Did the Buddha exist?

[Secret Chief]

. I looked into Tibetan Buddhism some years ago but there were cultural barriers in pursuing it further at the time.

Same. Tibetan Buddhism and the indigenous Bon seem to have influenced each other, from my cursory (and long ago) consideration of it.

 

[Heyo]

Buddhism is the fourth largest religion with an estimated 500+ million followers or about 7% of the world's population. The religion is based on the teachings of the Buddha, a character who is widely believed to have existed two and a half thousand years ago.

Did the Buddha really exist, and if so what is the evidence? An interesting and brief paper written by Dhivan Thomas Jones examines two competing views of scholars with an interest in the historical Buddha. One view consigns the Buddha to mythology as there is no scientific or empirical existence he existed. The competing view is the Buddha did exist based on an assumption that its the most plau explanation based on the available texts.

The debate is summarized:

Did the Buddha Exist? Contemporary scholarly debate about the historical Buddha

I remember the first time I heard someone doubt the existence of God. I was on a school bus, and Robert Neil said he didn’t believe in God. We were ten. I was shocked, as everything I knew about th…

dhivanthomasjones.wordpress.com

What are your thoughts? Did the Buddha exist? On what do you base your conclusions?

My thought is: does it matter?
Buddhism is built upon the teachings of "the Buddha" (who may or may not have been Siddhārtha Gautama). Nothing would change if he was invented.
Christianity is built upon the person of Jesus. Proving the mythicist hypothesis would put Christianity in a crisis.

 

[PearlSeeker]

Christianity is built upon the person of Jesus. Proving the mythicist hypothesis would put Christianity in a crisis.

That's true.

"And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain." (1 Corinthians 15:14)

 

[Link]

My thought is: does it matter?
Buddhism is built upon the teachings of "the Buddha" (who may or may not have been Siddhārtha Gautama). Nothing would change if he was invented.
Christianity is built upon the person of Jesus. Proving the mythicist hypothesis would put Christianity in a crisis.

I think Buddha was created as a catalyst to unite figure heads of various religions and create unity. So for example, say a community had amazing Prophet and scripture. Easy, it was one of Buddha's past lives.

The evidence I think shows many of the past live stories of Buddha (not all) are found through out the lands and cultures to other then Buddha originally.

 

[Vouthon]

Someone, a very insightful peripatetic spiritual seeker with direct experience of altered states of consciousness and a keen understanding of the human mind, was in my opinion the source of the oral traditions that lie behind the earliest layer of Buddhist literature in the Pali canon (such as the Aṭṭhakavagga, or “Book of Eights”).

I'm comfortable calling this original person, whomsoever he was in purely historic terms, the Buddha (the "awakened one").

It's quite possible that the legend of Gautama, the sage of the Sakyas, was conceived to codify different strands of ascetic thought and practice - but I personally believe that the early teachings have certain continuities and peculiarities which make it more likely that they came from a unique historical personality, an intellectual systematiser and genius. At base, the Dharma (the Noble Eightfold Path, Four Noble Truths etc.) forms a coherent system of thought and practice.

It looks to me much more akin to a theory, in religious terms something like say Einstein's general relativity is in physics (once you strip the supernatural elements away, there's a kind of model left with some testable predictions made about suffering and its root cause that I think individuals can 'test' for themselves).

With that being said, unlike in the case of Jesus and Muhammad (whom serious scholars universally concur existed and about which certain facts are generally indisputable i.e. that Jesus was a Galilean Jew executed for sedition by crucifixion under the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate or that a man named 'the Muhammad' played a key role in uniting disparate Arab tribes and initiated the Arab conquests of the seventh century) there is no proof at all, if by that one means contemporary or near-contemporary evidence, for Siddhartha Gautama's existence. As the scholar David Drewes noted in an article, ‘The Idea of the Historical Buddha’:

the Buddha… more than two centuries of scholarship have failed to establish anything about him...If we wish to present early Buddhism in a manner that accords with the standards of scientific, empirical inquiry, it is necessary to acknowledge that the Buddha belongs to [a] group [of mythological personages such as Agamemnon or King Arthur]’ (my italics)

In contrast, for Jesus (or indeed Muhammad (we have a few near-contemporary references to him by Syriac and Greek Christian authors and the Qur'an itself has surahs like 'Ar-Rum' that comment, reporter style, on events like as the Eastern Roman-Sassanian conflict) or John the Baptist but the below is for Jesus, in the interests of time):

• Stanton (2002, p. 145): Today nearly all historians, whether Christians or not, accept that Jesus existed and that the gospels contain plenty of valuable evidence which has to be weighed and assessed critically. There is general agreement that, with the possible exception of Paul, we know far more about Jesus of Nazareth than about any first or second century Jewish or pagan religious teacher.
• Burridge & Gould (2004, p. 34): "There's a lot of evidence for his existence."
• Ehrman (2011, p. 256-257): "He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees, based on certain and clear evidence."
• Ehrman (2012, pp. 4–5): "Serious historians of the early Christian movement—all of them—have spent many years preparing to be experts in their field. Just to read the ancient sources requires expertise in a range of ancient languages: Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and often Aramaic, Syriac, and Coptic, not to mention the modern languages of scholarship (for example, German and French). And that is just for starters. Expertise requires years of patiently examining ancient texts and a thorough grounding in the history and culture of Greek and Roman antiquity, the religions of the ancient Mediterranean world, both pagan and Jewish, knowledge of the history of the Christian church and the development of its social life and theology, and, well, lots of other things. It is striking that virtually everyone who has spent all the years needed to attain these qualifications is convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical figure."

