Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.107

c8.107

We are told that the coming Buddha was married—but whether to one or several wives is not known—and that he had a son, Râhula, who afterwards became a member of his religious order. These statements we can the less regard as concoctions, the more casually and incidentally they meet us in the older traditions, the person of Râhula or of his mother* being there employed neither for didactic purposes nor to introduce pathetic situations. If one takes into account the part which the obligation of austere chastity plays in the ethical views and the monastic rules of the Buddhists, he will understand that had we before us here not facts but gratuitous inventions, the tendency of the fabricators of the history must have been rather to throw a veil over a real existing marriage of Buddha than to invent one which had no existence.