Where was the Buddha really born?

Ranajit Pal, Ph.D. (ranajitpal.com)

Bamiyan, Afghanistan, was near Kapilavastu, birthplace of the Buddha (Afghan Treasures)

The fantastic recent find of about 10,000 ancient Buddhist fragments at Bamiyan [Afghanistan], part of which is now in the Schoyen Collection, shows that Buddhism was born here. 

  

The names Tiŝŝa, Siddhartha, and Suddho-dana, of the Persepolis Tablets prove conclusively that Gotama [Gautama Buddha] was from Seistan-Baluchistan. 

  

About the iconography of a beautiful schist stele from Mes Aynak, G. Fussman of the College de France writes that the prince shown sitting under foliage of [a] Pipal [tree] is Siddhartha before his enlightenment. 

  

Sistan-Baluchistan, ancient Indian frontier

Gregory Schopen also writes about a "cult tied to a cycle of festivals celebrating four moments, not in the biography of the Buddha but in the pre-enlightenment period of the life of Siddhartha."
  
Yet neither he nor G. Fussman recognizes the need to integrate the Mes Aynak findings with the priceless inscriptions from the Persepolis Tablets, which mention Tissa, Sedda Saramana (Siddhartha), Sudda Yauda Saramana (Suddodana), and Saman.
  
Schopen's video, entitled "Buddha as a Businessman," is largely based on false Nepalese data. More

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British Buddhism

BBC Religion

How many Buddhists are there in Britain?

In 2001, according to the census, there were 151,816 Buddhists in Britain. However, that does not take into account those who regard themselves as Buddhists as well as Christians, or Jews, or Taoists, or anything else.

  

The census form made no provision for such people to be counted. There are also those who refuse to label themselves as "Buddhists" because it runs counter to the principle of selflessness or egolessness. They prefer to think of themselves as free spirits.

  

Irrespective of how many Buddhists there are in Britain today, there is unquestionably a growing interest.

  

How has Buddhism developed in Britain?

Japanese-style Buddhist garden in Europ

Buddhism first found its way into Britain in the 19th century through translations of scriptures from the various schools in different parts of the east. In 1879 Sir Edwin Arnold compiled an epic poem, The Light of Asia, describing the Buddha's life. This was to become a classic and is still in print today.

  

The limited number of books available in those early years was enough to inspire a few to begin actually practicing Buddhism as a way of life. One of those, Allan Bennett, went to Sri Lanka in 1898 and returned as Ananda Metteyya, the first Englishman to be ordained as a Buddhist monk (bhikkhu) of the Theravada tradition.

   

[An Irishman -- Lawrence Carroll a.k.a. Lawrence O'Rourke or William Colvin -- preceded Bennett. He became Venerable Dhammaloka, the first Westerner to become a Buddhist monk, which he did in Southeast Asia years before.]

 

The Buddha sent the Dharma far and wide

In 1907 a number of people got together and formed The Buddhist Society of Great Britain and Ireland. This was succeeded in 1924 by The London Buddhist Society, founded by Christmas Humphreys. It was the first really successful organization in Britain to provide a platform for all schools and traditions of Buddhism. It stood alone for almost 50 years as the focal point for Buddhists in Britain.

Sixties Britain brought eastern religions into fashion for the first time, including Buddhism. The Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950 eventually led to the exodus of thousands of Tibetans with the Dalai Lama in 1959. This brought lamas to the west. These two factors in particular led to the mushrooming of new Buddhist groups. As a result, today almost every Buddhist tradition is represented in Britain. More

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Noah Levine teaches Against the (Dharma)?

Seth Auberon and Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly

He's a Dharma punk and not dumb, so how does he know so little about the Buddha?

In a devastating blow to Buddhist history, author and "Against the Stream" founder Noah Levine turned the Buddha's life into an unrecognizable mishmash of revisionist thought, doubt and outlandish speculation. At one point he had Siddhartha tying stones to his privates, all the while laughing and engendering laughter from an eager American audience. The constant refrain was, "We just don't know. These things weren't written down. There was a lot of mythologizing..." Therefore we can throw anything into the story we like and it'll be just as true/doubtful as all the rest of it? Levine's heart was obviously in the right place.

(LINK) BBC documentary: "The Life of the Buddha"

   

Maybe its less Buddhism than recovery and punk

But one would have to guess -- based solely on his bumbling through the life story -- that he only recently became acquainted with Buddhism as a sacred tradition of the East. The Buddha's life, certainly much informed by mythological elements prevalent in ancient India, is retold to inspire our own path: We live luxuriously, we suffer, we assume that the only antidote to suffering is hedonism, then one day occurs to us that this has never worked. So we try something else. We go on a quest. We question convention. We go have a look for ourselves. And inasmuch as we question or reject society, we look inward for answers: What is true? What can I know to be true? How can I bring suffering to an end, not just for myself, but for all beings who suffer?

• See Noah Levine continue Wednesdays live in Hollywood

Siddhartha did not set off on this quest only once; he (reappearing in various transient forms, not as the same being but not altogether another) spent many lives developing the perfections. These enabled him to become a master physician for what ails living beings, a superlative teacher able to communicate that subtle and profound discovery of what's been going wrong in our own search for a way out, a samma-sam-buddha or "right and fully awakened one." Levine is not alone in sowing doubt and, possibly inadvertently, ridiculing the "less important" Buddhist teachings, such as its venerable history and origins.
  
Former Buddhist monk and continuing British iconoclast Stephen Batchelor, author of Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, seems to have profoundly influenced Levine's view of not only Buddhist history but its theology (yes, it has one in spite of being a non-theistic tradition) and cosmology as well. There's more than a little of fellow punk and Zen Master Brad Warner in Levine's approach as well.
   

(ABC News) Stephen Batchelor talks about his confessions with ABC

To hear Levine tell it, Buddhism doesn't know its zafu from its zabuton and is ass-backwards on everything but its core insight (vipassana) teachings. With teachers like Jack Kornfield and his own father, Buddhist author Stephen Levine, that comes as a surprise. One would imagine his time in prison gave him time to reflect, grow hungry for answers, and then satisfy that hunger through books, monastics, and comparative religion professors.

 

Is Levine opinionated? It would not seem so, for when local meditator Sherry asked him to define "atheist," he suddenly had no personal opinion and turned the question on her like a reticent therapist.

  

Wisdom Quarterly would retell the story of the Buddha's life just for Levine's benefit. But any child with a picture book and even Keanu Reeves can get the highlights right.
  

   
It is difficult to see how one can have a sense of the Buddha's teaching, the Dharma, without a basic understanding of what the historical Buddha went through to arrive at the breakthrough that gave rise to the dispensation and the mythological elements that got added.

• FULL INTERVIEW: Stephen Batchelor's Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist

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