Features
Was the Buddha Born in Sri Lanka?
Bhante Dhammika of Australia
Just a few weeks ago the recipients of this year’s Nobel Prizes were announced. I always follow the announcement because I’m interested in the great men and women who have contributed so much to improving and enriching human life. But I have sometimes thought that there should also be an annual prize for the most useless, the most harmful or the most ridiculous invention, idea or scribbling each year – just to remind us that humans can also be incredibly stupid. It could be called the Ignoble Prize. If there was such a prize and I were one of the judges tasked with selecting the winner, this year I would award this Ignoble Prize to those who are claiming that the Buddha was born in Sri Lanka.
As there is not an atom of evidence for this laughably claim I will lay out just some of the mountain of evidence that the Buddha, the greatest of men, was an Indian, born in India, and who spent his whole life in India.
(1). Throughout the Tipitaka, the subcontinent we now call India is known as Jambudipa. The Buddha described India like this, “In this Jambudipa there are few pleasant parks, pleasant groves, pleasant stretches of land and lakes while more common are the steep rugged places, uncrossable rivers, dense thickets of thorny trees and inaccessible mountains.” This is a rather good description of India and quite at odds with the topography of Sri Lanka which most people agree is green, lush and fertile. There is no literature from either India or Sri Lanka where the name Jambudipa is given to Sri Lanka.
(2). The region of India where the Buddha was born was known to him and his contemporaries as the Middle Land (Majjhima Desa) because it was roughly centrally situated in northern India. Again, no ancient sources refer to Sri Lanka by this name, in fact, it is always described as being an island. The Buddha mentioned that in his time there were 16 states and kingdoms in India – Magadha, Kosala, Vamsa, etc. – and no states or kingdoms with such names are mentioned in Sri Lankan history. Likewise, none of the ancient kingdoms of Sri Lanka – Anuradapura, Rajarata, Ruhana, Polonnaruwa, etc. – are mentioned in any Indian sources. Further, archaeologists have uncovered the ruins of Rajagaha the capital of Magadha, Savatthi the capital of Kosala, and Kosambi the capital of Vamsa and identified them conclusively by ancient inscriptions found at the sites. All these and other cities visited by the Buddha are in northern India, not Sri Lanka.
(3). In the Rathavinita Sutta of the Majjhima Nikaya the Buddha described the Sakyan country as “the land of my birth” (jatibhumaka). All ancient sources without exception mention that the Sakyan land and its capital Kapilavatthu were in northern India. When, in the fifth-sixth centuries, several Chinese pilgrims journeyed to India and visited Kapilavatthu, one of them, Xuanzang, gave quite precise details of how to get there; and it was in India. He spoke to the monks living the monastery at Kapilavatthu but none of them told him that if he wanted to visit ‘the real’ Kapilavatthu he’d have to go all the way to Sri Lanka.
(4). In the Cullavagga of the Vinaya, the rules for monks and nuns, is a long account of the lead up to and the enactments of the Second Buddhist Council which took place about 100 years after the Buddha’s passing. There it says, “Lord Buddhas are born in the eastern districts” (puratthimesu janapadesu buddha bhagavanto uppajjanti). The Pali word uppajjati means ‘to arise’, ‘appear’ or ‘to be born’.
But what about the words puratthima and janapada? Does this mean that the Buddha was born in the eastern provenance of Sri Lanka? In Batticaloa perhaps, or Ampara? How about Kalmunai, Uhana or Pulladiputti? As ridiculous as it sounds, there are actually a few people who might argue that this is possible.
But if the Middle Land is really in India as I have mentioned above, why does this passage from the Vinaya refer to it as “the eastern district?”
During Buddhism’s first few decades it gradually spread throughout India but particularly so to Gandhara which was in what is now northern Pakistan and parts of Afghanistan which are to the west of the Middle Land and thus it was known to the Buddhists of Gandhara and other regions beyond the Middle Land as “the eastern district.”
