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Buddha’s life has the structure of a mythical hero’s journey.

Next, I will discuss Buddhist philosophy and the Buddhist solution to suffering. But before I do, I wanted to relate Buddha’s life—which, if nothing else, is a marvelous story.

The Buddha’s dates are uncertain and range from 624 BCE (earliest birth) to 368 BCE (latest death). Whatever his dates, he began as a wandering ascetic and lived for some 80 years. His movement, Buddhism, arose in reaction to the increasing remoteness and abstruseness of Vedic Brahmanism. His followers deified him and, accordingly, mythologized his life; and it would be profitless to try, if that were possible, to separate the mythology from the reality.

Birth

According to tradition, Siddharta Gautama, later known as the Buddha, was born in Lumbini, in what is now southern Nepal, to King Shuddhodana of the Shakya clan. His mother, Mahamaya, dreamt of a white elephant with six tusks entering her right side. Ten lunar months later, while strolling in a garden in Lumbini, she grabbed onto the drooping branch of a sal tree, and Siddharta (“He who has achieved his aim”) emerged fully formed from under her right arm. Siddharta proceeded to take seven steps before announcing that this would be his last life.

Early Years

Seven days later, Mahamaya died. The court astrologers predicted that Siddharta would become either a chakravartin (universal monarch) or a buddha (enlightened one). Not wishing to lose his son and heir—and, at that, a future chakravartin—to a life of renunciation, Shuddhodana confined him to a life of luxury within the precinct of the palace, where he would not be exposed to religious teaching or human suffering. At the age of 16, Siddharta married the beautiful princess Yashodara, and everything seemed on track for Shuddhodana.

First Contact With Old Age, Infirmity, and Death

But at the age of 29, having tired of the delights of the royal kitchen and harem, Siddharta asked to make a chariot ride through the city. The king agreed but had all the old, infirm, and otherwise poor cleared from the route. Even so, Siddharta did, for the very first time, catch a glimpse of an old man. He asked Channa, his charioteer: “Am I also subject to this?”

With his curiosity piqued, Siddharta made three more outings, seeing, in turn, a diseased man, a decaying corpse, and, finally, a meditating mendicant, whose serene smile inspired him to join the path in search of freedom from suffering.

Renunciation and the Path to Enlightenment

Sandstone head of the fasting Buddha, whom Sujata mistook for a wish-granting tree spirit. Gandhara, second or third century CE. British Museum, London. The Greco-Buddhist Ghandara school produced the first representations of the Buddha in human form, ending the early period of aniconism in Buddhism.

Source: Wikimedia Commons/public domain

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Siddharta renounced his position, wealth, and family to take up the life of a wandering ascetic. As night fell and he prepared to make his escape, he was told that a son had been born to him. He went into Yashodara’s chamber to look upon his sleeping wife and son and named the boy Rahula (“Fetter,” on the path to enlightenment). Having crossed the Anoma River into the forest, he sent back the faithful Channa along with his weapons, jewels, and hair. He even sent back his beloved horse, Kanthaka, who died from a broken heart.

In the forest, Siddharta adopted the life of a mendicant, or beggar. For the next six years, he practised successively under two meditation teachers. With five friends, he subjected himself to extreme forms of self-mortification, gradually reducing his daily meal to a single grain of rice.

One day, he accepted a bowl of kheera (milk-rice pudding) from a farmer’s wife called Sujata, who had mistaken the skeletal waif for a wish-granting tree spirit. With some food in the belly, he concluded that extreme asceticism would not advance him along the path to freedom from suffering, but serve only to cloud his mind.

Sandstone head of the fasting Buddha, whom Sujata mistook for a wish-granting tree spirit. Gandhara, second or third century CE. British Museum, London. The Greco-Buddhist Ghandara school produced the first representations of the Buddha in human form, ending the early period of aniconism in Buddhism.

Enlightenment

On the full moon of May, six years after having left the palace, the 35-year-old Siddharta sat in meditation under a peepul tree. The demon Mara tried to disrupt him, including by sending his daughters to seduce him.

When Mara challenged his right to occupy the ground on which he sat, he touched the earth with his right hand, and the goddess of the earth confirmed with a tremor that he had earned this right—on account of a great gift that he had made in his previous life as Prince Vessantara.

