buddha's native country and about the family from which he came. We know about his parents, the early death of his mother, and about her sister, who brought up the boy. We know a number of other facts which extend over the several parts of his life. It would indeed be quite inconceivable, even in India, if the Church which called itself by the name of the son of the Sakya house had, within a century after his death, ceased to preserve, even though veiled in legend, a correct memory of the most important names of the persons round Buddha, and of certain leading public events in his life. Who would admit it possible for the memory of Joseph and Mary, of Peter and John, of Judas and Pilate, of Nazareth and Golgotha, to be forgotten or supplanted by inventions in the early Christian Churches of the first century? Here, if anywhere, it is fair to accept simple facts as such.

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Or are we in error, and is that criticism in the right which even here discovers gross deception? Must not even the name of Buddha’s native town, Kapilavatthu, excite suspicion? The abode of the Kapila, the mythical primitive philosopher Kapila, the founder of the Sânkhya school?* Why should we not seek, aye, and find, arcana of mythology, allegory and literary history in such a name? Especially when of opinion, as Senart is,† that the very existence itself of such a town is not guaranteed to us on any satisfactory evidence whatever.

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† P. 512, Cf. p. 380, sec., and also Weber, “Indische Literatur Geschichte” (2 Auflage), p.

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Is the evidence really unreliable? The Chinese pilgrims, who travelled in India in the fifth and seventh centuries after Christ, saw the ruins of the town.‡ But, interposes Senart, no one can tell by looking at the ruins whether the town to which they belong, was called Kapilavatthu. Unfortunately, most assuredly no one can tell by a look, although there is always some weight to be attached to the local traditions connected with the place, and in this case also to the monuments still extant in the time of those Chinese pilgrims. The strongest confirmation, however, of what the Chinese pilgrims state, lies in the fact that, on the one hand, the occasional direct statements and indirect hints of the sacred Pâli works regarding the site of the town, and, on the other hand, the route of the pilgrims who looked for it, if both be traced on the map of India, coincide exactly : in addition to this, at the very place where, according to this evidence, Buddha's home must have been, there is a small stream which, even in the present day, bears the same name (Rohinî) as was borne by a stream in the territory of the Sakyas often mentioned in the Buddhist traditions. I hold, stronger indications it is impossible to expect of an early demolished town in a country in which systematic excavations have not yet been made.*

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∗ The alleged derivation of Buddhism from the Sânkhya philosophy plays an important part in many sketches of this as well as of other philosophies. I know nothing better to say on this subject than what Max Müller has already said (“Chips from a German Workshop,” i, 226): “We have looked in vain for any definite similarities between the system of Kapila, as known to us in the Sânkhyasûtras, and the Abhidarma, or the metaphysics of the Buddhists.”

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³⁰³ Senart finds, as was to be expected, in Kapilavatthu, “la ville, la fortresse de l’atmosphère.”

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‡ It is much to be regretted that General Cunningham, when he travelled the districts concerned for his archæological researches, allowed himself to be so far led astray by his geographical theories, which are on this point decidedly erroneous, as to look for the ruins of Kapilavatthu

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Buddha's mother Mâyâ (i.e., "miraculous power") has also become a mark for criticism because of her significant name. To Senart, Mâyâ, who dies a few days after the birth of her

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in a wrong place; a fresh search in the regions clearly indicated by the texts would be most desirable.

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∗ When Senart feels the want of a positive authority for the existence of Kapilavatthu, he has in his mind the silence of the Brahmanical literature, especially the great epic poems. Whoever considers at once what the epics, which were composed in the more westerly parts of India and the subject-matter of which lies chiefly in the more westerly lands, do yield for the geography of the east of the peninsula, and what they do not yield, will find their silence very explicable in the matter of this · certainly not very important, and moreover very early destroyed, town of Kapilavatthu.

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son, is the morning vapour, which vanishes before the rays of the sun. Weber,* who thought at an earlier period that he had discovered in Mâyâ's name a reference to the cosmic power of Màyâ in the Sânkhya philosophy, has himself revoked this opinion elsewhere at a later period, remembering that the notion of the Mâyâ belongs, not to the Sânkhya school, but to the Vedanta system; it may be added, that every philosophico-mystical idea of the Màyâ is wholly foreign to the ancient Buddhist texts throughout, and consequently the name of Buddha's mother cannot have been invented out of deference to any such idea.†

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† Even Mâyâ's sister, Mahâprajâpatî, does not escape the fate, that curious secrets have been supposed to be veiled in her significantly sounding name. (Senart, p. 339, note 1.) Senart translates Prajâpatî "creatrix," not without himself seeing that this is contrary to grammatical rule. Did the variante Prajâvatî (in the "Lal. Vist.") rightly noticed by him, not remind the distinguished Pâli scholar, that the word does not mean "creatrix" at all, but stands for Prajâvatî, "prolific in descendants?" In Pâli pajâpatî (=prajâvatî) is a very common appellation for "wife." See Childers, sub. verb. and "Mahâvagga," i, 14, 1, 2; x, 2, 3, 8. The meaning of the proper name is therefore quite of a harmless nature.

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We must admit that we place greater reliance on tradition. We believe that the town of Kapilavatthu had once an existence, that Buddha passed his youth there, and that the sacred texts name his mother Mâyâ, not because of any mythical or allegorical secrets, but because she was so called.

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Having unfolded our estimate of the value of the tradition, we now proceed to sketch the history of Buddha's life.

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∗ "Literaturgeschichte," l.c. Cf. Köppen, "Die Religion des Buddha," i, 76.