By the standards of scientific, empirical inquiry, Jesus and Muhammad existed according to the consensus of scholars and we know a few certain facts about their lives that lie beyond reasonable doubt. The Buddha does not pass that bar: there is no solid, factual, positivist, empirical evidence for the existence of the Buddha - but that doesn't mean he didn't exist. Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence and nor does the lack of a footprint in the historical record negate the immense value of the actual suttas attributed to the Buddha.

 

[Vouthon]

On Muhammad, see:

Fragment on the Arab Conquests - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Fragment on the Arab Conquests are fragmentary notes that were written around the year 636 AD on the front blank pages of a sixth-century Syriac Christian manuscript of the Gospel of Mark. The fragment depicts events from the early seventh century conflict between the Byzantines and "the Arabs of Muhammad", particularly of the battle of Yarmouk.[1]​

​

Text in square brackets is conjectured, being unreadable in the original.​

​

In January [the people of] Ḥomṣ took the word for their lives and many villages were ravaged by the killing of [the Arabs of] Muhammad and many people were slain and [taken] prisoner from Galilee as far as Beth...​

On the tw[enty-six]th of May the Saq[īlā]ra went [...] from the vicinity of Ḥomṣ and the Romans chased them [...]​

On the tenth [of August] the Romans fled from the vicinity of Damascus [and there were killed] many [people], some ten thousand. And at the turn [of the ye]ar the Romans came. On the twentieth of August in the year n[ine hundred and forty-]seven there gathered in Gabitha [a multitude of] the Romans, and many people [of the R]omans were kil[led], ome fifty thousand.[1]​

Wright was first to draw the attention to the fragment and suggested that "it seems to be a nearly contemporary notice",[52] a view which was also endorsed by Nöldeke.[53] The purpose of jotting this note in the book of Gospels appears to be commemorative as the author appears to have realized how momentous the events of his time were. The words "we saw" are positive evidence that the author was a contemporary. ​

Or the Qur'an itself, in sura Ar-Rum - referring to the contemporary events of the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628 (a cataclysmic total conflict that ended in pyrrhic victory for the Eastern Romans under Emperor Heraclius but mortally weakened the two great superpowers of late antiquity, and thereby created the necessary conditions for the Arab conquests directed against the heartlands of the Persian and Roman empires soon after):

The Ar-Rum sūrah tells how news of the ongoing war reached Mecca, with Muhammad and the early Muslims siding with the Monotheistic Greeks while the non-Muslim Meccans sided with the non-Monotheist Persians, each side regarding the victories of their favorites as proof of their own religious stance.[202] The Quran also predicts the Romans being victorious in regaining the lost territories. ​

Muhammad is observing the course of the war from afar and like most Abrahamics of the time basically praying for a Christian Roman victory over the 'heathen' Persians (which happens, only for both empires, which had exhausted their human and material resources in the war, to then be overwhelmed by the armies of Muhammad's own invading people - with the Arabs actually destroying entirely the Persian empire and severely weakening but not wiping out the Eastern Romans):

"The Romans were vanquished in the closer region [by the Sassanid Persians], and they, after being vanquished, will prevail within a certain number of years. To God belongs the command before and after. And that day, ones who believe will be glad with the help of God. He helps whom He wills. And He is The Almighty, The Compassionate."[Quran 30:2–5 (Translated by Laleh Bakhtiar)]​

If one were going to make an academic case for the existence of the Buddha, on scientific and empirical grounds, contemporary evidence like the above for Muhammad would need to be adduced. Quite simply, that can't be done.

 

[Dawnofhope]

Oral tradition is often undervalued. Much can be achieved by developing a community of adherents willing to learn, dictate and hopefully improve on a doctrine.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply.

I have no problem with oral tradition, and clearly its how most of the world religions were established.

The development of the written word is hugely important though. We would not be having this conversation if it were not so.

Civilisation as we know it depends on the written word as with any serious field of knowledge or endeavor.

Direct transmission is a valued and IMO central and very welcome feature of Buddhism (and other Dharmas). Counterintuictive as that may appear, one of the main duties of a lineage of transmission is actually to change and update the teachings in order to make and keep them relevant, healthy and useful.

I'm not sure what you mean by direct transmission. We have a body of writings from a variety of sources that we don't really know the origins of. We have no way of knowing who has altered them for what purpose. I understand it doesn't matter at all for many who identify as Buddhist.

The eventual development of a written doctrine isn't the panacea that some people believe it to be. It is not even clear that written doctrine is at all helpful or desirable. Reverence to texts is hardly unknown in Buddhism, but it isn't central either (and that is a very good thing IMO).

I don't view the Torah, Gospels or Quran as 'written doctrine', rather a written account of what Moses, Jesus and Muhammad taught. They may not be word for word what they said but that is fine. It would matter if they did not convey the essence of their teachings.

They seem like valuable starting points that have worked well for Jews, Christians and Muslims throughout the centuries.

In this age its relatively easy to step outside our cultural influences and independently research any of these religious texts. Criticise them as you may, they are central to many of those who identify with their teachings. We are talking about 50 to 60 percent of the world's population no less.

In a Buddhist context, Boddhidharma (himself a person of questionable literal existence) is said to have an aversion to reliance on written texts and to favor direct experience as a superior alternative. Gotta love him...

Literally nothing short of time travel can negate the hypothetical existence of people living that far back. It is really a Russel's Teapot situation.

FWIW the poll attached to this thread supports Siddhartha Buddha having been a real person. Only one participant in this thread has argued for the non existence of Buddha.

It seems to me that there is a lot more interest in determining whether Jesus existed and arguably in deciding that he did. To me personally the evidence available is both rather flimsy and rather suspect - and don't get me started on how it has been handled.

There are different approaches to viewing and handling the available evidence of course as there are to the available Buddhist texts. None of us are forced to take one approach only. We are free to choose and think for ourselves.

Thanks again for your thoughtful comments.