Through the night, he had visions of his past lives. Then, at dawn, he reached enlightenment and became a Buddha.

The peepul tree, Ficus religiosa, is now better known as the Bodhi tree, and the place where the Buddha sat in meditation as Bodh Gaya (“Place of Enlightenment”). Representations of the Buddha often include his earth-touching gesture, known as the bhumiparsha mudra.

First Sermons

Naga-enthroned Buddha, Angkor, twelfth century CE.

Source: Wikimedia Commons/Cleveland Museum of Art/Public domain

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The Buddha remained in the vicinity of the Bodhi tree to savour his enlightenment. When a seven-day storm blew up, the serpent king Mucalinda encircled him seven times with his coils and sheltered him with his seven-headed hood.

After seven weeks (note the preponderance of the number seven), the Buddha got up to teach. He delivered his first sermon in the deer park at Sarnath, on the outskirts of Kashi (modern-day Varanasi), preaching the Middle Way between luxury and austerity, the Four Noble Truths, and the Eightfold Path.

In his second sermon, he presented his doctrine of anatman (no-self). So eloquently did he speak that, upon hearing him, his five ascetic friends rose up into arhats (those who have gained such insight as to escape the cycle of rebirth). They became the first members of the Buddhist monastic order known as the sangha.

Naga-enthroned Buddha, Angkor, twelfth century CE.

Later Life

For the next 45 years, the Buddha spread his teachings across northeast India, followed by wandering ascetics and laypersons who supported the ascetics. Although many of his followers imitated him in renouncing the life of the householder, most were not so ambitious.

Over the years, many of the renouncers settled into monasteries funded by prominent members of the laity. The Buddha delivered many of his discourses in the monastery of Jetavana in Shravasti, the capital of Kosala, which had been donated to him by the banker Anathapindada.

When Mahamaya’s sister Mahapajapati, who had been his foster mother and became his stepmother, asked to be ordained, the Buddha refused her, perhaps owing to fears about the safety of nuns. But when pressed, he relented, and Mahapajapati became the first bhikkhuni (Buddhist nun). In time, Yashodhara, too, became a bhikkhuni. When Rahula asked for his patrimony, his father ordained him a monk.

However, the Buddha refused to appoint his radically austere cousin Devadatta as his successor. Bitterly aggrieved, Devadatta tried three times to kill him by means of assassins, a boulder, and an elephant, which arrested its charge to bow at his feet. The schism was repaired when the earth sucked Devadatta down into Naraka, or Hell.

Death

In Kushinagara, the Buddha, now around 80 years old, succumbed to a tainted piece of either mushroom or pork.

His chief disciple, Mahakashyapa, ignited the funeral pyre, after which his relics were distributed and enshrined in large mound-like structures called stupas.

According to Buddhist tradition, in the third century BCE, the Mauryan emperor Ashoka gathered the relics from seven of the eight stupas and erected 84,000 stupas to distribute them across India.

Some of Ashoka’s stupas, such as the Great Stupa at Sanchi and the Dhamek Stupa at Sarnath, remain important pilgrimage sites.

Read more in Indian Mythology and Philosophy.​

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Karma, often misunderstood as fate or destiny, is conceptualized as a causal law by which our modes of engagement come to determine our station and situation. According to several Indian religions, karma is the law of cause and effect extended to human affairs; every instance of thought, speech, and action is a cause, and all our experiences are their effects.

Karma, good and bad, is often referred to as punya (“merit”) and paap (“demerit”). Even if punya does not immediately pay off, or seem to pay off, it does in the longer term, which is why karma is tied to samsara, the transmigration of life, with future births conditioned by the accumulated balance of paap and punya.

Greek Parallels

At the outset of Plato’s Republic, the sophist Thrasymachus argues that it is not the just but the unjust who flourish, and that the tyrant, being the most wicked of people, is also the happiest. At the end of the Republic, in the Myth of Er, Plato resorts to reincarnation to guarantee that the genuinely just always come out on top, with each soul choosing its next life according to its wisdom. In this and other things, Plato was influenced by Pythagoras (d. 495 BCE), who, like the Indians, came to believe in the transmigration of the soul.

