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The History of Buddhist Thought c9: Chapter I. Introduction

The History of Buddhist Thought c9

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English

Contents

Chapter I. Introduction

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AN account of a religion may be expected to begin with the biography of its founder. But in the case of Buddhism we are faced with the fact that all the biographies by ancient Buddhist authors are centuries later than the period of which they speak. They have all been composed after the time when the movement had broken up into separate schools, and they represent the traditions, often contradictory, preserved by these bodies, and modified in accordance with various dogmas concerning the nature of a Buddha and the means of winning release. The popular story of Buddha’s life, as known to the West, is merely the modern version of one of these traditions, and it has been made plausible only by ignoring the other accounts and omitting all the marvels.

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So far as these traditions preserve doctrinal teaching about the nature and career of a Buddha they are highly important, but it is not until the sacred literature and its doctrines have been examined that their historical elements can be considered. Fragments of biography are to be found in the Buddhist Canon. There we find the teacher represented as wandering from place to place as an ascetic, and claiming to have become enlightened and free from all worldly ties. His disciples, who all follow the same ascetic life, are instructed by him to follow the path which he has discovered and, unlike the priests of the prevailing religion, he also gives moral discourses to lay people. His high birth as a member of the kshatriya or warrior caste is often emphasized, especially in opposition to the brahmins. Several other rival schools are mentioned, the chief being the Nigaṇṭhas, the sect still surviving as the Jains. The sphere of his activity was almost entirely in the Magadha and Kosala country, corresponding to the modern Behar, the United Provinces, and Nepal.

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There is no doubt that the central fact we have to deal with is that the founder was a religious genius. However much a genius is influenced by his spiritual environment, his own contribution is something new and original. It may be that he claims to have acquired it by inspiration, or that he has been directly taught by a divine instructor.

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Neither of these is the case with Buddhism, which represents its founder as having by his own unaided effort discovered “ the doctrine unheard before ”, and as having shown a way of salvation which makes an end of pain. But this new teaching cannot be fully explained by itself. It was expressed in accordance with the conceptions of the Hindu world in the sixth century B.C., and as it continued to develop it took for granted all the current views on the nature of the world and man so far as they were not in conflict with its own principles. This is the Buddhism with which we have to deal, not merely the kernel of new doctrine, but the actual system with all that it assimilated from the thought and social conditions of its environment, or adopted as it attracted new followers. The history of Buddhism is the history of the developments, schisms, corruptions, and reforms which the system underwent as it spread in India and beyond, and as it became accepted and reinterpreted by the most diverse cultures of Asia.

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The problem of the relation of Buddhism to Brahminism and of their interaction as religious and philosophical schools runs throughout the whole history. But Brahminism was not merely a rival; it was in the first place the system in the midst of which Buddhism originated. Brahminism had long grown out of the prehistoric nature religion of Aryan India, and, influenced doubtless by contact with non-Aryan peoples, had become by the sixth century B.C. an elaborate sacrificial and sacerdotal system. It had also originated the philosophical principles which have ever since dominated it. A consideration of this early form of Brahminism will be important in so far as it may have had an influence in determining the ideas of the thinker or thinkers who struck out a new path. We need to ascertain, if possible, the world of thought in which Buddha lived, what there was in it that he found inadequate or erroneous, and in opposition to which his teaching made such a powerful appeal.

Geography

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Two preliminary questions which must first be considered are the geographical and the chronological. The geographical facts are of the first importance, for they show that the early Brahminism as known from its literature belonged to a region far distant from the cradle of the new religion. The brahmin region was in the north-west of India, where its chief centre during the compilation of these documents was between the Ganges and the Jumna. Buddhism originated in a region much further to the east, a district which is treated by the brahminical works as unfit for the residence of brahmins. We cannot, therefore, assume that this Brahminism was identical with that known to the early Buddhists. It moreover claimed to possess a secret doctrine confined to exclusive schools, and some of its teachings do not seem even to have been known to the reformers of eastern India.

