'All conditioned things decay', was, as roughly translated, the Buddha's penultimate sentence. 'The one who has woken' (which is what the participle buddha means) was trying to reassure the monastic circle that his death was in the natural order of things. The Buddha's views on an afterlife are ambiguous. The historical man, however, saw the future of his thought as part of a philosophical continuum within society, and he apparently conceded the necessity of a degree of post humous ritual. In texts which describe the Buddha's final weeks we find him ordering the construction of reliquaries (stupas) for his ashes. These were to be placed symmetrically, as in many Buddhist propositions, on the sites of four life-events: his birth, enlightenment, first discourse and death.

LRB 5 August 1993 | PDF Download