Gośāla Maskarīputra

Indian religious leader

• Born: Sixth century b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Possibly Saravana, Magadha (now in India)
• Died: c. 467 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Savatthi, Magadha (now in India)

Gośāla Maskarīputra founded the religious sect known as the Ājīvikas, which held to a doctrine of absolute determinism and became known as a an early competitor of Buddhism and Jainism.

Early Life

The life of Gośāla Maskarīputra (goh-SHAH-lah MAS-kah-ree-PEW-trah) is known primarily from the writings of Buddhists and the Jains, who considered him a heretic. It is difficult to judge how much historical truth about the founder of the Ājīvikas can be found in the texts of these other religions. The two primary sources on Gośāla’s early life are the Jain Bhagavati Sūtra (c. fourth century c.e.; Sudharma Svami’s Bhagavati Sūtra; 1973) and the Samaññaphala Sutta (fifth century c.e.), written by the Buddhist Buddhaghosa. Although the Ājīvika faith appears to have had characteristics in common with both Jainism and Buddhism, it was closest to the Jains. Both the Ājīvikas and the Jains held that humankind had been visited by twenty-three tīrthaṅkaras, or “ford-makers,” who brought sacred truth. However, the Jains maintained that the twenty-fourth and last tīrthaṅkara was their sage Vardhamāna (c. 599-527 b.c.e.), while the Ājīvikas believed that Gośāla was the twenty-fourth tīrthaṅkara.

In the Jain version of Gośāla’s life, Vardhamāna, the major proclaimer of the Jain faith, tells the story of Gośāla’s birth. Vardhamāna relates that Gośāla’s father was named Mankhali and his mother was named Bhadda. Mankhali is said to have been a mankha, the precise meaning of which is now unclear, but which seems to have referred to a wanderer who lived by singing religious songs and showing religious pictures. While visiting the village of Sarāvaṇa, Mankhali left his pregnant wife in the cowshed of a rich man named Gobahula. There the child was born, thus obtaining his name, which refers to a place where cattle are kept. This story may be pure fiction, told for the sake of discrediting Gośāla, although the specific identification of Sarāvaṇa may indicate that this was Gośāla’s actual birthplace. The Buddhist version by Buddhaghosa agrees that Gośāla was born in a cowshed but maintains that Gośāla was a slave. Much of this story, also, may have been little more than an effort to discredit a rival religion.

As a young man, according to the account in the Bhagavati Sūtra, Gośāla took up his father’s occupation as a mankha. It does seem likely that he was a wandering religious practitioner and that this way of life brought him into contact with Vardhamāna, the founder of the Jain religion. Jainism, which continues to have a following into the twenty-first century, teaches extreme renunciation of material things and nonviolence (ahiṁsā) to achieve the liberation of the soul. The Bhagavati Sūtra maintains that Vardhamāna was living in a shed at Nālanda when Gośāla went to the Jain sage and begged to be allowed to become Vardhamāna’s disciple. After several rejections, Gośāla was accepted and the two holy men became companions for six years.

Life’s Work

The true events of Gośāla’s life and work are as difficult to ascertain as the circumstances of his childhood and upbringing, since so much of his biography has been passed down through hostile Jain and Buddhist writings. The Jain Bhagavati Sūtra tells that during their wanderings and adventures together, Gośāla was impressed by Vardhamāna’s magical powers and wanted to acquire these kinds of powers for himself. After observing Vardhamāna’s ascetic practices, Gośāla sat down by a lake facing the sun, with his hands raised above his head. He remained in this position for six months, eating only a handful of beans every three days. At the end of this period, Gośāla is said to have acquired the magical powers he desired. Since all sources indicate that Vardhamāna and Gośāla spent time together, it is probable that there were connections between these two religious teachers and that these connections were broken because they developed different doctrines. The story of sitting in one place to acquire powers is similar to accounts of how other holy men achieved enlightenment, so it is probably of the Ājīvika tradition regarding Gośāla.

For about sixteen years after the acquisition of his powers (or after his enlightenment), Gośāla stayed in the town of Sāvatthi (Śrāvastī, in Uttar Pradesh), in a pottery shop. His teachings attracted a number of disciples among the seekers of his age. The disciples who gathered around him at Sāvatthi were the first of the Ājīvika communities that were to spread and persist long after his death. The meaning of the term “Ājīvika” is unclear, but many scholars believe that it can be translated as “one who follows the ascetic way.”

The basic principle of Gośāla’s teaching was the concept of niyata, which is translated as “order” or “fate.” In his view, the universe is a system of interconnected forces in which every event happens by necessity. Gośāla accepted the common Indian idea of the rebirth of souls. However, while other Indian religions hold that rebirth is influenced by good or bad actions, Gośāla maintained that all sin and virtue had no effect. One’s past, present, and future births and all other events were simply the working out of a completely determined destiny. It was not simply that one’s will could change nothing: Free will itself was an illusion. Every individual was destined to go through a chain of births before ultimately ending in extinction. Faced with this utter powerlessness, the Ājīvikas believed that all one could do was to follow a life of simplicity and renunciation. Ājīvika doctrine also taught a perspective known as atomism, the view that all things are composed of much smaller building blocks. While determinism was clearly a part of Gośāla’s original teaching, though, the atomism may have been a later addition.

