Introduction
Four questions:
- 1) Historicity. The suttas are situated in history. Historical places, historical personages, historical rulers and kings, historical conflicts. The earliest historical record we have of the Buddha are the Aśokan edicts of the mid-third century BCE. If the Buddha is not an historical figure how does one account for this?
- 2) Aetiology. If the Buddha is not an historical personage, someone(s) had to create him and his teachings out of whole cloth. Why? Isn’t the simpler explanation (that requires no deliberate fraud) the more parsimonious solution? How do we account for the large body of unique, unified teachings, which he promulgated? Where did it come from if not from one insightful, brilliant individual?
- 3) Humanness. Much of the material in the Pāli scriptures portrays the Buddha not as a mythical figure, but as a human being, who lived, bled, aged, decayed and died. If he were an invented, mythical figure, why emphasize his common humanity?
- 4) Biographical. It is undeniable that some parts of the Buddha’s biography have been historicized, that is, given the appearance of historical verity through pure invention, according to the hyperbolic standards of biography of the time. But discoverable in the canon is evidence of an early, core biography preserving the authentic history of a real person in an unembellished state. Is this also invented?
The presumed historical existence of the Buddha is reflected in many of the early suttas where the Buddha is situated in actual historical places alongside real historical figures. This is not to deny the possibility that some of this material could have been invented by skillful fabricator(s), but the style of the work, natural, uncontrived and immediate, all argue for its genuineness. We know, for example, from other sources, that the kings (Ajātasattu, Bimbisāra, Pasenadi) the Buddha meets with were real historical figures; no one would thereby argue that the tales of the Buddha’s encounters with them were uniformly authentic as to details (for there are certainly contradictions in the suttas), but that there were such encounters seems undeniable—they are reported from too many, diverse sources. The Sāmaññaphalasutta tells of one such meeting between the King Ajātasattu and the Buddha, where the latter is identified by the king’s ministers as one of the leading ascetics living in and around Rajagaha at the time. All of these Ajātasattu had also visited,— including Nigaṇṭha Nātaputta, leader of the Jains, Pūraṇa Kassapa, an Ājīvaka, Makkhali Gosāla, an ahetuvādin who denied the efficacy of karma, Ajita Kesakambalī and Pakudha Kaccāyana, both nihilists, and Sañjaya Belaṭṭhaputta, a sceptic. We have independent verification of the existence of some of these leaders from the Jain and Sanskrit sources so there is no reason to question their authenticity (Law, Some Jaina Canonical Sūtras, 142). The earliest mention in Sanskrit sources of the Buddha comes in the Rāmayāna, where the Buddha is called both a thief and an atheist. The Rāmayāna is believed to date perhaps from the mid-third century BCE,8 —but this passage may be a later interpolation (Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, vol. 2, part 2, 721).
The Buddhist suttas have a lot of material on the Buddha’s rivalry with Nātaputta, and one would expect—assuming this material has not been made up—to find similar material in the Jaina canon; and indeed, there is mention of the Buddhists, and always in a pejorative context, although I am not aware of any specific attack on the Buddha himself or his authenticity. In the Sūtrakṛtāṅga 1.1.17, the Buddhists are called “fools” for rejecting an eternal soul. Although material like the above does not prove the historicity of the Buddha, it does prove the accuracy of the rivalry between the two groups (and their leaders) as presented in the Buddhist suttas. Surely, īf the Buddha were a fake historical personage, the Jains would have been the first to make the accusation.
Another historical episode involving Ajātasattu that purports to be historical reportage, is his tutelarship of Devadatta, and his assistance in the latter’s plot to kill the Buddha and take over leadership of the saṅgha. How accurate a story this is we cannot know, although the events are certainly credible, both because of the concern over the Buddha’s succession which we know existed at that time (for Ānanda himself addresses it with the Buddha),14—and that probably exists in every such situation where a great religious leader approaches the end of life, —and also because of the very real and very un-Buddhistic human reaction of the Buddha to Devadatta’s machinations, that is, his apparent anger and condemnation of Devadatta to hell for aeons, though a believer might justify that as prescience rather than deliberate intention. More on the human side of the Buddha below.
The names of places often contain important, historic information embedded in the words. In the case of ancient Indian names where the Buddha lived and worked, though many are Indo-Aryan (IA) in origin (and therefore relatively late, post-dating the IA immigrations), others can be traced back to their Dravidian and/or Munda and/or Tibetan roots, that is, to the autochthonous peoples prior to the IA immigrations, preserving an authentic historical tradition grounded in the peoples of the land; corroborating not only the verity of the place itself, but also that of its original inhabitants. I have argued elsewhere that the Buddha “stood midway between two cultures”—the Indo Aryans from outside India, and the indigenous peoples from its native soil (Levman, “Cultural remnants of the indigenous peoples in the Buddhist Scriptures,” 174). Much of the history of the Buddha and Buddhism has been “brahmanized” by his numerous brahmin followers’ attempts to place him firmly in the dominant Brahmanical establishment and represent him as a leading light of Brahmanism.
Not only place names, but common flora, fauna and farming implements specific to this region, and various religious customs (including burial rites) are all indigenous in origin (Emeneau, “Linguistic Prehistory of India,” 286-91; Emeneau’s article may also be found in Dil, Language and Linguistic Area, 92-99). The Jātaka stories, for example, contain a rich storehouse of animal names, farming words and slang words which may well be non-IA in origin (viḍāla/biḍāla = “cat”; kakaṇṭaka = “chameleon”; lāṅgala or naṅgala = “plough”; mora = “peacock”; nakula = “mongoose”; kamaṇḍalu = “water pot”; markaṭa = “monkey”; sakaṭa = “cart”; maṅgala = “auspicious”) (Jātaka 128, viḍāla/biḍāla: KEWA: vol. 2, 429, “probably a foreign word, Dravidian origin suspected.” Jātaka 141, kakaṇṭaka: KEWA: vol. 1, 137, s.v. kaṅkataḥ: “Unclear and not satisfactorily explained.” Jātaka 542, lāṅgala or naṅgala: a Munda word per Kuiper 1955: 156. Jātaka 159, mora/mayura: Mayrhofer 1992 (EWA): vol 2, 317, problematic, possibly Dravidian or Munda; see also Emeneau 1954, 288; also in Dil 1980: 95; Jātaka 165, nakula: EWA: vol. 2, 2, “unclear, foreign word?” Jātaka 175, kamaṇḍalu: Kuiper 1948: 163, possible Munda word. Jātaka 273, makkaṭa: EWA: vol. 2, 322, “unclear, foreign word?” from Dravidian or Austro-Asiatic. Turner 1962–85: 9882 < Kanada maṅga = monkey. sakaṭa: a Munda word per Kuiper 1955, 161; EWA: vol. 2, 601, “Not satisfactorily explained.” maṅgala: a Munda word per Kuiper 1955: 183. KEWA: vol. 2, 547, “Not securely explained”). T
ree and serpent worship are found throughout the suttas, and the unusual funeral rites of the tribes, where the Buddha’s body is wrapped in kappāsa cloth, placed in a tila23 oil vat or iron, covered with another pot and honoured with dance, songs and music for a week before cremation, are also indigenous customs, which have no place in Brahmanical ritual. I have covered this in detail elsewhere, so there is no need to repeat it here.24 Underneath the attempted brahmanical mythologization of the Buddha was a vibrant, indigenous culture with its own rich and authentic, cultural, social and religious heritage.
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