Responding to the Buddha's Absence

Firstly, a note about my absence from this blog for some months. This is due to spending time on long-form writing, specifically two books on the Heart Sutra, one aimed at scholars and the other aimed at general readers. I have several other essays in development for this blog.

The Ṛgveda contains stories about a Promethean figure called Yama, who discovered the way to die and be reborn amongst his ancestors in the pitṛloka or the world of the fathers. I take this to reflect Brahmins assimilating a doctrine of rebirth from their indigenous companions in India. The impression of taking up a previously unknown supernatural commitment is bolstered by the fact that rebirth is not mentioned in the older portions of the Ṛgveda.

The simplest form of rebirth eschatology is a simple cycle of this world and that world, with birth and death connecting them. We see "this world"/"other world" terminology associated with this in Pāli (ayaṃ loko vs paro loko). You always die here and are born there. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka introduced a new goal. Rather than returning to the ancestors, one can merge with Brahman. However, not everyone gets to merge with Brahman; you have to be a man, a Brahmin, and you have to have observed the special rituals all your life. If you are not a Brahmin man, you have some other less desirable fate.

With the addition of alternative destinations based on how one has lived, the stage is set for a revolution: good people—however we define "good"—go to a good place in the afterlife; and bad people go to a bad place. For the Jains, the right way to live is without killing anything. For Buddhists, the right way is to act with good intention. And so on.

At the same time, however, rebirth stops being a good thing. The cycle of rebirth began to be seen as a nightmare from which we all needed to wake up. This view is shared by Brahmins, Jains, and Buddhists.

Indian religions began to aim at what is often called "the deathless" (amṛta). The highest accolade the Buddha ever gave any of his followers after they died was "He has not been reborn". This was the aim of Buddhist practice. The Buddha died, and he was not reborn. The flame or, better, the burning that leapt from incarnation to incarnation, from moment to moment, was extinguished once and for all. As such, the culmination of the Buddha's career is not his attaining nirvāṇa under the bodhi tree, but rather his final extinction (parinirvāṇa) in Kushnagar. With his last death, the Buddha vanishes from our world, never to be seen again. And this is a good thing. At first. When Buddhist art first appears in India, around the time of Asoka, Buddhists are still celebrating the Buddha's ultimate extinction by representing him as absent from the scene.

We can see the Buddha as an anti-Promethean figure, who didn't steal immortality from the gods, but who flung the eternal round of rebirth back in their faces.

The absence of the Buddha is something to celebrate. He succeeded! Everything he said was true! He made it out! And so on. The Buddhist stories about the final death of the Buddha depict the arahants as stoic in the face of his death, with only Ānanda showing any human emotion, weeping for "He who was so kind" (an interesting characteristic to highlight at this point). And yet, this is only the beginning of the story.

Problematising the Buddha's Absence

Fast forward a few centuries. All the people who might have met the Buddha, and all their grandchildren, are dead. The recitation of stories about him has fallen into formalism. Doctrinal and practical disputes have fractured the Buddhist community again and again. There is now a whole zoo of sects competing for followers and patronage. At least some Buddhists are beginning to suspect that the absence of the Buddha is fatal for Buddhism.

In a sense, the impermanence of any particular dispensation is necessary in the myth of the Buddha. The stories of past buddhas emphasise the timelessness of Buddhism. But the idea that the Buddha has no teacher means that only one buddha can appear in the world (in any world) at a time. And the previous buddhas' teaching has to completely die away before a new person can become a buddha. Each buddha as to start from scratch. Buddhists even guessed at the duration of the Buddha's teaching; firstly, it was going to last 500 years, and later 1000 years, and so on until some Buddhists posited that Maitreya would be waiting billions of years for the teaching of Śākyamuni to die out.

However it happened, it's apparent that some Buddhists began to find the absence of a living Buddha problematic. Notably, certain sects came to the conclusion that in the absence of a Buddha, awakening is not possible.

Nowhere was the Buddha's absence more keenly felt than in China, where the idea that the Buddhadharma cyclically appears, persists for a time, and then disappears evolved into the idea that the disappearance is imminent, and we are witnessing the final decline of Buddhism. I've told the story of Jìngwǎn 靜琬, who responded to the end times by carving all the Buddhist sutras in stone at Fangshan.

A practice outlined in the early literature of Buddhism is buddhānusmṛti; recollection of the Buddha, or, to be more precise, recollection of the good qualities of the Buddha. People in the ancient world had exactly the same imaginative capacity as we do. And this means that people could have very vivid imaginative experiences of the Buddha.

Hallucinations and visions are a commonly experienced side-effect of sensory deprivation and are enhanced by ascetic practices such as starvation and sleep deprivation. Withdrawing attention from sensory experience in meditation is a form of sensory deprivation (see Attwood 2021). So, in a community of hardcore meditators, people will have visions. Anyone steeped in Buddhism is quite likely to have visions involving Buddhist imagery, or they will interpret what they see in Buddhist terms.

Recollection of the Buddha was further developed in the Pratyutpanna-buddhasammukhāvasthita-samādhi Sūtra "The Discourse on the Meditation on Meeting the Buddhas of the Present Face to Face". The Pratyutpanna-samādhi Sūtra is contemporary with early Prajñāpāramitā. This text teaches a meditative state in which we can have a vision of the buddhas of the present—not just Śākyamuni, but also Akṣobhya and Amitābha—enabling us to receive teachings from them, and ensuring that we are reborn in their buddha-field.

Indian Buddhists didn't give up on the idea that Śākyamuni was gone from our world and never returning. This fact is as important to Buddhists as Jesus rising from the dead is to Christians. However, recollection and the occasional visions were clearly not enough to sustain Buddhists. An integral aspect of Mahāyāna is the creation of various loopholes to the one Buddha rule. If we cannot have the Buddha, we may still have a buddha.

Note that in this essay I refer to "the early literature of Buddhism", by which I mean the oldest datable literature, which is largely from Gandhāra and China. This should not be confused with the rather dubious and historically problematic idea of "the literature of early Buddhism". As I have noted previously, so-called "early Buddhism" is an orientalist construct. Moreover, the use of Pāli is not attested before the fifth century CE. See also my as-yet-unpublished essay: On Historical Methods in Buddhist Studies and the Disputed Historicity of the Buddha (Version 2). 

Loopholes for Making the Buddha Present Again

The Other Universes Loophole

Two of the oldest and most striking Mahāyāna texts are both called Sukhāvativyūha Sūtra. In English, we distinguish a longer and shorter version, which in China are better known as the Wúliàngshòu jīng «無量壽經» (*Amitāyus Sūtra) and the Āmítuó Jīng «阿彌陀經» (*Amitābha Sūtra). The two texts are somewhat different, but they share certain themes.

In particular, these two texts get around the one buddha rule by imagining other worlds in which a buddha still lives. These worlds were called "buddhafields" (buddhakṣetra). In this view, we live in the buddhafield established by Śākyamuni. In some Chinese translations, Sukhāvatī is called a “purified land" (jìngtǔ 净土). From this, the term "pure land" caught on and, thus, we think of the Buddhism focused on Amitābha and Sukhāvatī as Pure Land Buddhism.

However, there is a limitation. Because of the one buddha rule, Amitābha cannot operate in our world. All he can offer is that when we die, he will ensure that we are reborn in Sukhāvatī, where we will meet with ideal conditions for ending rebirth, and live only one more life.

Note that although Sukhāvati is better known, the first pure land attested in Buddhist literature was actually Akṣobhya's buddhafield called Abhirati (on which see Nattier 2000 and Strauch 2010). Another "pure land" buddha is Bhaiṣajyaguruvaiḍūryaprabharāja (aka Bhaiṣajyaguru orBhaiṣajyarāja), who we know in English as "the Medicine Buddha". As noted, both Akṣobhya and Amitābha also feature in the Pratyutpannasamādhi Sūtra.

Pure Land Buddhism became very popular indeed in East Asia and remains amongst the most popular approaches to Buddhism in the modern world.

The Bodhisatva Loophole

The term bodhisatva initially seems to be a way of referring to Śākyamuni prior to his awakening. Although, of course, bodhisatva also refers to all the other Buddhas prior to their awakening. By the time of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā (circa the year 1 CE ± about 200 years), bodhisatva became a term for anyone who was working towards awakening.

By the way, the standard folk etymology, that bodhisatva is a noun that means "a being" (satva) who aspires to awakening (bodhi), is doctrinally fine, but grammatically incorrect. Sanskrit compounds in the form X-satva are almost always adjectival and mean something like "one whose essence is X" or "one having the nature of X". So bodhisatva is not a noun; it's an adjective that means "one whose nature is awakening". We can take this to mean one who is completely dedicated to awakening, but yet to attain it. 

In the Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtras, Amitābha is accompanied by his two chief disciples Avalokiteśvara and Mahāsthāmaprāpta, mirroring the triad of Śākyamuni, Śāriputra, and Maudgalyāyana. In the Chinese versions of these texts, Avalokiteśvara is named as Amitābha's heir, making him parallel to Maitreya. Hence, Avalokiteśvara is a bodhisatva.

In another early Mahāyāna text, the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka Sūtra (White Lotus Sutra), a chapter is added (towards the end of the long process of composition) in which Avalokiteśavara is said to respond directly to calls for help and is able to take any appropriate form to help people (including female forms). This chapter circulated independently in China as the Guānyīn jīng «觀音經» (Guanyin Sutra).

The Guanyin Sutra sets the pattern for a whole genre of miraculous stories in Chinese Buddhism in which people experiencing misfortunes call out the name of Avalokiteśvara and are rescued.

It is sometimes said that bodhisatvas of this type somehow "hold back" from nirvāṇa. There is a sense in which this is true, since they are said to be still active in the world. Since they are not absent from the world, they cannot have attained parinirvāṇa. However, it would be better to distinguish between nirvāṇa (which only happens to living beings) and parinirvāṇa (which only happens to awakened beings who die). The idea seems to be that a bodhisatva like Avalokitēsvara has attained nirvāṇa, but not parinirvāṇa. In any case, along the way they have attained almost unlimited magical powers, not least of which is the ability to travel from their own universe to ours (which is never explained as such), and includes a supernaturally long life. Later, in the Tibetan context, the bodhisatva is said to develop the ability to choose to incarnate after death. For example, the Dalai Lama is considered to be an incarnation or avatara of Avalokiteśavara.

In any case, bodhisatvas are not constrained by the one-buddha rule because they are not buddhas; they are the disciples of buddhas in other universes. Once this creative idea was seeded in the Buddhist imagination, it thrived and produced a vast number of bodhisatvas, each with their own cult.

These bodhisatvas from other buddhafields are sometimes erroneously called "celestial bodhisatvas" as though they parallel Christian angels (themselves based on Babylonian figures absorbed into Jewish mythology). 

The Eternal Buddha Loophole

While the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka Sūtra speaks to the origins of bodhisatva cults, the main event in the text is the (re)appearance of a Buddha from the distant past.

While Śākyamuni is preaching the Lotus Sutra, a huge stūpa made of the seven precious things rises from the earth accompanied by celestial music and offerings. Inside is the preserved body of Prabhūtaratna Buddha, who lived in the distant past. Long ago, he made a vow that, after entering parinirvāṇa, his entire body would remain inside a stūpa and that he would appear whenever the Lotus Sutra was preached.

