No basis identified for treating Buddha as an historical figure

by Damien F. Mackey “… in 1937, various expeditions were dispatched … to seek out the holy child according to the heavenly omens … each group included wise and worthy lamas of highly distinguished status in the theocracy. In addition … each group took costly gifts with them …”. Holger Kersten The Buddha is, like the Prophet Mohammed, a fictitious, non-historical composite, with roots in the Old Testament. In the case of the Buddha, Moses appears to have been the original (though not the only) matrix: Buddha partly based on Moses (4) Buddha partly based on Moses In the same article, I gave a list of Buddha borrowings from the life of Jesus Christ. Scholars frequently point to Buddha and Moses (and Jesus) comparisons. Here are just a few examples (of Buddha and Moses comparisons): https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/theses/jm214p573 “Telling birth stories: a comparative analysis of the birth stories of Moses and the Buddha”. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369948217_Gautama_Buddha_an_incarnation_of_Biblical_Moses Milorad Ivankovic (2023): “Gautama Buddha an incarnation of Biblical Moses”. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4061&context=etd Upananda Thero Dedunupitiye (2009): “Buddha and Moses as primordial saints: a new typology of parallel sainthoods derived from Pali Buddhism and Judaism”. https://discourse.suttacentral.net/t/the-buddha-the-book-of-exodus/10340 “The Buddha and The Book of Exodus”. https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/jewishweekly?a=d&d=JW20010202.2.122.25&e= Ronnie Caplane (2001): “What Buddha and Moses share”. And, as considered in my article: Magi incident absorbed into Buddhism? https://www.academia.edu/113301736/Magi_incident_absorbed_into_Buddhism the Magi incident in the Gospel of Matthew’s famous Infancy narrative (2:1-11) appears to have set off a long-standing Buddhist tradition of seeking out a holy child. “At last, in 1937, various expeditions were dispatched from Lhasa to seek out the holy child according to the heavenly omens, in the direction indicated. Each group included wise and worthy lamas of highly distinguished status in the theocracy. In addition to their servants, each group took costly gifts with them …”. Holger Kersten David Drewes has written tellingly on the likelihood that the Buddha is un-historical. I refer to his 2017 article: The Idea of the Historical Buddha [JIABS 2017] https://www.academia.edu/36121418/The_Idea_of_the_Historical_Buddha_JIABS_2017_ much of which could be applied, too, to the Prophet Mohammed. Here is the beginning of this must-read article: The idea of the historical Buddha is one of the most basic and familiar in the field of Buddhist studies, but also one of the most confusing and problematic. 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. here I would like to try to shed some light on this problem by reviewing the scholarship that introduced and sustained the idea of the historical Buddha. Though several valuable studies of this work have already appeared, they generally depict the process as one of progressive, ultimately successful, discovery. What I will try to suggest is that, if we pay close attention, it turns out that no discovery was actually made, and that no basis for treating the Buddha as a historical figure has yet been identified. Although the western encounter with Buddhism goes back centuries, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, hardly anything was actually known, and the question of Buddhism’s origin remained completely open. Many authors felt comfortable treating the Buddha as historical, but opinions varied widely. The idea that the Buddha was from Africa, proposed by Engelbert Kaempfer in the early eighteenth century, retained sufficient currency that Jean-Pierre Abel-rémusat, the leading French authority, devoted an article to refuting it in 1819. In 1823, Julius Klaproth argued against the still popular identification of the Buddha and the Norse god Odin, which had been proposed by William Jones in 1788. In 1825, Horace Hayman Wilson, arguably the leading British authority, proposed a version of the so-called two-Buddha theory, according to which there was an elder Buddha who lived between the tenth and twelfth centuries B.C.E., and a younger one who lived in the sixth or seventh. He also suggested that Buddhism may have been brought to India from central Asia. At the highest level of scholarship, the Buddha’s historicity was regarded as something that remained to be established. Rémusat, though sympathetic to the idea that the Buddha was historical, suggested in his 1819 article that it was necessary to avoid “prejudging the question one could raise on the reality of the historical existence of the figure called Buddha.” In his 1819 Sanskrit dictionary, Wilson defined Śākyamuni as “the real or supposed founder of the Baud’dha [i.e., Buddhist] religion” (s.v.). In 1827 Henry Colebrooke, the other leading British authority, similarly referred to the Buddha noncommittally as the “reputed author of the sútras” (558). The development that began to focus scholarly inquiry was Brian Houghton Hodgson’s discovery of Sanskrit Buddhist manuscripts in Nepal in 1822, which he first discussed in print in 1828. Recent scholarship has focused mainly on the fact that Hodgson sent shipments of these manuscripts to Eugène Burnouf, who used them as the basis for his Introduction à l’histoire du bouddhisme indien, published in 1844, which some have considered the main publication that established the Buddha as a historical figure. As we shall see, however, the actual argument Burnouf makes is not based on anything he found in Hodgson’s texts, but on two facts that Hodgson himself reported in 1828, which occupied scholarly discussion through the 1830s: first, that Nepalese texts report that Buddhism was revealed consecutively, over a period of aeons, by seven Buddhas: Vipaśyin, Śikhin, Viśvabhū, Krakucchanda, Kanakamuni, Kāśyapa, and Śākyamuni; and, second, that these texts claim to preserve the teachings of Śākyamuni, but not those of any of the earlier Buddhas. ….