Revisiting the Story of the Buddha’s Life

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: We know from all Buddhist cultures that a Buddha statue is not a Buddha until it’s consecrated. And so, for example, in Tibetan Buddhism, they will take the empty statue and they’ll take a stick, which is called a life stick, and they’ll wrap it with mantras, small at the top to fit inside the head, larger as the body gets larger. They’ll then fill in the rest with incense, with jewels, and often with some soil from some sacred place. Then they seal the bottom. Once the statue is sealed, then monks will recite a prayer which causes the Buddha to descend and enter that statue. And so I think when we think about how we understand that Buddha, it’s really us who are filling in that hollow place. We’re putting our own hopes, our aspirations, our beliefs about who he is. We put that inside, we seal the bottom, and then he’s ready for our worship. So I think this filling of the empty statue provides kind of a nice metaphor for this entire question of the Buddha’s biography and his existence.

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, and you just heard Donald Lopez. Don is the Arthur E. Ling Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan and a longtime Tricycle contributing editor. In his new book, The Buddha: Biography of a Myth, he draws from a variety of sources to trace a single narrative of the Buddha’s life, from his birth, through his enlightenment, to his passage into nirvana. While a number of scholars have attempted to demythologize the Buddha by extracting the man from the myth, Don sets out instead to present a remythologized Buddha, highlighting the supernatural elements of his life. So in today’s episode, Don walks us through his account of the Buddha’s life, and then we talk about the larger question of whether the Buddha actually existed and what’s at stake in the answer. So here’s my conversation with Don Lopez.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with scholar and longtime Tricycle contributor Don Lopez. Hi Don. It’s great to be with you.

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Hey James.

James Shaheen: So Don, we’re here to talk about your new book, The Buddha: Biography of a Myth. So to start, can you tell us a bit about the book and how you came to write it?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Well, I think you know they say that every English professor wants to write a novel, and it may be the case that every scholar of Buddhism wants to write a life of the Buddha. And it is the case for those of us who teach, especially in North America, whether we’re teaching World Religions, Intro to Asian religions, Religions of India, or Intro to Buddhism, we tell the life story of the Buddha several times every semester, so that story is always with us. Of course, every sutra that we read begins, “Thus did I hear: The Buddha was staying on Vulture Peak,” or “The Buddha was in Shravasti,” so the Buddha is always sort of on our mind. And for somebody like me who’s been around a long time, that’s a lot of years of thinking about the Buddha.

James Shaheen: So in previous books you documented how Europeans have depicted the Buddha, but in this book you take on the far more difficult task of depicting the Buddha yourself. So tell us about this task. What are some of the challenges of trying to present a narrative of the Buddha’s life?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Well, the challenge is that there’s not enough and too much. So there’s not enough historical information. We don’t know when he lived. There are many, many dates that have been put forward by Buddhist communities over the centuries, which vary by centuries, over the time of his death, which, as you know, Buddhists measure time not by the birth of the Buddha but by his death. And so sometimes we see books that give a date as something AN, or After Nirvana. And we also don’t know what he taught. Unlike the Gospels, we have thousands of texts that are attributed to him. Which of those did he teach? We don’t know. So there’s not enough information about when he lived, and then there are too many texts from which we can sort of figure out what he actually taught. So those are the two major challenges, and they are major.

James Shaheen: So you say very clearly that this is not a history of Buddhist lives of the Buddha, nor is it an account of European lives of the Buddhist. So what is it?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Well, I had written a lot about European views of the Buddha, and in 1995, I edited a book called Curators of the Buddha, and that was the first book, I think, to really look at the role of colonialism in the portrayal of the Buddha and Buddhism. In that book, I looked at for the first time this work by a French scholar called Eugène Burnouf, who in 1844 wrote a book with the surprisingly simple title Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism, and I got so intrigued by that book that with a French scholar, Katia Buffetrille, we translated the entire thing—600 pages—and published that in 2010. From that point, I felt like I was ready to really make the case that the Buddha, as we know him today, was really born in Paris in 1844. And so I did a book called From Stone to Flesh, which was really looking at how this image of the stone statue of the Buddha was turned into this human philosopher by European scholars. I found so much material from that project that I had to do a follow up volume called Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol. So really, for a decade I was just steeped in this idea of the Buddha really as we know him today being the product of European scholarship, and that was in very sharp contrast to the Buddha that I knew from reading Buddhist texts and from studying with Tibetan lamas and living in Buddhist communities. So there was this big disconnect between the European Buddha, the Buddha that we all think we know about in the West, and the Buddha of Buddhists. And so I thought, well, what can I do to try to face that dilemma?

James Shaheen: So you describe the European Buddha as a demythologized Buddha. Can you say something about that?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Well, I think obviously what we see is the Buddha has been portrayed as essentially a philosopher, a rationalist philosopher, a moral philosopher. He’s very French in a way because he’s teaching liberty from rebirth, fraternity of monks, and equality of all members of the castes. He is a man who lives and dies in India and dies at the age of 80. So he’s just one of many thinkers of ancient India, and that’s how he’s portrayed. When I think about him, I think about the photographs from that time. So we have the famous photographer Louis Daguerre, who invented the daguerreotype. I’ve seen all of these daguerreotype photos from the Civil War, for example, and the figures are very stiff. They’re very stolid. They’re rarely smiling. They’re black and white. So this is the Buddha of Burnouf. It’s the Buddha of a daguerreotype, a black-and-white Buddha. On the other hand, from reading Mahayana texts and Theravada texts. The Buddha is really someone who is a Buddha who is I guess we could call technicolor. He’s in 3D. He’s psychedelic. And so we have these two very different images, and I wanted to try to sort of come to grips with that whole question of why they’re so different and who the Buddha really is.