Thus, at face value, the Lotus Sutra gets around the one living buddha rule because, in fact, Prabhūtaratna is dead. However, the Lotus Sutra goes a lot further. The claim is made that all buddhas are merely manifestations (nirmāṇa) of Śākyamuni. And in point of fact, the buddhas who appear in different worlds, under different names, teaching different beings—including buddhas who appear to enter parinirvāṇa—are merely skilful manifestations of this singular primordial, eternal buddha.

In this view, there is really only one buddha who attained awakening in the distant past, and now transcends time and space. This buddha is constantly teaching the Dharma through manifest intermediaries, such as Gautama.

A similar claim is made in the somewhat later Survarṇabhāsottama sūtra (Golden Light Sutra).

The idea of emanations of an eternal buddha is further developed by Yogācāra Buddhists in their trikāya "three body" doctrine. Physical manifestations in our universe, like Śākyamuni, are nirmānakāya; Buddhas in the Pure Lands are saṃbhogakāya; and the ādibuddha is dharmakāya. The latter is often reified as "the Dharmakāya".

The idea of a primordial buddha (ādibuddha) becomes embedded in Tantric Buddhism, centred at first on Mahāvairocana and later on different figures. In Kūkai's accounts of esoteric Buddhism, all forms are the secret body of Mahāvairocana, all sounds are his secret voice, and all thoughts are his secret mind. Thus Mahāvairocana is the universe and the universe is Mahāvairocana.

The Buddha Nature Loophole

Another creative response to the absence of the Buddha was the idea of tathāgatagarbha, or buddhadhātu "Buddha nature". This suggests that we all have the germ of a buddha inherent within us, and practice is a matter of revealing our underlying nature.

This idea is first expounded in theMahāparinirvāṇa-mahāsūtra (also erroneously referred to as the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra) and elaborated in theTathāgatagarbha-sūtra.

Michael Radich (2015) suggests that the tathāgatagarbha "womb of the tathāgatas" contrasts with the fleshy womb from which humans are born. Brahmins always saw bodily fluids as ritually polluted, and in the Brahmanised Buddha myth, the Buddha does not emerge from his mother's vagina, where he would be polluted by vaginal secretions, amniotic fluid, and blood, but immaculately through her side. Some versions of the myth also suggest that Māyā was not impregnated in the usual way either, since semen is also a polluting body fluid. 

Radich invokes the Christian theological term docetic. A docetic view holds that Jesus was not really human but wholly divine. The contrary of this is the heretical idea of a wholly human Jesus, who was not divine, a view known as psilanthropic (Greek for "merely human").

Over time, Buddhists represent the Buddha as increasingly supernatural and magical. So "docetic" is a nice word, but it also might obscure the fact that what actually happened was that the Buddha became more and more like a god. The idea of a psilanthropic Buddha, as presented by humanists like Thomas and Carolyn Rhys Davids or Richard Gombrich, is popular in Europe but inconsistent with the general trend within Buddhism. 

Given all the different loopholes, the idea of docetic buddhas is apt. 

What stands out in all of this is how creative Indian Buddhists were in creating loopholes to deal with the problematic absence of the Buddha, and how many different solutions they came up with.

Prajñāpāramitā Doesn't Have a Loophole

Now, I said in the introduction to this essay that "some" Buddhists were bothered by the absence of the Buddha. And I've shown some of the main loopholes that Buddhists imagined in order to bring another buddha into our world to fill the void left by Śākyamuni's parinirvāṇa. There is one example of a piece of literature that seems almost reconciled to the absence of the Buddha.

Following the stock introduction, the opening lines of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā are a discussion about who has authority to preach the Dharma. The Buddha asks Subhūti to instruct the bodhisatvas, and Śāriputra wonders to himself whether Subhūti will teach from the Buddha's authority or his own. Knowing Śāriputra's mind, Subhūti answers that disciples of the Buddha speak with the anubhāva of the awakened (buddhānubhāvena).

In general, Sanskrit anubhāva means "direct perception, apprehension, experience, knowledge from experience, understanding". In translations of Buddhist texts, the word has taken on a magical connotation, and PED suggests translations such as "power, majesty, greatness, splendour, etc", leading to translations such as "by the power of the Buddha". This is certainly redolent of docetism.

I haven't thoroughly checked yet, but it seems to me that the buddha in buddhānubhavena, at least in the context of Aṣṭasāhasrikā, is not a reference to "the Buddha", but is just a past participle being used adjectivally (as they all can be). The Aṣṭasāhasrikā does not seem to refer to Śākyamuni as "the Buddha". He is addressed as Bhagavan and referred to as "a tathāgata". Winding back the docetism a little, I think that buddhānubhāvena means "with the experience of the awakened". Subhūti can speak with the experience of the awakened, precisely because he is awakened (buddha).

Subhūti goes on to explain (Vaidya 1960: 2-3):

yo hi tathāgatena dharmo deśitaḥ, tatra dharma-deśanāyāṃ śikṣamāṇās te tāṃ dharmatāṃ sākṣātkurvanti dhārayanti, tāṃ dharmatāṃ sākṣātkṛtya dhārayitvā yad yad eva bhāṣante, yad yad eva deśayanti, yad yad eva upadiśanti, yad yad evodīrayanti, yad yad eva [3] prakāśayanti, yad yad eva saṃprakāśayanti, sarvaṃ tad dharmatayā aviruddham |

For those who were taught that Dharma by the Tathāgata, training in that instruction of Dharma, they realise the nature [of experience] and retain/maintain [that realisation]. Having realised that nature, whatever they say, whatever they instruct, whatever they teach, whatever they draw out, whatever they reveal, and whatever they make manifest, all that is consistent with the nature [of experience] (dharmatā).

At the very least, this says that the first generation of disciples were every bit as capable of teaching the Dharma because they had realised it for themselves (sākṣātkurvanti) and still bore it in mind (dhārayanti). Which is to say, they were awakened (buddha). However, if this is true, then those disciples were capable of imparting the knowledge to their own followers, who themselves could attain nirvāṇa and become teachers. They are effectively saying that the Buddha's absence is not an issue as long as his awakened disciples (and their disciples) continue to practice Prajñāpāramitā. Only a buddha awakens without a teacher. 

Lineages of awakened teachers keep the Dharma alive in the absence of the Buddha, down to the present. This persistence over 2000 years contradicts the myth of the Buddha's dispensation gradually dying out. However, perhaps the number of non-awakened people operating as teachers of awakening argues for the opposite conclusion. You cannot teach what you do not know. In any case, Buddhism is clearly struggling under liberalism and capitalism, but it continues in some fashion. 

Conclusion

The desire of Buddhists to be in the presence of the Buddha, or at least a buddha, is understandable. All the more so when we consider how ideas, attitudes, and practices have accreted around the central idea of making experience cease in order to be released from rebirth. By the time Buddhism enters the historical record, we already have a lay wing mainly dedicated to material support of both eremitic and coenobitic monks, veneration of relics (aka stupa worship), and evidence of multiple schisms. As far as I can see, outside of Buddhist mythology, Buddhism as a cultural phenomenon was always pluralistic, and the "underlying unity" that some Theravādins profess to see in the Pāli suttas is a psychological projection. The earliest historical evidence of Buddhism (which does not include the Pāli Suttapiṭaka or the Dīpavaṃsa) is all highly pluralistic. 

The Buddha dies and is not reborn. This is celebrated as the greatest success of any person in history.  At first. Centuries later, the absence of the Buddha became problematic and drove a series of creative innovations which would enable one to come into the presence of a living Buddha. In addition to the older practice of recollecting the Buddha (buddhānusmṛti), I have outlined three such innovations:

(1) The invention of other universes, known as buddhafields, with living buddhas who could not be active in our world because of the one buddha rule. However, this development also gave us bodhisatvas from other universes who could be active in our world precisely because they are not buddhas. Buddhas and bodhisatvas proliferated.

(2) The idea of a transcendent, eternal, ādibuddha appeared first in the Lotus Sutra and later, for example, in the Golden Light Sutra. The idea is developed into the Yogācāra trikāya doctrine with its dharmakāya buddha, and this is assimilated into tantric/esoteric Buddhism. In these views, the absence of the Buddha is an illusion, since he is omnipresent.

(3) The tathāgatagarbha or buddha-nature doctrine argues that Buddhahood is something (pure and perfect) that already resides within all sentient beings. All Buddhist practice does is reveal the underlying reality (NB this attitude is highly reminiscent of Sāṃkhya as depicted in the Sāṃkhyakārikā).

By the beginning of the Common Era, buddhas are routinely god-like: eternal, omnipresent, and highly magical. Moreover, by this time Buddhists explicitly believe that buddhas and bodhisatvas respond to prayers and intercede in the world to save the pious. 

Finally, I pointed out that Aṣṭasāhasrikā addresses the problem by referring to the experience of the awakened (buddhānubhāva) which rests on a personal realisation (sākṣātkurvati) that is retained (dhārayati) by the bodhisatva. However, over time Prajñāpāramitā per se is subsumed into the Mahāyāna synthesis where it is seen merely as proto-Madhyamaka, and becomes detached from the practice of anupalambhayoga. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Attwood, Jayarava. 2021. "Sensory Deprivation and the Threefold Way." Unpublished essay. https://www.academia.edu/83896358/Sensory_Deprivation_and_the_Threefold_Way

Nattier, Jan. 2000. "The Realm of Akṣobhya: A Missing Piece in the History of Pure Land Buddhism." Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 23: 71–102.

Radich, Michael. 2015. The Mahāparinirvāṇa-mahāsūtra and the Emergence of Tathāgatagarbha Doctrine. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press,

Strauch, Ingo. 2010. "More Missing Pieces of Early Pure Land Buddhism: New Evidence for Akṣobhya and Abhirati in an Early Mahayana Sutra from Gandhāra." The Eastern Buddhist (New Series) 41(1): 23-66.

Vaidya, P.L. 1960. Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra. Darbhanga: The Mithila Institute.

History as Practiced by Philologists: A Response to Levman's Response to Drewes.

In 2017, David Drewes published an article that is now famous or infamous, depending on your viewpoint. Drewes argued for the thesis that we cannot connect the Buddha to any historical facts and concludes that historians should stop referring to "the historical Buddha". His article has no abstract, so let me cite a passage from his introduction that seems to sum up his argument:

On one hand, the Buddha is universally agreed to have lived; but, on the other, more than two centuries of scholarship have failed to establish anything about him. We are thus left with the rather strange proposition that Buddhism was founded by a historical figure who has not been linked to any historical facts, an idea that would seem decidedly unempirical, and only dubiously coherent. Stuck in this awkward situation, scholars have rarely been able to avoid the temptation to offer some suggestion as to what was likely, or ‘must’ have been, true about him. By the time they get done, we end up with a flesh and blood person – widely considered to be one of the greatest human beings ever to have lived – conjured up from little more than fancy. (2017: 1)

When Drewes says that "the Buddha is not linked to any historical facts", he means that there is no contemporary documentation of the Buddha. There are no eyewitness accounts of the Buddha, and there are no contemporary coins, inscriptions, or documents of any kind. There was no writing anywhere in India prior to the mid-third century BCE. This is indisputable. However, Drewes' article has engendered much disputation, of which Bryan Levman's (2019) response in the Canadian Journal of Buddhist Studies is a prominent example.