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The home of Buddhism lies in what is now South Behar, west of Bengal and south of the Ganges. This was the kingdom of the Magadhas, extending from the confluence of the Son with the Ganges towards the east some 150 miles as far as Bhagalpur, the ancient Champā. Forty miles to the south was the chief city Rājagaha (now Rajgir) and some 30 miles further south-west Buddha Gayā, the scene of Buddha’s enlightenment, and still further south the Southern Hills (Dakkhināgiri). The actual region of Bengal further east was then probably quite outside brahmin influence. Even to-day a linguistic map shows the Magadha region bounded on the south and east by tribes speaking non-Aryan (Muṇḍā) languages.¹

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¹ *Linguistic Survey of India*, vol. i, pt. 1.

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In Buddha’s time the aryanization of the country had begun but, as the anthropological evidence shows, it was the spread of an Aryan civilization over a more primitive population, and its introduction into this region was not by conquest but by gradual infiltration. In the eastern portion of Magadha dwelt the Angas, in Buddha’s time no longer an independent people. North of the Ganges were a number of peoples still in the tribal stage. The chief of these were the Vajjis with the chief city Vesālī (now Besar), and further north the Kolas and Mallas. To the west of these, between the Ganges and the Himalayas, were the Kosalas, a people who like the Magadhas were united into a kingdom, and had become paramount over other tribes. The capital was Sāvatthī (Śrāvastī), but another city is also mentioned, Sāketa or Ayodhyā,¹ and this appears to have been at a later time the capital. Among peoples subject to the Kosalas or under their suzerainty were the Kāsis in the south with capital Benares, and north of the Kosalas near the Himalayas a tribe destined to play an important part in later legend, the Sakyas (Śākyas), the tribe to which Buddha belonged. The Buddhist accounts speak of them as being ruled by a king, and say that if Buddha had not chosen to become a king of the Doctrine (Dhamma) he was destined to become a universal king (cakravartin) ruling from sea to sea. Nevertheless, there are indications that the rule of the Sakyas, like that of the adjoining tribes, was oligarchic. The district included part of what is now Nepal, and was probably never much more extensive.

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¹ Ayodhya is well known, being near the present Ajudhia in the Fyzabad District. The site of Sāvatthī is still disputed, but it is usually identified with Set Mahet, a large collection of ruins further north in the Babraich District of Oudh.

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It was within these districts that the first preaching of Buddhism took place, and we have good reason for holding that in Buddha’s lifetime it did not extend beyond. This may be inferred, not from the statements of the legends (which are often quite unhistorical, and represent Buddha as going to the Himalayas, Kashmir, and even Ceylon), but from the undesigned evidence furnished by the discourses themselves. Each discourse is preceded by a statement saying where it was delivered. Doubtless many of these ascriptions are inferences or mere guesses, but they do belong to an early tradition, and we find that according to this tradition the places which are recognized by it are practically confined to the districts mentioned above—the Magadha and Kosala kingdoms and the various tribes to the north-east. This limitation is the more significant when it is compared with the anachronisms of the stories found in the commentaries and Sanskrit works. We there find the mention of peoples in the extreme north-west, the Gandhāras, the Kambojas, the City of Taxila, and in the east Bengal, as well as southern India and Ceylon. The spread of Buddhism by the great trade routes was along the Ganges and Jumna towards the

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north-west and Kashmir and south of the Ganges along the Vindhyas, turning south to the west coast. Along these routes great Buddhist communities arose, and there is no doubt that legends connecting Buddha with these places were invented. But they are quite absent from the first four Nikāyas of the Pāli Scriptures, and these collections, even if they were revised in their present form as late as two centuries after Buddha’s death, show us the only region which has a historical claim to be the cradle of Buddhism.