James Shaheen: So you quote a rather striking passage from the “Great Discourse on the Lion’s Roar” to point out the perils of attempting to strip away the superhuman aspects of the Buddha’s life and powers. Would you be willing to read that passage? It’s on page 13.

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Yeah, so this is the Buddha speaking, and he says, “Should anyone say of me: ‘The recluse Gotama does not have any superhuman states, any distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones. The recluse Gotama teaches a Dhamma [merely] hammered out by reasoning following his own line of inquiry as it occurs to him’—unless he abandons that assertion and that state of mind and relinquishes that view, then as [surely as if he has been] carried off and put there, he will wind up in hell.” So the Buddha is, I think, in many ways directly contradicting the portrait of him that was painted in Paris in 1844 and saying, “If this is who you think I am, you’re in big trouble.”

James Shaheen: So the scholars still try to strip down the Buddha, or many do, or they’ve attempted to, and you note that the Dalai Lama once told you that if he believes what Western Scholars said about the Buddha, then “the Buddha would be only a nice person, and I know he is much more than that.” So what gets lost in trying to excavate the man from the myth?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Well, almost everything. You know, when we think about the Buddha, I was thinking about the way that the Buddha is studied in the Tibetan monasteries, and there’s a text that is studied. It’s called the Abhisamayalamkara. It has eight chapters, and the eighth chapter is all about the Buddha, and it’s called the chos sku in Tibetan, the fruition, the dharmakaya. And what we have to recognize there is that when we see this word dharmakaya, it’s one of the three bodies of the Buddha, and in that case, dharma does not mean the teachings. It’s not the body of the teachings; it’s the body of qualities. And so the Buddha has many, many different qualities, long lists of qualities, and so the Buddha is really a collection of qualities, extraordinary qualities, and that’s how he’s understood. The dharmakaya is, of course, the highest body of the Buddha. So this is what really I think His Holiness felt is lost in translation when you just see the Buddha as this nice person.

James Shaheen: Right. Your friend, the scholar Bernard Faure, talks about the mythological Buddha as the Buddha from which all of the teachings arise. My sense is that you’re sympathetic to that view.

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Completely. Yeah.

James Shaheen: Mmhmm. So you describe your own project as remythologizing the Buddha. Can you say something about that?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Well, we have this phrase that we use in religious studies of demythologizing, where we take some figure of the past and we try to get down to the historical figure by stripping away all the myth. That’s called demythologizing. And essentially I think what I’m trying to argue is when we try to demythologize the Buddha, there’s really not much left at all. So many of the elements of his story, as we’ll get to, have quote unquote mythological or supernatural elements about them. So again, for most people in the West who have really inherited this European view of the Buddha as the moral philosopher, I wanted to bring back all of that color, all of that technicolor, and bring back those myths and show how powerful and important they are for understanding both who the Buddha is and Buddhism more generally.

James Shaheen: So you turn to an unlikely source to frame your remythologized account of the Buddha’s life: a novel by the 19th-century French writer Gustave Flaubert. So can you give us some background on The Temptation of Saint Anthony, what he considered his greatest work? Why did you choose it as a frame?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Well, so again, we’re going back to 19th-century Paris and Burnouf’s Paris. So Flaubert is one of our great novelists, the author of Madame Bovary, of Sentimental Education, of the hilarious Bouvard et Pécuchet. But he himself, as you say, considered his Temptation of Saint Anthony to be his most important work and the one he spent many, many years on. Saint Anthony was a desert father, a Christian desert father of the 3rd and 4th century of the Common Era, and he’s famous for the temptations that he had to suffer during the night, various demons and gods would appear to him. This is something that’s been depicted in European painting many times, even by Hieronymus Bosch.

Flaubert was fascinated by this story, so he wanted to write a piece in which all of this happens. And so in his Temptation, all of the gods of mythology from around the world show up in various groups or one by one, and Saint Anthony has these visions of them and sometimes talks to them. And in the very center of the book, the person who shows up is the Buddha. The Buddha has the longest speech, and it turns out that Flaubert was a very serious scholar of Buddhism. That is, he had read Burnouf; he had read all of the texts that were available at that time; he’d read Burnouf’s translation of the Lotus Sutra; he knew that quite well. And a student of Burnouf named Édouard Foucaux had translated from Tibetan a work called the Lalitavistara, one of the very famous biographies of the Buddha, and Flaubert had read that. So this became the basis of Flaubert’s Buddha coming directly from a very important Indian Buddhist text. And so I decided, well, let’s just use that, because for anybody who sets out to write a life for the Buddha, you need some frame. I mean, otherwise it’s just complete chaos. What do you decide to leave out, and what do you decide to put in? So I just used Flaubert’s story as the frame and I quoted his passages and then laid out exactly what was happening in each of those things. So that was my device.