In this essay, I will review Levman's (2019) response to Drewes. I will let Levman introduce his own argument. The abstract of his article says:

This article is a response to David Drewes’ hypothesis (2017: 1-25) that the Buddha was a mythic figure who did not necessarily exist as a historical fact. The article suggests that there are four criteria by which the Buddha’s historicity can be established, none of which were discussed by Drewes: 1) the historical facts presented in the Buddhist canon which are corroborated by non-canonical sources, 2) the fact that there is no plausible alternative explanation for the provenance of the teachings 3) the humanness of the Buddha as presented in the canon belies the purported mythologization which Drewes asserts and 4) a core biography of the Founder can be discerned in the Buddhist canon, once later interpolations are removed.

Bryan Levman is an expert philologist who has specialised in the history of language in India. He has quite a chequered past, however, we are concerned here with his writing as a Buddhologist. 

One of the notable features of Levman's vehement disagreement with Stefan Karpik over what language the Buddha spoke was that, amidst deploying abstruse arguments and accusing each other of incompetence, neither of them expressed any doubt whatsoever about the Buddha as a historical character. They both took the historicity of the Buddha for granted.  

Both Drewes and Levman reference "historical facts" but in retrospect it's clear that they are using this phrase very differently from each other. Indeed, I would say that they are operating in quite distinct epistemes. So my first task is to define a "historical fact". I will take a historian's view of this issue. 

Historical Facts

Historians argue about methods and aims a great deal but they all broadly agree that history is the study of people and societies through documents. As historian, John Vincent (2006: 9), puts it:

"Historical study requires verbal evidence, with marginal exceptions. And this verbal evidence, with all respect to the fascination of oral history, is nearly all written evidence."

Documents are defined as broadly as possible. Any form of written evidence can be considered, including coins and inscriptions. Vincent (2006: 10), again, says: "History is about literate societies, and strongly tilted, at very least, towards literate people in literate societies".  Richard J. Evans (1997: 75) cites Sir Geoffrey Elton's definition:

A historical fact was something that happened in the past, which had left traces in documents which could be used by historians to reconstruct it in the present. 

Evans (1997: 76) notes that this view was expressed in direct contrast to E. H. Carr's view that "a past event did not become a historical fact until it was accepted as such by historians." Carr's view turns out to be untenable since he confuses "fact" with "evidence". This gives us a useful distinction: a fact is something that happened, and evidence is an attempt to use that fact to argue for a particular view of history. Evans (1997: 80) again:

What is at issue, therefore, is how historians use documents not to establish discreet facts, but as evidence for establishing the larger patterns that connect them. 

A "historical fact", then, is a documented fact. To be a historical fact about a particular time requires that the document be authored by someone who lived at that time. In effect, historical facts are eyewitness accounts preserved in documents. Determining the veracity or trustworthiness of such accounts is bread and butter for historians. 

Alexander Wynne (2019: 100) suggests that "Good evidence for the Buddha would perhaps be his mention in a non-Buddhist document from the fifth century BC." This is an example of someone confusing "facts" and "evidence". To provide us with facts about the Buddha, presuming he lived in the fifth century CE, a document must be from the fifth century BCE. Wynne admits that no such documents exist. If he were a historian he would admit that the absence of documents of any kind means that we cannot write a history of India in the fifth century. We have to step aside and let archaeologists and anthropologist do their work. Wynne continues to argue sans any relevant facts for another fifty pages. 

NB: Historians don't typically refer to facts or evidence as "good" or "bad". A fact may be true or false, but not "good" or "bad". Similarly a fact may constitute "salient" or "relevant" evidence for a particular argument or not. 

Importantly for this discussion, an inference is not a fact. At best an inference is an interpretation based on a fact or facts. Moreover, logical inferences are validated or invalidated against sets of axioms. It's all too obvious that for Levman, Karpik, and Wynne, the existence of the historical Buddha is axiomatic. Each of their projects is tendentiously seeking to prove what they take on faith. And each erroneously takes their own inferences, validated against their article of faith, to be "historical facts". 

Long before Drewes joined the fray, historian Jonathan S, Walters (1999: 248) wrote:

I think it fair to say that among contemporary historians of the Theravāda, there has been a marked shift from attempting to say much of anything at all about "early Buddhism". Whereas earlier scholars tended to ignore post-Aśokan Buddhist history as corrupt, more recent scholars have tended to regard early Buddhism as unknowable.

The Buddha lived in a pre-literate society and thus in a prehistoric society. A history of a pre-literate society or person is a contradiction in terms. In the context of history as a field or discipline, what Drewes says is entirely uncontroversial and in keeping with the theory and methods of modern historiography. (Note: I take historiography to mean "the act of, and methods used in, writing of history")

It is surprising that anyone who knows anything at all about historiography would take issue with this. It turns out that those who disagree with Drewes don't seem to know about historiography. In my conclusion, I will offer a possible explanation of why philologists and linguists, in particular, might disagree with historians' definition of "historical facts". However, we have first to address Levman's attempts to prove Drewes wrong.

Levman's Arguments Against Drewes.

1. Corroboration.

Levman's first objection is "the historical facts presented in the Buddhist canon which are corroborated by non-canonical sources". Leaving aside, for the moment, the problem of what, if any "historical facts" are presented in the Buddhist canon (and when they refer to), let's look at Levman's examples of corroboration:

"The Asokan rock edicts for example, contain numerous references to the Buddha, the earliest going back to shortly after his coronation in 268 BCE." (28).

However, even if the Asokan corpus does refer to the Buddha, it was composed after 268 BCE. Most scholars guess that the Buddha died around the year 400 BCE (see Norman 2008: 50-52) but this is far from certain and in conflict with all the existing Buddhist traditions which place his death at 486 CE or earlier. The Asokan documents reflect a view from a least 170 years after the putative lifetime of the Buddha (possibly considerably more). This is not an eyewitness account or even a second-hand account. Something that no one seems to have remarked on is that, by the time the edicts were composed, Asoka was a Buddhist convert who appeared to have a certain amount of convert zeal. 

The Asokan edicts are not evidence of the historicity of the Buddha. At best, they reflect beliefs about the Buddha from a later period, as expressed by a latter-day Buddhist convert, who dedicated his early life to brutal wars of conquest and had a lot of bad karma to make up for.

This is a clear example of Levman making a hypothetical inference based on the Asokan corpus and treating his inference as a "historical fact" based on his pre-existing belief in the historicity of the Buddha. By the way, no one argues against the idea of a community of Buddhists existing in the third century BCE. This is a historical fact. Levman's (2019: 29) next argument is:

The presumed historical existence of the Buddha is reflected in many of the early suttas where the Buddha is situated in actual historical places alongside real historical figures.

Note the phrase "presumed historical existence of the Buddha". This is Levman's presumption, not mine. As an example, he continues:

"We know, for example, from other sources, that the kings (Ajātasattu, Bimbisāra, Pasenadi) the Buddha meets with were real historical figures."

It is simply not true that Ajātasattu, Bimbisāra, and Pasenadi are historical figures. As with the Buddha, there are no contemporary documents connected with any of these names. As kings, they left no trace of historical evidence, because there was no writing in India at that time. Given this, Levman's attempts to back up his assertion are surprisingly half-hearted. For example, Levman casually mentions references to Bimbisāra and Ajātasattu in "Jain texts" (without any citation). However, this is to completely ignore the history of Jain literature. Johannes Bronkhorst (2020) comments:

Our most important sources of information regarding early Jainism are found in the canon preserved by the Śvetāmbara Jains. Unfortunately, this canon was given its definitive form at a late date, some 980 years after Mahāvīra according to a Jain tradition, that is, 454 or 514 CE.

The Jains themselves tell us that all of their early literature was lost and then later reconstructed. Jain literature is all considerably younger than, and owes a difficult-to-quantify debt to, Buddhist literature. Bronkhorst (2020) again:

We have already seen that the Sūtrakṛtāṅga Sūtra is one of the oldest texts contained in the Śvetāmbara canon. However, the contents of even this relatively old text date from long after Mahāvīra. This is clear from the following: the Sūtrakṛtāṅga Sūtra shows acquaintance with the innovations that had taken place in northwestern Buddhism in the 2nd century BCE. 

Jain literature can tell us nothing at all about the putative lifetime of the Buddha because, although it mentions events in the past, it was written down much later even than Buddhist literature. Moreover, the references Jain literature makes to the Buddha are vague. As Bollée (1974: 27) says:

It is only in the post-canonical period, and especially when the Jains begin to write in Sanskrit, that in our sources the railings at undefined opponents with more or less ambiguous statements about their views make way for more concrete philosophical arguing with different schools, among whom the Buddhists gradually come to the front to such an extent that śākyādayaḥ as a comprehensive expression for various heretics becomes dominating.

Similarly, Levman cites "Sanskrit genealogies... [in] Purāṇas, and so forth." Levman does not give an example from or even the name of a Purāṇa text, so it's difficult to know what he is referring to here. As far as the Purāṇa literature goes, it is impossible to accurately date the composition of any given Purāṇa text. The most plausible dating scenarios suggest they were composed well into the Common Era. 

So Levman's examples "corroborated facts" are not factual and are not corroborated. And the whole article follows this pattern. 

Levman goes on to discuss stories from various suttas as though they were evidence of historicity, but we've already seen that historians have long considered this to be folly. The suttas are not documents from the fifth century BCE. At best they reflect beliefs from the late first century BCE, but more likely even later. That idea the suttas reflect an earlier time is not a fact, it is an inference. Inferences about the past are not historical facts. 

There is another caveat here. The oldest extant Pāli document of any kind is a partial manuscript from the fifth century CE (Stargardt 1995). The next oldest is a fragment from the ninth century. There are no Pāli manuscripts from the first century, though there are Gāndhārī texts from that period. 

The idea that the Pāli texts were written down in the first century is based on uncorroborated claims made in the Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvāṃsa, which are relatively late texts composed in Sri Lanka. The Mahāvaṃsa (33.100) states that the canon and its commentaries were committed to writing in the reign of King Vaṭṭagāmiṇi (29-17 BCE) at the Alu-vihāra in Sri Lanka.

The authors of the Mahāvaṃsa lived thousands of miles and hundreds of years distant from the events they purport to describe. Moreover, as Jonathan Walters (2000) has pointed out:

Scholars who have treated the Vaṃsas as history have ignored the indications that they were written within (and should be understood within) a temporal and causal framework different from that which we know in the modern West.

In other words, Levman is guilty of the fallacy of presentism since he apparently assumes his own, modern, linear sense of time and causality applies to this ancient religious text. Similarly, Kristin Scheible (2016) has cast doubt on the naive use of the Mahāvaṃsa as a historical source. The clear trend in scholarship on the Vaṃsa literature is towards dehistoricizing it. The majority of modern historians don't consider the Mahāvāṃsa to be a straightforward record of history anymore. To some extent, Levman anticipates this objection and his response is telling:

The alternative, that somehow a pseudo-historical figure was fabricated out of whole cloth or evolved on its own does not make rational sense. (Emphasis added)

This is an example of the informal fallacy of argument from incredulity. Wynne (2019) and others are similarly incredulous. We don't even learn why Levman thinks that it "does not make rational sense". Presumably, this is because the historicity of the Buddha is a given in his view. It's not irrational to believe that human storytellers might have invented a heroic figure to be the protagonist of their stories. Since this is exactly what storytellers do, it would be more surprising if Buddhists did not do it (as I will argue below, we see them doing exactly this at every stage of Buddhist literature). That such stories might have evolved as they were repeated orally for centuries, is exactly what I expect.  