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There is a single passage in the Pāli which appears to imply not a wider range of Buddha’s activity than that described above, but a much wider geographical knowledge among the early Buddhists than that implied in most of the texts. It is in the *Anguttara Nikāya*, i, 213, repeated iv, 252, 256, 260, and consists of a list of countries which has been held to be a statement of the political divisions of India in or before Buddha’s time.¹ But the collection of discourses in which it is found has less claim than some of the others to be considered early or as conveying contemporary information. It even contains a legend about king Muṇḍa, the fifth in descent from Buddha’s contemporary Bimbisāra. The passage in question is not one that has any concern with giving geographical information, but merely introduces the names in an illustration. It occurs in a discourse on the merit of keeping the fast day (*uposatha*), and there it is said in verse:

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¹ Rh. Davids, in *CHI.*, i, 172.

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The moon’s brilliance and all the host of stars
Are not worth a sixteenth part
Of the fast day kept with the eight precepts.

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This is developed in the prose, where it is said:

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Just as if one should rule with supreme lordship over these sixteen great countries, namely the Angas, Magadhas, Kāsis, Kosalas, Vajjis, Mallas, Chetis, Vamsas, Kurus, Pañchālas, Macchas, Sūrasenas, Assakas, Avantis, Gandhāras, and Kambojas, they are not worth a sixteenth part of the fast day kept with the eight precepts.

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The word for “ part ” is *kalā*, properly a digit, the sixteenth part by which the moon increases daily between new and full moon, and the phrase “ not worth a sixteenth part ” was proverbial.² The compiler wanted a list of sixteen countries, and he has evidently made it up from an earlier list, for the first eight names down to the Sūrasenas occur in the *Janavasabha-sutta*, Dīgha, ii, 200). In that sutta Buddha is said to have explained the destinies of persons in these countries who had recently died, stating whether they had attained Nirvāṇa or in what stage of spiritual progress they were reborn. It is this list of twelve to which four others have here been added, the Asakas of south India, the Avantis of the west, and the Gandhāras and Kambojas of the extreme north-west. These names are frequent enough in later literature, but their almost complete absence from the four Nikāyas, and the fact that the list is preceded by a shorter one, makes it unlikely that it is due to someone who had a knowledge of the political divisions of India before Buddha’s time.

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² Cf. *Dhp.*, 70; *Mahābh.*, xii, 174, 48; *Praśna Up.*, vi, 2.

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Dr. Hemachandra Raychaudhuri ¹ has pointed out a similar list of sixteen countries in the *Bhagavatī-sūtra* of the Jains, which he thinks is later than the Buddhist list. It certainly shows how such lists might come to be compiled. It has no mention of the northern Kambojas and Gandhāras, but it includes several south Indian peoples. All that this proves is that the Jain author wrote in south India, and compiled his list from countries that he knew.

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¹ *Political History of Ancient India*, p. 46.

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This bare list of names (which are not local, but names of tribes or peoples) has little to do with explaining the geography of pre-Buddhistic India. The additional names suggest the directions in which Buddhism spread, but historically we start with the kingdoms of the Magadhas and the Kosalas. These continued to exist for more than a century after Buddha’s death, until the usurper Chandragupta seized the Magadha kingdom, overran his neighbours, and extended his power over most of north India.

Chronology

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Neither the Pāli nor the Sanskrit forms of the Canon give any help in determining anything about the dates of Buddha’s career or even about the historical sequence of the whole story. This comes from the Chronicles composed in Ceylon and from Sarvāstivādin works known as Avadānas. There are two Pāli Chronicles giving the early history of Buddhism, its introduction into Ceylon, and its progress

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in the Island. The earlier of these is the *Dīpavaṃsa*, “history of the Island (of Ceylon),” a record in verse, assigned to the fourth century A.D. The *Mahāvaṃsa*, “the great Chronicle,” also in verse, is a rewriting of the same subject matter with more completeness, and is about a century later. Both these works rest upon historical material which was contained in the old Sinhalese commentaries on the Canon, and most of the material with which we are concerned originated in India. It is unnecessary to consider the *Dīpavaṃsa* in detail here. Its relation to the *Mahāvaṃsa* has been discussed by W. Geiger in his editions of the text and translation of the *Mahāvaṃsa*.