(6). In 1897 excavations were done at a large mound near a village named Pippahwa in northern India very close to the border with Nepal. As the excavations proceeded it became clear that the weed-covered mound was actually an ancient Buddhist stupa and so it was decided to dig into this stupa and see if it contained anything. A sandstone relic casket was discovered which had an inscription on it, very possibility the oldest decipherable writing from India. The inscription reads, “This casket of relics of the blessed Buddha of the Sakyas [is gifted by] the brothers Sukirti, jointly with their sisters, sons and wives.” This inscription confirmed that the Buddha was a real person, and from India.
In the early 1970s the eminent Indian archaeologist K. M. Srivastava did further excavations at Pippahwa to see if it was, as many experts believed, the sited of Kapilavatthu, the Buddha’s hometown. In the process he uncovered nearly 40 clay sealings which included the words “Kapilavatthu bhikkhu sangha” thus proving beyond any doubt that Pippahawa is the town where the Buddha spent the first 35 years of his life. This site is in India, the casket and the sealing inscriptions are in an Indian language, King Asoka’s inscription on the Lumbini pillar is likewise in an Indian language, proving conclusively that the Buddha was born in India. Do any inscriptions found in any ancient sties in Sri Lanka mention that the site is Kapilavatthu or Lumbini? No! Not one!
(7). The authors of the Dipavamsa, the Mahavamsa, the Thupavamsa, the commentaries (atthakattha) to the Tipitaka and their sub-commentaries (tika) all agree that the Buddha was born in India. According to the Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa, King Asoka sent his son Mahinda to Sri Lanka to introduce the island to Buddhism. If the Buddha was a Sinhalese from Sri Lanka, the opposite should have happened, King Devananpiyatissa should have sent his son to King Asoka’s court to introduce Buddhism to India. To say that the Buddha was born in Sri Lanka is to turn 2000 years of history and tradition on their heads. It is to render the Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa to nothing more than useless novels whereas almost all historians agree that they contain a great deal of historically accurate information.
It would be easy to marshal much more evidence to show that the Buddha was born in India but perhaps this is sufficient, and there is little point in spending any more time debunking a notion that has no credibility. But how could someone come to believe and then promote a notion so patiently false? Why would someone oppose an idea that not only goes against the unanimous consensus of all historians of Indian culture and history, all Buddhist scholars, and the belief of 99.009% of the world’s Buddhists for the last 2,500 years? It could be plain common ignorance but this seems unlikely. Anyone with any education, especially living in a country where knowledge of Buddhism is widespread, could not possibly be unaware that the Buddha was an Indian. There must be some other reason for people holding to this view. Another possibility is a personality trait which has been identified by sociologists and psychologists. Some people, for whatever reason, feel the need to stand out from the crowd and to be the centre of attention. They lack the originality, the skills or the virtues that usually warrant acclaim so they adopt a belief, or sometimes a style of dress so ridiculous that everyone starts talking about them.
There are others who derive a perverse pleasure from being annoying. One way they do this is to pretend to believe something so outlandish that others try to convince them they are wrong and get frustrated when they fail to do so. There are many examples of people behaving like this – those who insist that the world is flat, that the moon landing was faked, that Marlow really wrote Shakespeare, etc. Another thing that sometimes drives people to adopt fringe theories is super-nationalism. They will insist that their country or countrymen excel all others and are better than all the other. They feel the need to adopt some great personality as one of their own to glorify their country and themselves by proxy. Napoleon was doing this when he famously said, “All great men are French.” Hitler did the same when he shouted, “The German Aryans are the apex of humanity.”
But the notion of the Buddha being a Sri Lankan is more than just a harmless delusion, the result of an inadequate personality or the hot air of an inflated ego; it is also potentially harmful. While it is now only the opinion of a few, it could spread and cause confusion, doubt and divisions within the Buddhist community and that would not be good for the progress of the Dhamma. King Asoka long ago said, “Truth triumphs” (Satyameva jayate) and hopefully it will in this case.