Austro-Asiatic Buddha

 

A Munda woman
Credit: Ramesh Lalwani

“Cultural Remnants of the Indigenous Peoples in the Buddhist Scriptures” is an interesting scholarly article available free on-line. It´s written by Bryan Geoffrey Levman and was originally published in Buddhist Studies Review in 2013. The author tackles a question I assume is somewhat contentious: the Buddha´s exact ethnic origins. Siddharta Gautama is said to have been a member of the Sakya or Shakya tribe. But who exactly were the Shakyas? I assume most see them as Indo-Aryans. Indeed, their name is similar to that of the Sakas, a Scythian group. However, there were obvious cultural differences between the Shakyas and the Indo-Aryans to their west. Simply put, the Shakyas were less “Brahmanized” and existed at the periphery of Vedic civilization. One possibility is that they represent a different wave of Indo-Aryan migrations, perhaps an earlier one. Another, explored by Levman, is that the Shakyas were of mixed ethnic origins, deriving a substantial portion of their ancestry from pre-Aryan indigenous peoples, specifically the Munda-speaking tribes. The Munda languages form a subset of the Austroasiatic language family (which also comprise Vietnamese, Khmer and Mon). Judging by all-knowing Wiki, at least currently the Munda are very dark-skinned.

The author points out that the Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda languages form a “Sprachbund” or linguistic area, since they mutually influence each other (despite being unrelated) in ways that make them distinct from languages outside the Indian subcontinent. If there is linguistic borrowing, there should logically also be cultural diffusion. So already on methodological grounds, we should expect Buddhism to be at the very least influenced by indigenous cultures. However, the later Buddhist sources make a sustained attempt at “Brahmanizing” him. The Shakya polity is described as a kingdom (according to Vedic norms), Buddha´s father (the king) is a kshatriya and has a retinue of prominent Brahmin priests, the Buddha himself is said to hail from a long line of Brahmins and other Vedic ancestors, he bears the marks of a Great Man known from Vedic mantras and is initiated with Vedic rituals. Apparently, even “Gotama” (Gautama) is a Brahminical clan name. But a closer study of Buddhist and Vedic sources paints a very different picture...

The Shakyas were not organized as a kingdom, but rather as a tribal republic. Buddha´s father Shuddhodana wasn´t a “king” but an elected leader. Nor did Siddharta ever refer to himself as a “prince”. Indeed, the Buddha never calls himself a “kshatriya” either, although he does say that the kshatriyas are higher than the Brahmins, thus inverting the Vedic position. Buddha praises the democratic system of the Shakyas and neighboring tribes, proscribing a similar procedure to govern the sangha (the monastic order). He resents the tributary status of the Shakyas vis-à-vis a more powerful neighboring tribe and seem to dislike wars of conquest in general. This is interesting, since it means that Buddha´s “egalitarian” and “democratic” traits weren´t somehow more “modern” than the Vedic ideals, but rather more traditional, harking back to a tribal past.

The Shakyas mythological ancestor, Ikshvaku, seem to have a name of Munda origins. The sage Asita, who predicted Siddharta´s future Buddhahood, is said to have been “black”, perhaps a reference to his actual skin color. Buddha himself supposedly had curly hair, something many Munda males still have today. The marriage customs of the Shakyas were non-Vedic, and even included incestuous marriages between brother and sister, or between parents and children. The burial customs were also non-Vedic, with round burial mounds rather than square burial places. Note that Buddhist stupas have round bases! In the Brahminical tradition, relics were considered impure and buried outside the village, while the relics of the Buddha were treated as sacred and placed inside prominent stupas.

According to orthoprax Vedic-Brahminical sources, the territory of the Shakyas was outside Aryavarta, the homeland of the Aryans. Shakyas and other groups living to the east of Aryavarta were considered “mixed caste” and therefore non-Aryan. These were the areas in which Buddha´s ministry took place. Even visiting the unclean eastern borderlands made it incumbent upon the Aryan to carry out purification rituals. The eastern peoples were referred to as demons (asuras), slaves, lower than shudras, and literally cursed. Several names of eastern tribes in the Vedic corpus seem derived from the Munda languages. One of the distinct poetic metres used by the Buddhists is non-Vedic and known as the ghost or goblin metre, probably a reflection of the supposed demonic nature of the eastern borderland tribes!

The author further believes that there are traces of tree and serpent worship in Buddhism. Serpent worship is distinctly non-Vedic and may have been introduced to India by an early Mongolian or Tibeto-Burmese migration. The snake-spirits or nagas are depicted as the protectors of the Buddha or as Buddhists themselves. They are to be worshipped. The Buddha is even referred to as a “naga” as a token of respect. The Buddha´s association with trees is obvious. The Sal tree was the sacred totem of the Shakyas. Buddha was both born and died close to such trees. Still today, the Mundas worship Sal trees. The Buddha refers to himself as a yakkha and preaches to literal yakkhas, a class of nature-spirits often associated with trees. In the Jataka tales (stories of the Buddha´s previous lives), he is often a tree-spirit. The sacred fig tree under which Buddha attained enlightenment is also important, the Buddha often being depicted as a tree in early Buddhist art. Sometimes, snakes and trees are evidently combined, as when the Buddha experienced bliss under a mucalinda tree (the name “mucalinda” being non-Aryan) and was protected against a sudden storm by a naga-king named Mucalinda…

We all have our agendas, and I suppose one purpose of de-Aryanizing the Buddha is to make him more “Woke” or “anti-imperialist”. The Buddha lived in a non-Aryan culture that was being Aryanized, trying to find a strategy of resistance against such colonialism. And it surely isn´t a co-incidence that the author emphasizes the “Black” aspects of the Mundas, coming across as a crypto-Afro-centrist. I suppose the tree worship could be tied to modern environmentalist sensibilities, and so on. That being said, it´s nevertheless an interesting contribution. And it could be spun in a completely different way: if the Buddha was just a tribal preacher in a one-horse-town in northern India 2,500 years ago, why should he be of any concern to us? I´m neither a Munda nor an Indo-Aryan, and I probably never met snake-kings either…

With that, shall we say, heteroprax reflection I end this review.