Chapter 87. The Buddha and the Early Sangha: Life, Teaching and the First Schism

Siddhartha Gautama, the “awakened one” (Buddha) of the Shakya clan, belongs to the same śramaṇa ferment as Mahavira (Chapter 86). His solution differed from Mahavira’s. He rejected both sensual indulgence and the self-torment of the Jains, he denied the permanent self that the Upanishads identified with Brahman, and he left behind an order of monks (the Sangha) rather than a successor. This chapter reconstructs the life from the scholarly biographies in the library (Armstrong, Carrithers) and from the scriptural narratives (Ashvaghosha’s Buddhacarita, the Pali canon). It then sets out the core teaching through Theravada expositors and a Theosophical lecturer. It follows the oral canon, the councils and the first schism between Sthaviras and Mahasanghikas. It closes with the dispute over whether Buddhism is atheistic.

Sources for a Life Lived 2,500 Years Ago

Michael Carrithers (in the Romanian translation of his Past Masters volume) states the problem directly: “As regards the life of the Buddha, we rely almost exclusively on Buddhist writings preserved in many Oriental languages.” The oldest layers, the Basket of Discourses (Suttapitaka) and the Basket of Discipline (Vinayapitaka), present themselves as the Buddha’s own answers given at particular places. Monks rehearsed these teachings during the four months of the monsoon retreat. They held a council “probably immediately after” his death and another “almost certainly a century later”. They used formulae, verse and the division of material into overlapping corpora, each memorised by designated monks. “The Buddhist sacred books were written down only three or four hundred years after the Buddha’s death.” Carrithers adds that the oral methods probably preserved his words better than “today’s print culture would be willing to admit”. Even so, some sayings were lost, some were misunderstood, and the monks “added much of their own, tending above all to glorify the figure of the Buddha”. The oldest texts crystallised around the time of the second council, “so that all we can hope for is to understand the Buddha about as well as his own disciples did three generations after his death” [Carrithers, Buddha – Maestrii Spiritului, #74309, Introduction, trans. from Romanian].

Van Voorst records the believers’ view, which differs from this: “Buddhists believe that Prince Gotama established among his monk disciples an oral transmission of his teachings on which later written scriptures are based. They trace all the varied scripture collections and their contents back to Buddha. All scriptures are his word.” In the traditional account, the first council met at Rajagaha “in 483 B.C.E.” Over seven months it fixed an official version, which Ananda recited, and the account even has the sayings written on palm leaves at that time. This differs from Carrithers’ three-to-four-century gap. Mahayanists hold that all three baskets date from that council. Theravadins assign the Abhidhamma Pitaka to a third council in 253 BCE, and “most modern scholars agree that the nature of this basket seems to suggest a later origin” [Van Voorst, Anthology of World Scriptures, #63227, ch. 3 “Historical Origin and Development”].

The Life: Renunciation, Austerity, Awakening

The poetic life most widely read is the Buddhacarita (“Acts of the Buddha”) by Ashvaghosha, “who lived in the first century B.C.E.”, and whom scholars “place… between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism” [Van Voorst, #63227, “The Life of Siddhartha Gotama”]. In its account the Bodhisattva enters Queen Maya’s womb as a six-tusked white elephant and is born from her side in the Lumbini garden, declaring “this is my last birth”. The sage Asita foretells his renunciation. His father, King Suddhodana, surrounds him with pleasures and marries him to Yasodhara. On three excursions, gods create an old man, a sick man and a corpse to “stir the heart of the king’s son”. A fourth apparition, a heavenly ascetic who “flew up to the sky”, rouses him to seek deliverance. On the bank of the Nairangana he practises fasting “for six years, vainly trying to attain merit… He had only skin and bone remaining” [Van Voorst, #63227, Buddhacarita 1-14]. Thornton (1898) sets the Buddha’s six years against Mahavira’s twelve and notes that “Buddha looked upon those six years as wasted time” [Thornton, Parsi, Jaina and Sikh, #55051, ch. II]. Karen Armstrong describes the outcome as the “Middle Way,” which shunned “physical and emotional self-indulgence on the one hand, and extreme asceticism (which could be just as destructive)” on the other [Armstrong, Buddha, #70021].

Carrithers reduces the legend to an outline he regards as historically secure: “birth, maturity, renunciation, search, awakening and liberation, preaching, death”. He identifies its two pivots as the renunciation and the awakening. He quotes the Buddha’s claim that “the world, the origin of the world, the cessation of the world and the path that leads to the cessation of the world exist within this fathom-long body” (S I 62), and the rule of testimony the Buddha set for himself and his monks: what one asserts must be “the same as what you have realised, seen, known yourself” (M I 265) [Carrithers, #74309, Introduction].

