Remythologizing the Buddha

The Buddha is one of the most significant figures in world history. But did he actually exist?

Scholar Donald S. Lopez Jr. takes up this question in his new book, The Buddha: Biography of a Myth. Drawing from a variety of sources including the Pali canon and the work of French novelist Gustave Flaubert, Lopez traces out a singular narrative of the Buddha’s life—and then explores the larger question about whether the Buddha was actually a historical figure. While a number of scholars have attempted to “demythologize” the Buddha by extracting the man from the myth, Lopez sets out instead to present a remythologized Buddha, highlighting the supernatural elements of his life.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sat down with Lopez to discuss the dangers of trying to strip away the superhuman aspects of the Buddha’s story, what we can learn about the Buddha’s existence from art history, and why arguing that the Buddha was not a historical figure is actually an argument that is authentically Buddhist. Read an excerpt from their conversation below, and then listen to the full conversation.

To start, can you tell us a bit about the book and how you came to write it? Well, 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. For those of us who teach, 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. And, 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 on our mind. For somebody like me who’s been around a long time, that’s a lot of years of thinking about the Buddha.

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? The challenge is that there’s not enough and too much. 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 for the time of his death, which vary by centuries. We also don’t know what he taught. We have thousands of texts that are attributed to him, so 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 have to figure out what he actually taught. Those are the two major challenges, and they are major.

You say very clearly that this book is not a history of Buddhist lives of the Buddha, nor is it an account of European lives of the Buddha. So what is it? Well, I’ve written a lot about European views of the Buddha, and in 1995, I edited a book called Curators of the Buddha, which 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 a work by a French scholar named Eugène Burnouf, who wrote a book in 1844 with the surprisingly simple title Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism. I got so intrigued by that book that I translated the entire thing—600 pages—with a French scholar, Katia Buffetrille, and published that translation 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 wrote a book called From Stone to Flesh, which looked 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.

For a decade I was just steeped in this idea of the Buddha 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 studying with Tibetan lamas and living in Buddhist communities. So there was this big disconnect between the European Buddha that we know in the West and the Buddha of Buddhists, and so I thought, well, what can I do to try to face that dilemma?

You describe the European Buddha as a demythologized Buddha. Can you say something about that? What we see is that the Buddha has been portrayed as essentially a rationalist philosopher, or a moral philosopher. He’s very French in a way because he’s portrayed as 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, and he’s portrayed as just one of many thinkers of ancient India.

When I think about [the European Buddha], I think about the photographs from that time. We have the famous photographer Louis Daguerre, who invented the daguerreotype. I’ve seen 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 what 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 come to grips with the question of why they’re so different and who the Buddha really is.

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? Yeah, 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.”

Yet many scholars still attempt to strip down the Buddha, and you note that the Dalai Lama once told you that if he believed 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? Well, almost everything. You know, when we think about how the Buddha is studied in Tibetan monasteries, there’s a text that is studied called the Abhisamayalamkara. It has eight chapters, and the eighth chapter is all about what’s called the chos sku in Tibetan, the fruition body, or the dharmakaya. When we see this word dharmakaya, it’s one of the three bodies of the Buddha, and in this 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 extraordinary qualities, and that’s how he’s understood. The dharmakaya is, of course, the highest body of the Buddha. This is what I think His Holiness felt is lost in translation when you just see the Buddha as a nice person.

You describe your own project as remythologizing the Buddha. What do you mean by that? 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. Essentially, 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 have mythological or supernatural elements about them. For people in the West who have inherited this European view of the Buddha as a moral philosopher, I wanted to bring back 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.

If the teachings have the salvific power that is ascribed to them, and 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?

The book also raises a larger question: Did the Buddha actually exist? How do you think of this question? You know, I think it’s ultimately unanswerable. How do we identify the historical existence of a figure 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 placed in his voice. 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? What I try to do in the book is to raise this question and look at all the reasons that one might say yes or no in terms of the question of his historical existence, ultimately coming to the conclusion that it doesn’t really matter that much. I mean, if the teachings have the salvific power that is ascribed to them, and 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?

As one way of addressing this question, you turn to art, and you say you wrote parts of the book while visiting an exhibition on early Buddhist art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York. So what can we learn about these questions of the Buddha’s existence from art? Well, it just adds another layer of mystery, because as you remember, when you walk through that “Tree and Serpent” show, you’re seeing primarily what we call aniconic Buddhist art. All the famous scenes from the Buddha’s life are there—his birth, his departure from the palace, his enlightenment, his passage into nirvana—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 passage into nirvana, there’s typically a stupa.

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? 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, and I think we bring Buddhist philosophy into 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.

You note that once statues of the Buddha began to be created, they 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? 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. 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. They’ll then fill the rest of the statue 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 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 those inside and seal the bottom, and then he’s ready for our worship. So I think this filling of the empty statue provides a nice metaphor for this entire question of the Buddha’s biography and existence.

Another dimension of the debate over the Buddha’s humanity 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? So there are 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. When we think, for example, of Shantirakshita’s work on the Compendium of Principles, the Tattvasamgraha, much of it is in response to Mimamsa attacks on Buddhism. As Hindus, the Mimamsa believe in the Vedas, and the Vedas are seen as eternal. They have no human author; they’ve existed in all time for all time in the form of speech. The rishis 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. They have a term that they use, apauruseya, which means not human, to define their Vedas. And so one of the Mimamsa attacks on Buddhism is that its founder was a human, and therefore his teachings are fallible. But then we find Buddhist authors saying that Buddhist sutras also do not have a human author, and they even say that Buddhist sutras emerge from trees and from walls. And so the Buddha as a speaker becomes separated from his own teachings in order to be able to answer this Hindu attack on Buddhist teachings.

Well, if 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? Yeah, the truths themselves are eternal, and we have that statement many times in the canon. And so 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.

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? Well, in answer to that, I would say, “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.”

This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.