James Shaheen: Yeah. You know, this is a side comment, I didn’t know that he considered that his most important work. I learned that from reading your book. And you describe the novel as the string that holds the book together, more or less what you just explained. It’s the frame for this whole book. So let’s turn to the story of the Buddha as it appears in The Temptation of Saint Anthony. You say that Flaubert begins not with the Buddhist’s teachings but with his body. So can you tell us about the body of the Buddha and some of the thirty-two marks he’s adorned with?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Yeah, so the Buddha, among his many qualities, are the qualities of his body, which are called the thirty-two marks, or the thirty-two major marks, as we say in English, and the eighty minor marks of the Buddha, and these are the marks of a mahapurusha. Mahapurusha means “great person,” but “great person” doesn’t do much in English, so I tend to translate mahapurusha as “superman”—that is, the thirty-two marks of a superman. So the thirty-two, these are going either from the top of his head to the soles of his feet or the other direction, and we have these things which are often just like he has good skin, things that would be kind of normal, but he has flat feet, starting from the bottom; strangely, standing upright, his hands extend below his knees. And so next time you stand up, reach down and see how far your hands go, and you’ll see how long the Buddha’s arms are. He has webbed fingers and toes. This is quite unusual, and there are some art historical reasons for that possibly. He has his famous retractable penis, which he can retract entirely inside his body. He has forty teeth, which is a lot more than the rest of us have. All of his hair curls to the right. He has a tongue that is long enough that he can lick behind his ears, and it’s wide enough that he can cover his entire face when he sticks out his tongue and points it upwards. And of course he has the famous bump on the head, the ushnisha, a word that just means like a turban in Sanskrit. But ​​the ushnisha is very important. It probably just began as a top knot, but it turned into this almost magical thing on his head, which is kind of a no-fly zone. Gods can’t fly over it, and it actually becomes later on a deity. It’s deified, this ushnisha, as a goddess who’s called the victorious crown protrusion. So that’s just among the thirty-two. And then there are another eighty on the list. All of these, of course, are listed at the back of the Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism under the numbers thirty-two and eighty.

James Shaheen: You know, I have to say, it sounds kind of monstrous. So what’s going on here?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Well, I think it probably was a list of things that sounded good at the time in a way. The webbed fingers, we don’t have any accounts of the Buddha doing any swimming, so we don’t know where that came from, but I think some art historians feel, and you’ve seen this yourself, when we see ancient statues from any culture carved in stone, the hardest thing to carve are fingers because they often break off in the process of chiseling, so often the sculptor would just leave a little thin bit of stone between the fingers so that the fingers wouldn’t break off, and somebody saw that and said, “Oh, he must have webbed hands, webbed fingers.”

James Shaheen: You know, there are some nicer features, and one of my favorite descriptions is of the Buddha’s smile, which emanates multicolor rays of light that descend to the hells and up to the heavens. Can you say something about that?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Yeah, so his smile is very important. There’s a lot to say about the Buddha’s smile, and I think one reason that he doesn’t smile much is that these giant rainbow lights come out of his mouth whenever he does, and they go all the way up to the gods and down into the hells. But there’s also a very famous passage in which those rays of light also offer predictions. So if the Buddha smiles at someone and that ray of light touches the person, the ray of light will come back into the Buddha’s body at different parts, and that will predict where they’re going to be reborn. So if they come back into the Buddha’s feet, not good. If they come back into his face, that’s all good. If it comes into one of his hands, they’ll be some kind of a king. So all that is talked about. So even the Buddha’s smile has great potency.

James Shaheen: You know, another superhuman aspect of the Buddha’s life is his unusual birth. So can you tell us about the legends surrounding the birth of the Buddha and his mother’s palatial womb? It’s described in detail.

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Yes. So as we know, of course, this was not the Buddha’s only lifetime; it was his last lifetime, and he’d been perfecting himself over millions of lifetimes as a bodhisattva. So before any Buddha enters the world, his last lifetime is in the Tushita Heaven, which is one of the heavens above Mount Meru, and there he surveys the world to decide where he’s going to be reborn: what country, what caste he will be, who his parents will be, and various other things. So he looked down, and he saw a woman that he identified as his future mother, and he said “At that time, her lifespan must be correct, and her lifespan, from the time I enter her womb, will be ten months and seven days.” So in the lunar calendar, the gestation of a human is not nine months but ten months. So this meant that he would be in her womb for the normal amount of time, and then seven days after his birth, she would die.

So he enters the womb, and the womb is like a palace. First of all, the Buddha enters her womb in the form of a white elephant through her right side. The Buddha’s father is not present at that time, so there’s a bit of an immaculate conception going on here. Then her womb is this incredible palace in which the gods can come visit him, and they take walks through these gardens. There’s a whole long section in various sutras that describe her womb, and to have that palace inside her womb is entirely blissful for her.

So at the end of ten lunar months, it’s time for him to be reborn, and so she decides that she wants to give birth to her child at her parents’ place. So she leaves the palace and begins walking toward her parents and stops in a garden called Lumbini. There, she feels birth pangs, and she grabs a tree with her right hand and this child emerges from under her right arm, not through the usual route. And when we see him in statuary, he already has hair, already has the ushnisha, and he also is dressed in a little loin cloth. So he comes out, he’s caught by two gods, and he immediately can walk. He takes seven steps to the north. He can talk, and he says, “This is my last lifetime.” So he’s an extraordinary child with an extraordinary birth.

