Birth of the Buddha

The Buddha’s Immaculate Conception occurred when a six-tusked white elephant entered the right side of his mother, Queen Maya, in a dream or, according to older accounts, in actuality. Residing at Kapilavastu with her husband, King Suddodana of the Shakya clan, Maya decided to give birth in her mother’s home in Devadrsha, at a distance from Kapilavastu.

The pregnancy had already lasted ten lunar months. She is overcome en route and, halfway to Devadrsha, stops at Lumbini. It was the end of the dry season on the eve of the spring lunar new year. She retires into the wooded grove and, under the light of the full moon, raises her right hand to grasp a lowering branch of the fruiting Sal tree. The bodhisattva emerges from her right side; drops to the ground like a like ripe fruit and is caught on a cushion by Indra, king of the Hindu pantheon.

The newborn bodhisattva then takes seven steps to the north – lotus blossoms springing up in each footfall – and declares, “This is may last birth.” Seven days later Maya dies. She ascends to Trayastrimsa Heaven.

Who is this holy child? And whence cometh he? Unlike the Virgin Birth of Mary, Maya’s immaculate conception does not certify that this child was born of a Heavenly Father. On the contrary, it proves that the Buddha, mythically speaking at least, has no father at all, much less a divine one. The six tusked white elephant, even if it is a holy spirit, cannot be that of a heavenly father.

On the contrary, the white elephant is an emphatically aquatic beast. It is a wet-season talisman, auspicious royal proxy in rain-making ceremonies and grand totem-at-large for aboriginal and matrilineal Asia. It is identified, therefore. unequivocally with the feminine aquatic powers governing the primal waters.

Moreover, according to the Pali canon, the Buddha a) in a previous life, was himself born a white elephant with the auspicious six tusks and b) in the present life, tamed a wild elephant set upon him by his cousin Devadatta in a failed attempt on his life. By the rule of mythic equations, therefore, these facts all lead to the same conclusion, viz., the elephant is the Buddha.

And it follows from this mythic identity that a Buddha conceived by an elephant is a Buddha born by self-conception – an absurdity by Aryan principles, where every son must have a father, but a perfectly logical notion in matrilineal cultures, which do not, after all, assume any necessary connection between sex and birth. Where sex and birth have not yet been joined intellectually, neither have fathers and sons. IN matrilineal societies the necessary connection exists only between mother’s brother and sister’s son. Conception, meanwhile, is the business of totems – birds, crocodiles, dragons, elephants, etc. – not fathers.

Thus, in Buddhist culture, the myth of immaculate conception does not serve, as it does in Christian culture, to confirm the Buddha’s paternity, but rather to deny it altogether. Since descent is destiny, the fatherless Buddha of art and lore holds weighty consequences. The scriptural accounts carefully trace the Buddha’s ancestry through the male line back through fifty-five thousand generations directly to Mandhatar, the ideal king and first cakravartin, or wheel-turning righteous sovereign. So if the Buddha is his father’s son, as stated in scriptures, then he is destined to become an the great cakravartin emperor of the present age because, by patrilineal descent, he is heir to the world throne. This is all clear.

But in matrilineal native India of Buddha’s day, paternity was irrelevant, birth conceived as auto-parthenogenetic, and descent traced through the mother. The nativity myths of Buddhist art therefore, despite their charming naïveté, have a serious purpose. Birth-by-Buddha-elephant demolishes the cakravartin destiny inherited from the father. As his mother’s child, the Buddha’s destiny will be radically different. To know his destiny therefore is to know Maya.

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