It seems clear that this determinism was part of Ājīvika doctrine because this view appears consistently in all reports of Gośāla and his teachings. The Pāli language Buddhist texts frequently compare the teachings of the Buddha with those of “the six heretics,” teachers of sects competing with Buddhism during the Buddha’s lifetime. In the Samaññaphala Sutta, these six heretics are named and their teachings are discussed at some length. In this text, Buddhaghosa wrote that Ajatasattu, king of Magadha in northern India, fell into a spiritual crisis. The king’s advisers suggested six teachers that he could visit for an answer to his questions. After receiving unsatisfactory answers from all six, he finally visited the Buddha and, before hearing a sermon, told the Buddha about the teachers. Ajatasattu identified Gośāla as the second of the six. He described Gośāla as teaching that there was no cause of either sin or purity, that destiny directs all occurrences, and that all beings necessarily go through repeated births and deaths.

Toward the end of his life, in the account given by the Bhagavati Sūtra, Gośāla was visited at Sāvatthi by six holy men known as the disacaras. This is apparently a reference to a conference or council held at Sāvatthi by Gośāla and his major disciples. The Ājīvika doctrines seem to have been discussed and refined at this conference, and it probably began the process of assembling the Ājīvika scriptures from earlier writings. These scriptures have been lost in the centuries since the disappearance of the Ājīvika religion, but selections from them have survived as disapproving quotations in Buddhist and Jain texts.

Gośāla is supposed to have visited Vardhamāna not long after the meeting with the six holy men. The Ājīvika sage was angry because the Jain leader had talked about Gośāla’s lowly birth and about shameful incidents during the time the two were together. Gośāla threatened Vardhamāna with magic, but Vardhamāna simply answered that the magic would affect only Gośāla himself, who would soon be stricken with fever and die. Gośāla made his way back to his shed and fell into the foretold fever. During his sickness, he is said to have proclaimed some of the last doctrines of his religion. He then gave instructions for an elaborate funeral, during which his followers would proclaim the death of the last tīrthaṅkara. Before dying, however, Gośāla repented and announced that he was a fraud and that Vardhamāna was the true “ford-maker.” The Ājīvika leader told his followers to tie a rope around his foot and to drag his body through the streets of Sāvatthi, praising Vardhamāna. The followers only drew a map of Sāvatthi on the floor of the pottery shop and, after dragging the body over the map, held funeral celebrations according to the original instructions before cremating the body. The tale of Gośāla’s repentance and deathbed conversion should be regarded with skepticism, since it is the Jain version. Still, it does indicate that the Jains and the Ājīvikas had once been closely connected, possibly even members of the same sect, and that there was some bitterness when the two went their separate ways.

Gośāla’s religion survived him for about a thousand years. The Ājīvikas committed to a religious profession followed a regimen of strict asceticism, begging their food and eating only a restricted diet. Sometimes they carried their asceticism to the point of starving themselves to death. The Ājīvika monks were supported by lay believers, in a manner similar to Buddhist monks. Stone inscriptions during the time of the Buddhist emperor Aśoka (c. 302-c. 238 b.c.e.) indicate that Ājīvika communities flourished by this time. There are various mentions of Ājīvika communities in Buddhist writings, most of which compare these communities unfavorably to those of the Buddhists. Over the centuries, the Ājīvika religion dwindled, while the rival Jain faith survived in India and Buddhism spread throughout Asia. Ājīvika communities maintained a hold in the southern parts of India, but these also gradually vanished, possibly absorbed into the complex and flexible system of the dominant Hindu religion.

Significance

Gośāla Maskarīputra’s life and teachings illustrate the variety of philosophical views that thrived in India at the time that Buddhism and Jainism emerged from Hinduism. He also propounded an early form of determinism that was similar in many ways to later determinist philosophies in other parts of the world, such as that of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677 c.e.). Although Ājīvikism largely died out in northern India about two centuries after Gośāla’s death, Ājīvika communities in southern India survived until about the fourteenth or fifteenth century c.e. Even after that, they may have left influences on the beliefs of Hindu sects in southern India.

Bibliography

Basham, A. L. History and Doctrines of the Ajivikas: A Vanished Indian Religion. 1951. Reprint. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1981. An essential work on the Ājīvikas that contains an extensive discussion of the Buddhist and Jain versions of the life of Gośāla.

Charoborti, Haripada. Asceticism in Ancient India: In Brahmanical, Buddhist, Jaina and Ajivika Societies (From the Earliest Times to the Period of Sankaracharya). Columbia, Mo.: South Asian Books, 1993. A useful work on the religious communities of ancient India and one of the few that devotes substantial attention to the Ājīvikas.

Dundas, Paul. The Jains. New York: Routledge, 2002. An excellent book on the history and practice of Jainism.