The Transfer of Karma

Although karma is individual, it is believed that in certain circumstances it can be transferred—for example, from a dying father to his son, with the son being, essentially, the continuation of the father. This rite, in which the father places himself above his son, and touches his organs with his own, is laid out in the Kaushitaki Upanishad.

More ordinarily, the paap of a person, living or deceased, may be mitigated by the prayers and pilgrimages of others.

The Function of Karma and Christian Parallels

Karma serves the same purpose as Eden in providing the major motivation to lead a moral life. In the Christian tradition, it is believed that the soul of the newly deceased is judged and sent to heaven, hell, or purgatory. Then, there is also a Last Judgement that takes place after the Second Coming of Christ and the resurrection of the dead.

In the Letter to the Galatians, St Paul warns: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” According to the Old Testament, punishment might even be extended to later generations, that is, to future selves:

The Lord is long-suffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.

Karma also serves other purposes, such as accounting for the existence of evil, rationalizing rebirth (which could also operate independently of karma), and providing a soteriological goal of final liberation.

In determining our circumstances and even our temperament, karma may constrict our options, but it does not deprive us of choice and deliberation, enabling it to condone social inequities and the caste system while at the same time affirming human freedom.

The Philosophy of Karma

The importance of karma, and the degree of freedom and determination within it, is a matter of debate between the Hindu schools.

But even if karma theory is not literally true, it is at least metaphorically true. Being good does pay off, if only in peace of mind and mental health.

In which case, is karma theory a firm basis for morality, or an appeal to naked self-interest?

One way around this problem, which has been taken, is to broaden the scope of karma to include thoughts as well as actions, so that the system becomes impossible to game.

Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is not the same, and does not feel the same, as doing it for the right reason. According to the Great Forest Upanishad, the truly virtuous act is the one that is desire-less. Like the Stoic archer, one must concentrate on doing the right thing, to the best of one’s ability, without being attached to the outcome. For it is from attachment that life and misery arise.

The Buddhist Solution

The Buddha had another way around the problem, which is to deny the metaphysical distinction between the self and others so that helping others is the same as helping oneself.

Aristotle makes a similar move in the Nicomachean Ethics, when he says that there is no conflict between helping a friend and helping oneself insofar as a perfect friend is like another self.

When we are good to another, we are good to all, including ourself, because the distinction is an illusion, and karma travels.

If we have no self, why did the Buddhists not altogether give up on karma and samsara?

In part, because karma can still operate in the absence of a Self, or Atma, with future incarnations being conditioned by the sum of all the karmic actions that have been put into the world.

Every person—their parents, their teachers, and their parents and teachers—is the embodiment of every karmic action that has ever gone before. Our every action reverberates to the end of time.

Read more in Indian Mythology and Philosophy.

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A cultural and intellecual history of Ancient India.

Impeccably crafted… a monumental achievement. —Rich Follett for Readers’ Favorite ★★★★★

Sitting down with the Bhagavad Gita at the age of sixteen opened many new channels in my mind. Ever since, for the best part of thirty years, I have been searching for a book on Indian thought that ties it all up, coherently and succinctly.

Write the book you want to read, they say—and this, here, is it.

While covering all the important areas (see contents list below), you will learn:

  • How the Vedic gods are related to the Greek and Roman ones.
  • The secret of the self that even the gods were desperate to learn.
  • How to stop suffering, according to the Buddha.
  • How to achieve enlightenment, according to the Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains.
  • How the swastika came to be appropriated by the Nazis.
  • How Gandhi’s non-violence is rooted in Indian philosophy.
  • Why the Kama Sutra is about a lot more than sex.
  • What yoga’s actually about—not even my yoga teacher knew this.
  • How the Gupta Golden Age led to the invention of zero, chess, and nose jobs.
  • And much, much more.

