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Comment by hackernewds | Hacker News Reader

The article you linked is full of inaccuracies

> Most modern scholars believe he was most likely born sometime around 480 BC or thereabouts in Śākya Gaṇarājya, an oligarchic state in the northern Indian subcontinent and he most likely died sometime around 400 BC or thereabouts.

Siddhartha Gautama was born in present day Nepal, in the city of Kapilvastu in the Lumbini region. There are archaeological remains of the palace where he was born along with scriptures explicitly matching the origins and design.

The article also goes to great lengths to emphasize a lot of details are nebulous, however they are documented well since the Buddha was a royal prince. For that reason not sure where the idea that the depiction of Chinese Buddha should be accurate is insinuated either.

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Śākya Gaṇarājya translates to English as Shakya Republic and that is actually correct. Kapilavastu was the capital of the Republic/Oligarchy of the Shakya clan. Buddha's father was the elected chief at the time of his birth. This is why one of his epithets is Shakyamuni ("muni" means sage so sage of the Shakyas.)

Strictly speaking Buddha was not a royal price but scion of an aristocratic family. As a comparison think of someone born in a patrician family of Rome when his father is a Consul of Rome. The Wikipedia article has good details about the Shakyas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakya

> Strictly speaking Buddha was not a royal price but scion of an aristocratic family.

Is that so?

It was propheised at his birth (so the legend goes) that he would either become an enlightened teacher, or a "wheel-turning" world monarch (chakravartin). That doesn't prove he wasn't a royal prince, but then I guess I'm not sure exactly what a "prince" is.

Prince is the son of a monarch. A monarch is the sole ruler (mono = one).

In an oligarchy you can still have powerful military rulers "whose chariot wheels roll everywhere"

To continue the comparison with the Roman republic. Consuls where great leaders bestowed with great power and honoured for their military successes. The Roman republic had a taboo of monarchy, one that Caesar himself played with dangerously and which got him killed.

Yabbut in some circumstances, a "prince" is effectively a king. I'm thinking of the princes in the Holy Roman Empire; they paid fealty to the Emperor, formally; but they were the masters of all they surveyed. And the word "prince" in literature often seems to mean exactly the same as "king".

Princes are not necessary the sons of monarchs: independent principalities can and do exist (see for example Monaco).

Prince comes from princeps (the first), a title used by the Emperor Augustus.

Well if we want to dig in the etymology then princeps meant the first in the order (in battle) of the soldiers. This was used during the Roman republic and the connotation was indeed that the first soldiers were the best, more experienced ones Over time Romans realized that it was more effective to not deploy their best soldiers first and so the princeps (the best most experienced soldiers) were in the back.

additionally this history is supported by the Ashoka stamba erected at the historical birth site of the Buddha in Kapilvastu, Nepal as well. you will find though a recently inaugurated Kapilvastu city in India, and one can speculate around why :)

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