Buddha's Family Tree + Did Buddha Exist?

hi this is matt baker and today i'm going to show you the family tree of the buddha the central figure in the religion known as buddhism in addition to discussing his family tree i'll also be answering the question did the buddha exist and i'll be doing so in a similar manner to the video that i posted a few months ago on did moses exist so in other words we're going to look both at what buddhist religious tradition has to say about the buddha as well as what the historical method has to say about him [Music] before we dive into his family tree let's first take a look at when and where the buddha lived let's start with when using my timeline of world history chart note that the thick brown line on this chart is 600 bce this is an important year in world history because it very roughly marks the turning point between the end of the iron age and the start of what historians call classical antiquity basically classical antiquity is when humans first started to write history in a more straightforward literal manner kind of like we do today before this history was usually passed down orally and was almost always mixed with mythology and legend that's why it's much harder to determine whether or not someone from the bronze age or iron age existed such as moses than it is to determine whether or not someone from classical antiquity existed such as the buddha or jesus you'll note that the period in which the buddha lived is also known as the axial age it was during the axial age from 600 bce to 300 bce that most of humanity's most important philosophical foundations were laid and what makes the axial age so interesting is that these foundations were laid pretty much simultaneously yet independently in several different locations so around the same time that the buddha was walking the earth so were chinese philosophers such as confucius and greek philosophers such as plato it was also during the lifetime of the buddha that the acamented persian empire which we discussed last week on this channel was dominating the entire middle east and that the jews living in that empire were putting together what would eventually become known as the old testament so yeah a lot of important changes were happening in the world when the buddha lived let's now talk about where the buddha lived to the east of the acamented persian empire were 16 mahajanapadas which dominated north india mahajanapada means something like great realm and these can be thought of as mini kingdoms although in some cases they were actually republics governed by oligarchs there are three in particular that i'd like to point out first kuru the kuru kingdom is where the hindu epic the mahabharata is set although the events in that story supposedly occurred many centuries before buddhist time we did a video on that topic which i'll link to in the description if you're interested second i want to point out magadha starting around the time of the buddha magadha started to become the most powerful of the 16 mahajanapadas in fact it would eventually grow and grow and come to rule virtually all of the indian subcontinent under emperor ashoka whom we'll talk about later but the third and most important mahajanapada i want to point out is kosala because it was within the realm of kosala that the buddha was born in what is today nepal near the kingdom of kasala were two smaller realms that were basically vassal states of kasala these two realms were located on either side of a river and were ruled by the shakya clan and the khalia clan it was from the shakya clan that the buddha descended now the first thing you need to know is that buddha is a title not a name so when buddha was born he wasn't actually called buddha or the buddha yet his name was siddhartha gautama and he was born as a prince his father sudodana is often referred to in buddhist literature as the king of the shakyas although king is probably not the correct term from a technical point of view historically he was something closer to an oligarch or a tribal leader but for the sake of simplicity i'll be using terms like king queen and prince throughout sudodana married two sisters pajapati and maya from the kholia royal family their brother supa buddha would go on to become the khalia king maya was the mother of the buddha and there is an elaborate story concerning her that relates to the buddha's conception and birth one night during a full moon she had a vivid dream in which a white elephant holding a lotus flower appeared circled her three times and then entered her womb through her right side this was supposedly the moment that the buddha was conceived according to the story she then gave birth to prince siddhartha exactly 10 lunar months later but then she died shortly thereafter siddhartha was therefore raised by his stepmother and aunt pajapati pajapati and sudodhana had a son and a daughter who were thus the half-siblings of the buddha they were named nanda ananda note that while the english spelling is the same the pronunciation is different both of buddha's siblings would go on to become his followers but both also had their struggles which are described in buddhist literature but i'm getting ahead of the story prince siddhartha married his cousin yosadara from the khalia clan and together they had a son named rahula however one day prince siddhartha left the palace and came to know about human suffering because of this he decided to leave his family and life of luxury and live a life of extreme poverty and meditation instead but after several years as an ascetic he achieved enlightenment and became the buddha the word buddha meaning one who has awakened after enlightenment the buddha started teaching others about what he called the middle path between self-indulgence on one hand and self-mortification on the other in this video i'm not going to go into detail on buddha's teaching however if you're interested to learn more about buddhism in general i recommend this overview by kagito which i'll link to in the description for now i simply want to point out a few more people in his family tree during his lifetime the buddha had ten main disciples two of whom were his paternal cousins anuruddha ananda in particular is an important figure within buddhist history as he was the primary attendant of the buddha and the one who is credited with remembering all of the buddha's teachings so that they could eventually be passed down and recorded however on his mother's side of the family the buddha had another cousin named devadatta who was his wife's brother and who appears in many buddha stories as the main enemy of the buddha even though he too was one of the buddha's followers for example there's several stories where he tries to kill the buddha and others where he tries to take over the leadership in the end he gets swallowed up by the earth and dies now although the buddha is primarily associated with buddhism he is also a revered figure within hinduism as well and therefore he has been integrated into the overall scheme of hindu legend and lore as i mentioned the buddha was born as a prince and came from a ruling family this means he belonged to the kashatriya caste or varna for most of india's history hindu society was divided into four main social classes called varnas there are the brahmanas who are the priests and scholars the kashatriyas who are the rulers and warriors the vaishyas who are the farmers and merchants and the sudra who are the laborers and servants in ancient times the kashatriya had two main dynasties the suryavamsa or solar dynasty and the chandravamsa or lunar dynasty note that