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10. The Life of Siddhattha Gotama
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10 The Life of Siddhattha Gotama Among the thousands of intrepid individuals who sought to end samsara in the forests of northeastern India in the Axial Age was a young man by the name of Siddhattha Gotama. Like many others, Gotama had been convinced that conquering the anguish of samsaric existence was life’s highest aspiration. Nothing else could be more important, and he was willing to give up everything to attain that goal. Yet his pursuit of the spiritual options available at the time brought him no satisfaction. He quickly mastered the ascetic disciplines for realizing Brahman but found that they did not bring what he was looking for. The way of devotion to the gods held little interest for him; he thought the gods themselves were in need of the solution he sought. After many years of frustration, he departed from these well-trodden paths and on his own discovered the object of his search. His discovery finally brought him happiness and relief from the suffering that appeared to be inherent in life itself. Siddhattha Gotama had become the Buddha. We will begin our study of this remarkable individual with special attention to the early experiences that led him to discover a new perspective. In later chapters, we will compare the teachings and practices he espoused and relate them to the other Axial Age philosophies we have already examined. For the first time in our study of the Indian Axial Age, we have an actual historical individual to whom we can connect specific teachings. It is important to study the Buddha’s teachings in the context of his life, because the two are so closely intertwined. The Buddha was not an armchair philosopher; his view was the direct result of his attentive engagement with his own experience, a habit of being he encouraged in his followers. 97 “For the first time in our study of the Indian Axial Age, we have an actual historical individual to whom we can connect specific teachings. It is important to study the Buddha’s teachings in the context of his life, because the two are so closely intertwined. The Buddha was not an armchair philosopher; his view was the direct result of his attentive engagement with his own experience, a habit of being he encouraged in his followers.” The Historical Buddha Like other founders of religious movements, we can distinguish the historical Buddha from the Buddha of myth and legend. By “the historical Buddha,” we mean the actual individual who lived in human history and what we can say about him with reasonable certainty using modern methods of historiography. By “the Buddha of myth and legend,” we mean the aspects of his life story that are later embellishments added by his followers after his death. In many cases, the line between history and myth is not always easy to draw, and scholars constantly debate what belongs on one side or the other. THE SOURCES Part of the difficulty in recovering the historical Buddha resides in the nature of our sources. The earliest Buddhist scriptures first existed in oral form and were not written down until three to four hundred years after the Buddha’s death. Furthermore, as the Buddhist tradition continued to develop and spread to different regions of Asia, new scriptures were added to reflect the philosophical emphases of emerging new sects. As Buddhism evolved, followers’ views of the Buddha’s life and its significance also changed. The Pali Canon, the Buddhist texts closest in time to the life of the Buddha, are the most reliable sources for constructing the life of the historical Buddha. There are also collections of scriptures in Tibetan, Sanskrit, and Chinese, which were written later and are less historically dependable than the Pali Canon.1 The Pali collection comprises a large number of volumes, enough to occupy a couple of feet on a library shelf. The most important part of the canon for our purposes is the set of writings called the Suttas, or discourses, which the Buddhist tradition considers the direct words of the Buddha himself. 1. “Pali” refers to the language of the text. The Buddha probably did not speak Pali himself but a Sanskritic language close to it. Pali is also a Sanskritic language, but a vernacular spoken by ordinary people, not the formal Sanskrit used by the Brahmin priests. 98 | The Age of the Sages [3.215.79.206] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:08 GMT) HISTORICAL FACTS OF GOTAMA’S...