Gau’tama Buddha ‘the Scythian Sage’ and Indian Philosophy[1]
Gautama is best known as the Buddha, ‘the Awakened One’. His other unique epithet, Sakyamuni ‘the Scythian Sage”, marks him as a foreigner from northwestern India or Central Asia, regions known to have been ruled by the Scythians, Scytho-Medes, and related peoples who succeeded them. No other Indian philosopher has an epithet marking him as a foreigner. (The same is true in Greece for Anacharsis the Scythian.)
According to tradition, Gautama left his home as a young prince and wandered to Magadha, in eastern India, where he “awoke”, or was “enlightened”. He taught there for the rest of his life. His teachings are radically unlike anything else known in Greece, Scythia; Persia, India, or China before him. His life is widely considered to mark the beginning of history in India.
Gautama expounds a logical epistemological system that denies the existence of a criterion to decide or judge between opposed absolute assertions or “views”—antilogies such as Truth vs. Falsehood, Honesty vs. Dishonesty, etc. His teachings are exclusively on ethics, particularly the problem of happiness or equanimity. Solving it involves rigorous personal physical-mental practice. He says nothing at all about metaphysical topics such as divinity or an afterlife, nor about the natural, physical world. His core teaching is known as the Trilaksana ‘three characteristics’ of all dharmas—ethical “things” or constituents of the conceptual world of our thoughts and emotions:
All constituents are (1) ‘impermanent’, all constituents are (2) ‘imperfect’, and all constituents are (3) ‘without an inherent identity’.
Our earliest dated testimony of this teaching is a quotation by the Greek philosopher Pyrrho, who was in India with Alexander the Great for two years, from 327 to 325 BC. Pyrrho’s Greek version gives the three in reverse order: all ethical “things” are without an inherent identity (anatman), they are imperfect (duhkha), and they are irnpermanent (anitya). Consequently, he adds, there can be no absolute difference between true and false. The three statements of the Trilaksana, like all Early Buddhist teachings, are resoundingly negative. Other teachings which logically derive from the Trilaksana include having no Views or beliefs (about absolutes) and not choosing either side of any contention (based on absolutes). The unstated, but logically expected, indirect outcome of meditating on the Trilaksana is “nirvana“, a word that refers to the extinguishing of the burning of the passions, and as a result, being undisturbed (calm).
Over the centuries, Gautama’s teachings have changed into what is now known as Buddhism, a world religion’ yet down to the present the chief goal of Buddhist practice (meditatlon) has remained the achievement of a deep understanding of the interconnected insights of the Trilaksana, the three characteristics.
Gautama rejected the teachings of his Scythian relatives, including Zoroaster, who stress the traditional ethical issues represented by the antilogy of the Truth versus the Lie.” That antilogy is a vital issue for the solemn oath of loyalty, a core element of steppe culture. The Buddha did share the fundamentally ethical focus of philosophy that characterizes both Anacharsis and Zoroaster, but unlike Zoroaster he uses a logical, analytical approach similar to that of Anacharsis. In their fundamentally sceptical outlook Gautama and Anacharsis are the opposite of Zoroaster.
[1] This article contains excerpts from the book by Christopher I. Beckwith: The Scythian Empire