Utkal University
& KIIPS, Bhubaneshwar, 8 February 2020
Abstract
The Buddha was not the inventor of a new
method in the service of a new philosophical goal. He trod into existing
footsteps: seeking the goal of Liberation through the method of Meditation.
This ideal was already available before he was born and that was what beckoned
him into a spiritual career. Even more specifically, he learned meditation
techniques from established pre-Buddhist masters and integrated these
prominently in the Buddhist meditation curriculum.
1.
Navel-gazing
Less contemplative
religions denounce Buddhists as “navel-gazers”. Indeed Chan/Zen Buddhists even
literally focus on the energy centre just below the navel, a point borrowing
its special meaning from Daoism, which calls it Dantian, ‘the field of
cinnabar’. But the good thing about this focus on the navel is its unintended
symbolism: a navel presupposes birth from parents. It proves you are part of a
lineage, you have been born as an heir, and with a debt to your ancestry.
So indeed, Buddhist tradition pays a lot of
attention to the role of Śākyamuni’s ancestry in his unique life path, particularly
his father, also his foster-mother, his wife and concubines and his son. We
know more about his family situation than of that of most sannyasins, who tend
to keep their pre-initiation lives secret.
2. Anti-ancestry bias: the Buddha as rebel
Every
great thinker has numerous studies dedicated to the influences that formed him.
For Siddhārtha Gautama, the Buddha,
however, this question is now systematically ignored or downplayed. Instead, the claim is propped up that he was
a radically different mind from what surrounded or preceded him.
Either
he is deemed a rebel against the ambient (partly or predominantly Vedic) culture.
This view came about among 19th-century Protestant Orientalists as a
conscious projection of Luther rebelling against Popery or of Jesus challenging
the Pharisees. Thought up in Germany, today it is taught worldwide to almost
everyone through school manuals and introductory books, both abroad and in
India; the only exception is Buddhist countries to the extent that they
maintain their own centuries-old tradition (e.g. the Buddha biography by Hsinng
Yun 2013 used by the Fo Guang, “sunbeams of the Buddha”, school), but not to
the extent that they too have absorbed the Western “consensus”. You can find it
strongly in Bhimrao Ambedkar’s The Buddha and His Dhamma, less strongly in
Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India (because he contradictorily adds
that the Buddha’s contribution is typical for Indian culture).
The
most subtle recent variation on this approach is by Richard Gombrich, who
admits the Buddha borrowed from both Jainism (whose historical tīrthaṁkara
Pārśvanāth lived some 250 years earlier) and the Upaniṣads: the
Buddha “was alluding primarily to teachings in the early Upaniṣads,
especially the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, (ĀUP) teachings which are usually
known as Vedānta, a term which literally means ‘Conclusions of the Veda’.
With some of these teachings the Buddha agreed; others he criticized, though
usually he did so obliquely.” (Gombrich 2009:60) However, he only agreed with the
words, not the meanings: he used the old words but gave them a new meaning
entirely his own. Thus, for the Jainas karma refers to a form of matter,
but for the Buddha, this existing term becomes a matter of intention. (Gombrich
2009:75)
So:
“On the one hand, the Upaniṣads had a gnostic soteriology: our basic
problem is a lack of understanding. (…) On the other hand, Jainism and related
sects saw our basic problem as involvement with the world through desire: the
answer lies in acquiring total self-control. (…) Though the Upaniṣads
also deprecated desire and Jainism also advocated understanding, it was the
Buddha who found the perfect combination of the two approaches.” (Gombrich
2009:74) For Gombrich, the Buddha formally
walked in the trodden paths of the ambient society, but only to revolutionize
it in a very subtle way.
But if
true, this reinterpretation does not put Buddhism outside Hinduism, on the
contrary. Reinterpretation is already part of the evolving Vedic thought. Thus,
Karma as understood in Vedic Karmakāṇḍa (ritual work) differs
from what it becomes in the Bhagavad Gītā (in the source text and even more as
nowadays interpreted: “the yoga of work”) and in reincarnationist context. The
common measure is “action at a distance”: in Vedic ritualism, a fire sacrifice
is performed with a chosen goal in mind, say victory on the battlefield, and hopefully
causes through action at a distance the desired result, crossing the space and
time between the ritual and the battlefield result; in reincarnationist
parlance, karma from past actions signifies the causation at a distance of a
destiny in the future. The shift is from a ritual causation to a moral
causation, but the same term remains in use.
