Gautama Buddha

Book Review of Gautama Buddha, Iqbal Singh, Oxford University Press Singh wrote this book in the early 1990's; at least the introduction says 1993. There have been countless biographies of the Buddha, and not a few have been pretty good. I have other favorites, the latest by Karen Armstrong, simply called Buddha. But I really love Singh's book. It is readable, knowledgeable, treats the myths with respect while calling them myths, and possibly because Singh himself is an Indian and a scholar, this book dares to go where I have wanted to go for many years. Here's what I mean: Just about every biography of the Buddha either resides well within the myth, or centers on breaking entirely with the myth. But even within both these camps few authors have dared to really speculate about the social and political realities that the Buddha must have faced. Oh sure, they'll make some general statements about caste, conditions, war, the state of the proto-Hindu society, but they will rarely attempt a full fabric wrapping of the life, times, sights, and smells of the age which the Buddha had to deal with directly. Let's look at an example. When elaborating on how the Buddha's father, Suddhodana, could not have been a king since they resided in a republic which was of the older and threatened social order (threatened by kingdoms!), Singh writes: The decay of the old social order based on the twin principles of tribal autonomy and the inviolable sanctity of the family group had set in long before Gautama's days. Irresistible economic pressure and a whole complex of psycho-political forces which those had brought into play, had rendered the tribal-cum-patriarchal republics in India more or less obsolete; their simple economy and social organization belonged to the past rather than to the future. The early tribal institutions and self-governing townships were in advanced stages of disintegration; already, when Gautama was born, several kingdoms had sprung up, and were steadily acquiring power through every conceivable means at their disposal, the methods of expansion ranging from actual wars of conquest to the nobler diplomacy of multiple matrimonial alliances. . . . Buddhist texts reveal that there still survived a number of independent or semi-independent aristocratic republics akin to the city-states flourishing in Greece roughly about the same time. Kapilavastu was one of them. Finally, context. We have been wanting a biography that is willing to give us enough background to relate, to connect, the world of our founder to that world which produced us. Singh does this all through the book. But more, he is willing to speculate as to the mind state that is behind the actions of the major players of the Buddha's story. By setting up enough historical backdrop to give us a feel of the fabric, he can speculate as to what makes the people move, and he is believable in most of his speculation. It brings the story of that time from black and whit