Courtesy : Bodhipaksa Buddha was not a “Hindu Prince.” He was not a “Hindu” and he was not a “prince.” The onus is really on those who say the Buddha grew up as a “Hindu” to justify that claim. But the term Hindu didn’t exist at the time of the Buddha. The term “Hinduism” wasn’t created until the 19th century. There’s no evidence that there was a caste system in the Sakyan territory, and the Buddha seemed to regard the four-fold caste system of Brahminism as a foreign affair. There’s no reference that I’m aware of to the Buddha having ever followed Brahminical teachings — even if you do accept the anachronism of calling that tradition “Hinduism.” You could call some of the religious traditions that were around at the time as “Vedic” or “Brahminical” and that would make more sense — although again there’s no evidence that the Buddha ever practiced these religions. But “Hinduism” is just an inappropriate term. The “prince” thing is arguable, depending on how you understand that word. Here’s Vishvapani in his Gautama Buddha (Quercus, 2011): So far as we can tell, Gautama’s father Suddhodana, was a Shakyan aristocrat, and some sources call him a ‘raja’. But despite the version of Gautama’s life made familiar in legendary accounts, this doesn’t mean that he was a king (they were called ‘Maharajas’). It is possible that he was just one aristocrat among many, but according to some sources, Suddhodana was the Shakyans’ chief raja. We know from descriptions of other gana communities that chieftains were elected in a meeting of representatives of aristocratic families at the assembly hall…” Excavations of the likely candidates for the Buddha’s home town don’t reveal any palaces, and in fact the term the Buddha uses when he does describe his father’s houses as “palaces” is not the same as the term used for the dwelling of a Maharaja. Probably the term “mansion” should have been used. What we do see are wooden houses, often above the animals’ accommodation. So Suddhodana was more like a “tribal chief” than what we would think of as a king. Which would make Gautama the “chief’s son” rather than what we would think of as a “prince.” Trevor Ling in “The Buddha” makes essentially the same point — the father as an elected head of an aristocratic ruling class. The word “prince” — without reference to the above — is highly misleading. And to call him a “Hindu prince” is doubly misleading. Here’s Richard Gombrich, one of the world’s leading Buddhist scholars, on the Sakyan Republic: The Buddha came from a community called (in Sanskrit) Shakyas; hence his commonest Sanskrit title, Shakyamuni, ‘the Sage of the Shakyas’. This fact is of great historical importance, because according to the Buddha (or, strictly speaking, according to words attributed to him in the Maha-Parinibbana Sutta) he modelled the organization of his Sangha on that of such communities as his own. Historians usually call these communities ‘tribes’, but I am wary of that term, which corresponds to no word in Sanskrit or Pali. ‘Tribe’ evokes an isolated community with no socially structured inequality. The Shakyas seem not to have had a varna [caste] system but they did have servants. They were isolated to the extent that they were self-governing, and their polity was of a form not envisaged in brahminical theory. We deduce that the heads of households – maybe only those above a certain age or otherwise of a certain standing – met in council to discuss their problems and tried to reach unanimous decisions. Some historians call this an oligarchy, some a republic; certainly it was not a brahminical monarchy, and makes more than dubious the later story [emphasis added] that the future Buddha’s father was the local king. This polity presented the Buddha with a model of how a casteless society could function. In the Sangha he instituted no principle of rank but seniority, counted in that case from ordination; maybe age was the ranking principle in the Shakya council. (From Theravada Buddhism, page 49–50)
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 19:27:23 +0000
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