The night of awakening is traditionally divided into three watches, each bringing one of three knowledges. Jeff Shelley’s short study focuses on the first, the recollection of former lives, quoting the Bhayabherava Sutta: “There I was so named, of such a clan, with such an appearance, such was my nutriment, such my experience of pleasure and pain, such my life-term; and passing away from there, I reappeared elsewhere… Thus with their aspects and particulars I recollected my manifold past lives.” Shelley notes that some readings “will lead the student to believe that the Buddha lived many lives spanning eons”, while “others will state he was a man just the best of man”. He offers a psychological reading built on the four nutriments (edible food, sense impression, volition, consciousness), in which recollection becomes moment-by-moment insight into how experience is fed [Shelley, A Further Investigation of the First Watch, #39079].

Osho offers an iconoclastic counter-story. In it, Siddhartha competed with Mahavira and six others for the vacant seat of twenty-fourth Jain Tirthankara. He lost because he “was not such a great ascetic”, whereas “Mahavir was almost a masochist”. He then took the parallel title “Buddha” and “visualized twenty-three absolutely imaginary Buddhas who had preceded him… just to complete the score of twenty-four” [Osho, No Mind: The Flowers of Eternity, #46664, ch. 6]. No other source in this chapter supports the claim. It is reported here as Osho’s own account.

The Teaching: Four Truths, Path, Dependent Origination, No-Self

Narada Mahathera, a Sri Lankan Theravada monk, gives the canonical formulation: “The foundations of Buddhism are the four Noble Truths — namely, Suffering…, its cause (i.e., Craving), its end (i.e., Nibbana…), and the Middle Way.” Suffering is “birth… old age… disease… death… in brief the five Aggregates of Attachment”. Its cause is “the craving which leads from rebirth to rebirth”, for sensual pleasures, for existence and for annihilation. Its end is “the remainderless, total annihilation of this very craving”. The path is “the Noble Eightfold Path which consists of right understanding, right thoughts, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right endeavor, right mindfulness, and right concentration”. He rejects the charge of pessimism: Buddhism “is neither totally pessimistic nor totally optimistic” [Narada Mahathera, Buddhism in a Nutshell, #54393, ch. V]. He describes paticca samuppada (dependent origination) as “only a discourse on the process of birth and death and not a theory of the ultimate origin of life” [#54393, ch. VIII].

On anatta Narada is explicit: “Buddhism denies the existence of an unchanging or eternal soul created by a God or emanating from a Divine Essence (Paramatma).” Rebirth must be distinguished from “re-incarnation which implies the transmigration of a soul”. He enlists Hume (“I never catch myself…”), William James (“the thoughts themselves are the thinkers”) and Bertrand Russell, and concludes: “The Buddha anticipated these facts some 2500 years ago.” The mind is “nothing but a complex compound of fleeting mental states” [#54393, ch. IX “Anatta or Soul-lessness”]. Armstrong sets this against the Upanishads. The atman was “the eternal, unchangeable Self sought by the yogins… believed in the Upanisads to be identical with brahman”. The Buddha “did not believe that ‘consciousness’ was the kind of permanent, eternal Self sought by the yogins, but saw it as a last flickering energy, like a flame”. The doctrine “did not seek to annihilate the self. He simply denied that the self had ever existed” [Armstrong, Buddha, #70021, ch. 4 “Dhamma” and Glossary].

Annie Besant, lecturing at the Theosophical Society’s Adyar headquarters in 1896, builds her account on Rhys Davids and Oldenberg’s SBE Vinaya Texts (Mahavagga I.i) and the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta. At Benares the Buddha told the five ascetics “that the two extremes of self-indulgence and of constant self-mortification were alike profitless, and that, avoiding these, He had trodden the middle path, which leads to insight, which leads to wisdom”. Besant also explains “the twelve Nidanas”, whose “first is Avidya, ‘ignorance'”. She quotes the Sutra of Forty-two Sections (Beal’s translation from the Chinese) for the instruction “Keep wide awake, Ananda” [Besant, Four Great Religions, #55017, “Buddhism”].

Is Buddhism Atheistic?

The question divides the library’s sources. The evangelical Encyclopedic Dictionary of Cults, Sects, and World Religions holds that Buddhist teaching on the self “probably accounts in part for the allegation that it is a form of atheism. Actually, Buddhism is no more atheistic than it is theistic or pantheistic.” It argues that the charge “can hardly be laid at the door of a teacher who declares of the universe… ‘There is an unborn, an originated [sic], an uncreated'”. The entry contrasts Buddhist “self-attainment of salvation” with Christian atonement. It also notes that Buddhism, “protesting the caste system”, propounded “an ethic of egalitarianism”, and that “Mahayana and Theravada Buddhists differ in their ideas of salvation and the afterlife” [Schmidt, Mather & Nichols, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Cults, #65667, “Buddhism”].