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The *Mahāvaṃsa* has been extended from time to time by continuations, but the original form was in thirty-seven chapters, ending like the *Dīpavaṃsa* with the reign of Mahāsena, king of Ceylon, early in the fourth century A.D. It begins with the resolve which “our Conqueror” made under the Buddha Dīpankara, and the prophecy by Dīpankara about his destiny, repeated by each succeeding Buddha, until in his last life as Gotama he attained complete enlightenment, and began to teach the Doctrine at Benares. The rest of the chapter gives the Sinhalese legend of his three visits to Ceylon, the first of them nine months after his enlightenment, the next five years later, and the third in the eighth year. So far we have purely imaginative legend. The actual history begins with the second chapter, and it is introduced, after the style of the Purāṇas, with the genealogy of Buddha from Mahāsammata, the first king of this age (*kalpa*) down to his father, king Suddhodana. It then continues:

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Māyā and Pajāpatī were the queens of Suddhodana; our Conqueror¹ was the son of Suddhodana and Māyā.

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¹ *Jina* (conqueror), *muni* (recluse), *satthā* (teacher), *bodhisatta* (destined Buddha), *buddha* (enlightened), *tathāgata* (he who has gone thus or to such a state) are all titles of Siddhattha. His name Gotama (Skt. Gautama) was a kind of surname, as it was the common name of his clan or *gotra*, applied to all descended from the same supposed ancestor. This *gotra*, however, is a brahmin *gotra*, and was probably the *gotra* of the hotar priest who performed the sacrifices for this warrior tribe. See *Life of Buddha*, p. 22.

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In the unbroken lineage of Mahāsammata, which thus became the head of the warrior caste, was born the Great Recluse.

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The wife of prince Siddhattha, the Bodhisatta, was Bhaddakaccānā, and his son was Rāhula.

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Bimbisāra and prince Siddhattha were friends; and likewise friends were the fathers of both.

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The Bodhisatta was five years older than Bimbisāra; and at the age of twenty-nine the Bodhisatta renounced the world.

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He strove for six years, and in due course won enlightenment; and at the age of thirty-five he visited Bimbisāra.

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Now the virtuous Bimbisāra at the age of fifteen was himself consecrated by his father; and after he had attained the kingdom (of Magadha),

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In the sixteenth year, the Teacher taught the Doctrine; fifty-two years did Bimbisāra rule his kingdom.

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Fifteen years was his reign before the Conqueror came, and thirty-seven more while the Tathāgata lived.

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Ajātasattu, son of Bimbisāra, intent on murdering his father, ruled his kingdom for thirty-two years, a great injurer of friends.

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In the eighth year of Ajātasattu the Recluse attained Nirvāna; thereafter Ajātasattu ruled his kingdom for twenty-four years.

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When the Conqueror, living for forty-five years, had performed all duties in the world in every way,

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At Kusinārā, between the excellent pair of sāla trees he, the light of the world, attained Nirvāna.

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The third chapter continues with the funeral rites of Buddha and the holding of a Council by the monks of the Order six months later for the reciting and collecting of the Doctrine.

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In the fourth chapter six successors of Ajātasattu are recorded, the last of whom was Kālāsoka. It was after ten years of his reign that the second Council was held, exactly a century after Buddha's death. This Council is said to have dealt only with disciplinary measures. It declared illegal ten practices in which relaxation of the rules had taken place among the monks of Vesālī.

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The fifth chapter records the rise of "the doctrines of other teachers", resulting in seventeen new schools in the second century after Buddha's death, and later still six other schools in India and two in Ceylon. Authors belonging to Sanskrit schools also give lists of eighteen, and these lists contain the kernel of what we know of the history of the Order and the development of the doctrine in the earlier period. This chapter also continues the history of the kings of Magadha down to Asoka.

