God's Generals by Richard A Gabriel

Author:Richard A Gabriel
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / General
ISBN: 9781473859067
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2016-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

the king Vidudabha slew all the Sakyas, beginning with babes at the breast, and with their heart’s blood did he wash the bench on which he [Buddha] had sat in the Sakyan assembly.68

The cost of victory had been high, however, and the losses taken against the Sakya had so weakened the Kosalas that shortly after the war they were attacked by the kingdom of Magadha, their king slain and the territory incorporated into the expanding Magadhan empire.

If it is reasonable to conclude that Buddha experienced war during his young life, we are left to explain why he abandoned his wife, his young son, his family, his clan and his father’s court to embrace the life of a wandering ascetic (parivraja). Whatever caused Buddha to do this must have been some sort of traumatic event. The story that he was shocked by his first encounter with a sick man, an old man and a dying man is hardly credible, though it may contain a kernel of truth. Another tradition suggests the reason Buddha left his life behind at the age of twenty-nine was his abhorrence of war. The tradition holds that when the sangh voted to go to war against the Koliyas, Buddha refused to accept the majority vote and vowed he would not take part in the fighting. The tradition records him as saying, ‘I shall not join your army and I shall not take part in the war.’69 Buddha was very clear that it was the evils of war that prompted his action saying, ‘Dharma, as I understand it, consists in recognizing that enmity does not disappear by enmity. It can be conquered only by love.’70 This was serious business indeed and Buddha could have been executed. Perhaps because he was the son of the chief, the sangh agreed to his going into exile.71

What both versions of Buddha’s actions have in common is that both are rooted in strong feelings of personal despair. Karen Armstrong suggests as much when she notes that ‘when he decided to leave home, Gotama [Buddha], one might think, appeared to have lost his ability to live with the unpalatable facts of life and to have fallen prey to a profound depression’.72 She notes that when Buddha looked at human life, ‘he could see only a grim cycle of suffering, which began with the trauma of birth and proceeded inexorably to aging, illness death, sorrow, and corruption’.73 For some reason, life had become meaningless for the young Buddha, and he was consumed by a sense of helplessness, obsessed with the finality of life, and felt a profound terror and alienation from the world.74 He found no comfort in his family, wife or even his newborn son, whom he named Rahula, which means ‘fetter’. It was as if he felt that the child would be but another burden.

While not impossible, deep and prolonged depression like that displayed by Buddha in the twenty-ninth year of his life is not usually the result of a single short-term event.

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