Shelley Schanfield
I never intended to write a novel about the Buddha’s wife.
In fact, I never intended to write a novel at all. I love historical fiction, and I wanted to read the story of Siddhartha, the young prince who lived sometime in the 5th or 6th century BCE in Northeastern India, and who rejected wealth and power, duty and family to wander homeless, seeking a way to free humanity from suffering. He became the Buddha, whose teachings have helped millions and are still as profound and useful today as they were 2500 years ago.
Long story short, I never found a historical novel about the Buddha’s life that satisfied me. Toni Morrison says you must write the book you want to read, and full of insanely naïve enthusiasm, I decided to write my own. I didn’t know what I was getting into, between the research I’d need to do and learning the writer’s craft, but that’s another story.
Once embarked on my quest to write the novel I wanted to read, I found myself immersed in India’s incredibly rich mythological past, which is filled with so many stories that Prince Siddhartha would have heard, as well as his own life story, which is told in the Pali Canon. His teachings were passed along orally for several hundred years after his death, and only came to be wriiten down in the Pali language (a kind of vernacular Sanskrit) around the 3rd century BCE. The Pali Canon is an enormous collection of sutras, legends, and commentaries on Buddhist meditative practices.
But even more overwhelming is the body of sacred Sanskrit literature. I wanted to know about the religious thought that shaped the Buddha, so I dipped into the hymns of the Vedas (composed around 1700-1500 BCE) and the early Upanishads (c. 500-400 BCE). I also read the Mahabharata in condensed versions, which though written down sometime between 300 BCE and 300 CE was undoubtedly passed along orally for centuries before, and thus its stories must have been familiar to Siddhartha. To give an idea of the vastness of India’s myths and legends, consider that the Mahabharata, an epic poem of over 75,000 verses, is seven times longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, and as Professor Wendy Doniger of the University of Chicago says, “a hundred times more interesting.” There are several very good retellings in English; my current favorite is Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling by Carole Satyamurti.
You can find links to other books that I used on my website.
In fact, I never intended to write a novel at all. I love historical fiction, and I wanted to read the story of Siddhartha, the young prince who lived sometime in the 5th or 6th century BCE in Northeastern India, and who rejected wealth and power, duty and family to wander homeless, seeking a way to free humanity from suffering. He became the Buddha, whose teachings have helped millions and are still as profound and useful today as they were 2500 years ago.
Long story short, I never found a historical novel about the Buddha’s life that satisfied me. Toni Morrison says you must write the book you want to read, and full of insanely naïve enthusiasm, I decided to write my own. I didn’t know what I was getting into, between the research I’d need to do and learning the writer’s craft, but that’s another story.
Once embarked on my quest to write the novel I wanted to read, I found myself immersed in India’s incredibly rich mythological past, which is filled with so many stories that Prince Siddhartha would have heard, as well as his own life story, which is told in the Pali Canon. His teachings were passed along orally for several hundred years after his death, and only came to be wriiten down in the Pali language (a kind of vernacular Sanskrit) around the 3rd century BCE. The Pali Canon is an enormous collection of sutras, legends, and commentaries on Buddhist meditative practices.
But even more overwhelming is the body of sacred Sanskrit literature. I wanted to know about the religious thought that shaped the Buddha, so I dipped into the hymns of the Vedas (composed around 1700-1500 BCE) and the early Upanishads (c. 500-400 BCE). I also read the Mahabharata in condensed versions, which though written down sometime between 300 BCE and 300 CE was undoubtedly passed along orally for centuries before, and thus its stories must have been familiar to Siddhartha. To give an idea of the vastness of India’s myths and legends, consider that the Mahabharata, an epic poem of over 75,000 verses, is seven times longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, and as Professor Wendy Doniger of the University of Chicago says, “a hundred times more interesting.” There are several very good retellings in English; my current favorite is Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling by Carole Satyamurti.
You can find links to other books that I used on my website.
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