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Kālāsoka was succeeded by his ten brothers, who reigned in all twenty-two years. Then followed the nine Nandas, who also reigned twenty-two years. The last of these, Dhanananda, was overthrown by Chandagutta (Chandra-gupta), who made himself master of northern India, and reigned twenty-four years. His son Bindusāra succeeded, and reigned twenty-eight.

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Bindusāra’s splendid sons were a hundred and one; but of these Asoka excelled in merit, splendour, might, and wondrous power. When he had slain ninety-nine of his brothers by different mothers, he attained the sole rule in all Jambudīpa. It is to be known that from the Nirvāṇa of the Conqueror down to Asoka’s consecration it is two hundred and eighteen years. Four years after the famous one (Asoka) had attained sole rule he caused himself to be consecrated in the city of Pāṭaliputta (Patna).

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The rest of the chapter tells of Asoka’s conversion to Buddhism, and how his name became changed from Asoka the fierce (Chaṇḍāsoka) to Asoka the righteous (Dhammāsoka). He reformed the Order, expelling the heretical monks, and the third Council was held in the seventeenth year of his reign. The Chronicle then turns to the history of Ceylon, and tells no more of Buddhism in India beyond Asoka’s sending of missionaries to various countries after the third Council and the official introduction of Buddhism into Ceylon by Asoka’s son Mahinda.

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This is the tradition as preserved by one school, the Theravāda, and the extent to which the details can be relied upon is much disputed.¹ It is unnecessary for our purpose to investigate the chronological problems beyond pointing out those which can be verified independently as historical facts. Chandagutta (Chandragupta), the grandfather of Asoka, has been identified with certainty as the Indian ruler known to the Greeks and Romans as Sandrocottus, who about 304-3 B.C. made a treaty with Seleucus Nicator. The historical character of Asoka’s reign is proved by the decrees which he caused to be inscribed on rocks and pillars in various parts of India. All the earlier dates are problematical, though they agree to some extent with the chronology of the Jains and the Purāṇas. If we could be sure of the number 218 as the number of years between the death of Buddha and the Consecration of Asoka, all the rest would fall into a natural chronological sequence. The Sarvāstivādin tradition, however, puts Asoka one century after the death of Buddha, and apparently confuses him with Kālāsoka. But, as it also omits Chandragupta from its list of kings, there is no reason to prefer it as the more correct. The relative dates as accepted by the Theravāda school thus become:

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¹ An examination of the Pāli evidence compared with that of the Jains and the Purāṇas is given by W. Geiger in the introduction to his translation of the Mahāvamsa. Mr. Bhattasali, preferring the Jain dates, wishes to shift all the dates five years forward. How precarious the whole scheme is can be seen from the fact that Dr. Matsumoto, following Professor Ui, shifts the death of Buddha to 386 B.C., nearly a century later. See Die Prajñāpāramitā-Literatur, p. 25. Stuttgart, 1932. None of these dates agrees with the traditional dates accepted by the Buddhists themselves. In Ceylon, Siam, and Burma 544 B.C. is the date of Buddha’s death; in China 1067 B.C. and other dates are given. Mr. Bhattasali’s calculation is given in JRAS. 1932, p. 273.

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B.C. 563 Birth of Gotama Buddha. 559 Birth of Bimbisāra, king of Magadha. 543 Accession of Bimbisāra. 534 Great Renunciation of Gotama. 528 The Enlightenment. 491 Accession of Ajātasattu. 483 Death of Buddha and first Council at Rājagaha. 393 Accession of Kālāsoka. 383-2 Second Council at Vesālī and first schism. 365-343 The ten sons of Kālāsoka. 343-321 The nine Nandas. 321 Usurpation of Chandragupta and founding of the Maurya empire. 297 Accession of Bindusāra. 269 Accession of his son Asoka. 265 Consecration of Asoka. 247 Third Council at Pāṭaliputta. 246 Mission of Mahinda to Ceylon.

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