Levman finally finds some purchase on historical facts seven pages into his article when he introduces the issue of how accurately the Pāli stories present geographical information, and accurately reflect the flora and fauna of the Ganges Valley. This strategy is also employed by Wynne (2019). However, the fact that Sāvatthī, for example, was a real city is not evidence that the Buddha was a real person. Rather, it is evidence that the Pāli authors knew Sāvatthī from first-hand experience or got reliable second-hand descriptions. 

2. Aetiology

Levman's second argument is to ask: "If the Buddha is indeed a mythic figure, how did his teachings arise?" He argues that if we say his explanation is not the explanation then we are bound to offer an alternative explanation. This is not the case.

The drift of Drewes's argument is to say that in the absence of historical facts (i.e. contemporary documentation) there is nothing that we can interpret to create a historical narrative. The absence of historical facts means that historians have to accept that they are ignorant and stop talking. Moreover, the old Roman legal principle applies:

Onus probandi incumbit ei qui dicit, non ei qui negat.
The burden of proof lies with the one who asserts, not the one who denies

Levman is making assertions, so the burden of proof lies with him. We've already seen that the standard of the "evidence" Levman cites is insufficient to make his case. Indeed, although he repeatedly mentions "historical facts", Levman has presented none. Rather he presents his speculations about what the facts might have been, validated against his axiomatic belief in the historical Buddha, and treats this mess as "facts". There is no documentation from the time he wishes to historicise. Historians don't engage in the reconstruction of facts. They use facts as evidence to construct a story about the past. 

In making the observation that there are no contemporary documents from which to construct a history of that period, Drewes has done his job as a historian. Explaining prehistory is not the job of historians; it is the job of archaeologists and anthropologists. For example, there are interesting archaeological accounts of the second urbanisation based on the distribution of pot-making technology, which gives us the "two cultures hypothesis" (see e.g. Samuel  2008: 48 ff.). Neither Levman nor Karpik mentions this hypothesis. 

Levman (36) continues

Over the twenty-five centuries since the Buddha lived and taught, billions of people have responded to his teachings of relief from suffering through the realization of selflessness; the four-fold saṅgha of upāsakas and upāsikās, bhikkhus and bhikkhunis has lasted in an uninterrupted continuum from then to the present day. Are we to say that these teachings were simply invented or evolved? Is that even possible?

It's apparent here, again, that for Levman the historicity of the Buddha is not in question. It is something that he takes for granted. He's not making an argument from facts, he is stating a belief about what the facts might have been. And there are at least two other fallacies involved here. 

"Billions" is probably an exaggeration. The fact that a million people believe a myth is not a reason to consider it historical. This appeal to the authority of the masses is called the bandwagon fallacy. Moreover, millions of people (more often than not, the very same millions of people) have also believed that the Buddha performed miracles. Levman does not consider this other testimony from the same source to be a "historical fact". If the bandwagon fallacy applies, then Levman should be arguing that the historical Buddha did miracles as a matter of historical fact. 

In "Is it even possible?" we also have another argument from incredulity. Levman has twice now asked his readers, "Could the teachings have been invented and then evolved?" So let's look at how we might answer him. 

From Buddhist literature, we know that Buddhist teachings evolved constantly while there was life in Indian Buddhism (and also that it continued to evolve outside of India). Even within the Pāli texts, we see clear evidence of the evolution of Buddhist doctrines, from archaic formulations later refined or abandoned, to the emergence of abhidharma-style lists. This evolution is frequently used as evidence for the antiquity and authenticity of the Pāli suttas. In fact, every documented Buddhist sect in history eventually abandoned Buddhavacana in favour of new doctrines.

We also know that ancient Buddhists invented new buddhas. We know, for example, that Buddhists invented the "buddhas of the past" to compete with the Jains and their lists of tīrthaṅkaras. And this happened early enough to become canonical. We also know that, before the Common Era, Buddhists were busy inventing new buddhas ex nihilo, e.g. Amitābha, Akṣobhya, and Bhaiṣyajagūru. In addition, they invented a whole new class of ahistorical awakened beings, i.e. bodhisatvas such as Mañjuśrī and Avalokitasvara (later Avalokiteśvara).

Since the invention of both doctrines and buddhas are observed at every point in documented Buddhist history, it makes no sense to argue that such processes were unknown before the advent of writing. Here we see how Levman's a priori beliefs skew his arguments towards tendentious conclusions. If later mentions of the Buddha are "evidence", the later inventions of buddhas are also "evidence" in the same way. Levman considers the former to be factual and does not consider the latter at all. 

Interestingly, Roy Norman (2008: 47), notes that the words buddha and jina are common to both Buddhism and Jainism, meaning that "there were buddhas and there were jinas before the beginning of both Buddhism and Jainism". If buddhas predate Buddhism then it is entirely possible, for example, that the protagonist of the Pāli suttas is a composite of numerous buddhas. This might explain variations in terminology. 

In answer to Levman's question—Is that even possible?—then, I would answer, that it is not only possible that Buddhists invented doctrines and that those doctrines evolved; it was the norm. The invention of buddhas was also normative. The Buddha and his doctrines could easily have been "fabricated out of whole cloth" and this would have been entirely in keeping with trends we see everywhere in Buddhism and in other world mythologies. So Levman's incredulity is not probative; it's just an expression of his ignorance. 

Levman finishes this section by recapitulating his assertion that the bandwagon fallacy applies. This tells us that his invocation of this fallacy was not a mistake. He appears to genuinely think that the bandwagon fallacy is a valid historical method.

3. The Humanness of the Buddha

Levman's third argument is that amongst all the many supernatural features of the protagonist of the Buddhist suttas, are some human details. These details he draws from Pāli texts that were not written down until some 400-500 years after the events that they purport to describe. Detailing all of the fallacies that this argument involves would be tedious, however, there is one informal fallacy here that it is worth focussing on since it also cropped up earlier. 

On any given page of the Pāli canon, we are likely to encounter both human details and superhuman details attributed to the Buddha by the author(s). By "superhuman" here, I mean qualities that involve magic or the supernatural, such as miracles, psychic powers, visiting god realms, and so on; anything that breaks the laws of physics as we know them.

From this body of literature, Levman cites examples of one type of detail and not the other, and the only examples he cites are those that support his view. But he does not tell us why or how he made this distinction and doesn't admit that there are a huge number of passages that don't support his view. In using selected examples that are not representative of the whole literature, he appears to believe that what fits his presuppositions is positive evidence for his conclusions and what does not fit is not evidence at all. This is called the cherry-picking fallacy.

In fact, the Pāli authors almost always included both kinds of details and there is little or no sign that they made the kind of distinction that Levman takes to be a given. The authors apparently didn't think in terms of "historical facts" and "extraneous magical thinking that can safely be ignored". As far as the authors of the Pāli Canon were concerned, it's all undifferentiated buddhavacana, including the miracles and magic. Levman seeks to impose his modernist distinctions on an ancient literature that definitely did not make that distinction. So this is also an example of the presentism fallacy.

All stories contain human details, even when they are about non-humans because this is how stories work. Drewes (2017: 19) notes that many other mythic figures are fleshed out by storytellers:

There may similarly have been an actual person behind the mythical Agamemnon, Homer, or King Arthur; Vyāsa, Vālmīki, Kṛṣṇa, or Rāma, but this does not make it possible to identify them as historical.

After many pages of fallacious argument in this style, we find Levman asserting:

If the Buddha were indeed a mythic character, surely this kind of human material, where the Founder is portrayed as old and weak, would be the first to go (44).

In Christian hermeneutics, unflattering details about Jesus—such as being betrayed to his death by his own followers—are given extra significance because of the principle of embarrassment (c.f. Meier's Historicity Criteria). Stories about real people would be expected not to include unflattering details unless they were true, so such details can be taken to be more likely to be factual. This is not a criterion that can be applied in isolation and we would want to see documentary corroboration from another source but, still, the inclusion of negative qualities makes a protagonist seem more real, not less. 

Compare some examples from Greek mythology. I think of the myth of Prometheus—almost certainly not based on a real person—who creates humans and steals fire from Zeus for us. Zeus doesn't take fire away from us, but he does punish Prometheus for eternity and creates Pandora's box (which introduces evil into the world via women's curiosity about the world). Zeus himself was guilty of numerous rapes and other forms of brutality. I think also of Hephaestus who was born lame, rejected by his mother, fell hopelessly in love with Aphrodite, and experienced overwhelming jealousy towards Ares. Or think of  capricious Yahweh who, enraged by human conduct, wiped out humanity and started again from Noah and his family, but who apparently still applied the doctrine of original sin to justify oppressing humanity with difficulty and pain. 

Does myth-making always exclude the negative? By no means. The gods have all of humanity's foibles, often in extreme forms. Suppose the inventive storyteller wanted us to believe in the historicity of the Buddha. The little negative details are exactly the kind of qualities they would include, be it historical fact or pious fiction. Human details make fictional characters relatable and memorable. 

So there is no reason to assume that human details attributed to the Buddha reflect historical facts. 

4. Biographical

Finally, Levman argues "But discoverable in the canon is evidence of an early, core biography preserving the authentic history of a real person in an unembellished state. Is this also invented?" (26).

Note again the incredulity. We have already established that the only documented history can be "authentic" and the documents that Levman cites are from at least 400 years after the period he wishes to historicise (and probably much longer). Levman's method here is no more than the interpretation of scripture, a procedure already long discredited amongst historians when Drewes wrote his article. Much of what Levman writes in this section takes the form of "hand waving", e.g.

This may or may not represent something close to the actual words of the historical Buddha; the simplicity and candor of the statement do seem to reflect a “certain genuineness” on the part of the speaker (47).

The idea of "a certain genuineness" is vague and subjective and Levman's use of scare quotes here suggests that he was aware of this. It's all too apparent that Levman finds passages to be "genuine" when they confirm his belief and when he does not find that confirmation he does not discuss them at all (cherry-picking fallacy). 

More importantly, how would anyone know if any words from any source reflected the "actual words" of the "historical" Buddha? Given the lack of contemporary documentation, what is the yardstick here? No one disputes that the Buddha was a non-literate person living in a non-literate society. There are no possible corroborating sources from the fifth century BCE. 

Identifying common elements in versions of a story does not make them truer, if anything it just makes them seem older. How old, we have no idea. The idea that older = truer is a fallacy known as appealing to tradition. The "simplicity" of an idea has never been a criterion for its historicity.

