BUDDHA. - The historical reality of the B., contested by E. Senart, who sought to make of him a solar god, ceased to be called into doubt when archaeological discoveries confirmed the data of the pāli tradition concerning his birth and death.
In 1896 the column was brought to light which the emperor Aśoka erected at Lummini (now Rummin-dei, in the Nepalese Tarāī) around 244 B.C., in memory of the fact that the B. had been born there; and in 1898 the urn was discovered at Piprāva which contained a portion of his relics. Birth and death are the two extremes of a long life (ca. 557-477 B.C.), which is known to us only in its most salient episodes. The pāli canon will be followed, which, although it cannot be considered a historical document, represents the oldest tradition (earlier than the 3rd century B.C.) and even where it yields to the marvelous, allows reality to be sifted from fable. No account will be taken, on the other hand, of the late legendary biographies, which are of purely literary interest. The miraculous conception of Māyā, the mother of the B., who sees in a dream the future savior of the world, descended from the Tuṣita heaven, entering her right side in the form of a white elephant, belongs to the amplifications of the supernaturalist sects, which regarded the B. as a "supramundane (lokottara)" being. And when the Mahāvastu (ca. 4th-5th century A.D.) completes the episode with the detail of Māyā's virginity, the doubt is legitimate that this addition is a derivation from Christianity.
The B. belonged to a noble and wealthy family, called that of the Sakya, "the mighty." When the B. was born, his father Suddhodana was the elective and temporary head of an aristocratic republic, situated on the slopes of the Nepalese Himālaya, near present-day Tilaurā Koṭ. The small state comprised eight cities besides the capital, Kapilavatthu, and could have had ca. one million inhabitants. Suddhodana was therefore not a king in the modern sense of the word, as the title of rājā, rex, conferred on him in the introduction to the Jātaka, might lead one to believe. From his name, "he of the white rice," it was thought possible to infer that he was also a great owner of rice fields. He had two wives, sisters and daughters of a magnate of Koli, the elder of whom, Māyā, was the mother of the B.
When the time of birth drew near, Māyā set out on a journey to reach her paternal family, but labor surprised her a short distance from Kapilavatthu, in the Lummini grove, where the B. came into the world. The event has in itself nothing extraordinary, but the legendary sources transformed it into a miraculous birth. The episode of the B. emerging from his mother's right side, she standing beneath a sāl tree and grasping a branch of the plant, is a favorite subject of Buddhist iconography. Māyā died a week later, and the child was entrusted to the care of his aunt and stepmother Mahāpajāpati. He was given the name Siddhattha, but the texts ordinarily call him Gotama (Skt. Gautama), "descendant of Gotama," the probable progenitor of the family. He grew up in luxury and softness and married, at nineteen, a cousin of his, whom the pāli texts call Rāhulamātā, "the mother of Rāhula," the only son of the B., who later entered the monastic Order. At 29 the disgust for a comfortable and idle life seized him, and he abandoned family and home. He was led to this by meditation on the sorrow of existence in its chief manifestations of sickness, old age and death. He put on the yellow robe of the mendicant ascetic, and after a brief stay with two brahman masters of Yoga, whose doctrines did not satisfy him, he withdrew into the forests of Uruvelā, today Urel near Gayā, subjecting himself to fasts and ascetic exercises. After six years of useless martyrdom, during which he did not attain the longed-for clairvoyance, he understood the futility of the effort and returned to the life of the mendicant ascetic and to food obtained in alms.
The mental concentration learned from the Yoga masters finally led him to the goal, and one night, seated beneath a fig tree, he attained clairvoyance; he discovered the causes of the world's sorrow and the way that leads to liberation from rebirth. From that moment he was the B., the Awakened One, the Enlightened One. The di-
The spread 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 that time the monastic community grew continuously. Having returned to Kapilavatthu, at the urging of Suddhodana, 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 rigidly ascetic sect. In the fifth year of the B.'s apostolate, Suddhodana died, and Mahāpajāpati, left a widow, asked for herself and for other Sakya ladies, among them Rāhulamātā, admission to the Order. With great difficulty and through the intercession of Ānanda, the B. was induced to found the female monastic community, to which he imposed special rules.
The pāli texts are scanty in information about the last twenty-four years of the Illuminated One's life, which must have passed in tranquil uniformity. In the company of the most authoritative monks, he went from one village to another spreading his teachings, and interrupted his wanderings only during the rainy season, which he spent in one of the vihāra or refuges, donated to the community by generous benefactors. Rich in detail, on the other hand, is the narrative concerning the last three months of the Illuminated One's life, handed down by the "Discourse on the Great Extinction" (Dīghanikāya, 16). On the road to Kuṣināgara, the B. accepted the invitation of the goldsmith or smith Gunda, who gave him fatty pork to eat according to some, or mushrooms according to others. The indigestible food was the cause of the B.'s death.
In sight of Kutināgara, he lay down in a grove of sāl trees never to rise again, attended by Ānanda. By order of the Malla, lords of the city, the corpse was cremated with the honors due to a world ruler, and over a portion of his ashes the Sakya erected the nūpa (tumulus with relics) found and opened by Peppé after almost twenty-four centuries.
Bibliography
Ferdinando Belloni Filippi