3. The Buddha as fountainhead
An
even more daring alternative within the ancestry-denying consensus is the one
we might summarize as: “All
roads lead to the Buddha.” Since rebellion against something is still a form of
relation, a newer school claims that he was not a follower of nor even a rebel
against earlier models, but an incredibly creative founder from whom his
surroundings borrowed. Here he is the fountainhead of all that not just
Buddhist but even Hindu culture has to offer: either it is Buddhist and
obviously his, or it is non-Buddhist, and in that case it has been borrowed (or
in neo-Ambedkarspeak: “stolen”) from the Buddha. “Hinduism bad, Buddhism good”,
seems to be the operative guideline, so anything bad that can be found in
Buddhism is a contamination from Hinduism (or “Brahminism”), anything good in
Hinduism must be an import from Buddhism.
One
core of truth in this view is that we may be mistaken in deducing all spiritual
developments in India from the Vedas, too often seen as the source of
everything worthwhile. Vedic culture with its hymn recitation and its fire
sacrifice, and with an array of sciences growing around it (astronomy,
mathematics, grammar) was only one of the tributaries of Hindu culture, viz.
the tradition of the Paurava tribe centred on the Sarasvatī basin in
present-day Haryāṇā. It was not the mother but the sister of other
tributaries, like the devotional culture with its idols and idol-houses
(temples), originating in peninsular India; the culture of mother-goddess
worship with blood sacrifices, rooted in every village but centred mostly in
Bengal and Assam; and the culture of Greater Magadha, roughly Bihar, where
asceticism and the belief in reincarnation originate. It is when the Vedic
culture expands to the east, where Yājñavalkya wins a debate at king Janaka
in Videha (northwestern Bihar) that these elements become central in the
youngest layer of the Veda, the major Upaniṣads. So, less than a
reaction to the Vedas, the Śramana (renunciate) culture may be a sister
tradition developing on its own, with the Buddha as one of its children.
As
Shrikant Talageri always emphasizes: “In this Hindu culture, the original
religious elements of the Pūru tribes (the Vedic hymns and different types of
Vedic yajñas) became just one nominal part of the whole religion, subordinated
in actual importance to the elements from the other tribes: the philosophical
concepts (Upaniṣads, Buddhism, Jainism, Charvaka’s philosophy etc.) from
the Ikṣvāku tribes, Tantrism from tribes further east, idol-worship and
temple culture from the tribes in South India, etc.” (Talageri 2019:169)
An
academic support of this view is to be found in a Buddhacentric chronology. Johannes
Bronkhorst (2000:112-123) has argued that the Upaniṣads actually
postdate the Buddha, making
the yogic ideas in them a calque on Buddhism. He brings in rather convoluted
philological arguments, which have failed to find much approval among specialists
in a position to judge this hypothesis. Thus Gombrich cites several Upaniṣadic
verses as known to the Buddha (BĀU 1:4:5-6, Gombrich 2009:76; Gombrich 1987).
However, the implied conclusion of Upanishadic non-originality has become
popular in politically motivated circles in Western and Indian academe and in
the Ambedkarite movement.
Gombrich
identifies the earliest reference to yogic practice as: “Therefore, knowing
this, having become calm, subdued, quiet, patiently enduring, concentrated, one
sees the soul [ātman, more usually ‘self’] in oneself.” (Bṛhadāraṇyaka
Upaniṣad 4:4:23) Even later is the first formal, self-conscious definition
of the term Yoga (‘a
yoke, the yoking’ > discipline): “The
earliest known definition of yoga comes in the c. third-century BCE Kaṭha
Upaniṣad” (Mallinson & Singleton 2017:xv), viz.: “When the 5 senses are
silenced, along with the mind, and the intellect stops its activity: that is
called the highest state. Strongly restraining the sense is what is called Yoga."
(Kaṭha Up. 2.3.10–11)
Having done a lot of research in Indian
chronology, but without presupposing the late Aryan Invasion sequence (Ṛg-Veda in
-1200 etc.), we always wonder where people get those dates from, posited with
such confidence. The texts themselves don’t give these, and we know these dates
are partly determined by the cramped and unhistorical hypothesis of an Aryan
invasion ca. 1500 BCE. We find no reason to insist that the Kaṭha Upaniṣad
postdates the Buddha. And let this still be a legitimate topic of debate, the Bṛhadāraṇyaka
Upaniṣad’s higher antiquity is just too well-established. That it is
earlier than the Buddha, follows from the fact that, as per Gombrich, he quotes
from it.several times. It is also taken to contain some ideas known through
Buddhism but in less systematized form, not because the Brahmin editors were
too simple to properly digest ideas borrowed from a prior-existing Buddhism,
but because they came earlier and expressed the same ideas in a more
spontaneous form.
Unlikely
and criticized as it is, the hypothesis of a post-Buddha date for the Upaniṣads
deserves to be taken seriously, if only as a thought experiment. Supposing it
is true, then the Buddha’s lonely and therefore titanic achievements are impressive,
but then this begs the question where the Buddha had it all from: if he did not
build on the older tradition, Vedic or Magadhan, did he get is from revelation,
or from pure genius?