The problem here is that the further back in time we go, the more partial and fragmentary are our witnesses to history. Fewer and fewer sources may well give the illusion of increasing simplicity, when in fact it's just a paucity of sources. There is no a priori reason that the past should be any less complex than the present (at least in historical terms). As Graeber and Wengrow (2021) have amply demonstrated in their first two chapters, those people the Europeans described as "simple" and even "savage" were usually anything but. Arguably the indigenous Americans encountered by Europeans were far more socially and politically sophisticated than their European counterparts. Notably, it was Europeans who adopted American ideas—like individual liberty—rather than the other way around.

How does Levman know that any statement in Pāli is "candid"? He claims to be concerned with rational conclusions, but what rational criteria can he possibly apply to arrive at this "insight"? This is all just confirmation bias. This section finishes with a flourish of hand-waving

Of his true roots we know very little, beyond the few snippets which are buried in the canon, or can be reasonably surmised based on the evidence. All of the material I have been able to find is summarized in my 2013 article. But though his background has been mythologized, this does not make him a mythological character, just someone whose true roots have been obscured and excised for purposes of social and political acceptance.

This is what Drewes was referring to at the outset when he said, "scholars have rarely been able to avoid the temptation to offer some suggestion as to what was likely, or ‘must’ have been, true about him."

In point of fact, of the Buddha's "true roots", we know nothing. The snippets that conform to Levman's views are dwarfed by an avalanche of passages that do not. Levman systematically ignores the vast bulk of the Pāli canon because it doesn't support his argument. There are literally no documentary facts upon which any reasonable surmise might be based. And Levman has not introduced any new facts and inferences are not facts. 

Levman sums up by repeating the numerous fallacies already listed. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Levman doesn't understand the theories and methods of modern historiography. He completely misses the significance and importance of Drewes's argument. 

Summing up

At this point, I would characterise Levman's article as an example of what historiographer Carl R. Trueman (2010: 45) calls the aesthetic fallacy: “if it looks scholarly, then, agree or disagree with it, it is scholarly and must be taken seriously and allowed a place at the scholarly table”. Levman's article looks scholarly, but his methods are not scholarly. At least not from the point of view of a historian. 

History is the study of documents. There are no Indian documents before Asoka because writing was not used in India until he created his famous edicts. Attempting to write a history of a preliterate society is a contradiction in terms, at least as far as historians are concerned. This is the historian's episteme. This is how historians try to ensure the validity of their use of historical facts as evidence for reconstructing knowledge of the past. The epistemology of history is still a live topic and the impact of postmodernist critiques of the use of texts is still being felt. Still, the centrality of contemporary documentation has never been problematised. 

Levman appears to fundamentally miss Drewes' point and makes a series of irrelevant arguments. For example, Levman appears to be convinced that certain presumptions and subjective judgements about stories recorded in Pāli amount to historical facts about the Buddha. Or that his inferences about the past amount to historical facts. In his arguments, Levman relies heavily on unexamined assumptions, skimps on citations, makes factually incorrect statements, and employs numerous informal fallacies including, presentism, argument from incredulity, cherry-picking, the bandwagon fallacy, and confirmation bias.

Fallacies and biases aside, it's clear that Levman, Karpik, and Wynne are all doing something similar when they argue for the historicity of the Buddha. And I think I can shed some light on this. 

Two Epistemes

Most Buddhist Studies scholars are educated in the theories and methods of philology and/or historical linguistics; not in the theories and methods of history and historiography. Philologers routinely reconstruct lost ur-texts from surviving witnesses and historical linguists routinely reconstruct long lost proto-languages. My thesis is that, given these prominent activities it might seem natural for philologists and historical linguists to use similar methods to attempt to reconstruct historical facts via inferences. 

Nineteenth-century linguists, especially in Germany, were able to analyse the way that phonology changes over time and observe that only certain changes and certain types of changes occur. This allows philologists to define descriptive "laws" which limit how any Indo-European language is permitted to change. So we get Bartholomae's Law, Grimm's Law and so on. Since phonological change follows regular patterns that apply across locations and times, we can apply descriptive laws prescriptively and retroactively to reconstruct a universal mother tongue for all of the Indo-European family of languages. Given modern languages and a set of rules, the sounds of ancient languages can be retrospectively reconstructed with considerable confidence. The reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European is an awesome achievement. 

The practice of textual criticism has its roots in the interpretation of legal and religious documents. Formalised methods of recreating the ur-text of the author developed over centuries. Whether they know it or not, modern scholars rely on the method of Karl Lachmann (1793-1851), especially as expressed by his student Paul Maas (1927). As manuscripts are repeatedly copied, errors and amendments build up. By carefully comparing witnesses using Lachmann's method, the textual critic may restore the "original text" even though none of the surviving documents reflects that text. 

In both cases, scholars can infer reliable knowledge of the past based on extant documents. This should sound familiar because it also describes the method of Levman, Karpik, and Wynne (other biases and fallacious arguments aside). They are all making inferences about the past and treating these as historical facts. However, this is not a sound methodology for historiography. 

In contrast to the situation in which we have complete descriptions of dozens of modern languages and extensive descriptions of ancient languages, the Pāli texts don't constitute anything like a complete description of a culture or society. They are normative religious texts that are, for the most part, mythological in character, and only look "historical" after some very restrictive cherry-picking. There is no historical analogue of the lawful changes in phonology (or grammar). 

Historians have long acknowledged that history is not governed by laws analogous to those that govern phonological change. It is a truism that those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. However, it is also a truism that knowledge of the past does not enable one to predict the future. Indeed, in history knowledge of the present does not allow us to predict the past either. If it did then we could simply observe Buddhists in the present, formulate some laws that govern change, and infer facts about the past. This method does not work for history. 

It's notable that in the absence of any general laws, Levman appears to substitute "common sense". I point, for example, to his repeated argument from incredulity and his use of subjective terms like "candour" or "genuineness". Even though Drewes pre-warns him that this is not a credible method, Levman goes ahead and does it anyway.

In effect, historians and philologists have different views on epistemology based on different methods applied to different bodies of knowledge. In this view, philologists appear to believe that the kinds of methods that allow them to reconstruct a proto-language or an ur-text can be applied mutatis mutandis to historical facts. Levman repeatedly treats his inferences as facts. 

While the philological approach to history fails, and fails badly, in terms of historiography, at least this explanation of Levman's method as rooted in philology and historical linguistics rather than history and historiography makes a certain kind of sense. I'm not sure this is correct, but this is the most charitable interpretation of Levman's method that I have been able to come up with. 

This view may also help to explain the (undeniable) controversy that Drewes' article caused amongst Buddhist Studies scholars and religieux. Perhaps Drewes's invocation of historical methods, while obvious to any professional historian, was a bit too casual for an audience of philologists and linguists with no background in historiography. Philologists confidently resurrect lost texts and linguists resurrect dead languages all the time, so resurrecting the Buddha may well seem straightforward to them, more especially if his historicity is axiomatic for them. Historians in their turn expect facts to emerge from documents of that time. They are puzzled that the evidence presented is all 500 years too late and of very mixed provenance and doubtful veracity. One side is shouting "What about the facts?" and the other is shouting back "What facts?". As far as I know, no one has previously observed that the two sides define the word "fact" in different ways. 

Conclusions

In the arena of academic historiography, Drewes is right to say "my argument is really a minor one" (19). In the context of modern historiographical methods, there is no such thing as "the historical Buddha" because there are no documents from that time. Drewes is absolutely right that historians should stop using this phrase. 

I think it's fair to say that the dispute over the historicity of the Buddha has been framed in ideological terms, i.e. as a conflict between traditionalists and modernists. This is unfortunate because ideological disputes are extremely resistant to resolution. Ideologues don't change their minds. The dispute is better framed as a dispute over methodology and epistemology. 

This is to say, the dispute hinges on the ability of different methods to give us reliable information about the past. Historians, who specialise in explaining the past, universally agree that history begins with contemporary documents, with the broadest possible meaning of document as any form of writing. A historical fact is a documented fact. 

The problem is that Levman is not a historian. Levman does apply a historian's methodology and does not cite any authorities on the theories or methods of historians. Rather, where Levman is not relying on some fallacy or other, he relies almost entirely on treating inferences as historical facts (analogous to PIE or some ur-text). The raw materials for his inferences are documents from a much later period, after writing began to be used. The validation of such inferences seems to rest on his axiomatic belief in the historicity of the Buddha (the same can be said of Karpik and Wynne) and appeals to incredulity, common sense, and so. 

As compelling as the rhetoric of a "middle way" might be at this point in trying to resolve a dispute, it's clear that historians have already established a "middle way". This is to restrict themselves to contemporary documents. This means that historiography is necessarily limited in scope and reach. 

In fact, the method of treating inferences as facts, as adopted by philologists like Levman, is not a reliable way to get information about the past. It works in the case of proto-languages and ur-texts, but it does not work in historiography. That Levman's attempt to apply this method is plagued by fallacious reasoning and bias should not distract from the problem that his method is fundamentally unsound. 

This is also an answer to the philosopher/philologer colleague who accused me and Drewes of practising "positivism" because we refuse to accept the philological method of treating inferences as facts. We are not "positivists" demanding scientific facts, we are historians using generally accepted methods in historiography to assess the salience and veracity of facts in documents. 

That said, I do not think the idea of a founder of Buddhism is impossible or unreasonable (as I understand Drewes he thinks the same). It actually seems quite plausible that the mythology of Buddhism might be based on a real religious leader. The problem here is that history is not about what we surmise or guess to be true. Inferences are not facts. 

History deals with documented facts and prioritises facts that can be corroborated. As such history is extremely limited in scope. As John Vincent (quoted above) says, "history leans towards literate individuals in literate societies". The Buddha is not a historical figure by any definition of "historical" used by historians precisely because he is not a literate figure and was not from a literate society. In attempting to historicise the mythical Buddha using other methods and without reference to the long history of historiography, Levman ignores the accumulated wisdom of historians. 

Notwithstanding the possibility of his being based on a real person, the Buddha as presented in Buddhist documents is clearly a mythological figure, who has human traits, but also does miracles and has supernatural powers. The term mythological is not intended to have any pejorative connotation. Myths are how preliterate societies encoded their views about the world and their values before the advent of writing. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Allen, Charles. (2012). Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor. London: Abacus.

Bollée, W. B. (1974). "Buddhists and Buddhism in the Earlier Literature of the Śvetâmbara Jains." In Buddhist Studies in Honour of I.B. Horner, edited by L. Cousins, A. Kunst, K. R. Norman, 27-39. Dordrecht: Springer.

Bronkhorst, Johannes. (2020) "The Formative Period of Jainism (c. 500 BCE – 200 CE)" In Brill's Encyclopedia of Jainism Online. doi:10.1163/2590-2768_BEJO_COM_047082.

Drewes, David. (2017). "The Ideal of the Historical Buddha." Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 40: 1-15.

Evans, Richard J. (1997). In Defence of History. London: Granta Books.

Levman, Bryan. (2019). "The Historical Buddha: Response to Drewes" Canadian Journal of Buddhist Studies 14: 25-56.

Maas, Paul. 1927. Textkritik. Leipzig: Teubner. 

Norman, K. R. (2008). A Philological Approach to Buddhism: The Bukkyō Denō Kyōkai Lectures 1994. Oxford: Pali Text Society. 

Olivelle, Patrick. (2023). Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King. Yale University Press

Samuel, Geoffrey. (2008). The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indian Religions to the Thirteenth Century. Cambridge University Press.

