Fact Check: Did the Buddha use cannabis?

Alejandro (TheHighestCritic, 11/20/20); Pat Macpherson, Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

This cartoonish Fat Happy Buddha is NOT the Buddha of history. He is a bodhisattva named Putai, Budai, or Hotei. He was a kind, jolly, overweight monk who gave candy to children from a bag.

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Buzznik Alejandro over at TheHighestCritic.com has a question, which he has already answered quite sure that he's right.

Q: Did the Buddha Gautama use cannabis?

Let's examine this Q from the view of a pot leaf

According, to, like, some mystical sutra, Bro, you know, um, Siddhartha, who later became Buddha, used cannabis. He was all Buddhafied! But, check this out, NOT how you would think, not in the traditional sense.

I didn't use weed either. I was a good monk

It's said that prior to his Great Awakening [his Maha Bodhi, which means prior to when he was the Buddha, which means the "Awakened One"], Buddha Siddhartha lived on nothing but a single cannabis seed per day for SIX YEARS! 🤯

• It's a beautiful legend, and we hope it's true because raw hemp seeds are a superfood, a miracle, a health-wonder full of Omega 3, 6, and 9 essential fatty acids in balance, which is extraordinarily rare in nature. Everyone should eat raw hemp seeds every day. Put them in a blender with pure water, and it's an instant healthy white nut-milk with no other ingredients necessary.

What’s interesting about this, is that cannabis only receives slight reference in Buddhist legends even though it is rather significant to the religion.

• This is because it is not significant to the religion or the PRACTICE of the Ennobling (Enlightening) Eightfold Path the religion teaches. In fact, the only thing we can think of relating cannabis bud, flower, dab (hash exudations), or the plant as an entheogenic drug, has to do with Buddhism is that the Buddha was a Scythian (Shakyan) from neighboring Gandhara (now Afghanistan, nearby but not in magical Nepal, which is high in the Himalayas) from the foothills of the Hindu Kush, which is part of the Himalayan range, far to the west of Nepal. The Scythians were originally nomadic wandering in Central Asia before settling and adopting an agrarian way of life. They did not drink ordinary alcohol. They drank a special kind made of fermented mare's milk. A mare is a female horse, and the low-grade alcohol made from natural yeast falling on lactose and souring it makes a kind of less addictive alcohol than toxic grain-based alcohol. The Scythians had a drink called soma (haoma) into which they put cannabis to make a kind of mundane ambrosia (amrita). Some may have been a general name because the real stuff seems to have been the entheogen blue lotus, a DMT-type substance also popular in ancient Egypt. It's hard to imagine that Siddhartha, a prince of a Scythian group called the Sakas raised watching dancing girls and musicians, would never have tried it. Cannabis grows wild throughout the foothills, where it originated as a plant.

Prince Sidhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha Gautama, lived in Lumbini in the Himalayan foothills of Nepal, a region that’s rich in cultivated and naturally occurring Cannabis indica known as Nepali Indica.

• Prince Sid, who became "The Buddha" by virtue of his spiritual awakening at the age of 35 after six or seven years of intensive endeavor on his quest to discover why we suffer and what can be done about it, was born in Lumbini Garden but he never lived there. He was raised in Kapilavastu (which Dr. Ranajit Pal has demonstrated must have been in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, and its environs, which we feel safe to speculate were Mes Aynak and Kabul (Kabil, Kapil, Kapilavastu) because he lived in three different places, three seasonal capitals that relocated by season, hot, cold, and rainy. He awoke to the Truth. There is no record of him smoking or consuming cannabis to get high or anything else. If the seed was eaten as a food, he might have eaten it but only if it were provided to him as he was a wandering ascetic living on alms, having gone East to proto-India, just south of Nepal, in his pursuit of enlightenment.

As the story goes, Siddhartha the wandering ascetic (doing tapas or extreme austerities and self-mortifications as misguided penance to compensate for this anti-spiritual body, a common practice among yogis) became so weak because of excessive fasting, that he resumed eating because a woman named Sujata and her maid offered him food.

He recovered his strength and realized the body is not a hindrance to spirituality. In fact, it can be a vehicle to it. His strength and health regained, he began his legendary meditation under the Bodhi tree. 

• It is called the Bodhi tree because bodhi means "enlightenment" or "awakening." Prior to his great awakening, it was not called that. The tree (Ficus religiosa, a giant pipal tree, which is like a banyan) drops tons of fruit, small figs that are not eaten (and who knows why because they are delicious and nutritious) except as a resource during famine. Religious studies teachers in the US note that the chemical composition of these figs is one molecule different from acid, LSD. The implication being, Wouldn't he have eaten these under that tree and otherwise fasting because he was not getting up to go on alms. And though no one was offering this food, the Tree was. He called on the Earth, in the earth-witnessing mudra, to vouch for him. We know trees have dryads. That's why he was fed by Sujata. She and her maid were making offerings to the tree spirit near their house as she wanted to get pregnant. She became pregnant, and this was the big offering in gratitude. Seeing him with his long hair, possibly in dreads from not washing it, they mistook him for spirit of the tree.

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