4. Proto-Buddhism
In Siddhārtha Gautama’s life story, the presence of
spiritualism and asceticism in his pre-ascetic years is striking. At birth, he
is predicted to either become a great ruler (as had been planned by his father)
or a great renunciate,-- a category clearly already known. In the
classical story of his four meetings at age 29, it is the sight of a renunciant
that sets him on his distinctive course. He wants to realize an ideal that
others have already pursued and, given the inspiring effect this renunciant
had, probably realized.
No
mention is made anywhere of his contemporaries being surprised that someone
would go and become a forest ascetic. Among the Romans or the Aztecs or most
peoples, this would have been considered strange: a healthy young man who spurns
a family life with wife and child and, for a prince, even concubines, in order to
go to the forest to pursue a bizarre state of mind which he fancies to be
Enlightenment. This was, after all, Hindu civilization, already familiar with
the lifestyle that the Buddha would make world-famous. It was a long-existing
footstep in which Siddhārtha followed. And in a next
phase, once in the forest, he does not just go his own way. Famously, for a
while, he joins a group of extreme ascetics, perhaps Jainas or a similar sect
already in existence: as sons of the same culture, they were on a search for
the same thing as he. It is only after sharing with them a part of his
spiritual path that finally he leaves them, continuing his search into its more
distinctively Buddhist phase.
More
than forty years later, in the final years of his life, after having amply
developed his own Dharma, he lays down his view of the good society in
“the Seven Injunctions of Non-Decline”. (Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūkta 1.1-5, “Chapter of the supreme exctinction”, Sanskrit;
and Satta-Aparihāniya-Dhammā: “Seven non-decrease duties”, in Aṅguttara-Nikāya
7:21, Pali, treated by Elst 2018). These relate the sapta śīla, the
“seven precepts” of non-decline. Just as in spiritual life, the Buddha’s apple
hasn’t fallen far from the tree, so in his social vision: it reproduces the
institutions and traditions he has grown up with.
The
first principle is unity in decision-making, deliberation till a consensus is reached,
as the key to social cohesion and national invincibility. This was the
political institution he had grown up with in the Śākya republic, and as
a member of the Kṣatriya elite, he had been a full member of the
Republic’s Senate, where deliberation and forging a consensus was his way of
life. For the rest, a good cohesive spirit in society is furthered by
respecting the laws, respecting women, respecting holy men, and preserving the
existing religious traditions (sacred places, pilgrimages, festivals). Far from
being a rebel, we learn that the Buddha was a conservative. Like his Chinese
contemporary Confucius, he did not advocate draconic laws nor “more blue on the
street”, but the force of traditional mores and the awe for the sacred to
streamline society.
5. The Buddha’s teachers
We
know some specifics of his culturally approved search in the footsteps of
earlier philosophers and renunciants. According to the Ariyapariyesana
Sutta (“syllabus on the noble search”), before reaching his Great
Awakening, he had two meditation teachers. The first one was linked with the
philosophical school Sāṁkhya, “enumeration”, then having a more general
meaning compared to later centuries when it had to compete with an array of
other schools, roughly “philosophy”. These were Ālāra Kālāma, a
famous expert in breath control and Dhyāna mārga, “the way of
meditation”; and Uddaka Rāmaputta, closer to Jainism. They taught him two advanced meditation techniques:
“staying in nothingness” (ākiñcaññāyatana), c.q. “entering the dimension
of neither perception nor non-perception” (nevasaññānasaññāyatana), also
qualified as “the peak of existence”.
The scenario in both cases was the same. He mastered the techniques in months, became equal to
his teachers; but then he grew dissatisfied with them because these mental
states did not, after the return to ordinary consciousness, eliminate suffering.
In the Buddha’s own words: “But
the thought occurred to me, 'This Dhamma leads not to disenchantment, to
dispassion, to cessation, to stilling, to direct knowledge, to Awakening, nor
to Unbinding, but only to reappearance in the dimension of nothingness.' So,
dissatisfied with that Dhamma, I left.”
Since
the beginning, he had had this idiosyncratic concern, not shared with all other
aspirants. Indeed, in the critiques of Buddhist meditation (as by Dayānanda 1875),
the seeming self-evidence of suffering (duḥkha) as motivating
starting-point of the spiritual search is rejected. Human searches for lofty
goals including the quest for Awakening can have more positive origins than the
attempt to quell suffering. The Upaniṣads strive for Mukti or Mokṣa
(liberation), viz. from Avidyā, (ignorance), a very similar goal to
Buddhist Nirvāṇa, “extinction”, but don’t start out with declaring that
this is a matter of escaping from this Vale of Tears. Only in the
Buddhist-influenced Yoga Sūtra of Patañjali do we find a less
emphatic but real enough acknowledgment that “to the discerning, everything is
painful”, 2:15; Yardi 1996:166).