James Shaheen: So once he’s born, he leads a lavish life in the palace, shielded from suffering. Can you walk us through some of the highlights of his childhood?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Yeah. So, as you know, one of the things that I guess you do when you have a son, especially a prince, is you bring in the court astrologers, and they make a prediction about his future. And they all said that he’s either going to become a great king, a chakravartin, or he is going to become a buddha, although one of them just held up one finger and said that there’s no doubt about it—he’ll become a Buddha.

So surprisingly to us, this horrifies his father. The last thing he wants him to do is to become some sort of a yogin living in the forest. He wants him to succeed him on the throne. So he decides, perhaps correctly, that interest in religion is born from depression and that if he can keep his child from ever being depressed, he will never leave, and he’ll succeed him on the throne. So he makes this palace where everything is beautiful. There’s no one old, no one ugly, no one sick. And he stays there for twenty-nine years without leaving the palace. During those twenty-nine years, there are just a few things that happen. Of course, he’s a great athlete, he’s a great wrestler, great archer, an elephant dies and he kicks him over the palace walls with his big toe. And when he goes to school, of course he knows all languages, he knows everything, more than the teacher, and he runs through the Sanskrit alphabet with every letter as the first letter of some Buddhist teaching.

So one of the things that’s strange, and I talk about this in the book, is that this is someone who’s been perfecting himself over a gazillion past lifetimes. He’s looked down from heaven ready to be reborn and to have his last lifetime as the Buddha, but some kind of amnesia sets in. So this person who is going to relieve us all from suffering forgets that there is birth and that there’s old age and sickness and death. And so this happens in the course of the four chariot rides.

But before that, there’s an interesting scene in which every year in the springtime, the king would sponsor a plowing ceremony. He would go out with the farmers and get some fancy plow that was pulled by these beautiful oxen and he would plow a few rows. Everybody came out to watch the king do that, and there are different versions of how old the Buddha was, but he was pretty young. He was still a child at the time, because he had nurse maids. So during all this stuff, they just put him under a tree and put a little curtain around it so that he wouldn’t be bothered, but the nurse maids got interested in seeing the ceremony, so they went to see it. When they looked back, it turned out that the Buddha was sitting in meditation under the tree, and during the time they were there, which was hours, the shadow that was protecting him from the sunlight had not moved. So this was a meditation experience, which he seemed to then later forget about. And then just when he’s about to achieve enlightenment, he goes back to that practice that he remembered from those days. So this amnesia of forgetting the memories is a very important theme during his childhood.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I mean the myth of his birth, I won’t try to rationalize it, but the myth of his birth, he proclaims that this is his last lifetime, and then the lavish life in the palace seems like a second gestational period.

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. A twenty-nine-year gestation.

James Shaheen: Yeah, well some of us never reached that point.

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Yeah. Right.

James Shaheen: So you talk about the four sights as one of the rare moments of dramatic tension in the Buddha’s biography: How could the prince be so shocked to learn of the existence of old age, illness, and death? So how has this question been addressed in Buddhist traditions, and how do you yourself understand it?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Yeah, so the four sights, of course, are the four chariot rides. So just to get us back to the story, the Buddha only becomes curious about the outside world when he is 29, and he asks his father, “Can I take a ride outside the city?” His father says no, and he keeps bugging him about it, and he says, “OK, fine.” But the king goes out and takes some precautions. He sends out the army to do this kind of sweep, and they get everybody who is old or ugly or sick, and they put them into detention for a day, and they put musicians in the trees and put out incense and flowers and things.

So the Buddha goes out with his charioteer, and he sees an old man who somehow was missed in the sweep, and the Buddha says not “Who is that?” but “What is that?” And the charioteer says, “An old man,” and the Buddha is completely shocked: “What’s an old man?” He learns that everybody’s going to become old, and it says that the Buddha, when he heard that, it was like a lightning striking near a bull. He was so shocked by that when he figured out that he and his parents—his mother, of course, was dead, but he had a stepmother at this time—everybody that he knew would get old, he couldn’t stand. And he said, “Take me back.” So this happens three more times. He sees an old man, then a sick man, then a corpse, and he sees a meditating yogin. And these are the four sights that cause him to escape the palace, to set out for enlightenment. 

So how do we understand this? I mean, he’s 29 and I think if we think back to when we were 29 ourselves, did we really think that much about old age? I mean, we walk by old people on the street all the time and never pay any attention to them. Certainly we don’t see that much sickness in our current life. In the Buddha’s time, of course, there would be sickness, but he was living in a palace where no one was sick. And we tend not to really see a corpse until perhaps we go to the funeral of a family member, of a grandparent. And so this age of 29 I think probably has some psychological truth to that, that this is when we sort of begin to see that these things are going to happen to all of us. And it’s at that point that we might think, OK, well what do we do now?

