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The Buddha

When did he live?

The best available evidence has the Buddha living and teaching in the fifth century before the Common Era. The evidence for this is perhaps remarkable in its completeness, I’m aware of only one other ancient religious figure having such a reliable fix in time and that is the Buddha’s contemporary the founder of Jainism, Jaina Mahavira and this is because he is so frequently mentioned in Buddhist texts. And to this we curiously enough owe the English and the Age of Enlightenment in Europe. Because at this time there was an outbreak of curiosity in Europe. This was due in part to the English, the French and the Dutch acquiring empires in Asia (the English hit the jackpot and got India, Sri Lanka, Burma and Malaysia, the French picked up Indo-China, the Dutch Indonesia). The Spanish had the Philippines which they had turned 90% Catholic, also by the time that serious questions were being asked, Spain was essentially not in the empire building business. So there was this outbreak of curiosity, that resulted in things being dug up and translations of indigenous religious texts being made. Including significantly the travel journals of some Chinese monks who had made pilgrimages to India.

The English, we may remember, were the colonial masters of the Indian sub-continent for a century. They were also the rulers of Sri Lanka, Burma, and Hong Kong. They were also travellers and traders and travelled to China and Japan. The English and other Europeans kept seeing amazing similarities in the local religion. The Japanese had similar statues to the Sinhalese, which bore more than a passing resemblance to the statues in Tibetan monasteries, the Vietnamese had statues that looked like the Japanese. Not surprisingly a penny dropped and the question was asked “Are all these “idols” from the same religion?”

Now parallel to this dropped penny, the English were engaged in surveying and mapping their newly acquired Empire in India. Sooner or later the two worlds were going to meet. They met in the form of Alexander Cunningham. The English by this time had established that there was a Pan Asian religion called “Buddhism”. They were also furiously digging up every ruin they came across and translating the inscriptions they found on coins, on rocks, on pillars. Sooner or later someone was going to “test drive” what the translations of Buddhist texts were telling them….that when the Buddha had died that his ashes were distributed to eight different places. They had the translations of Venerable Fa Hien who very considerately included accurate descriptions and distances in his journal. Once the English had converted Venerable Fa Hiens ancient Chinese measures to English miles, yards and feet, the rest, so to speak was easy.

Within 20 years the English had located the birth, enlightenment and death places of the Buddha. They had also excavated the stupa they found their and translated the inscriptions that they found. Significantly in 1851 at Sanchi the reliquaries of the Buddha’s disciples Maha Sariputta and Maha Moggallana. In 1897 at Piprahwa the relics of the Buddha himself were found exactly where both Fa Hien and the suttas had said they would be.

Evidence, including I believe, carbon dating has placed the objects found at Piprahwa and Sanchi to the 5th Century BCE + or – 200 years.

Who was he?

The person we know as The Buddha came into the world on the full moon in what is now our month of May somewhere around the year 560 BCE . His mother Maha Maya was following the custom of her time and returning to the village of her birth to give birth to her child. There are legends of her dreaming that a white elephant had entered her womb and of the newly born child taking seven steps and declaring that this was his last lifetime and that he was a Buddha…..which notably conflicts with another essential (and to my mind seriously inspirational) part of the Buddhas biography. His father Suddhodana was a governor of the expanding Koliyan kingdom . He was also eventually the father of at least one son, the Arahant Rahula, and an unknown number of daughters…..daughters not being important in the succession of power, are therefore unlikely to be mentioned by ancient chroniclers, but nevertheless, there is no mention of a daughter of the Buddha.

Ultimately, as the son of a governor, Gotama would have entered the administration of the Koliyan kingdom, led a normal life of marriage, work and a death in his late 60’s.

Fortunately for us, this was not to be so. At the time of his birth, the infant Gotama’s horoscope was drawn up (proof that not a lot has changed in India in 2600 years), the hermit Asita predicted/saw in the horoscope that the boy currently only interested in his next feed, was someone very special indeed….a Wheel Turning Monarch. You get the impression that Dad was wildly happy about the news….not what the Old Man had in mind for junior.

You can almost imagine the scene:

Asita: Ah, sir, I’ve ah done young Gotama’s horoscope

Suddhodana: Yes! My son will conquer the world, have 50 wives and leave 300 children!

Asita: Ooh, ah!

Suddhodana: Well? Out with it man!

Asita: I’ve done the horoscope, it does say that there is a very good chance that he will conquer India and have 50 wives and 300 children, but there’s something else in his chart.

Suddhodana: Something else? What something else? I didn’t pay you for “something else”.

Asita: Sir, ah, would it upset you all that much if he was to become one of those forest ascetics and become a Buddha?

Suddhodana: WHAT?

You can imagine crockery being thrown at this point and Asita looking very carefully at where the guards hands were in relation to their swords. Clearly the second aspect of the horoscope wasn’t the desired outcome, because the decision was made that absolutely everything possible to prevent its occurring must be done. Young Gotama was to have a good education, he was to live a life of total pleasure, he was never to be exposed to anything that might remotely trigger a spiritual question in his young mind, including seeing old people….which means that after a while he stopped seeing Dad and they became pen-pals. This was the Grand Plan, and like all Grand Plans it had a serious flaw.

You can imagine the life that the young Gotama was living….endless sex, great food, and enough alcohol to drown in. But sooner or later the boy needed to have some time on his own. He asks to be taken for a drive. Along the way he sees something that he has never seen before: a sick man. He asks “What’s wrong with that person, they look pale, they’re unsteady on their feet, hell they look like shit?” Now the bodyguard/chaperone/charioteer has been ordered to say nothing, but he responds “That person, sir, is sick, he is unwell”.

“What’s “sick”?”

You can imagine that there followed a pretty long question and answer session between Gotama and the other person. At the end of it, the boy isn’t happy. He gets taken home, he thinks it over, he most likely corners a couple of people and asks them about this thing called “being sick”.

Some months later he gets taken for another drive. This time he sees an elderly person. Again the same Q & A session results. He gets taken back home. It’s a repeat of before. The Grand Plan is getting shaky.

Gotama gets taken out for a third drive….you can imagine by now that no one is volunteering for the job. They see a corpse. This time a serious Q & A breaks loose because in the space of about a year the young Gotama has seen three things that he never even guessed existed and he has some serious questions that need to be answered.

The fourth and final trip is the decider. A wandering ascetic is seen. Now this is just the sort of person that the Old Man didn’t want junior to become. To make it worse the ascetic is happy. There is a chance that the young Gotama saw this ascetic on his alms round.

“So who’s that guy with the shaved head, brown robes and bowl, the happy one?”

“That would be a wandering ascetic sir. Someone who seeks the ending of birth and death.”

So by now Gotama is a seriously troubled young man. The Grand Plan has come apart at the seems and Gotama has seen exactly the things that Dad didn’t want him to.