Scheible, Kristin (2016). Reading the Mahāvamsa: The Literary Aims of a Theravada Buddhist History. New York:  Columbia University Press. 

Schopen, Gregory. (1996). "Two Problems in the History of Indian Buddhism: The Layman/Monk Distinction and the Doctrines of the Transference of Merit." In Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic Buddhism in India. University of Hawaii Press. 

Stargardt, Janice. (1995). “The Oldest Known Pali Texts, 5–6th century: Results of the Cambridge Symposium on the Pyu Golden Pali Text from Śrī Kṣetra, 18–19 April 1995.” The Journal of the Pali Text Society 21: 199-213.

Trueman, Carl R. (2010). Histories and Fallacies: Problems Faced in the Writing of History. Wheaton, Ill: Crossway.

Vincent, John. (2006). An Intelligent Person's Guide to History. London: Duckworth Overlook. (first published 1995).

Walters, Jonathan. S. (1999) "Suttas as History: Four Approaches to the Sermon on the Noble Quest (Ariyapariyesana Sutta)." History of Religions 38.3: 247-8.

———. (2000). "Buddhist History: The Sri Lankan Pāli Vaṃsas and their Commentaries". In Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practice in South Asia, 99-164. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195124309.003.0003

Wynne, Alexander. (2019). "Did the Buddha Exist?" Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies 16: 98–48.

Why Did Buddhists Abandon Buddhavana?

I doubt there is a Buddhist alive today who does not revere the words of the Buddha (buddhavacana), at least in some form. The extent to which Buddhist doctrines are considered authentic is the extent to which they are considered to have been enunciated by the Buddha, whether we think this means an historical person or some form of deity.

While academic historians argue against the historicity the Buddha (e.g. Drewes 2017), Buddhist theologians produce apologetics for the authenticity of the Pali suttas as buddhavacana (e.g. Sujato and Bramali 2014). Indeed, the idea that the Pāli suttas are the word of the Buddha is still current in many Buddhist sects. There is a kind of consensus that if early Buddhist texts don't contain all the words of the Buddha, they at least preserve some of them. This is accompanied by varied speculations about which words those are. Accompanying this are various arguments about what the Buddha's "original teachings" were, including some that seek to exclude well-known Buddhist doctrines about karma, rebirth, and ātman.

Despite the different opinions about how it is constituted, everyone seems agreed that the highest value can be assigned to buddhavacana and that the fact of being spoken by the Buddha is still the most important measure of authenticity. I don't think there is anything controversial about this statement, but it does raise some interesting questions.

That said, readers may be puzzled by my title today. Did Buddhists really abandon buddhvacana?

Evolution of Doctrine

Despite the forgoing argument, it is a notable fact of Buddhism that Buddhist doctrines evolved both gradually and, at times, suddenly. By the beginning of the Common Era we see multiple competing versions of the major genres of Buddhist text: Sutra, Vinaya, Abhidharma, and śāstra. While there is some inter-sect commonality in the Sutra genre, the seven extant Vinaya texts show considerable differences, while the extant Abhidharma texts have very little in common except for the general idea of cataloguing dharmas.

At the level of sect we see the emergence of competing heterodox interpretations of doctrine such as sarvāstivāda and pudgalavāda. Both of these are now routinely represented as being Buddhist heresies but, in their own time, were entirely mainstream and respectable. And this is only with respect to texts produced by India. Outside of India far more radical changes occurred as Buddhism was syncretised with local worldviews and beliefs.

As far as I can see, all Buddhist sects gradually moved away from buddhavacana and adopted novel doctrines over time. Even the venerable Theravāda tradition—whose own mythology includes the claim to have preserved the entire oeuvre of the Buddha in the very language that he spoke—moved substantially away from those texts. Modern Theravāda is actually based on the writings of Buddhaghosa, a fifth century commentator, and on medieval sub-commentaries on Abhidhamma, such as the Abhidhammattha Saṅgaha. The practice of meditation died out in Theravāda sects and had to be reinvented in the eighteenth century. Indeed, some Theravādins have argued that liberation from rebirth is impossible in the absence of a living Buddha.

We also see radical departures from early doctrines, such as the Madhyamaka metaphysics of Nāgārjuna. Basic Buddhist ideas such as the distinction between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa (roughly the distinction between continuing to be reborn and not being reborn) are replaced by slogans like "saṃsāra and nirvāṇa are the same thing". To be very clear, this makes no sense in general Buddhist terms. The whole idea of Buddhist soteriology turns on the difference between being reborn and not being reborn. If we repudiate this, then we repudiate Buddhism. And those who study Nāgārjuna's gnomic utterances seem to revel in this repudiation and take this to be a higher form of truth which they grandiloquently name paramārtha-satya "the truth of ultimate meaning".

Note that although Prajñāpāramitā is routinely presented as a radical break in the Buddhist tradition along with Madhyamaka, recently several scholars (esp Huifeng and I) have begun to see considerably more continuity than the historically dominant explanations allow. The idea of withdrawing attention from sensory experience so that it ceases, leaving the practitioner in a state of contentless alertness, is central to Aṣṭa. And we can find ample parallels to this in Pāli. Many of us have now commented on the parallels with the Cūḷasuññata Sutta (MN 121), for example. It now seems wrong to me to think of Prajñāpāramitā as culminating in Madhyamaka. Note that, as far as anyone can tell, Nāgārjuna does not cite any Prajñāpāramitā texts. Nor do they appear to have the same message.

Thus, while Buddhists certainly do valorise buddhavacana, at least some of them strenuously repudiate it and claim we should replace it with Nāgārjuna-vacana; at the same time trying to convince us, despite the obvious contradiction, that buddhavacana and Nāgārjuna-vacana are one and the same thing despite apparently making contradictory claims. Either saṃsāra and nirvāṇa are the same or they are not, and Buddhist soteriology (that is to say the possibility of escaping from saṃsāra by not being reborn) is dependent on them not being the same.

Whither Buddhavacana?

It is a brute fact of Buddhist history that, for all the high-toned talk about buddhavacana, no Buddhist sect in history was ever satisfied with it. Whether they drifted away or were propelled at speed, all Buddhist sects gradually replaced buddhavacana with their own doctrines.

We partly know this because the sects all moved in different directions and some of the vehement polemics that they composed denouncing each other have survived. The Pāḷi Kathavatthu, for example, records Theravāda complaints against other Buddhists and was probably composed at a time when they themselves were decisively moving away from buddhavacana and developing their unique and distinctive Abhidhamma tradition.

After many years of consuming Buddhist studies literature, including hundreds of articles and dozens of books, I cannot recall a single account of Buddhist history that did more than note the evolution of the doctrine in various directions. The well-documented, centuries-long, intra-Buddhist conflicts over doctrine are played down, if they are discussed at all. And no explanation for the changes ever seem to be offered. Scholars seem to say "things changed" and then have nothing to say about why things changed.

I would be very surprised indeed if changes in Buddhist doctrine could not be related to causes. This is what historians do, after all. Just listing a series of changes is not very interesting if we cannot say anything about what led to the change and how the change was reflected in other aspects of the attendant culture.

Why are modern Theravādin bhikkhus like Sujato and Brahmali so anxious about the issue of authenticity that they go to the trouble of publishing a lengthy quasi-scholarly defence of the authenticity of the Pāli suttas? Is there some real possibility of inauthentic Buddhist teachings? Well, yes there is from a Theravāda point of view; almost every other sect of Buddhism could be seen as inauthentic if they believe (as the bhikkhus seem to) that the Pāli represents buddhavacana and other Buddhist texts do not.

The issue is addressed head on in the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā (Aṣṭa). The first thing that happens is that the Buddha asks Elder Subhūti to deliver a sermon on Perfect Insight to the bodhisatvas (which here seems to mean the monks assembled in the audience since no other people are present). Elder Śāriputra wonders whether Subhūṭi will speak from his own insight, or whether he will rely on the anubhāva of the Buddha. Elder Subhūti replies that everything a disciple of the Buddha says is a product of the Buddha's anubhābva

The word anubhāva is difficult to translate since the etymology is unhelpful (it means something like "after-being". However, the word is clearly used in a sense that suggests that the Buddha has a kind of puissance or power by which words spoken by his disciples are, in effect, buddhavacana. Every word that Elder Subhūti speaks, in this view, is something the Buddha might have said.

So the open question is this: If early Buddhists genuinely believed themselves to be in possession of authentic buddhavacana, and they thought this included (by implication) a complete and nuanced description of the Buddhist path, why do we now have a massive plurality of versions of the the Buddha path?

Or, more simply, why did Buddhists come to feel unsatisfied with buddhavacana and replace it with the ideas of lesser figures who came later. How did some Buddhists come to substantially repudiate buddhavacana. Why did Buddhists abandon buddhavacana?

I don't know the answer and I'm not aware of any salient discussions.

A Suggestion

Some time ago, I tried to publish an article which gave a unified explanation for why doctrines that sought to explain karma proliferated. This was knocked back by a stout Theravādin defence from the editor and reviewers and I felt so disheartened that I let it drop. I don't think I was wrong, I think that causal explanations are not seen as valid in Buddhist Studies, so it seemed pointless to continue trying to offer one.

I think Buddhists noticed certain problems in early Buddhist doctrine and responded. In particular I noted that there was a problem I called "action at a temporal distance". Let's say that I make a great donation to a Buddhist monastery and earn a vast amount of merit (puṇya, aka "good karma") in the process. Some Buddhist texts say "I am the heir of my actions", i.e. the person who experiences the consequences is the same as the one who acts. And this can stretch across lifetimes. This is the main theme of the Jātaka and Avadāna literature and one of the main ways that Buddhists talk about morality.

At the same time, however, most readings of the doctrine of dependent arising say that I am not the same person from moment to moment, let alone from lifetime to lifetime. So the one who experiences the consequences is not the same as the one who acts, but only arises in dependence on their actions.

If the action of giving is a discrete event which lasts for a few seconds (maybe) and then ceases, how can that be the condition for some effect in the future given dependent arising? The standard formula is

This being, that becomes. When this arises, that arises.
This not being, that does not become. When that ceases, this ceases.

I argued that this means that the condition has to be present for the effect to arise, and if it is absent the effect ceases or never arises in the first place. The Theravādins in academia disagreed with this extremely enough to reject my article outright, but it is undoubtedly how proponents of sarvāstivāda understood it.

Thus Buddhist morality tales and Buddhist metaphysical texts tell a very different story about continuity over time. Standard modern interpretations of karma don't acknowledge this dichotomy and thus do not explain it. When I looked at historical accounts of karma I did not find a good explanation, but I did perceive a pattern.

In my rejected article I tried to show how various historical Buddhist sects responded to this problem. For example, the Sarvāstivādins took a fundamentalist view of dependent arising.

In this view, if something is able to act as a cause, it must be present. That is to say, if my past actions are causing me to experience something (or anything) now, then they must still be present in some form (the nature of this presence is not discussed). Interpreted metaphysically, which is not obligatory, this means that a past condition must still exist (asti) if it is functioning as a condition. And if something I do now is to have future consequences, then it must continue to be present. Again, this is just a literal reading of the dependent arising formula, albeit it in an optional metaphysical framework. Hence the doctrine (vāda) of always existent (sarva-asti) phenomena (dharma).