James Shaheen: So eventually the prince departs from the palace with much fanfare from the gods, and after six years of austerities, he sits down under a tree determined to achieve enlightenment that very night. So can you tell us about the story surrounding the night of the prince’s awakening, particularly the attack of Mara and his daughters?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Right. So Mara is the Buddhist god of desire and death, and sometimes he’s called the Buddhist devil, but he is actually a god. He lives in one of the god realms, one of the very high heavens of the Buddhist cosmos, and somebody is reborn as Mara, and he is Mara for a while, and then he’s reborn someplace else and a new Mara comes. But Mara understood that if this person finds a path out of suffering, I’m in trouble. That is, this person is someone I must stop because my goal is to seduce people into the joys of the senses until they die and they’re reborn and they remain in samsara. So he ends up attacking the Buddha, and this is one of the most depicted scenes in Buddhist art because he has this huge army of demons, these awful-looking, horrible beings that come, and they send down lava and giant boulders and huge storms. And the Buddha just sits there, completely passively. It says that a cyclone comes through, and the Buddha’s robe barely moved at all. They send down this horrible torrent of rain, and he’s completely dry. So nothing works.

He sends his daughters to try to tempt the Buddha. His daughters have the wonderful names of Craving, Discontent, and Lust, and they are skilled in the arts of love. And so they’re trying to decide what kind of woman is attractive to this guy. And they’re able to change their form, so they first appear as beautiful young virgins, then as beautiful women who’ve just married, and then have had one child, two children, and then are old. Each of those, the Buddha is completely unmoved. But he uses his powers to prevent them from transforming them back into their beautiful selves, and he leaves them stuck in their old age form. So, of course, they’re horrified by this. They go back to their father, Mara, and say, “Look what this guy’s done to us. Please move us back into our beautiful form.” He says, “I can’t do that. It’s beyond my power. He’s got to do it.” So they go and ask him, and he does do that for them. So he lets them go back to their form, but only after they take refuge in him. So it’s an interesting moment because when we think of who were the first Buddhists, we typically say it’s these two guys who gave him his first meal forty-nine days after his enlightenment, but it could be Mara’s daughters.

James Shaheen: Yeah, it’s funny, they try to seduce him, and then he seduces them into taking refuge. Is that right?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: He wouldn’t use that term, but yeah.

James Shaheen: No, he wouldn’t say seduce. So after Maura is defeated, the Buddha attains enlightenment in the third watch of the night, and you note the strangeness of this moment. So would you be willing to read a short passage from the book? It’s on page 101.

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: “The most important moment in the history of Buddhism, the cosmic moment, the salvific moment, occurs at night, in silence, and in solitude. Nothing is spoken, nothing is heard. Like Moses on the mountaintop and Muhammad in the cave, the prince, in his solitude, is unwitnessed by human eyes. But unlike them, he receives no command to recite, no commandments carved on tablets of stone. There is no God, or his messenger, there is no witness. And there is no drama, no burning bush, no empty tomb. There is simply a man sitting cross-legged under a tree in a forest as a new day dawns. What he has experienced had not been preserved to be uncovered; it had not been hidden to be revealed. The enlightenment of the Buddha is said to be the same enlightenment achieved by the buddhas of the past, a truth that had been forgotten.”

James Shaheen: So Don, could you tell us about the oddity of this moment, especially in relation to analogous events and other world religions?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Well, that’s what I’m alluding to here, of course. So we’re talking about during the Exodus, Moses receives the Ten Commandments. He comes down and finds the Israelites worshiping the golden calf. And so this is a very key moment, of course, in the Exodus narrative. Mohammed is in a cave and the angel Gabriel appears to him and tells him to recite and tells him what to say, and the Quran is then dictated to him. He goes back home and then has his wife take dictation. And of course, in terms of Jesus, we have so many things, but of course the empty tomb on that first Easter morning when the women come to find him and he’s not there. And so all of these things are events that eventually are witnessed, right? Obviously Moses comes down from the mountain, Mohammed goes home, the women eventually find Jesus. They know that he’s risen. And the Buddha is just a person sitting cross-legged under a tree. Nothing is said, nothing is spoken. He doesn’t say a word, and nothing is heard. So it really is this moment of enlightenment, which is unique to him, something that he’s been striving for over all of these bazillion past lifetimes. But then he has to take seven weeks to sort of decide what to do. And these seven weeks, I think, are a crucial and fascinating part of the story. And I spend quite a bit of time talking about those weeks. It’s only at the end of those seven weeks he decides, “OK, I’m going to teach.”

James Shaheen: You know, what he teaches is in fact a truth that is discovered again and again and again. It’s hidden for a period, and then it’s rediscovered by the new Buddha. Is that right?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: That’s right. Yeah. So obviously Buddhists believe that there have been many Buddhas in the past, and we have the names of many of them. And this is said to have gone back. There is no beginning of time in Buddhism. There have always been Buddhas, but the problem is that when a Buddha passes away, then a period occurs over several thousand years in which his teachings are completely forgotten. And it’s only then that a new Buddha comes. And so we are sort of in this period now where things are getting worse and worse, and from the Buddha’s perspective, eventually a time will come when his teachings are forgotten. As I often say in my class, you Google the word Buddha and you get no hits, and it’s only then that Maitreya, the next Buddha, will come. So we know the next Buddha is waiting in his Tushita Heaven now, but he will only appear when the teachings of our Buddha heaven completely disappear from the world.

