Shakya Erotic

The Shakya are the clan that produced the Buddha, and that one fact has carried their name across two and a half thousand years and most of Asia. Siddhartha Gautama was born a Shakya, and Shakyamuni, sage of the Shakyas, is still what millions of Buddhists call him. The clan lived in the Terai, the humid lowland where the Gangetic plain meets the first Himalayan ridges, on ground now split between southern Nepal and Uttar Pradesh in India. Their capital was Kapilavastu, and archaeologists still argue whether it lies under Tilaurakot in Nepal or Piprahwa across the border. Lumbini, the Buddha's birthplace, sits a short distance away on the Nepali side.

The Shakyas were not a kingdom. They ran a gana-sangha, an assembly republic in which the heads of landholding kshatriya families met in a council hall and chose a raja from among themselves, closer to a chairman than a king. This arrangement was common along the eastern fringe of the Vedic world and rare inside it, and it left a mark on the Buddhist monastic order, which borrowed clan assembly procedure for its own governance. The Shakyas lived in the shadow of Kosala to the west, and the relationship ended badly. Tradition holds that the Kosalan king Vidudabha, humiliated to learn that his Shakya mother was a slave's daughter passed off as a noblewoman, sacked Kapilavastu within the Buddha's lifetime. A relic casket unearthed at Piprahwa in 1898 carries an inscription naming the Shakyas as the people who enshrined a share of the Buddha's ashes, the earliest surviving trace of the clan in its own words.

The name did not die with the city. In the Kathmandu Valley, Shakya is a living Buddhist caste among the Newar, whose members claim descent from refugees of the old clan. They speak Nepal Bhasa, a Sino-Tibetan language with no relation to the Indo-Aryan Prakrit of their claimed ancestors, alongside Nepali. Newar Shakyas belong by birth to the bahas and bahis, the courtyard monasteries of the valley, and every Shakya boy goes through Bare Chhuyegu, a few days of formal ordination with shaved head and begging bowl before returning to lay life. With the Vajracharya priests they form the Bare, the caste that keeps Newar Vajrayana running. Their other inheritance is metal. The workshops of Patan are largely Shakya family businesses, casting and hammering the gilt copper Buddhas that furnish monasteries from Lhasa to Los Angeles. In India, meanwhile, the surname was taken up during the twentieth century by communities in Uttar Pradesh claiming kshatriya descent and, for many, a Buddhist identity, so that Shakya today names both an artisan caste and a political statement.