Thursday, October 28th, 2010 Who was the Buddha? An Examination of the Buddha's Muṇḍan Heritage

Description

The image we have of the Buddha – as a kṣatriya Aryan prince who renounces wealth and power to follow the Aryan path of renunciation and who founds a new religion which is a reaction to and reformulation of Vedic and Upaniṣadic teachings – is a later Aryanization of his life, begun by Aśvaghoṣa in his Buddhacarita biography and by the author of the Lalitavistara biography, some five hundred years after his passing. This view is still current among many modern academics. By examining the earliest biographical sources of the Buddha’s life and lineage we can learn several important facts about his heritage and philosophy: the Buddha’s renunciant tradition did not stem from Vedism, but from the native religious practices of the authocthonous tribes. The Sakya tribes were a Muṇḍan speaking aboriginal group who lived on the fringes of Aryan India and practiced a religious which was uniquely non-Aryan. Their belief in reincarnation and karmic retribution, for example, is indigenous to the native tribes and adopted from them into the Aryan belief system, not the other way around. The Buddha also never called himself a kṣatriya and in fact did not believe in caste; his so-called kṣatriya status is problematized and shown to be assigned by the Aryan hegemony who assimilated and conquered the tribes, calling the ones who helped them kṣatriyas and the ones who opposed them śūdras or dāsas. By the Buddha’s time there was significant assimilation and miscegenation between the local Muṇḍan and immigrating Aryan ethnic groups, and the Buddha’s position between the two was a primary factor in early Buddhism’s success.
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Bryan Levman is a PhD student in the Department of Religion, Buddhist Studies at the University of Toronto. His principal research interest is the language of the earliest Buddhist tradition; what it is and how it was understood by native speakers and by later interpreters. In studying the earliest Buddhist writings he discovered that many of the commonly accepted “facts” of the Buddha’s biography and teachings were not supported by the textual sources, but appeared to be re-constructions by his biographers, assimilating the movement to the dominant Aryan hegemony, centuries after his passing. Hence the genesis of this talk.