The Man, the Myth, the Buddha

James Shaheen (JS): So you’ve written two very different books. Could you each, in a nutshell, tell us what you hoped to achieve in your books? We can start with you, Don.

Donald S. Lopez Jr. (DL): I’ve written quite a bit about the European encounter with Buddhism. I did a book called From Stone to Flesh, which looked at the earliest European encounters up until the 19th century, from the Buddha seen as an idol—a purveyor of idolatry to be defeated by the Roman Catholic Church—to the Buddha seen as a philosopher of the French Enlightenment, as portrayed by people like Eugène Burnouf and Hermann Oldenberg. 

But in those portrayals, I found that the Buddha had been turned into a black-and-white figure, a teacher of liberty and fraternity and equality. And this was not the Buddha that I knew from Buddhist communities. So I thought I’d try to write a book that portrayed the Buddha as he’s been understood by Buddhist communities over the millennia. 

These European scholars had demythologized the Buddha—that’s the term that is often used in the study of religion—so I tried to remythologize him by restoring the miracle and wonder that surrounds the Buddha in so many beautiful Buddhist texts. That’s the short answer.

JS: Stephen?

Stephen Batchelor (SB): Well, I’ve been on a quest to find the historical Buddha—which after reading Don’s book you might start to have serious doubts about—but this is something that’s preoccupied me for about twenty-five years, actually, setting out in earnest to try to track down this guy, the Buddha Gautama. Two of my previous books, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist and After Buddhism, attempt to recover from the early Pali materials something of the human being who lies behind all of these incredible myths and stories and images and artworks and so on. 

And what I’ve attempted to do in the current book, Buddha, Socrates and Us, is to actually reflect the Buddha through the life of Socrates, and reflect Socrates through the life of the Buddha. The two of them are roughly contemporaneous according to scholarly dating—although if you read Don’s book, you’ll realize that this is a very, very fluid business, trying to actually pin down dates to the Buddha.

I find that Socrates plays a similar role in Western culture as the Buddha does in Asian culture, both being at the root of a whole civilizational movement. Not just a religion or a school of philosophy but an actual way of thinking and being human that finds its origins in these two figures. So it seemed to be a good moment to actually try to bring them into some kind of conversation with one another, each hopefully illuminating the other, and also exploring how their followers, over the following centuries, developed and further refined their ideas.

JS: So, Don, you hope to remythologize the Buddha. You state that pretty clearly in your book. What do you think we lose when we drop the Buddha’s mythological dimension?

DL: Well, I think we lose almost his entire biography. We obviously lose the previous lives, all the jataka tales, which are the most important and popular form of Buddhist literature. We miss the story of his birth, his descent into his mother’s womb from Tushita heaven, and his emergence from her right side. We miss the night of his enlightenment, when he’s attacked by Mara. If we go through all of the major events of the Buddha’s life—which are counted in different ways by different Buddhist schools—most of them have to go away if we demythologize him. 

So what we’re left with is some texts, not all texts—a particular selection of texts that present him in a certain way. And we have to then set aside, for example, the Mahayana sutras. We have to set aside all of the representations of the Buddha in the other Nikaya schools, including many Theravada accounts. So there’s not much left, would be my argument, once we demythologize him.

JS: Stephen, the Dalai Lama is quoted in Don’s book as saying, “If I believed that he was a human being, the Buddha would only be a nice person, and I know he is much more than that.” But what do we gain by emphasizing his humanity, by humanizing him and peeling away the mythological aspects that people may have difficulty with?

SB: If you read Don’s book, you’ll find that this is a process that’s occurred throughout the history of Buddhism. All the different communities that have taken on board Buddhist teachings, be they in India, China, Japan, or wherever, have found their own Buddha to meet the particular needs of their culture in their times. And so, consequently, you have all of these various iterations of how the Buddha speaks and lives for these different communities throughout history. 

Now, I am a Westerner coming from a completely unreligious family, and have, in the last twenty years or so, been very concerned to try to articulate a secular Buddhism, one that’s not tied to the dominant forms of the Buddhist religion. I take an interest in trying to track down those pieces, those passages, those texts that give us at least a glimpse of an actual human being—someone who I can relate to as a secular person coming out of a humanist society and seeking to find a voice in which to articulate Buddhist values in the kind of world we live in now. I think something is very much gained in this process. But, again, that depends on my particular take, right?

JS: Well, the takes are very different. But, Stephen, can we have the Buddha without Buddhism? I mean, you talk about Socrates. He didn’t start a religion, but his ideas permeate our culture. Would the same apply here if the Buddha were simply a philosopher?

SB: I think probably not, actually, because the Buddha—or Gotama, as I prefer to call him, looking after something human—comes to us only through the Buddhist tradition, through its various iterations. I’d find it quite difficult to imagine a person who was somehow completely disconnected from everything that followed in his wake. That doesn’t make an awful lot of sense to me.

JS: Don, I’ll ask you the inverse. Can we have Buddhism without the Buddha?

DL: You’re asking a variation of a very famous question from Wittgenstein: Can you play chess without the queen? This would mean getting out the chess board and putting the pieces in their particular places, and then removing the queen from each side. You can certainly play the game, because we know how the pieces move. But is it chess? That is, what is missing? Wittgenstein didn’t know it, but the same argument had been made by Candrakirti centuries before about a chariot. When we take away pieces, is it still a chariot? 

I think you can certainly have Buddhism without the historical Buddha but not without the supernatural Buddha.

Can you have Buddhism without the Buddha? I think you certainly can have Buddhism without the historical Buddha. That’s, of course, my argument. But that entire quest for a historical Buddha is a separate conversation. I think that the supernatural Buddha, the ahistorical Buddha, is clearly there in the tradition, and always has been. So I think you can certainly have Buddhism without the historical Buddha but not without the supernatural Buddha.

JS: I should just mention that you both have deep backgrounds in the Tibetan Gelug tradition. You encountered the Gelug tradition very early and took very different directions. Both of your renderings of the Buddha also draw from the Western tradition, although in very different ways. 

Stephen, your Buddha is a great philosopher, and, like Socrates, was primarily concerned with ethics, or, to quote you, “how to live a good, just, and dignified life in an unstable world.” Can you say something more about this Buddha, this philosopher-Buddha concerned with ethics and ethical living?

SB: . . . It’s by understanding the Buddha in the actual communal, social, political, and economic world in which he’s depicted in the Pali suttas that I find him to be more than just a religious teacher, but also a philosopher engaged in endless dialogues, as in the case of Socrates. 

I also find an emphasis again and again on the eightfold path. The eightfold path is, for me, the essential structure of an ethical good life. And the eightfold path is, remember, the very first thing that the Buddha is said to have announced in his first discourse, and it’s also the very final thing that he taught to his last disciple, a man called Subhadda. Subhadda approached him on his deathbed and asked, “After you’re gone, how will we know, if someone claims to be teaching Buddhism, that it is your teaching?” And the answer is: “if it contains the noble eightfold path.” 

So, for me, the path is a template primarily for an ethical existence—not just an existence in which we get deep philosophical insights into the nature of reality, or deep, contemplative, mystical states of experience through meditation and so on. It’s actually about a life that allows us to flourish in the fullness of our humanity.