Searching for the Buddha

Please visit my Buddha Myth blog here: http://thaimangoes.blogspot.com/2009/08/g9.html

I’ve been searching for the historical Buddha, the man behind the myth, and learned of an earth-moving discovery by an Indian researcher. All right, perhaps the earth didn’t move, but for me it seemed to have. The discovery by Ranajit Pal was that Buddhism arose in Iran, not India. I’ll come back to this later. First let me put the whole thing in context.
There are not many books that do more than repeat the usual legends. Walk into any bookstore, go to the section on religious books, open any book on Buddhism, and they begin something like this:

 “Siddhartha Gautama was a prince of the Sakya kingdom. His father was King Siddhodana"

 I would riffle through the book and put it down. If the author is just going to repeat legend in his very first paragraphs, would the rest of the book be of any use as history?

 I did find a reprint of “The Life of Buddha as Legend and History,” first published in 1927, by Edward J. Thomas (1869-1958). He was a librarian in India and wrote several books on Buddhism. He says: “All the forms of the legend of Buddha’s birth assume that he was the son of a king. It is generally agreed that this is unhistorical, and it has been usual to deduct the evidently incredible portions and leave the rest as history.”

 If Gautama wasn’t the son of a king, what are we to make of the legend in which his father tries to prevent him from learning about sickness, old age, and death? which is the reason that started the Buddha off on his quest for Enlightenment.

 John Keay, “History of India” (2000): “Trade and craftsmanship were more the Buddha’s milieu than royal ceremonial. The affluence against which he eventually reacted by renouncing his wife and family to begin an enquiry into the human condition may have been real; equally it may have been the perceived luxury of more celebrated urban centers like Vaisali, capital of the Licchavis, or the Koshalan metropolis of Sravasti, or Rajagriha in Magadha.”

 

Of course some scholars have doubted whether Gautama was a historical person in the first place. H.H. Wilson (1786-1860) (translator of the Rig Veda into English) wrote that it was “not impossible, after all, that Sakya Muni (another name for Gautama Buddha) is an unreal being, and that all that is related of him is as much a fiction as is that of his preceding migrations.”

 But let’s assume Buddha was a historical person. So where was he born? Legend has it that he was born in a park at Lumbini, near a town called Kapilavastu (the capital of his father's 'kingdom'). And where is Kapilavastu?

 The location of ancient Kapilavastu is still not unanimously accepted. Generally, Indian guidebooks consider Piprahwa to be the real Kapilavastu, while Nepalese guidebooks consider Tilaurakot to be the real Kapilavastu.

 According to Heather Hindman ("Touring Lumbini: On Buddhist Centers and National Margins”, University of Chicago), “The location of the sage's birth lies in the ancient land ruled by the father of Siddhartha, which probably crosses the current border of Nepal and India. Yet, in the present era in which a major tourist site can dramatically alter the economy of a small country like Nepal, the two nations find it vital to fix the location of the birth on one side of the border or the other."

But there is compelling evidence to show that Lumbini is an astonishing fraud, begun in 1896, and unwittingly fostered ever since. The man responsible was Dr Alois Anton Führer, a German archaeologist employed by the (British) Government of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh between 1885-98, and co-discoverer of the present Lumbini site. See this website for details: "Lumbini on Trial: The Untold Story" (http://www.lumkap.org.uk/).

The golden Buddha, Wat Trimit
Now comes the earth-moving discovery by the Indian researcher, Ranajit Pal. He claims that Buddhism arose, not in North India, but in what is now Iran, that part of Iran which was formerly a part of India (so called India within Iran). See "Zoroaster and Gotama in a Non-Jonesean Framework" (http://www.ranajitpal.com/zoroaster.html):

Pal sees William Jones as having unwittingly helped to place the birthplace of Buddhism in North India. Jones (1746-1794) was a philologist and polymath who proposed that Sanskrit and European languages are related and descended from a common language, now extinct, given the name Indo-European.

Jones, who was a judge in India, was entranced by Indian culture, an as-yet untouched field in European scholarship, and founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Over the next ten years he would produce a flood of works on India, launching the modern study of the subcontinent in virtually every social science. He also wrote on the local laws, music, literature, botany, and geography, and made the first English translations of several important works of Indian literature.

So he more or less invented Indology. But, according to Pal, he made one blunder, which was to locate Alexander the Great’s Palibothra at Patna, right in India’s heartland. This caused others to look for Kapilavastu in North India/Nepal.

“Owing to Jonesian delusions and Führer’s skulduggery, it has remained unknown that Buddhism came of age in India but was born and reared in the chrysalis of Persia. Although persecuted by kings, it once flourished in Iran. That the cultural history of Nepal offers nothing that can be seen as a prelude to Buddhism is not surprising in view of the numerous forgeries that underlie Nepalese archaeology.”

(Please see comment 7 below for further clarification by Dr. Ranajit Pal.)

I haven’t found a mainstream historian who is willing to go along with this yet, but--if proven--this addresses one of those puzzles: if Buddhism arose in North India, why is Greco-Buddhist art older than Indian Buddhist art? It also explains what the Bamiyan Buddhas were doing in Afghanistan, though sadly no more.

Left: Seated Buddha of the Gandhara school, second century BCE. Shows Greek influence in facial features and toga.

 Center: Seated Buddha from Sarnath, fifth century CE.

Right: Bamiyan Buddha (sixth century CE) before it was dynamited by the Taleban. Greco-Buddhist style.

According to a Wikipedia article: “Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hsüan-tsang (Xuanzang) passed through the area around AD 630 and described Bamiyan as a flourishing Buddhist center "with more than ten monasteries and more than a thousand monks", and he noted that both Buddha figures were "decorated with gold and fine jewels" (Wriggins, 1995).”
 If Buddhism's birthplace is North India as currently believed, it would seem incredible for Buddhism to have spread from East to West so quickly, reversing the traditional West to East flow of migrations.

This map is taken from one of Ranajit Pal's websites. I have indicated by a circle the part of India within Iran in 4th century BC. Pal says that Alexander’s victory celebrations over the Indians at Kohnouj proves that southeast Iran was within India in the 4^th century BC.