Sometime
in mid-quest, people redefine their goals, and the Buddha’s mature
understanding of his spiritual goal could have changed from his juvenile
impulse. But no, he remained entirely serious about his original goal, so after
learning meditation, he moved on to develop his own variation. In modern
introductions, to Buddhism, this is often portrayed as a revolt, even done in disgust.
Thus, Bronkhorst breezily dismisses this evidence for the Hindu roots of
Buddhism: “…the Bodhisattva’s training under Ālāra
Kālāma and Uddaka the son of Rāma, which he
then discarded as useless.” (Bronkhorst 1993, emphasis added) This conflicts
with the source text, and with Buddhist practice, which has integrated these
meditation techniques in its training programme. They received the place of
honour in the Buddhist curriculum: as the last two stages before Liberation,
the final two of the four Jhānas (“meditations”, Sanskrit Dhyānas).
It is not a rejection but rather a case of Friedrich Nietzsche’s remark that
“you don’t honour your teacher by remaining his pupil”.
The Buddha went beyond what he had learned, but the information
given by the Sutta about the mutual relationship between him
and his teachers during and after his apprenticeship is all positive. They
remained friends, he called them “my companion in the holy life”. After his
discovery of Nirvāṇa, the Buddha sent for them to share it, only to
find that they had already died.
6. All this and world peace
That
Buddhism is but one of the evolutes of a much older tradition, is a modestly
useful insight for world peace. It takes the doctrinal dimension out of
the modern anti-Hindu animus in Buddhist countrie, which has led to the
expulsion of Hindu populations from Myanmar, Sri Lanka or Bhutan. Inside India,
it takes away a similar anti-Hindu animus among the followers of Jawaharlal
Nehru, who turned Buddhism into India’s unofficial state religion, (reviving
Aśoka’s state symbols). They and the Ambedkarites have started to wield
Buddhism as a weapon against Hinduism. The Buddha himself would be surprised to
see what has become of his legacy. He himself never had a quarrel with the
ambient Brahmin-dominated culture, and the only attempts on his life were by
one of his own jealous disciples.
But
even without these political benefits, it remains worthwhile for its own sake to
raise awareness of Buddhism’s profound rootedness in a much older Hindu
culture. Compared to the Western and neo-Buddhist conflict models of the
Buddha’s relation with Hindu tradition, it is simply more truthful.
Conclusion
Gautama the Buddha was part
of an ancient tradition. Just as it is false to dub Mahatma Gandhi the
"father of the nation" (because he considered himself the son of an
ancient nation), it would be false to call the Buddha the father of anything.
He was the founder of a monastic order, the Saṁgha, but not of a new
religion. His Dharma was a variation on the teachings that already
existed, perhaps with a few unique touches, just like most other Sampradāyas.
Indeed, the differences between them are mirrored by the differences that soon
developed between sub-schools of Buddhism. Nobody calls Mahāyāna a break-away
from Buddhism, just as nobody calls Advaita a breakaway from Vedānta.
Similarly, we should not call Buddhism a breakaway from Hinduism.
Ambedkar,
Bhimrao, 1957 (Akash Singh Rathore ed. 2011): The Buddha and His Dhamma,
OUP, Delhi.
Bronkhorst,
Johannes, 2000 (1993): The Two Traditions of Meditation in Ancient India,
Motilal Bannarsidass, Delhi.
Dayānanda
Sarasvatī, Svāmī,
1875 (2014): Satyārtha Prakāśa (Light of Truth, Sanskrit text with
English trannslation), Vijay Kumar Hasananda, Delhi.
Elst,
Koenraad, 2018: “The Buddha as political advisor”, unpublished paper read on 23
January at Jindal University, Sonepat.
Gombrich,
Richard, 1987: “Old bodies like carts”, mentioned in Gombrich 2009:63, 213n.
--,
2009: What the Buddha Thought, Equinox, London.
Hsing
Yun, 2013 (Chinese original 1998): The Biography of Sakyamuni Buddha,
Foguang Publ., Taiwan.
Nehru,
Jawaharlal, 1994 (1946): Discovery of India, OUP Delhi.
Sarvepalli
Radhakrishnan, ed., 1992 (1953): The Principal Upaniṣads, Humanity
Books, New York.
Talageri,
Shrikant, 2019: Genetics and the Aryan Debate, Aditya Prakashan, Delhi.
Yardi,
MR, 1996 (1979): The Yoga of Patañjali, BORI, Pune
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