Nowadays, I would separate out "presence" and "existence" because I think the discussion was probably intended to refer to the presence or absence of sensory experience, which is only loosely connected to the existence of objects.

In the article, I made similar arguments for pudgalavāda, kṣanavāda (doctrine of moments), and śūnyavāda (doctrine of absence). And I argued that they were all solutions to the same problem: how karma can operate at a temporal distance (how can consequences manifest if the condition has ceased).

It is precisely this kind of explanation that is absent from Buddhism and from academic Buddhist Studies. And the response I got from academia suggested that my attempt to give such a causal explanation of doctrinal evolution was unwelcome. I dropped the article and didn't even bother to put it on academia.edu along with my other failures, though several blog posts leading up to the article are still here.

Assuming that there is any merit in this suggestion (and I remained convinced that there is), we can say, in some cases and to some extent, why early Buddhists abandoned buddhavacana (as they all did). In this case it was because there was a conflict between Buddhist morality and Buddhist metaphysics.

If I am right about this conflict (which no one else seems to have noticed), then the idea of a big bang origin to Buddhism from the insights and utterances of one man is undermined. There is an expectation of great religious figures that they present a coherent set of ideas, attitudes, and practices. Whether this is expectation is reasonable is debatable, but here we see problematic incoherency in what passes for  buddhavacana.

It is simply a mistake to think of ideas like karma and rebirth as emerging from the mouth of the Buddha fully formed without any interactions with other religions. We know that Buddhists absorbed and adapted ideas from Jainism and Brahmanism, for example. It seems to me more likely that Buddhists operated in a milieu in which karma and rebirth were givens, and proposed new explanations of these phenomena that were not initially coherent. After a centuries long process of winnowing (assisted presumably by the decline and disappearance of heterodox sects), Buddhists settled on the best explanation available and retrospectively called that buddhavacana.

As a result I would say that we have to acknowledge that buddhavacana os a contested term, in the sense that Buddhists fought over what counted as buddhavacana. There is no general agreement, whether historically or presently, on what constitutes buddhavacana. The concept is also contested in the sense that Buddhists found the buddhavacana they inherited unconvincing or otherwise unsatisfactory and replaced it with other words that they labelled buddhavacana, a practice that is arguably still current. 

And if there is this level of ambiguity and conflict about buddhavacana, where does that leave arguments about the historicity of the Buddha which is so closely tied to it? I submit that, for historians at least, David Drewes' contention that we should stop talking about "the historical Buddha" because the idea is incoherent, is on the right track. And I add that the concept of buddhavacana is also incoherent in practice.

~~oOo~~

P.S. It occurred to me after I wrote this yesterday to spell out that any example of so-called buddhavacana could well have attained that label post hoc (after the fact): the text was composed, by whoever, and then attributed to the Buddha. 

This also led me to consider the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, i.e. since Y follows X in sequence, X is the cause of Y (also stated amongst scientists as "correlation is not causation"). It made me think about the proposition: a text is called buddhavacana by Buddhists, therefore it must be "words spoken by the Buddha" (the caveat being... except when we have reason to think it isn't). In other words, we know it's not true that every text labelled buddhavacana by Buddhists could possibly be buddhavacana. We know, for example, that Buddhists continued to apply the label long after the time we guess that the Buddha might have lived. And to find justifications for doing so, including inventing new Buddhas, making the Buddha an eternal deity, and so on. We have no idea when the label was first used. 

P.P.S. Thanks for reading. I'm not blogging much these days because I'm mainly focussed on publishing peer-reviewed articles on the Heart Sutra at present. I do post more often on my Facebook Heart Sutra group. Any day now, I'm expecting galley proofs for two companion articles, one of which presents revised editions and translations; the other compares the Sanskrit and Chinese texts in unprecedented detail and tries to explain why they are different. Next up is a major article on the dates of the Heart Sutra (hopefully in 2024) and then I think I'm done. I'd like to put it all in a book, but not sure about who the audience would be anymore since I no longer have any sense of who would be interested in an accurate history, reliable editions, and a coherent interpretation of this weird little text that has come to dominate my life. 

Bibliography

Drewes, David. (2017). "The Idea of the Historical Buddha". JIABS 40: 1-25.DOI: 10.2143/JIABS.40.0.3269003

Sujato and Brahmali (2014). The Authenticity of the Early Buddhist Texts. Self-published via Lulu.com

Myth vs History

I recently came across the text of a talk by Elizabeth Wilson, an academic historian. Her academic website says: "I work on the religions of South Asia; my main specialization is in Buddhist Gupta-era narrative literatures". So we might expect Wilson to have a fairly sophisticated approach to narratives and the historicity of religious narratives. And yet, I find her saying:

The historical Buddha lost his mother when he was just a baby. Legends describe the awakened Buddha ascending to the heaven where his mother had taken birth as a goddess due to her good karma. He gave her the greatest gift that he could offer: the gift of how to transcend death, the path that he discovered sitting under the foot of a tree on the day that he awakened to the truths of Buddhism.

https://www.academia.edu/104145053/Meditative_mothering_How_Buddhism_honors_both_compassionate_caregiving_and_celibate_monks_and_nuns

What draws my attention here are two phrases: "historical Buddha" and "Legends describe". Are we talking about history or are we talking about legend? Wilson seems to conflate the two. For example, the source for the fact that "the historical Buddha lost his mother as a baby", is exactly the same source as the legend that describes Māyā Gotamī ascending to the Tuṣita devaloka. It is not that we turn to Buddhist history texts for one kind of information and to Buddhist legendary texts for the other. The same sources are cited for both kinds of fact. How does that even work?

Now Wilson's talk is quite light in tone, which suggests that I should not take it too seriously. On the other hand, it was uploaded to academia.edu, which suggests that she wanted her academic colleagues to know about it and take it seriously. In what follows, I take Wilson somewhat seriously and (fair or not) as a representative of a particular approach to academic Buddhist history.

Before going further, I need to say a few words about how I understand myth.

Myth

Generally speaking, myths are a collection of stories told by a pre-modern people, culture, or society. The myths of a people express their views about the universe and their place in it. Characters and events in myths are often interpreted as having symbolic rather than realistic value. For example, the characters in myths are often considered to be personifications of certain valuable qualities. Another way of saying this is that values are conveyed in the form of stories about a person whose behaviour exemplifies those values. Myth covers the origins of the world (cosmogony) and the content of it (cosmology). It may include accounts of where people came from and more specifically the origin story of the audience. As such, myths express the identity and values of the culture. Most myths contain substantial references to the supernatural, often in the form of "minimally counterintuitive" elements, such as animals or other non-human beings that have human characteristics such as speech.

The stories in myths contribute to a larger scale narrative. Each story contributes to a "story arc" that describes the history of the universe. In fact, Michael Witzel (2012) has proposed that myths, which vary considerably from culture to culture, follow one of two story arcs. One is prevalent amongst aboriginals in Australia, New Guinea, the Andaman Islands, and sub-Saharan Africa. This is by far the older tradition, since the people who share it cannot have been in contact more recently than about 50,000-70,000 years before the present. The other story arc is prevalent in Europe, Asia, the Americas, and pretty much everywhere else, but still goes back at least before the peopling of the Americas (so around 20,000-30,000 years). In this essay, I'll focus on the latter story.

An outline of this story arc that I previously cited in 2013, goes like this:

In the beginning there is nothing, chaos, non-being. Sometimes there are primordial waters. The universe is created from an egg or sometimes from a cosmic man.

The earth is retrieved from the waters by a diver or fisherman. (Father) heaven and (mother) earth are in perpetual embrace and their children, the gods, are born in between them. They push their parents apart and often hold them apart with an enormous tree. The light of the sun is revealed for the first time.

Several generations of gods are born and there is infighting. The younger generation defeat and kill the elder. One of the gods kills a dragon and this fertilises the earth. Slaying the dragon is often associated with an intoxicating drink.

The sun fathers the human race (sometimes only the chieftains of humans). Humans flourish but begin to commit evil deeds. Humans also begin to die. A great flood nearly wipes out humanity which is re-seeded by the survivors.

There is a period of heroic humans and particularly the bringing of culture in the form of fire, food. The benefactor is a hero or sometimes a shaman. Having survived and now equipped with culture, humans spread out. Local histories and local nobility begin to emerge and then dominate. Consistent with their being four ages of the world, everything ends in the destruction of the world, humans and gods. In some stories this destruction is the prelude for cyclic renewal.

I grew up with both Polynesian and European myth, and have subsequently become familiar with myths from India and Iran. Witzel's story rings true to me. Despite considerable diversity, the collections of myths across Asia, Europe, and the Americas generally follow this same story arc, but the characters and events may vary. The conserved feature is the plot: creation, first-generation gods, second-generation gods, heroes (demigods), ordinary humans.

Of course, Witzel is not the first to notice broad thematic consistency in world mythology. Carl G. Jung also noticed this and conjectured that all of our minds are supernaturally connected via a "collective unconscious". Jung's bullshit was eclectic and was probably influenced by his reading of the Vedanta and/or Neoplatonism. In any case, Witzel's conjecture is more parsimonious and I think Occam's razor applies: if we can explain something like global commonalities in myth without invoking the supernatural or inventing entities such as the "collective unconscious", then that explanation should be preferred.

We can distinguish myth, which is ahistorical, from legend, which is thought (even if only apocryphally) to have some basis in history. An example of an edge case might be the stories of King Arthur. Arthur is clearly an heroic human being who has considerable supernatural assistance from Merlin. Many believe that Arthur was based on some historical figure, although they don't necessarily agree on which. The foundations of this belief are far from solid. Much the same can be said about the Buddha. Many people believe that the stories in Buddhist suttas are based on the real adventures of a man in the early Iron Age in India, that is, around the middle of the first millennium BCE.

For reference, I now live in an area that was dotted with Iron Age settlements, which are clear in the archaeological record. That said, not one single character or event has come down to the present from that period in Britain. We know a little about how such people lived from archaeology, but nothing at all about individuals. We certainly do not have any religious teachings from that period.

Buddhist myth is strange in that the story arcs don't apply. The Buddhist cosmogonic story, for example, is not particularly Buddhist. Rather it appears to mainly be fragments of Brahmanical myth and some elements of what I take to be chthonic or aboriginal myth (the stories of the original inhabitants of the central Ganges valley prior to the arrival of Indo-European speakers). Scholars such as Richard Gombrich have pointed out that in some cases, such as the Tevijjā Sutta (DN 13), Buddhist myth is presented as a parody of Brahmanical belief. In any case, the standard Buddhist cosmogony and cosmology is not Buddhist per se. It has been assimilated, with minor changes, from a Brahmanical community.

Gods and other supernatural figures are an important part of Buddhist myth. Many stories feature devas, asuras, or Brahmās which come from Vedic myth. They also feature animistic gods such as yakkha, nāga, and kiṃnāra that seem to be chthonic. But as far as I can see, there is no story arc of the universe in the Buddhist mythos. The myths of Buddhism tend to focus on the career of the Buddha within a Brahmanical cosmos. This suggests that, despite appearing to come from one ethnic group (i.e. Sakya or Sakka "the Strong"), Buddhists did not adopt the mythology of that group.