James Shaheen: We’re relatively lucky, then, that we can Google the Buddha, right?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Absolutely.

James Shaheen: We’re somewhere in the middle of it all. OK, when he first teaches the dharma, his famous first sermon, this is where many of the biographies of the Buddha end and don’t include the rest of his life and his passage into nirvana. So why is this the case? Why would that be the culmination?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Really, once he teaches the path to nirvana, there’s not much more to do. Obviously we have the whole establishing the order of monks and nuns, which is hugely important, and we find that in a different section of the canon. That’s found in the discipline section, in the vinaya, not so much in the sutras. And so basically he has these years left from age 29 to age 80, in which not much happens. As you know, his evil cousin tries to assassinate him, he gives a lot of teachings, but his teachings are variations on what he taught the first time. And so narratively speaking, there’s not much that goes on. And then we do have his passage into nirvana, which then occurs in a separate text, the Mahaparinirvana Sutra, the Sutra on the Great Final Nirvana, and that there’s a lot of work that has to be done in that text, and that then is where a lot of the various strings get sort of wrapped up and tied together, but that period between really his enlightenment and first teaching or first sermon to the group of five up until his last meal, not much goes on from a narrative point of view.

James Shaheen: Well, you mentioned the Mahaparinirvana Sutra, and there are two accounts of the Buddha’s passing or not passing into nirvana, but they have strikingly contradictory messages. So can you tell us a bit about these two accounts and what we can learn from reading them in conversation with each other?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: So the Pali text is the more famous, and so it’s the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, and that’s the one that we know and that we have experts from in so many different anthologies. The other one is in Sanskrit, the Mahaparinirvana Sutra. This is a much longer work, and there’s maybe one translation so far, I think from the Chinese. It’s a work that requires a lot of study, and that’s being done by some important scholars right now. But that’s a Mahayana sutra, and the Buddha doesn’t pass in nirvana because he’s eternal, right? The Buddha is this immortal being, and so it’s the direct opposite. There is no passage into the nirvana without remainder. So this kind shows us particularly around this idea of tathagatagarbha, buddha-nature. That’s something that’s taught a lot in this second Mahayana sutra, the Sanskrit sutra. And so it just shows us how the person of the Buddha evolved over time as we come into the mahayana, where the Lotus Sutra and others will say that the Buddha just pretends to enter nirvana. He’s immortal.

James Shaheen: So the Pali version includes an account of the Buddha’s final meal, which has been thoroughly discussed and debated throughout history, with many questions about how the Buddha could have died of dysentery. But you suggest an alternative reading of the sutra and the Buddha’s final days. Tell us about that.

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: So the Buddha goes and accepts a meal from a man named Cunda, a blacksmith, and we don’t know exactly what it was. There’s two ways to understand this term. In Pali Buddhism and Theravada Buddhism, monks eat meat, so it’s pork; in Sanskrit Buddhism and in Chinese Buddhism, the Buddha is a vegetarian, so it’s some kind of a truffle. It’s called pig’s delight. So is this something that is delightful to eat because it’s a pig, or is it something that pigs like to eat? That’s a big question, and there are long academic articles about that question. 

So Cunda prepares this meal, and the Buddha says to him, “Only serve this to me, and take the rest of it and bury it, because only a Buddha can digest this meal.” So the Buddha eats his pig’s delight and suffers something which would be translated literally as “red flows.” And that is generally understood to be an attack of dysentery, which is very painful. And so this is a question: Did the Buddha die of dysentery? What was that? And if he’s the Buddha, what did he do in a past life to die of that? So that’s something I talk about quite a bit in that chapter. 

But when we look at the traditional biographies, it is said that there are, and the Buddha actually tells this to Ananda, that there are two important meals in the life of the Buddha: the meal right before he achieved nirvana, because he’d been practicing starvation. He’d been eating one grain of rice for a long time, he was completely emaciated, and he ate this meal from a woman named Sujata, which sustained him for the next seven weeks during his enlightenment time. So that’s very important, and that’s said to be infused by the gods with special powers to keep him going. And then the other meal is his last meal, which is also infused by the gods. And so the Buddha only eats right before noon, so he has that meal. Obviously it’s very painful. But then he gets up and walks with Ananda all the way to Kushinagara. There’s a scene in which someone offers him a robe, he puts it on, and his body is glowing more beautifully than the golden robe. Then he lies down between the two trees in that famous scene, and he gives a lot of teachings over the next several hours. So, is he dying of dysentery or not?

The other thing we know is that the Buddha had already predicted the time of his death. Mara said, “Listen, you’ve done what you wanted to do, go ahead and die.” The Buddha says to Ananda, “You know, if he’s asked to do so, a Buddha can live for an eon.” And Ananda says, “Oh, really?” And then he tells him a second time. And Ananda says, “Oh, that’s nice.” And then he tells him a third time, “If only asked to do so, a Buddha can live for an eon until the end of an eon,” and Ananda just says, “Whatever.” And so then there’s an earthquake, and Ananda kind of wakes up and he says, “What’s that earthquake?” And he says, “Well, there’s an earthquake when a Buddha has relinquished his life force.” And Ananda says, “Oh my God, please live for an eon until the end of an eon.” And the Buddha says, “Sorry, you had three chances. It’s too late now. I’m going to die, and I’m going to pass into nirvana in three months.” So that had been predicted three months before the dysentery scene. So the dysentery scene is complicated. There’s a lot to say about it, and I dwell on it at some length to try to sort of figure out what it’s doing in the story.

