Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism

THE name Buddha, ‘ the Knower,’ ‘the Enlightened,’ ‘the Wake,’ is the appellation by which the wandering preaching friar Gautama became best known to his disciples. Of this man we are able to say with some certainty that he was born in the year 563 B.C. and died in 483 B.C. He was the heir of a ruling house of the Sakyas, whose little kingdom, a rich irrigated plain between the Nepalese foot-hills and the river Rapti, lay to the north-east of the present province of Oudh. To the south-west lay the larger and more powerful kingdom of the Kosalas, to whom the Sakyas owed a nominal allegiance. The Buddha’s personal name was Siddhattha, his family name Gautama, his father’s name Suddhodana, his mother’s Maya. It is only in later legend that Suddhodana is represented as a great king; most likely he was in fact a wealthy knight and landowner. Siddhattha’s mother died seven days after his birth, and her sister MahajapatI, another wife of Suddhodana, filled the place of mother to the young prince. He was brought up in Kapilavatthu, a busy provincial capital; he was trained in martial exercises, riding, and outdoor life generally, and in all knightly accomplishments, but it is not indicated in the early books that he was accomplished in Brahmanical lore. In accordance with the custom of well-to-do youths, he occupied three different houses in winter, summer, and the rainy season, these houses being provided with beautiful pleasure gardens and a good deal of simple luxury. It is recorded that he was married, and had a son, by name Rahula, who afterwards became his disciple. Siddhattha experienced the intellectual and spiritual unrest of his age, and felt a growing dissatisfaction with the world of pleasure in which he moved, a dissatisfaction rooted in the fact of its transience and uncertainty, and of man’s subjection to all the ills of mortality. Suddhodana feared that these thoucjhts would lead to the loss of his son, who would become a hermit, as was the tendency of the thinkers of the time; and these fears were well founded, for in spite of every pleasure and luxury that could be devised to withhold him, Siddhattha ultimately left his home to adopt the ‘ homeless life ‘ of the ‘Wanderer,’ a seeker after truth that should avail to liberate all men from the bondage of mortality. Such enlightenment he found after years of search. Thereafter, during a long ministry as a wandering preacher, he taught the Four Ariyan Truths and the Eightfold Path; attracting many disciples, he founded a monastic order as a refuge for higher men, the seekers for everlasting freedom and unshakable peace. He died at the age of eighty. After his death his disciples gathered together the “Words of the Enlightened One,” and from this nucleus there grew up in the course of a few centuries the whole body of the Pali canon, and ultimately, under slightly different interpretation, the whole mass of the Mahayana Sutras. That so much of the story represents literal fact is not only very possible, but extremely probable; for there is nothing here which is not in perfect accordance with the life of that age and the natural development of Indian thought. We know, for example, that many groups of wandering ascetics were engaged in the same quest, and that they were largely recruited from an intellectual and social aristocracy to whom the pretensions of Brahmanical priestcraft were no longer acceptable, and who were no less out of sympathy with the multitudinous cults of popular animism. We know the name of at least one other princely ascetic, Vardhamana, a contemporary of the Buddha, and the founder of the monastic system of the Jainas.