BUDDHA & His Birthplace
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THE REAL BIRTHPLACE OF BUDDHA: Sri Ajit Kumar Tripathy
It has long been taken for granted that Kapilavastu, the chief city of the Sakyas, and Lumbini, the actual birth place of the teacher, were situated in the Nepalese Tarai. The main basis of this belief is the inscribed pillar of Rummindei, recording the visit of the emperor Asoka, to the place where Buddha was born. It was little known that the same fact in similar words and script existed at Orissa.
Cunningham in his "Ancient Geography of India" points out the place where from the Tarai inscription had been discovered is not at all related to the name Kapilavastu or even the name Kapila.
And the noted
historian Dr. Smith asserts that the place of the discovery of the Tarai inscription
was never called Rummindei; it was a forged name given to it by archaeologist
Fuhrer. Besides it has been proved that Buddhism had not been adopted in Nepal
till the 6th century A.D. In face of all these clear-cut statements of noted scholars,
it is quite sane to focus our attention on the village Kapileswara in Bhubaneswar.
The centuries old Kapileswara village has got some similarity with the Kapilavastu
in name and a place nearing called Lembai is similar to Lumbini. According to
Tripitaka, Lumbini was a small estate with its capital at Kapilvastu. At present
there is Lembai Pargana; and Kapileswara is a part of it. Besides the inscription
of Kapileswara village corroborates the statement of Tripitaka and the Kalinga
war of Asoka. The mention of the era of Buddha and the name of the scribe in the
said inscription help us to take this as gunine. Out of four places hallowed in
memory of Buddha, one is his birthplace the village Kapilavastu or Kapileswara.
When the birth place was destroyed, the Buddhist monks searched for a new place in the dense forest of Tarai region in Nepal and put another stupa there. As other places associated with the life of Buddha like his enlightenment, turning the Wheel of Dharma and his death, all happened to be in the North, it was quite natural to locate it again in the same North. In no Buddhist literature there is any description relating to history or geography of the so called Kapilavastu of Nepal. Only because the Tarai inscription was discovered there, the place attained celebrity throughout the world. Dr. Fuhrer discovered the Asokan stone inscription in the Nepal Tarai in 1896. The Kapileswara birth-place, also evidently an Asokan stone inscription, was discovered 32 years later. A great deal of discussion on the Kapileswara plate appeared in the Indian Historical Quarterly (vol. V) in 1929, but no research was conducted on it. Mr. Chakradhar Mahapatra argues that an Asoka-pillar at the then Kapilavastu and the present Kapileswar, which recorded the birth was destroyed in religious disturbances in Orissa.
The Budhists erected a second pillar in the then inaccessible Nepal Tarai, and engraved on it a duplicate of the original inscription. This is why, we are told, the date of the epigraph in "the Buddha era" and the name of engraver, Chundray, are not mentioned on Rumindei pillar. It is also a fact that this pillar is devoid of the characteristic Asokan capital. The noted historian V.A.Smith challenges this statement of Dr. Fuhrer and comments - This gives no further evidence for Fuhrer's assertion and it appears that neither the Nepalese officials nor the hill-men called it Rumindei. This was forgery of the name by Fuhrer in order to make his discovery a conclusion and to relate it with the name Lumbini. And uptill now it has become the conclusion. But later on he (Dr. Fuhrer) admitted that there was no such name called Rummindei. From the Mahabansa section of the Tripitaka published later, it came to be known that Lumbini was a vast feudal (zamindari) area, and not a village or a place. In the so called birth place of Buddha in Nepal, not only the name Lumbini, but also the name Kapilavastu is rare. The statement of Cunningham in his book 'The Ancient Geography of India' bears testimony to this: No trace of Kapila has yet been discovered at the foot of the Himalayas. After the recognition of these areas as the birth-place of Lord Buddha, only recently (within thirty years) these names are being used in the maps and official documents. Another important fact is that a temple of Mayadevi, Buddha's mother, is also found at so called Lumbini.
