BUDDHA. – The historical reality of the Buddha, contested by E. Senart, who sought to portray him as a solar deity, ceased to be doubted when archaeological discoveries confirmed the data of the Pāli tradition regarding his birth and death.
In 1896, the column erected by the Emperor Aśoka at Lumbinī (now Rummin-dei, in the Nepalese Tarāi) around 244 BC was unearthed, commemorating the Buddha’s birth there; and in 1898, the urn containing a portion of his relics was discovered at Pipravā. Birth and death mark the two extremes of a long life (c. 557–477 BC), known to us only through its most salient episodes. The Pāli canon will be followed here, though it cannot be considered a historical document, it represents the oldest tradition (prior to the 3rd century BC) and, even where it yields to the marvellous, allows us to distinguish reality from fable. No account will be taken, however, of the later legendary biographies, which are of purely literary interest. The miraculous conception of Māyā, the Buddha’s mother, who dreams of the future saviour of the world descending from the Tusita heaven and entering her right side in the form of a white elephant, belongs to the amplifications of supernaturalist sects that regarded the Buddha as a “transcendent” (lokottara) being. When the Mahāvastu (c. 4th–5th century AD) embellishes the episode with the detail of Māyā’s virginity, it is legitimate to suspect that this addition may derive from Christianity.
The Buddha belonged to a noble and wealthy family, the Śākya, “the mighty.” When he was born, his father Suddhodana was the elected and temporary head of an aristocratic republic situated on the slopes of the Nepalese Himalayas, near modern Tilaurā Koṭ. The small state comprised eight cities besides the capital, Kapilavatthu, and may have had about a million inhabitants. Suddhodana was therefore not a king in the modern sense of the word, despite the title of rājā, rex, conferred upon him in the introduction to the Jātaka. From his name, “he of the white rice,” it was thought possible to infer that he was also a large landowner of rice fields. He had two wives, sisters and daughters of a magnate of Koli, the elder of whom, Māyā, was the Buddha’s mother.
As the time of birth approached, Māyā set out to join her father’s family, but was overtaken by labour near Kapilavatthu, in the Lumbinī grove, where the Buddha was born. The event in itself is not extraordinary, but legendary sources transformed it into a miraculous birth. The episode of the Buddha emerging from his mother’s right side, while she, standing beneath a sāl tree, grasps a branch of the plant, is a favourite subject of Buddhist iconography. Māyā died a week later, and the child was entrusted to the care of his stepmother Mahāpajāpatī. He was named Siddhattha, but the texts ordinarily call him Gotama (Skt. Gautama), “descendant of Gotama,” a probable eponymous ancestor of the family. He grew up in luxury and indulgence and, at the age of nineteen, married a cousin, whom the Pāli texts call Rāhulamātā, “the mother of Rāhula,” the Buddha’s only son who later entered the monastic order.
At the age of twenty-nine, he was seized by disgust for his comfortable and idle life, and abandoned his family and home. He was driven to this by meditation on the suffering of existence in its chief manifestations: sickness, old age, and death. Clad in the yellow robe of a mendicant ascetic, and after a brief stay with two Brahman teachers of Yoga, whose doctrines did not satisfy him, he withdrew to the forests of Uruvelā (modern Urel near Gayā), subjecting himself to fasts and ascetic exercises. After six years of fruitless mortification, during which he did not attain the desired enlightenment, he realised the futility of such effort and returned to the life of a mendicant ascetic, taking food obtained by alms.
Mental concentration, learned from the Yoga masters, finally led him to his goal, and one night, seated beneath a fig tree, he attained enlightenment; he discovered the causes of worldly suffering and the path leading to liberation from rebirth. From that moment he was the Buddha, the Awakened One, the Enlightened One. The dissemination of his doctrine began with the sermon at Benares, delivered to five anchorites, his first disciples and apostles.
At Uruvelā, he converted, by working miracles, a thousand Brahman hermits, and from then on the monastic community grew steadily. Returning to Kapilavatthu at Suddhodana’s request to visit his family, he found among his relatives his dearest and most faithful disciple, Ānanda, and also the Judas of the Buddhist community, Devadatta, founder of a more rigorously ascetic sect. In the fifth year of his apostolate, Suddhodana died, and Mahāpajāpatī, now widowed, requested admission to the Order for herself and other noblewomen of the Śākya, including Rāhulamātā. With great difficulty and through Ānanda’s intercession, the Buddha consented to found the community of nuns, imposing special rules upon II.
Scant are the details in the Pāli texts concerning the last twenty-four years of the Enlightened One’s life, which must have passed in tranquil uniformity. In the company of his most eminent monks, he moved from village to village proclaiming his teachings, interrupting his wanderings only during the rainy season, which he spent in one of the vihāras or refuges donated to the community by generous patrons. Rich in detail, however, is the account concerning the last three months of the Enlightened One’s life, preserved in the “Discourse on the Great Extinction” (Dīghanikāya, 16). On the road to Kuśināgara, the Buddha accepted the invitation of the goldsmith or smith Gunda, who gave him food of fat boar meat—according to some—or, according to others, mushrooms. The indigestible meal caused the Buddha’s death.
In sight of Kuśināgara, he lay down in a sāl grove and did not rise again, attended by Ānanda. By order of the Malla, lords of the city, the body was cremated with the honours due a universal ruler, and over a portion of his ashes the Śākya erected the stūpa (a mound containing relics) found and opened by Peppé after nearly twenty-four centuries.