By Chandre Dharmawardana

Gautama Buddha has been such a towering figure for over twenty six centuries of human history that there is no shortage of authors attempting to put together his life story cast as that of a supernatural being. Asvaghosa’s Buddhacharita” appeared in the 1st century in Sanskrit. It is the story as narrated in the Lalitavisture Sutra that became translated into Chinese during the Jin and Tang dynasties, and inspired the art and sculpture of Gandhara and Barobudur. Tenzin Chogyel’s 18th century work Life of the Lord Victor Shakyamuni, Ornament of One Thousand Lamps for the Fortunate Eon is still a Penguin classic (as translated by R. Schaeffer from Tibetan).

Interestingly, there is no Life of the Buddha” in Pali itself (if we discount Buddhagosha’s Kathavatthu), and the thus have I heard” sutta’s of Bhikku Ananada, the personal assistant to the Buddha, contain only a minimal emphasis on the life of the Buddha directly. This was entirely in keeping with the Buddha’s exhortation to each one to minimize one’s sense of self ” to the point of extinction.

However, it is inescapable that the life of a great teacher will be chronicled by his followers. Today, there is even a collective effort by a group of scholars who work within the Buddha Sutra project”, aimed at presenting the Buddha’s life and teachings in English from a perspective grounded in the original Pali texts. The project, involving various international scholars of several traditions contribute different viewpoints and interpretations.

In contrast, there are the well-known individual scholarly studies, varying from the classic work of E. J. Thomas entitled The Life of the Buddha according to the Pali Canon”, the very comprehensive accounts by Bhikku Nanamoli, or the scholarly work of John Strong that attempts to balance the historical narrative with the supernatural, canonical with the vernacular [1]. Furthermore, a vast variety of books in English cover even the sociological and cultural background related to the Buddha’s life within fictionalised approaches and via fact-seeking narratives. The classic work Siddhartha” by Hermann Hesse, or the very recent Mansions of the Moon”, by Shyam Selvadurai attempts to depict the daily life of Siddartha in the fifth century BCE in fictional settings. Interpretive narratives such as The man who understood suffering” by Pankaj Misra provide another perspective on the Buddha and his times. In fact, a cursory search in a public library in Ontario, Canada came up with more than a dozen different books, and as many video presentations, in response to the search for the key-word Life of the Buddha”.

Interestingly, a simple non-exhaustive search for books in Sinhala on The Life of the Buddha” brings out some 39 books, but most of the content is restricted to a narrow re-rendering of the usual story that we learn from the well-known books by Bhikku Narada, or Ven. Kotagama Vachissra, while others are hagiographic and cover even the legendary life of Deepankara Buddha who, according to traditional belief, lived some hundred thousand eons (kalpa”) ago!

However, as far as I know, there are hardly any books in Sinhala that attempt to discuss the sociological and cultural characteristics of the life and times of the Buddha, or discuss how an age of inquisitiveness and search for answers to fundamental philosophic questions developed in north Indian city states of the Magadha, Anga and Vajji regions that bracketed the River Ganges. In fact, Prof. Price, writing a preface to K. N. Jayatilleke’ s book on the Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge states that the intellectual ambiance and the epistemological stance of the Buddha’s times could have been that of 1920s Cambridge when Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and others set the pace! A similar intellectual ambiance of open-minded inquiry regarding existential questions existed in the golden age of Greece, with philosophers like Heraclitus, Socrates and others who were surely influenced by the ebb and flow of ideas from India to the West, via the silk route that passed through Varanasi (Baranes Nuvara of Sinhalese Buddhist texts). The Buddha had strategically chosen Varanasi, le carrefour of the East-West and North-South silk routes, to deliver his first sermon to his earliest disciples.

This usual narrowness found in the books on the Life of the Buddha” available in Sinhala is to some extent bridged by the appearance of the book Siddhartha Gauthama- Shakya Muneendrayano” (Sarasavi Publishers, 2024) [2] written by Rajendra Alwis, an educationist and linguist holding post-graduate degrees from Universities in the UK and Canada. The book comes with an introduction by Dharmasena Hettiarchchi. well known for his writings on Buddhist Economic thought. Rajendra Alwis devotes the first four chapters of his book to a discussion of the socio-cultural and agricultural background that prevailed in ancient India. He attempts to frame the rise of Buddhist thought in the Southern Bihar region of India with the rise of a rice-eating” civilisation that had the leisure and prosperity for intellectual discourse on existentialist matters.

The chapter on Brahminic traditions and the type of education received by upper caste children of the era is of some interest since some Indian and Western writers have even made the mistake of stating that the Buddha had no formal education. Rajendra Alwis occasionally weaves into his text quotations from the Sinhala Sandesha Kavya, etc., to buttress his arguments, and nicely blends Sinhalese literature into the narrative.

However, this discussion, or possibly an additional chapter, could have branched into a critical discussion of the teachings of the leading Indian thinkers of the era, both within the Jain and the Vedic traditions of the period. The systematisation of Parkrit languages into a synthetic linguistic form, viz., Sanskrit, in the hands of Panini and other Scholars took place during and overarching this same era. So, a lot of mind-boggling achievements took place during the Buddha’s time, and I for one would have liked to see these mentioned and juxtaposed within the context of what one might call the Enlightenment of the Ancient world that took place in the 6th Century BCE in India. Another lacuna in the book, hopefully to be rectified in a future edition, is the lack of a map, showing the cities and kingdoms that hosted the rise of this enlightenment during the times of Gautama Buddha and Mahaveera.

The treatment of the Buddha’s life is always a delicate task, especially when writing in Sinhala, in a context where the Buddha is traditionally presented as a superhuman person – Lord Buddha – even above and beyond all the devas. Rajendra Alwis has managed the tight-rope walk and discussed delicate issues and controversial events in the Buddha’s life, without the slightest sign of disrespect, or without introducing too much speculation of his own into events where nothing is accurately known. We need more books of this genre for the the Sinhala-reading public.

[1] See review by McGill University scholar Jessica Main: https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/reviews/15976/main-strong-buddha-short-biography

[2] https://www.sarasavi.lk/product/siddhartha-gauthama-shakyamunidrayano-9553131948

By Chandre Dharmawardana
chandre.dharma@yahoo.ca

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