Who was the ascetic Siddhartha saw?

Geethanjali Kids (animation); Dhr. Seven, Pat Macpherson, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly

There have always been nomadic hermits (sramanas) apart from conceited brahmanas.

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Herman Hesse echoes the tale.

Any Westerner who learns about Buddhism usually learns it with the allegorical story of the Buddha's life, from Scythian prince to Awakene Oned. The location changed from Central Asia (Gandhara, Afghanistan, Shakya Land, called Kapilavastu).

When the prince, living a luxurious sheltered life with his white pony (Kanthaka), three seasonal capitals and palaces, his beautiful young bride (Bimba Devi or Yasodhara), excellent education, and many friends, relatives, and fellow Scythians the Sakas, saw the Four Signs, he knew it was time to leave on a spiritual quest for proto-India.

• ("India" was not a thing until Buddhist Emperor Ashoka united many smaller kingdoms and territories into one country, the Roseapple Land, Jambudvipa, or Bharat. Great Bharat or Mahabharat is said to have long existed, according to the Mahabharata, thousands of years earlier in and around the Indus Valley Civilization, Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, and a civilization around Gandhara).

With each rebirth, many troubles follow.

The first three signs (aging, sickness, and death) shook him and made him lose interest in a life of distractions. If life was beset with such unsatisfactoriness, lack of fulfillment, and suffering, what was the point? What could he offer his people if he could not guide them to any escape from the inevitable?

But he saw a fourth sign (hermit, recluse, renunciate, wandering ascetic, monastic). The question arises, who in the heck was that guy? If the future Buddha, who would awaken seven years later and establish a monastic sangha or community of male and female wandering ascetics, had yet to create saffron robed monks, who was this person?

Scythian comb from Solokha, 4th century. Scythians were goldsmiths with numerous mines.

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It's not a flaw in the story. It's an indication how far back the tradition of wandering asceticism or shramanas (shamans, who seek direct experience of the divine, knowledge and vision). Even in those times and in that place Brahmins (the high caste temple priests of the Vedic religion, Brahmanism, and later Hinduism) existed.

But here far in the northwest frontier of future-India, Brahmins were subordinated to nobles or warrior caste individuals like the Sakas, an exceedingly proud and haughty recently settled nomadic people from Sakastan in Scythia around modern Afghanistan (Bamiyan, Mes Aynak, and Kabul as likely the three seasonal capitals of what is collectively called Kapilavastu or Kapilavatthu, Kapil = Kabul. See ranajitpal.com).

So what was the ancient practice of spiritual nomads, the wandering ascetics that existed in the Scythia of the Sakas even before Prince Siddhartha (the future Buddha) was born?

Scythian religion

Who was this pre-Buddhism wandering ascetic (sramana) who inspired Siddhartha to seek the direct experience of Truth and set up an organization so that men and women could do the same and come to realization in this very life?

Scythian religion refers to the mythology, ritual practices, and beliefs of the Scythian cultures, a collection of closely related ancient Iranian (Aryan) peoples.

They inhabited Central Asia and the Pontic–Caspian steppe in Eastern Europe throughout Classical Antiquity, spoke the Scythian language (itself a member of the Eastern Iranian language family), and which included:

• the Alans,
• the Scythians proper,
• the Sarmatians,
• the Sindi,
• the Massagetae, and
• the SAKA (the Buddha's Sakas, Shakyas, Indo-Scythians, Indo-Sakas, speakers of Pali).

What little is known of the religion is drawn from the work of the 5th century Greek historian and ethnographer Herodotus. Scythian religion is assumed to have been related to the earlier Proto-Indo-Iranian religion, and to have influenced later Slavic, Hungarian, and Turkic mythologies, as well as some contemporary Eastern Iranian and Ossetian traditions. More