Armstrong takes the opposite line: “The Buddha always denied the existence of any absolute principle or Supreme Being, since this could be another thing to cling to, another fetter.” Nibbana “was neither a personality nor a place like Heaven” [Armstrong, Buddha, #70021, ch. 4]. Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, the Thai reformer, rejects the Western view that Buddhism “isn’t a religion, since it has no God”. In his account, the Law of Nature “is the Buddhist God. In Buddhism there isn’t a personal God; its God — the Law of Nature — is an impersonal God. Because Buddhism, in fact, has a God, it is a religion” [Buddhadasa, The Natural Cure for Spiritual Disease, #54398]. Narada takes a middle position: “In one sense Buddhism is not a religion, in another sense it is the religion of religions… It is neither eternalism nor nihilism” [Narada, #54393]. Van Voorst records the historical shift that sharpened the question. With Mahayana (1st century CE), “the older idea of self-redemption characteristic of Theravada Buddhism gave way to redemption through the grace of this Buddha” and of bodhisattvas [Van Voorst, #63227].

Councils and the First Schism

The reference shelf summarises the scholarly reconstruction. According to the Cullavagga, three months after the parinirvana the arahants met at Rajagaha under Mahakassapa, with King Ajatasattu’s support. Even then the monk Purana declared he would keep the teaching “in that same way that I heard it in the Lord’s presence”, which Paul Williams reads as early disagreement. “Some scholars argue that the First Council did not actually take place.” According to Theravada tradition, the first schism followed the Second Council at Vaishali, “approximately one hundred years after” the Buddha. Lamotte and Hirakawa place it under Ashoka (c. 268-232 BCE), while Collett Cox places it after his death [Wikipedia: Early Buddhist schools]. Jan Nattier and Charles Prebish date the split to 116 years after the nirvana. The causes are disputed. The Mahasanghika Sariputrapariprccha, the earliest surviving account, attributes the split to the majority (mahasangha) refusing extra Vinaya rules proposed by a minority of Elders. Sthavira sources such as the Sarvastivadins blame Mahadeva’s “five points”, four of which make arhatship an imperfect attainment. Scholars note that Sthavira Vinayas do contain more rules, but Bhante Sujato denies that the Mahasanghika Vinaya is demonstrably the oldest [Wikipedia: Mahāsāṃghika]. The Mahasanghikas went on to anticipate Mahayana ideas, among them a transcendent Buddha, many contemporaneous buddhas and the luminous mind. The Sthaviras produced the Vibhajjavada orthodoxy of the Third Council under Moggaliputta Tissa, whose canon Mahinda took to Sri Lanka, where it was written down in Pali [Wikipedia: Early Buddhist schools; Wikipedia: Mahāsāṃghika].

A Modern Western Counterpoint: Heisman’s “Rational Self-Annihilation”

Mitchell Heisman does not discuss the Buddha in the passages retrieved for this chapter. The comparison drawn here is therefore this study’s, not his. His Suicide Note sets out what he calls “the non-Euclidean logic of rational self-destruction” as the inverse of Hobbes’ “rational self-preservation”. He asks: “Could the attempt to remove all sources of prejudice, bias, and subjectivity amount to rational self-destruction? Is to most fully approach objectivity to approach death?” He also asks whether a rigorously value-free scientist ends in “indifference to the survival, not only of a given individual,… but of all life” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252]. The Buddhist tradition addresses a similar question in Narada’s list of three cravings, which includes “craving for annihilation” (vibhavatanha) as a cause of suffering, and in Armstrong’s insistence that anatta “did not seek to annihilate the self”. Nibbana, on this account, is the extinction of craving and not of a self, which never existed. Heisman’s project, by contrast, takes the dissolution of the self’s biases to its literal and physical end.

Key points

• Carrithers stresses that the Buddha’s life is known almost entirely from Buddhist texts written down “three or four hundred years” after his death. Van Voorst records the believers’ view that “All scriptures are his word”, with a first council at Rajagaha in 483 BCE.
• Ashvaghosha’s Buddhacarita (1st century BCE), placed between Theravada and Mahayana, supplies the classic narrative: miraculous birth, the four sights, six years of fasting, awakening.
• Shelley reads the first watch of the awakening night, the recollection of past lives, both literally and as moment-by-moment insight through the four nutriments.
• Narada gives the Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path and defines anatta as the denial of “an unchanging or eternal soul”. Armstrong contrasts this with the Upanishadic atman.
• Besant’s Theosophical lecture relies on Rhys Davids and Oldenberg for the first sermon’s Middle Way and on the twelve nidanas beginning with ignorance.
• On atheism, the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Cults says Buddhism is “no more atheistic than it is theistic or pantheistic”, Armstrong says the Buddha denied any Supreme Being, and Buddhadasa calls the impersonal Law of Nature “the Buddhist God”.
• The first schism (Sthavira vs Mahasanghika) followed the Vaishali council c. 100-116 years after the Buddha. Sources disagree over whether Vinaya rules or Mahadeva’s five points caused it.
• Osho’s claim that the Buddha lost a “competition” to Mahavira, and Heisman’s “rational self-destruction”, stand as unconventional counterpoints to the tradition’s own account.