Armstrong rebuts Indian mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik’s claim that the Buddha was a 19th.Centuy Western orientalists’ construct and not a real “historical man”.
By P.K.Balachandran
Colombo, May 27 – Rebutting a theory spread by Indian mythologist Devdutt Pattnaik that the Buddha was a 19th.Centuy Western orientalists’ construct and not a real “historical” person, the “Buddha’s biographer, Karen Armstrong, says that he was indeed a “historical person” and not a “mythical figure.”
She insists that one should see the core ideas associated with the Buddha rather that the myths that had proliferated around him.
In a review of Armstrong’s book “Buddha”, Laura Miller points out that the Buddha lived at a time when literacy was uncommon in India. So he left behind very little information that could be considered historically sound.
And the most authoritative of the orally preserved scripture that does describe a bit of his life, the Pali canon, wasn’t written down until the first century BCE., hundreds of years after the Buddha’s death.
The Buddha himself considered biographies irrelevant and inimical to human happiness. Biographies with the emphasis on the personal, were to the Buddha like “the discarded skin of a snake.” Therefore, Buddhist holy texts didn’t focus much on Gautama’s life or offer a continuous narrative of it. Scattered fragments of his biography appear in various texts whose status is often disputed.
Shorn of the stories connected with his life, Buddha’s life was entirely human, Armstrong argues.
“The gods who populate some Buddhist tales were fallible and mortal despite their powers. The Buddha himself did not believe in a Supreme Being. He confined his searches to his own human nature and always insisted that his experiences-even the supreme truth of Nibbana – were entirely natural to humanity,” she points out.
Buddhism is, at heart, a “do-it-yourself” religion. “The Buddha always refused to take anything on trust. Later, when he had his own sangha, he insistently warned his disciples not to take anything at all on hearsay,” Armstrong adds.
The Buddhism that Armstrong describes, then, is a kind of cosmic “instruction book.” The principles and procedures come first, with anecdotes from the Buddha’s life only used as occasional illustrations.
Ambedkar Saw realism in Buddhism
In her short paper on Dr. B.R.Ambedkar’s passion for Buddhism, Mayuri Dihingia says that Ambedkar, who drafted the Indian constitution, saw Buddha’s teachings not merely as a collection of rituals, prayers, rules and regulations but a pathway to equalitarianism and individual and social balance.
After enduring the atrocities committed by the upper caste Hindus against his caste (the so-called “Untouchable” Dalits), Dr Ambedkar renounced Hinduism and converted to Buddhism, which for him was the ultimate means to put an end to the caste system in Indian society.
Ambedkar yearned for Buddhism’s morality and humanity under which all human beings have the right to live in dignity and be free. By following the philosophy of Buddha based on ethics, rationality, reasoning one can indeed become truly enlightened, Ambedkar felt.
Offers Way Out Reincarnation
The basis of the caste system in India was the belief in “reincarnation”. If you live according to the rules of your caste, you get rewarded in the next birth or reincarnation. If you do not, you get punished in your next birth. A high caste man would be reborn as a low caste person or even as an animal, if caste rules and norms of society were broken by him.
But the Buddha saw reincarnation as a “shackling to an endless cycle of loss, pain and death”.
“The prospect of living one life after another filled Gothama with horror. Buddha’s teachings offer step-by-step instructions on how to get off this hellish hamster wheel and pass into the indescribable state of nirvana,” Armstrong says.
For Ambedkar, freedom from reincarnation through the Buddha’s Eight Fold Path was the right recipe for the liberation of the Dalits condemned to a lowly life because of that belief. Hence Ambedkar’s his conversion with 500,000 of his followers in Nagpur in 1956.
Pattanaik’s Contention
In his recent column in The Hindu (May 16), Indian mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik points out that there are many versions of the actions and events relating to the Buddha. This makes it difficult to pinpoint things about him with accuracy and historical reliability.
Buddhist lore shared the general Indian tendency to resort to myth-making. “Myth-making pervaded all religions in the Indian subcontinent. We have all heard how there is no one single Ramayana, there are many — 300 at least. There is no one Buddha. There are dozens, maybe thousands, perhaps even millions, as per the earliest Buddhist scriptures,” Pattanaik says.
There are hundreds of versions of the Buddha’s tale in Pali and Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese literature, he points out.
He goes on to contend that the historical Buddha, as we know him today, is a discovery by Western orientalists and archaeologists who had worked in Ceylon and North India in the 19 th.Century.
With archaeological and epigraphical material discovered in the 19 th.Century, the British began their quest for accuracy about the Buddha, shorn of myths and legends. Western scholars dived into the available material to get the crux of Buddha’s thoughts and teachings. These struck them as being very modern and scientific. And the Buddha was hailed as the “Light of Asia.”
“The British rediscovered the Buddha and presented Buddhism as a Protestant movement. Westerners did this to present an alternative Indian model to ritualistic Vedic Hinduism,” Pattanaik says.
However, it was not easy to sift the truth from the myth. “In the vast literary corpus of Buddhism were found stories of Gautama Buddha travelling to Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand in his lifetime. There were fantastic tales of him fighting Mara, the demon of desire, and (also) realistic ones of his death following a bout of dysentery after eating pork or mushrooms. European historians took it upon themselves to decide which of these stories were true.”
“Japanese scholars of the early 20th century listed over 40 theories about Buddha’s birth date. The site of his birth and death were identified based on traditional pilgrim routes, not evidence, Pattanaik points out.
In the Pali versions, Buddha’s son Rahula is born on the day of his departure. In the Sanskrit versions, the child is conceived on that night. There are stories stating that the pregnant Yashodhara gave birth to Rahula on the day Buddha attained enlightenment
Further, no one knew which language Buddha spoke in, Pattanaik says. Pali was a language used by Sri Lankan Buddhist monks around 500 AD to distinguish themselves from the rival Mahayana sect.
According to Pattanaik, the earliest biographies of the Buddha (Buddhacharita, Lalitavistara S?tra, Mah?vastu) were compiled only by 200 AD.
Interestingly, none of the early biographies referred to the Buddha’s death or Parinirvana, Pattanaik contends. This found mention only in the Mahaparinibbana-sutta, dated at 500 AD.
Fleshing Out the Essentials
Pattanaik says that Western Orientalists fleshed out, from these myriad tales, a version of Buddhism akin to the Protestant movement in Europe. It was in opposition to Vedic ritualism and all the mumbo jumbo of ancient Indian religions.
“The Westerners were constructing Indian history using the framework of European Christian history. They established the Buddha as historical in contrast to the mythic Ram and Krishna of the Hindus.”
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