James Shaheen: You know, Ananda really blew it. It’s like his Adam and Eve moment. You know, he really blows it for the rest of us.

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: He really did. Yeah. That’s his curse—poor Ananda.

James Shaheen: So now we’ve covered the broad strokes of the Buddha’s biography, and we arrive at a larger question, one that keeps getting asked, no matter how much we might wish it goes away: Did the Buddha actually exist? How do you think of this question?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: You know, I think it’s ultimately unanswerable. Again, as we’re trying to, how do we identify the historical existence of a savior when we have so little to go on? We don’t really know what he taught, we just have these teachings that came down, and we know many, many teachings that are ascribed to the Buddha, if he lived, were composed long after his death but yet placed in his voice. And we don’t know exactly what he taught. So when did he live? We don’t know. What did he teach? We don’t know. So where is he in all of this?

So what I really try to do in the book is really to sort of raise this question and really look at all the reasons that one might say yes or no in terms of the question of his historical existence, and then coming to the conclusion that, you know, it doesn’t really matter that much, right? I mean, if the teachings have this salvific power that is ascribed to them, if we have these fabulous stories that are so inspiring, does it matter whether there is a flesh and blood person behind all of that?

James Shaheen: Well, you lay out a distinction between the Buddha and what you call the Buddha function. So what do you mean by the Buddha function, and how do you see the relationship between the two?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: So, of course, we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of texts that are ascribed to the Buddha, and when we count the Mahayana sutras, we get into the thousands. Anything that is going to be canonical in Buddhism has to be spoken by the Buddha, and we know that so many of these texts are not spoken by him. Even when we come to the monastic code, it’s interesting that we sort of think about, “Oh, there’s just all these rules for monks and nuns,” but every single rule has a story behind it. The Buddha didn’t just lay out the hundreds of rules for monks and nuns. Somebody had to do something wrong, and the Buddha says, “OK, you can’t do that anymore, and from now on, there’s a rule that you can’t.” So for example, in Theravada Buddhism, monks keep 227 vows, and nuns keep 311. There’s a story for every one of those. And so did the Buddha really lay out all of that? Are the stories about the origins of all of these vows historically coming from the time of the Buddha? Certainly not. We know, for example, that many of those vows have to do with monastery life—the particulars of the monastery, the monk’s cell, the nun’s cell. Do you have a door on your cell? All of these things are described in great detail, but we have no archeological evidence for monasteries until centuries after the Buddha died, if we knew when he died. So that means the monastic code where we have an individual story of the Buddha making a rule against something, all of those came about post his death if he lived. So what do we do with all of these texts that are definitely after him? The Mahayana sutras, scholars are in complete agreement that the Buddha did not teach these. So what are we supposed to do with his historicity when we have these teachings?

So I decided that we need to identify the Buddha function. It can’t be the word of the Buddha unless it’s “Thus did I hear: The Buddha was in such-and-such a place.” So that’s the Buddha function. It sanctifies that sutra. How do we follow the rules? Well, the Buddha had to make the rule. How do we sanctify that way? Because we tell the story about them. So that’s the Buddha function for the vinaya and for the sutras.

James Shaheen: So a related question is whether the Buddha was a human being. Some European scholars have tried to extract the man from the myth, while others say that there’s only myth. And so it really does beg the question of whether the Buddha was ever a man to begin with. So how do you look at that?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Well, I mean, in many ways the same question about historicity, but just in terms of the categories of Buddhist rebirth. Of course, there’s six types of rebirth: gods, demigods, humans, animals, ghosts, and denizens of hell. And the Buddha is a human, because he’s born from a human mother, but he’s described very often as a god. He’s called the devatideva, the god above the gods. The gods worship Him, and the word “god” in some cases in Buddhist literature means a Buddha. And so he is this sort of figure who’s kind of on this borderline, this liminal state between the divine and the human. I think that’s really what we’re looking at here, right? How do we understand this person who seemed to be, again, I don’t want to make parallels with Jesus of is he God or man, but he’s really on the borderline between those two. And that then, again, puts the historicity question in yet another light.

James Shaheen: So as one way of addressing this question, you turn to art, and you say you wrote parts of the book while visiting the exhibition on early Buddhist art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York, something you very kindly took our staff on a tour of. So what can we learn about these questions of the Buddha’s existence from art?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Well, I mean, again, it just adds another layer of mystery, because as you remember, when you walk through that “Tree and Serpent” show, you’re seeing primarily, at least in the first part of the exhibition, what we call the aniconic Buddhist art, that is, scenes from the Buddha’s life, his birth, his departure from the palace, his enlightenment, his passage into nirvana, all the famous scenes are there, but he’s absent. So for example, at his birth, his mother is holding a cushion, and it’s got two little baby footprints in it. When he is leaving the palace, there’s just a horse with a parasol on the saddle and not a human, but all the gods are around. For his enlightenment, it’s just a tree being worshiped by the gods. At his death, that’s typically a stupa, his passage into Nirvana. And so we don’t know why this is. This is one of the great mysteries of Buddhist studies and especially art history. Why was it that the Buddha was not depicted in the way that we know him for centuries until eventually we start having the Buddha in his iconic form?