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BUDDHA'S YOUTH.

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The noble boy Siddhattha was born in the country and the tribe of the Sakyas ("The Powerful") somewhere about the middle of the sixth century before Christ. Better known than this name which he seems to have borne in the family circle, are other appellations. As a preaching monk wandering through India he was to his contemporaries "The ascetic Gotama"—this surname the Sakyas had, in accordance with the custom of Indian noble families, borrowed from one of the ancient Vedic bard-families; to us no name for this renowned of all Indians is so familiar as that with which the disciples who accepted his faith have expressed his authoritative position as the overthrower of error, as the discerner of the truth which gives deliverance, the name Buddha, i.e., "the enlightened," "the knower."

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We can point out the native land of Buddha on the map of India with tolerable accuracy.

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Between the Nepalese lower range of the Himalaya and the middle part of the course of the Rapti,* which runs through the north-eastern part of the province of Oudh, there stretches a strip of level, fruitful land,† some thirty English miles broad, well-watered by the numerous streams that issue from the Himalayas. Here lay the not very extensive territory over which the Sakyas claimed supremacy and dominion. On the east the Rohinî separated their lands from their neighbours; to this day this stream has preserved the name which it bore more than two thousand years ago.* On the west and south the rule of the Sakyas extended quite up, or nearly so, to the Rapti.†

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∗ This river often appears in the Buddhist literature as Aciravatî.

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† The Chinese pilgrim Hiouen Thsang (about 650 A.C.) says of Buddha's native state (St. Julien's Translation, ii, 130): "La terre est grasse et fertile; les semailles et les récoltes ont lieu à des époques régulières; les saisons ne se dérangent jamais; les moeurs des habitants sont douces et faciles."

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† The territory of the Sakyas included, as far as it appears, according to the present divisions of the land, approximately the following circles (pergunnahs) belonging to the Goruckpore district: Binayakpore, Bansee, and the western half of pergunnah Haveli. For an exact estimate of the extent of this territory the data at hand are obviously insufficient; I might quite roughly estimate it at nine-tenths the area of Yorkshire.

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Scarcely anywhere does the appearance of a country depend so completely on the activity or sloth of its inhabitants, as in these parts of India adjoining the Himalayas. The mountains send forth year by year inexhaustible volumes of water: whether for the benefit or for the destruction of the country depends solely on man's activity. Tracts of land which in times of unrest and thriftlessness are a swampy wilderness, the homes of pestilential vapours, may by a few years of regular and steady industry pass into a state of high and prosperous culture, and, if the causes of decline set in anew, return still more quickly to the state of a wilderness.

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In the time of Sakya sovereignty this land must have been highly cultivated, a condition which it again attained under the government of the great emperor Akbar, and which, after long periods of protracted disquiet and sore decay, it is just now beginning once more to approach under the beneficent hand of the British administration, which is intent on supplying the land with the necessary working power.*

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∗ The Rohinî falls into the Rapti near Goruckpore, some hundred English miles north of Benares.

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Between tall forests of sál trees yellow rice-fields spread out in uniform richness. The rice plant, which the Buddhist texts here mention, constitutes to-day, as in ancient times, the chief crop of this country, where the water of the rainy season and of inundations remains long standing on the rich soil of the low lying flats, and renders in great measure superfluous that excessively troublesome artificial irrigation which is elsewhere necessary for rice.† Between the rice-fields we may here and there place villages in the days of the Sakyas such as exist to-day, hidden among the rich, dark-green foliage of mangos and tamarinds, which surround the village site. In the background of the picture, over the black masses of the mountains of Nepal, rise the towering snow-capt summits of the Himalayas.

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† Inter alia, the importance of rice cultivation to the Sakyas is evident from the name of Buddha's father, "pure rice," probably also from the otherwise seemingly fictitious names of his four brothers: clear-rice, strong-rice, white-rice, and immeasurable-rice.

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The kingdom of the Sakyas was one of those small aristocratic governments, a number of which had maintained themselves on the outskirts of the greater Indian monarchies. We shall not be far astray if we picture to ourselves the Sakyas as the forerunners in some fashion of such Rajput families as have in later times, by the aid of armed bands, held their ground against neighbouring rajas.‡ Of these greater monarchies there stood in closest proximity to the Sakyas, the powerful kingdom of Kosala (corresponding pretty nearly with the Oudh of to-day), adjoining it on the south and west. The Sakyas looked on themselves as Kosalas, and the kings of Kosala claimed certain rights over them, though probably merely honorary rights; later on they are said to have brought the Sakya-land wholly within their power, and to have exterminated the ruling family.*

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∗ Cf. the descriptions of Buchanan, who travelled in the country about 1810 (Montgomery Martin, ii, 292, 402, etc.), with A. Swinton's "Manual of Statistics of the district of Goruckpore" (Allahabad, 1861), and the new official "Statistical description and historical account of the Gorakhpore district" (Allahabad, 1880), pp. 287-330.

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‡ An instructive picture of these occurrences is given by Sir W. H. Sleeman, in his "Journey through the Kingdom of Oude," for inst. vol. i, p. 240.

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But though the Sakyas occupied but an insignificant position in respect of military and political power among their neighbours, the haughty spirit which prevailed in their ancient family was characteristic of the Sakya line. Brahmans who had entered the council chamber of the Sakyas could testify to the little notice which these worldly nobles, who derived their nobility from the king Okkâka (Ikshvâku), renowned in song, were inclined to take of the claims of spiritual dignitaries.

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