Dispute over the Buddha's Birthplace

Dispute over the Birthplace of Buddha Boils Again

Dream Nepal (edited for clarity by Wisdom Quarterly)

[According to Dream Nepal:] It has become the norm for Indians to claim that the Buddha was born in India. This piece of news is propaganda meant to create hype in the media.

• The invisible history of Afghanistan comes to L.A.

Indians envy the rich traditions of Nepal. They cannot bear to see tourists flying to the ancient tourist mecca of Kathmandu. They cannot accept Nepal glorifying (and being glorified by) the tradition of the Buddha.

Subhas Chandra Pattanayak has made the news with the same old story that desperately seeks to place the birthplace of the Buddha in India.

The model for the Aukana Buddha was Afghanistan's enormous statues, which came before Sri Lankan Buddhism, the second oldest seat of the tradition. Sinhalese Buddhists on the island off the tip of India say their origins are Aryan (Iranian), that is, from northwestern India and Magadha, having travelled here by boat in waves.

His opening sentences simply mock the whole world, which believes that Gautam Buddha was born in Kapilavastu, Nepal. But due to a Brahminical conspiracy, the world is so misguided that the birthplace of the Buddha has wrongly been taken to be in the Terai region of Nepal [Lumbini, a park the Siddhartha's mother was traveling through on her way home to give birth among her family, as was the ancient Indian custom].

Therefore the real Kapilavastu, known presently as Kapileswara near Bhubaneswar in Orissa (India), is seldom visited by the present generation of Buddhists. How on Earth can Pattanayak think it's a conspiracy?

Who cared about the importance of the birthplace of the Buddha at the time when we started to believe that he was born in Nepal [as promoted by British and other Western archeologists who came in after European colonial rule was set up and advocated such things as the Aryan Invasion theory because they could not accept that India had developed such technological and cultural advances without help from waves of Caucasians streaming in from the north]?

Thai Buddha built in the original style, derived from Gandharan-style northwestern Indian statues (modern Afghanistan) such as the Bamiyan Buddha (Image: Glenn Carter).

But now that the Buddha's birthplace is of eminent historical, cultural, and economic significance, Indians are dying to confuse people with false information.

The world [except for Dr. Ranajit Pal, Wisdom Quarterly, and a growing number of investigators] believes the Buddha was born in Kapilavastu, Nepal. [Actually, Nepal and nearly everyone else promote a small park called Lumbini as the actual birthplace, with Kapilavastu being Siddhartha's hometown, where his mother returned to raise him, the capital of his father and the rest of the Shakya clan's territory.]

However, these stupid bunch of people who are trying to make it into the news are involving themselves in various lame accusations in a desperate attempt to save their baseless ideas. Subhas writes... More

The Buddha's Real Roots
Wisdom Quarterly (COMMENTARY)
One need only visit modern "Lumbini," Nepal to get a sense that this is not Siddhartha's birthplace. The archeological evidence is scanty -- but it does exist. How is one to account for it?

Dr. Pal explains that a Fuhrer, a British archeologist, tried to gather acclaim by finding this important site. He was not going to be stopped by the facts. He conspired to deliberately place what few artifacts have ever been found there, thus obscuring the real site. The evidence, both textual and archeological, points more and more far to the West, to the frontiers of ancient India.

Recent evidence reveals a whole other reason for the British to promote the view that the Buddha's birthplace and hometown were far to the east in Nepal:

There is an "invisible history" of what we call Afghanistan (a northwestern province blending with ancient India, which itself was simply a collection of mahajanapadas, or "footholds of clans," territories controlled by powerful extended families, often called kingdoms even though the forms of government differed over time from place to place just as their borders did).

Hundreds of years ago, the British drew the Durand/Zero line because Afghanistan had always been a launchpad for empires in the region. It is pivotal, strategic, and along ancient trading routes. Even today, only sixty years after Afghanistan and Pakistan were created out of Indian territory, and long after the Indo-Greco and Bactrian empires:

Bactria (Greek Βακτριανή, with Pashto, Persian, Tajik, and Chinese variations), later variously called Tukharistan, Tokharistan, and Tocharistan, was the ancient name of a historical region in Central Asia, located between the range of the Hindu Kush and the Amu Darya (Oxus). It was a part of the northeastern periphery of the Iranian world and northwestern Indian world -- now part of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Tajikistan. The region was once host to Zoroastrianism (which was second only to Judaism in contributing to Christianity) and Buddhism.

Gandhara (an ancient name made famous by the gorgeous art and Indo-Greco statues in the Gandharan style in American museums such as Pasadena's Norton Simon). It has long been assumed that as Buddhism went west, he took on Western features in the image of Greek sculptures and Western ideals of beauty.

However, there is good reason to believe he came from the vicinity of modern Afghanistan with genetic traits more characteristic of Central Asians (Aryans = ancient Iranians) -- tall, blue eyes, light skin (golden as opposed to the two other categories of red and black). At that time -- long before Islam or Christianity, before Arab invasions into the region, after the fall of great empires in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and most notably Sumer -- India was the great power and influence in the region, as it had been for many centuries from the time of the Indus River civilizations, which cut right down the center of this area along the ancient Indus and Saraswati river routes. The Grand Statues of the World - Woman dies as Afghan protests continue - Need a job? Work at Democracy Now!