Farming Deathlessness

“’So you claim to be a farmer… but we do not see you ploughing! Tell me, since you've asked, of ploughing, so I'll know what you call “ploughing”. Faith is the seed, practice the rain, and wisdom is my yoke and plough. Modesty's the pole, mind the strap, mindfulness my ploughshare and goad. Body and speech are guarded well, and food and drink have been restrained. Truthfulness I use for weeding, and gentleness urges me on. Effort is my beast of burden, pulling me onward to safety. On it goes without returning, where, having gone, one does not grieve. This is how I plough my ploughing – the crop it yields is deathlessness! And when one has ploughed this ploughing, one is released from all suffering…

I am of Khattiya, Warrior-noble stock. I was reborn into a Khattiya family. I am a Gotama by clan. My life's span is of short length, it is brief and soon over; one who lives long now completes the century or a little more. I became fully enlightened at the foot of an Assatha Banyan tree. My chief disciples are Sariputta and Moggallana. I have had one assembly of disciples, consisting of twelve hundred and fifty monks, all of them arahants. My chief personal attendant now is Bhikkhu Ananda. My father was king Suddhodana, my mother was Queen Maya, and the royal capital was Kapilavatthu…’

~ The Life of the Buddha, as it appears in the Pali Canon

“The “Pali Canon” is a body of texts taught by the Buddha, which has been preserved in the Pali language. Pali is a form of popular Sanskrit also known as a “prakrit”. Sanskrit was the language of the Brahmanical religion in India. For example, the Upanishads have been recorded in Sanskrit. Pali is to Sanskrit what Italian is to Latin. The Buddha did not speak Pali, but he might have spoken a number of Sanskrit-based dialects. Pali is a literary version of these Sanskrit-based dialects. Over time it became the lingua franca for Buddhist monks who lived in different regions of India, so that they had a common language in which they could recite and memorize the Buddha's teachings found in the suttas – discourses delivered by the Buddha or one of his prominent disciples.

The Pali Canon was recited and memorized communally by groups of monastics for three to four hundred years before it was inscribed on palm leaves in Sri Lanka. There is no Pali script as such. It is the tradition to transcribe the Pali Canon in the specific script of each country. The Pali Canon was first written down in Sinhalese. Since then it has been transcribed in Burmese and other East-Asian scripts, and nowadays Westerners can read the Pali Canon in Roman script…”

The Buddha rarely talked about himself and his life prior to his awakening. Gotama is the name of his clan and as a youth he was called Siddhatta Gotama. The legend about the Buddha's life is that he was the prince of a kingdom. This legend was constituted over time and finalized in the Buddhacarita written by Ashvagosha in the second century CE. Scholars now believe that the Buddha was born and died in the fifth century BCE, which would make him a contemporary of Socrates. He was born in Lumbini, a small park near the border of Nepal and India, and raised in the nearby town of Kapilavatthu. The Buddha's father, Suddhodana, was the elected head of an aristocratic hereditary ruling class, and as such he had the status and prestige equivalent to the ruler of a small kingdom. Sakya was a vassal state of a much bigger kingdom, Kosala, and the king of Kosala was the overlord of the Sakyans…”

~ Martine Batchelor, The Spirit of the Buddha

Image ~ The Buddha, sculpture, Gandhara, Indian subcontinent. Collection: National Museum, New Delhi. Buddhist art from the north-western regions of the Kushana empire (1st and 2nd centuries C.E.) displays the influences of Greek and Central Asian art.