With this in mind let us consider some elements of Buddhist myth that Elizabeth Wilson invokes.

The Myth of the Buddha's Mother

The main sources for Wilson's stories are early Mahāyāna texts like the Lalitavistara or the Mahāvastu. Here the stories of the Buddha are considerably more elaborate and contain more supernatural elements compared to the same stories in earlier literature.

The early death of Māyā Gautamī is part of this story. It includes such supernatural events as the Buddha emerging from his mother's side, taking seven steps, and then delivering a Buddhist sermon immediately after his birth. No part of this story is "historical". All of this material is of the same type, on the same level, and has the same level of historicity. Which is to say, it is ahistorical, (i.e. not historical)

On the other hand, elements of this myth are noticeably absent in an earlier version of the Buddha's biography, found in the Ariyapariyesanā Sutta (MN 26). There, the Buddha's mother is still alive when he leaves home as an unmarried youth. The Buddha myth developed over time and in a particular direction. I think there is some teleology here as the myth of the Buddha seems to have developed to appeal more to Brahmins, by assimilating more and more of their mythos. This was so broadly accepted that no one now questions the name Gautama, an ostentatiously Brahmin name associated with raising cattle, applied to a man from an agrarian society.

A lot of the myth of the Buddha's birth for example seems to involve avoidance of what anthropologists call "pollution". Ritual pollution can be incurred by contact with whatever causes pollution. The opposite, ritual purity, is maintained by avoiding contact with pollutants. Having been polluted, one can be restored to purity by public ritual acts.The particular kinds of ritual pollution in the Buddha myth again suggest Brahmin sensibilities.

For example, the Buddhist myth references Brahmanical taboos around bodily fluids, especially when it comes to women's bodies. In these patriarchal myths, women's bodies are an inherent a source of ritual pollution. Arguably, for example, the Buddha is born "through his mother's side" in order to avoid mentioning the word vagina, but more importantly it enables the magical Buddha to avoid the pollution inherent in contact with the associated bodily fluids. That kind of thinking is not evident in, say, early Buddhist suttas. It gradually crept into Buddhism, and it clearly invokes the mores of Brahmins. The apotheosis of this negative emotion towards bodies can be found in Śāntideva's quasi-Buddhist Bodhicāryāvatāra, in which he rages against "the body" in extremely crude terms; what we might call the "body-is-a-sack-of-shit" doctrine. It's quite important for the buddha myth that the Buddha bring no baggage with him into this life, because otherwise he could not attain liberation.

As I noted, in the Ariyapariyesanā Sutta, the Buddha's mother is alive and well when he leaves home. We can see this fact in two ways. It's quite typical to see this portrayed as earlier on the grounds that it is less sophisticated. I've made this case myself. However, I now think it equally plausible that it represents a contemporaneous minority opinion. Either way, despite the later universality of the story, some Buddhists, at some time, did not share the myth of Māyā dying following the birth of the buddha-to-be.

This part of the Buddha myth has parallels in Christianity. The mother of Jesus was a "virgin". Scholars have long noted that the word translated as "virgin" really just meant "a young woman". Still, the idea that Mary was a virgin is so entrenched that it is now an indispensable part of Christian mythology. If Mary was a virgin then no polluting sex, or sexual fluids, were involved in the conception of Jesus. Rather his conception was "immaculate" or ritually pure. The purity of the mother guarantees the purity of the son.

The myth of Māyā was shaped to fit the myth of the Buddha, and it was apparently modified as time went on and the ideas about the Buddha changed. Let's now look at some aspects of the Buddha myth.

Buddha

I want to draw attention to a part of Witzel's outline of the mythic arc.

There is a period of heroic humans and particularly the bringing of culture in the form of fire, food. The benefactor is a hero or sometimes a shaman.

I want to consider the Buddha qua benefactor of humanity as a "hero" and as a "shaman".

Buddha as Hero

In the mythic story arc, following creation we see two generations of gods, with the second generation creating humanity and at times interbreeding with them to create demigods (e.g. Herakles). This first generation of humans directly interact with the gods and are envious of them. Heroic figures arise to take something from the gods to benefit humanity.

The paradigmatic human hero of Greek myth is Prometheus. In Māori myth it is Māui. Both Prometheus and Māui stole fire from the gods. In Indian myth it is Yama, who found the way to rebirth amongst one's ancestors. Heroes benefit all humanity, although often at great personal cost: Prometheus is chained to a rock for eternity, where an eagle tears out his liver everyday. Maui is crushed in the vagina of Hinenui-te-po (the great lady of the night), the Māori psychopomp, while trying to steal the secret of immortality from her.

Stealing fire from the gods is a common theme. Fire-using amongst genus homo starts millions of years before the emergence of modern humans, so there is no question of this being a legend. Neither Prometheus nor Māui are based on some guy who "invented fire". And note the gender bias here, the hero is always a man, which suggests to me that these stories were invented and transmitted amongst men. Did women have their own stories about their own heroes?

Yama is interesting in this context because he did not steal fire. Yama was a human being who discovered the way to being reborn amongst one's male ancestors (the pitāraḥ "fathers") after death. That is to say, Yama discovered rebirth. Again, this is not to suggest that some guy called Yama, was literally the first man to undergo rebirth. Rather, this probably reflects the assimilation of rebirth from the remnants of the Indus valley civilisation by the Vedics as they settled into their new home. I've rather speculatively referred to this as a meeting of the water tribe (Indus) and the fire nation (Vedic).

Buddhists made Yama into the King of Hell. As the man who discovered and inaugurated rebirth, Yama is responsible for untold suffering. The principal goal of Buddhism is to end rebirth, so the man who started it deserves special attention. Even though his role in rebirth is never mentioned by Buddhists, their treatment of him is consistent with such knowledge being possessed in the past.

The contrast between Buddha and Yama is interesting since no one has ever, to my knowledge, argued that Yama was a real person. Of course, the stories about Yama are relatively crude in Buddhism, and he never attained the level of interest and focus that Buddha did for Buddhists.

The Buddha as hero, discovers the way to end rebirth, the opposite of immortality. So the Buddhist myth is kind of strange in wanting to end the kind of immortality associated with rebirth.

Buddha as Shaman

It's some time since I explored the literature of shamanism, but what stands out in my memory is that the shaman is always a liminal figure. They stand between this world and the supernatural world. Unlike ordinary people, they can move from one world to the other. This means that they are not entirely part of the tribe, but nor are they an outsider.

The Buddha notably has numerous supernatural powers: clairvoyance, clairaudience, the ability to travel to the devaloka and brahmaloka, the ability to fly, and many more. And as time goes on, Buddhist descriptions of the Buddha become more and more magical.

It's quite common for the Buddha's followers to ask where someone was reborn after death and the Buddha was said to have the supernatural ability to see this. And of course, he can also see when someone is not reborn anywhere, when they have attained liberation from rebirth. As such the Buddha has at least some of the functions of a shaman. For many Buddhists, the point of Buddhism is to provide access to the supernatural or at least to supernatural knowledge of "reality".

Early Buddhists portray the Buddha as dying and not being reborn, which was the main goal of Buddhism at first. After some generations, it is apparent that new generations of Buddhists were not reconciled with the disappearance of the Buddha from our world. One can almost hear the cries of "O Buddha, why have you abandoned us?" In any case, Buddhists began to invent many new ways of meeting a Buddha. One could meet a Buddha in a meditation-induced vision for example. Buddhists also invented other universes with living Buddhas that could communicate with us. Other Buddhists conjectured that the living Buddha was just an avatara of a supernatural being beyond time and space, the Dharmakāya Buddha. Some allowed for past Buddhas to manifest in the present. Some invented a new class of supernatural being, the bodhisatva, who could be enlightened but also choose to be reborn so as to be available to help all sentient beings escape from rebirth (some wags have noted that this is logically equivalent to the elimination of sentient life on earth).

Conclusion

In a 2017 article for JIABS, David Drewes argued that academic historians should not talk about "the historical Buddha" because the term "historical" is meaningless when we cannot link the character in Buddhist stories to any historical events, so he is not "historical" in the usual sense of that word. Even the widely-cited dates for the Buddha are guesses based on vague information in normative religious texts. In fact, no character from the early Buddhist texts can be considered "historical" since none of them can be linked to any facts or events. The first truly historical person in Indian history is the Emperor Asoka, and even his dates have an element of uncertainty.

The naive use of normative texts as historical sources is rife and ongoing in Buddhist Studies. When scholars use texts like the Lalitavistara as sources of historical "facts", they have left the academic reservation and ventured into the realm of religious apologetics. The Lalitavistara is an explicitly religious text, full of magic and miracles. It has little or no historical value. To use this as a source of information about the "historical Buddha" is nonsensical. It can tell us something about the religious values and aspirations of the authors, but then we don't really know where or when or by whom it was composed. The idea that we can pick and choose, separating our historical facts and leaving the myth behind is naive. In the end such distinctions are subjective.

If the source says that the Buddha was born through his mother's side, took seven steps, and then delivered a Buddhist sermon, we can't validly conclude "the Buddha was born" and then some mythic elements were added, and therefore the Buddha is historical. If the source says that, then we are clearly in the realm of myth, of the symbolic representation and personification of values. Other details about the Buddha's life—e.g. his wife and child—are from the same source and exist on the same level. It's all myth. There is nothing wrong with myth, but it's not history.

Moreover, Buddhist normative sources are not univocal on these issues. As noted, the idea that the Buddha had a wife and child is not included in the biography in the Ariyaperiyesanā Sutta. Moreover, his mother is very much alive in that version. This means we have to consider the relations between conflicting religious narratives, something that is rarely if ever done. The Ariyapariyesanā biography is simpler, and this is interpreted as meaning that it is more primitive and thus earlier, and thus more authentic (more historical). The assumption here is that stories always get more complex over time and that a simpler version of a story must predate the more elaborate version. But we don't know this because there is no way to corroborate such a conjecture.

The Buddha, like Yama, is a mythic figure. He is a god in all but name. The earliest texts do portray him as a man, but for every human encounter with the Buddha we also see encounters in which he is clearly supernatural or in command of supernatural powers. Stories about the supernatural can be seen in the context of the history of supernatural storytelling, but they are not historical per se. If the Buddha is portrayed as flying around, historians cannot conclude that once upon a time a human being could fly. In reality some animals or objects do fly, but we can explain this in terms of power to weight ratios and the generation of lift. We don't need a supernatural explanation to explain the flight of a bumble bee or a 747. A human being flying without any physical aids is not possible.

The argument here is that we have to take these texts in the round, rather than assuming we are competent to extract the historical from the mythic. The texts are not composed in such a way as to make this a viable procedure. Buddhist texts are full of magic, miracles, and other supernatural phenomena, mostly associated with the character of the Buddha. You wouldn't know it from reading popular accounts of Buddhism in English, but magic is inherent in the Buddhist worldview as we meet it in Iron Age texts. Magic is built into the stories; built into the character of the Buddha as hero and as shaman. Magic can't easily be extracted to leave only the non-magical elements, especially when they occur in the same passages.

To be an historical character, the Buddha would have to stand apart from religious, magical stories, but he can't. All the sources that supposedly describe his life are explicitly magical, explicitly supernatural, i.e. explicitly ahistorical.

~~oOo~~