Never before has the history of Indian thought and culture been laid out as clearly and succinctly as in Burton’s book. —Prof Nicolas Martin, Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies, University of Zürich 

The parallels between Indian and Greek philosophy amazed me… This book will hold your interest until the last page. —Courtnee Turner Hoyle for Readers’ Favorite ★★★★★

Burton shines a fascinating light on one of the world’s most ancient, and still thriving, cultures. —The US Review of Books (Recommended)

Neel is an incredibly insightful and elegant writer, with a deep knowledge of all he surveys. —Dr James Davies, medical anthropologist and psychotherapist, author of ‘Cracked’

Burton’s writing blends deep knowledge of his subject with lively anecdote and a genuine concern for how we might draw on the insights of psychology and philosophy to live a better life. Highly recommended! —Dr Gareth Southwell, philosopher and writer, author of ‘Words of Wisdom’

I’ve read many Neel Burton books. He’s a wonderful writer and able to immerse you lightly in pretty heavy stuff. —Adrian Bailey, Vine Voice

Contents List

Preface
Introduction: A Picture of India

1. The Indus Valley Civilization
2. The Aryans and their Vedas
3. Vedic Gods: Indra, Agni, Soma, and the Rest
4. Sanskrit and the Grammar of Panini
5. The Upanishads
6. Brahman and Brahma
7. Atman, or the Self
8. Karma, Samsara, Moksha, Yoga
9. Life of the Buddha
10. Buddhist Philosophy
11. The Jataka Tales
12. The Panchatantra
13. Jainism, Ahimsa, and Gandhi’s Satyagraha
14. The Mauryas: Chandragupta and Ashoka
15. Greek India
16. Dharma, the Laws of Manu, and the Caste System
17. The Arthashastra of Kautilya
18. The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana
19. The Ramayana of Valmiki
20. The Mahabharata of Vyasa
21. The Bhagavad Gita, or Song of God
22. The Puranas: Vishnu, Shiva, and Devi
23. The Guptas: The Golden Age of India
24. The Six Darshanas: Samkhya-Yoga
25. The Six Darshanas: Nyaya-Vaisheshika
26. The Six Darshanas: Mimamsa-Vedanta

Final words

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The Indus seals may shed light on the early history of Hinduism and yoga.

Figure 1. ‘Unicorn’ stamp seal and modern impression.

In my previous article, I discussed the Indian subcontinent’s first civilization and asked whether it might have been a utopia.

Of course, it is impossible to write about the Indus Valley Civilization without also writing about its famous seals.

These soapstone seals are a little over one-inch square and engraved with an image in the centre, and, on top, have signs that look like writing. Often, they have a pierced boss on the reverse to accommodate a cord.

The images are most commonly of animals such as bulls, elephants, and rhinoceros. But by far the most represented animal, on more than half of the seals, is a ‘unicorn’ with what seems to be the body of a bull and the head of a zebra, crowned by a single, sigmoidal horn (Figure 1).

Some five thousand Indus seals have been found, some as far afield as Central Asia and the Middle East. From the large number of surviving sealings, it seems that they were used like signet rings, pressed into clay or wax to brand wares and sign contracts and receipts. Some seals may also have been worn as amulets or talismans.

The Pashupati Seal

Although animals, including bulls, dominate representations on Indus seals and other artefacts, there are no representations of cows. That said, there are some suggestions of continuity with Hinduism.

For example, female terracotta figurines have been found with red pigment on the hair parting, similar to the sindoor worn by married Hindu women.

Although carved some two thousand years later, the animals on the capital plinths of the pillars of Ashoka (d. 232 BCE) are of a similar style to those on the Indus seals.

The so-called Pashupati (“Lord of the Animals”) seal, which is more elaborate than most, depicts a cross-legged figure surrounded by animals (Figure 2). Some have interpreted the figure, who has a horned headdress and possibly (it is hard to tell) three heads and a lingam, as an early depiction of Shiva, or proto-Shiva.

The Pashupati seal might also represent the earliest evidence of yoga, or yogic meditation, which has been an important inspiration and influence on modern approaches to mental health.

Figure 2. The Pashupati seal, with surrounding animals and Indus script. 2600-1900 BCE.

Deciphering the Indus Script

If we know relatively little about the Indus Valley Civilization, this is in part because the Indus script, like Minoan Linear A, remains undeciphered. It is also because the Harappans had no monarchs and cremated their dead, so that there are no rich burials like Tutankhamun in Egypt.

