The Buddha is often called Shakyamuni, which means: the sage of the Shakyas. Shakyas were a tribal people, who had a small oligarchic republic in what is now Nepal and Northern India. Siddhartha Gautama was the son of, what we in our days, I suppose, call the president of this political area. So, it was a big thing for him to reject the worldly life of his parents and set out as a homeless wanderer and start a new religion, which rejected all of the values of power and wealth and caste and status that he had been brought up to. So, in this sense, Shakyamuni Buddha was the ultimate rebel.
The Shakyans, it is said according to some traditions, were Scythians who had moved into the North part of India. According to other traditions, the were a semi-mongoloid race, more related to the Tibetans and the people of Mongolia. It’s possible that both traditions are true. They could well have been an inter-mixture of these two ethnic groups.
Towards the end of the Buddha’s life, the Shakyan republic came to an end. The Shakyans had a reputation for pride and arrogance. The king of Kolya, the next-door country, eventually became totally fed up with this and he invaded and destroyed the Shakyan republic. The Shakyan tribe was smashed and scattered. Some of the descendants, it is said, migrated to the East. Some kings of Burma have claimed descendance from them.
Also, the tribe call Chakma, who lived in the Chittagong hills of Bangladesh claim to be the descendants of the Shakyans. I first heard about the Chakmas when I was a teenager. At that time I was starting to become fascinated by Buddhism. So, anything in the news related to Buddhism caught my eye; and so, occasionally I saw in the newspapers stories about the great problems of the Chakma tribe. Being a religious and ethnic minority in Bangladesh, an overpopulated, poor, Muslim country, they were in a difficult position. A great many of them had become refugees over the border in Northeast India. The story is quite like that of the Tibetans, who have been overrun by a much more populous neighbour; and many of them have become refugees in India. I always read these stories with fascination.
Many years later I met a monk at a meeting in which we were talking about aid work and community; and this monk approached me and said, he had had a letter from somebody in India and it was a plea for help and he didn’t know what to do with it because he had no means of assisting but would I look into the matter? I took the letter and when I read the letter, I was startled to see that it was from a man, Mr Talukdar, who was a Chakma; and I thought that this was a remarkable co-incidence.
Anyway, I wrote back, I replied to the letter, in due course I went to India, I met Mr Talukdar, I met his friends, his Chakma companions, and I heard all about the problems of the tribal people. This is how I first became interested in India and the problems of the oppressed tribal and low-caste and out-caste groups of people there. Its also part of the beginnings of the Amida Community and its work in India. That work continues to this day.
Thank you very much
Namo Amida Bu
Dharmavidya
David
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