surya is the hindu god of the sun and chandra is the hindu god of the moon the buddha and his family are said to come from the solar dynasty along with rama who is the main character from the hindu epic the ramayana in contrast the main characters from the other big hindu epic the mahabharata are said to have come from the lunar dynasty these include arjuna and krishna according to most hindus rama krishna and buddha were all incarnations of the god visnu visnu is supposed to be incarnated 10 times rama was number 7 krishna was number 8 buddha was number 9 which leaves one more still to come ok now that we've discussed the various religious traditions about the buddha let's now address the question did he actually exist as a historical person in my video about moses i talked about three methods that can be used to prove a person's existence the best of course being physical remains now one thing i failed to mention in that video is that there is a difference between physical remains that are available for scientific testing and those that are inaccessible due to religious reasons so for example many people pointed out that the physical remains of the prophet muhammad do exist and that they are located in the prophet's mosque in medina however we have no way of proving whether or not this is actually true because i'm pretty sure that the caretakers of that mosque are never going to allow any scientists to do tests on the supposed remains of muhammad as that would be considered very irreverent the same is true of the buddha there are many temples throughout the world that claim to have physical relics of the buddha such as the temple of the tooth located in sri lanka i've actually visited that temple many times when i worked in sri lanka as a teacher but like the tomb of muhammad scientists are unable to examine any of the supposed relics of the buddha and therefore they cannot be used as evidence for the buddha's existence after physical remains the next best thing is other types of archaeological evidence such as stone inscriptions now when it comes to the buddha we do not have any archaeological evidence that dates to his lifetime however we do have inscriptions that mention him dating to about 200 years after his death remember emperor ashoka that i mentioned earlier he was the guy who united the entire indian subcontinent for the first time bringing to an end the period of the 16 mahajanapadas aside from the bronze age indus valley script the next oldest inscriptions found in india date from the time of ashoka he is known for having erected several pillars with various edicts using the ancient brahmi script well the pillar shown here contains the word sakyamuni which means the shakya sage and it is the earliest known reference to the buddha but again this inscription dates to around 200 years after the buddha's death so although that's pretty good in terms of archaeological evidence this one inscription alone isn't enough to settle the question we must therefore also look at a third type of evidence textual sources and when it comes to the buddha we have two main sources one is the polycannon which dates to around 30 bce and is the standard set of buddhist scriptures used by the theraveda branch of buddhism practiced in countries like sri lanka thailand and myanmar the other source is the chinese canon which dates to around 400 ce and is the standard set of scriptures used by the mahayana branch in places like china japan and korea now as i mentioned in my moses video historians use several criteria to determine whether or not a source can be trusted when it comes to historical accuracy the first question they ask is does the source match the archaeological record and when it comes to early buddhist texts the answer is generally speaking yes the overall setting described in the stories about buddha's life matches well with what we know of the mahajanapada period in indian history many small city-states ruled by local kings rather than a huge centralized state which came later secondly are there multiple sources that all tell the same story in this case the answer is both yes and no on the one hand we do not have any ancient sources outside of buddhist literature that can confirm the more fantastical elements of his life story such as his ability to perform miracles however on the other hand we do have several greek and roman sources that seem to back up the general fact that the buddha was an important sage or teacher from india and that he founded an important religious movement third is there any chance that the source is biased well here like all religious literature one has to admit that yes the early buddhist canons are biased because they after all were made by followers of the religion not by impartial observers but like i said if you strip away the supernatural elements from these stories there is quite a bit of consistency when it comes to the basics next let's consider how much time passed between the death of the buddha and the earliest mention of him in a non-religious source i did this previously with moses jesus and muhammad and noted that the answers for them were 1000 63 and 8 respectively from those figures you can definitely see that moses is the odd man out what about buddha first off it's a bit tricky because there are two different death dates that scholars tend to give it's either 480 bce or 400 bce but if we go with an average between those two and then measure from the date that ashoka erected his pillars we get 184 years so you can see that this puts the buddha in a category more similar to jesus than to moses or muhammad here's a very important chart that i showed in my moses video note that both jesus and the buddha lived during the period shown in the middle in yellow called classical antiquity generally speaking the likelihood of a person from classical accounts being historical is always going to be much higher than that of a person from bronze age or iron age accounts that's why i would tend to label figures such as achilles david or arjuna as legendary but figures such as julius caesar jesus or buddha as historical the final question we have to consider is what genre of writing was used well like most religious literature the main purpose of the buddhist scriptures is not to serve as a record of historical events but rather to pass on certain spiritual teachings in this case this is often done in the form of sutras which are short wise sayings attributed to the buddha okay so what's our conclusion well based on all of these facts i think it is fair to say that the buddha was most likely a historical person who lived on the indian subcontinent around 500 bce and who became a well-known spiritual teacher as for the many acts and sayings attributed to him well like in the case of jesus that is more a matter of personal faith not of historical fact okay so that was a look at the family tree of the buddha as well as the historical evidence for his existence thanks for watching [Music] [Music] you

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Length: 20min 28sec (1228 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/animuseternal]

Oh, I was wondering when this guy would get to the Buddha. Wonder where he'll source his texts from. The MOses video, and the other two related videos form that project from other channels (covering Jesus and Muhammad), was really good.

[u/aFiachra]

Good stuff.

Is it me or do scholars tend to mispronounce “th” in Theravada and Siddhartha? It is like “t” as in “talk”, not “th” as in “thought”. Aspirated “t” from Pali.

[u/BuddhistFirst]

Thank you so much for sharing this friend.