The Indus script is the earliest form of writing on the Indian subcontinent, with some inscriptions dating from the early Harappan phase, before 2700 BCE. After the demise of the Indus Valley Civilization, writing would not reappear in the subcontinent for another millennium.

Thousands of inscriptions have been found, mostly on seals, impressions of seals, and pottery markings. Most are very short, and none is longer than 26 signs. The signs are inscribed from right to left, and occasionally in boustrophedon (“turning ox”, alternating right-left, left-right from line to line).

Several hundred signs have been identified, although many are hapax, dis, or tris legomena that occur only once, twice, or thrice. Unless the signs are reducible, their sheer number suggests that the script is logosyllabic, with signs representing words as well as sounds—like Cuneiform, Han characters, and Mayan and Aztec glyphs. Certain strokes appear to be numerical.

Deciphering the Indus script is difficult for several reasons. First, the inscriptions are short. Second, there are no bilingual or digraphic texts like the Rosetta Stone. Third, we have no names, such as the names of cities, kings, or gods. Fourth, the signs might not even represent a language. And fifth, we do not know what this language might be, or even whether it is Indo-European, Dravidian, or something else.

If you enjoy a brainteaser, why not try to crack the code—and bring back a lost civilization?

Neel Burton is author of Indian Mythology and Philosophy.​

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I have long been fascinated by the myth of Echo and Narcissus, and may finally have cracked its meaning.

First, let’s remind ourselves of the myth. In Ovid’s version, the nymph Echo falls in love with Narcissus, a youth of remarkable beauty. As a child, Narcissus had been prophesied by Teiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes, to ‘live to a ripe old age, so long as he never knows himself’.

One day, Echo followed Narcissus through the woods as he hunted for stags. She longed to speak to him but dared not utter the first word. Overhearing her footsteps, the youth cried out, “Who’s there?”—to which she responded, “Who’s there?” When at last she revealed herself, she leapt out to embrace Narcissus, but he scorned her and cast her off.

Echo spent the rest of her days pining for Narcissus, and slowly withered away until there was nothing left of her but her voice.

Some time after his encounter with Echo, Narcissus went to quench his thirst at a pool of water. Seeing his own image in the water, he fell in love with it. But each time he bent down to kiss it, it seemed to disappear. Narcissus grew ever more thirsty but would not leave or disturb the pool of water for fear of losing sight of his fine features. 

At length, he died of thirst, and there, on the very spot, appeared the narcissus flower, with its bright face and bowed neck.

So what could this myth mean? 

On one level, it is an admonition to treat others as we would ourself be treated—and in particular to be considerate in responding to the affections of others, which, as with Echo, are often so raw and visceral as to be existential.

Poor Echo had no self and no being outside of Narcissus, and after being rejected by him ‘slowly withered away until there was nothing left of her but her voice’.

Even her voice, the only thing that remained of her, was his rather than her own.

On another level, the myth is a warning against vanity and self-love. Often, we get so caught up in our being, in our little ego [Latin, ‘I am’], that we lose sight of the bigger picture and, as a result, pass over the beauty and bounty that is life.

By being too wrapped up in ourself, we actually restrict our range of perception and action and, ultimately, our potential as human beings. And so, in some sense, we kill ourself, like so many ambitious or self-centred people.

Treating other people badly, as Narcissus did, is a sure sign of still being trapped in ourself.

Teiresias prophesied that Narcissus would ‘live to a ripe old age, as long as he never knows himself ’, because to truly know ourself is also to know that there is nothing to know. Our self, our ego, is nothing but an illusion, nothing more substantial than the unstable reflection that Narcissus tried in vain to kiss. 

Narcissus’s ego boundaries only dissolved in death, when he merged back into creation in the form of a daffodil—which, like us, flowers too early and too briefly, and often too brashly, if it flowers at all.

Echo had not enough ego, and Narcissus far too much. The key is to find the right and dynamic equilibrium, to be secure in ourself and yet to be able to dissociate from the envelope that we happen to have been born into.

In Greek myth, the hero has to die and travel through the underworld before re-emerging as a hero. He has to conquer himself, to die to himself, to become more than merely human. For nothing is harder than to come back from hell.

Neel Burton is author of The Meaning of Myth.

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