And so again, I prefer to leave that as a mystery. I mean, I think there are people who would want to say, “Well, there was no self anyway, and so they’re really trying to portray these deep Buddhist teachings.” But the artisans who carved these things were not monks. They knew the stories, and I think we sort of bring Buddhist philosophy into Buddhist art, especially early Buddhist art, at our own peril. And so I’d rather leave that as a mystery for the moment, about the aniconism of his depiction.

James Shaheen: I think you were going to write an article for us about aniconic Buddhist art, but I’ll put that aside for now. So you note that once statues of the Buddha began to be created, when all of a sudden they appear, which is a sort of remarkable moment in that exhibition. All of a sudden there’s the Buddha, and I was almost disappointed. But in any event, these statutes were not considered complete until they were filled, sometimes with relics, sometimes with jewels, sometimes with stories. So what can this teach us about the story of the Buddha’s life?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: This is now when we’re getting into the point where statues can be cast and not just carved in stone. So they’re hollow. And we know from all Buddhist cultures that a Buddha statue is not a Buddha until it’s consecrated. And so, for example, in Tibetan Buddhism, they will take the empty statue and they’ll take a stick, which is called a life stick, and they’ll wrap it with mantras, small at the top to fit inside the head, larger as the body gets larger. They’ll then fill in the rest with incense, with jewels, and often with some soil from some sacred place. Then they seal the bottom. Once the statue is sealed, then monks will recite a prayer which causes the Buddha to descend and enter that statue. And so I think when we think about how we understand that Buddha, it’s really us who are filling in that hollow place. We’re putting our own hopes, our aspirations, our beliefs about who he is. We put that inside, we seal the bottom, and then he’s ready for our worship. So I think this filling of the empty statue provides kind of a nice metaphor for this entire question of the Buddha’s biography and his existence.

James Shaheen: One of our covers several years ago was one of these Buddhas, and it was an X-ray of the Buddha, so you could see all of the relics inside. And one thing about the aniconic art, it left so much to the imagination. I was really getting into it. So by the time you see the representations of the Buddha, it’s a little bit of a letdown, but still quite beautiful. So another dimension of the debate over whether the Buddha existed or was human concerns the validity of his teachings, and you point out that Mimamsa authors considered Buddhist sutras fallible because they had a human author. So how did Buddhists counter this claim? 

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Right. So there there’re six classical schools of Hindu philosophy, and one is called Mimamsa. They were the primary opponents of the Buddhists, and I think the most successful opponents of the Buddhists in India. We think, for example, Shantirakshita’s work on the Compendium of Principles, the Tattvasamgraha, much of it is in response to Mimamsa attacks on Buddhism. So as Hindus, they believe in the Vedas, and the Vedas are eternal. They have no human author. They’ve existed in all time for all time in the form of speech. And it’s only the rishis, the sages who heard the Vedas and then recited them, and they’ve been preserved as sound. And so because they have no human author, from the Hindu perspective, the Vedas are infallible. Humans are fallible, and therefore anything with a human author is subject to error. And so one of their attacks on Buddhism is that your founder was a human, and therefore his teachings are fallible. They can’t all be true, and they have a term that they use, apauruseya, which means not human, to define their Vedas. But then we find Buddhist authors saying that the Buddha’s sutras also do not have a human author, and they even say that the Buddha’s sutras can emerge from trees and from walls. And so the Buddha as a speaker becomes kind of separated from his own teachings in order to be able to answer this Hindu attack and a very successful Hindu attack, frankly, on Buddhists. We’re talking 7th, 8th, 9th century, and this is one of the reasons I think in some ways, much more than the so-called argument about the Muslim invaders that led to the demise of Buddhism in India, were the successful philosophical attacks on the teachings by Vedic proponents.

James Shaheen: Well, if, on the other hand, these truths are revealed, truths to be discovered again and again and again, the Buddha becomes a vehicle for truths that may have no author. Does that make sense? 

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Yeah. So the truths themselves are eternal, right? And we have that statement many times in the canon. And so this is merely, the Buddha becomes kind of the mouthpiece in a sense, in his beautiful voice, for speaking these truths. But those truths did not originate with him. Definitely not.

James Shaheen: So building on that point, you say that arguing that the Buddha was not a historical figure is an argument that is authentically Buddhist, and to say that the Buddha did not exist is not to say that he is false. So how so?

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Well, I think in answer to that, I would say that in the same way, “No suffering, no origin, no cessation, no path, no wisdom, no attainment, no non-attainment. Therefore, Shariputra, because bodhisattvas have no attainment, they rely on and abide in the perfection of wisdom.”

James Shaheen: Don Lopez, thanks so much for joining. It’s been a great pleasure. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of The Buddha: Biography of a Myth, available now. Thanks, Don.

Donald S. Lopez Jr.: Thank you. Always a pleasure.

James Shaheen:  ​​You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Donald S. Lopez Jr. Tricycle is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available. We are pleased to offer our podcasts freely. If you would like to support the podcast, please consider subscribing to Tricycle or making a donation at tricycle.org/donate. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and the Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!