"Buddha" before the Pali Canon?

[Steve Farmer]

Much thanks to Lance Cousins, Lars Martin Fosse, Ulrich T. Kragh,
et al., for their helpful posts. Also to Michael Witzel, who also
pointed me offline to Bechert's _Die Sprache der ältesten
Buddhistischen Überlieferung_ and provided other
linguistic data - including some contradicting
the claims in other posts. I guess that I can assume from
this - as well as from Madhav Deshpande's post - that the
field is far from a consensus on the questions that I
was asking.

I'll add only a few comments on the biographical side of
the issue. On the linguistic questions, I want to
study _Die Sprache_ and the other sources
that I've been pointed to before saying anything more.

I'd like to start by emphasizing that I'm far from
dogmatic on the biographical issue - in my post I was
poking sticks in hornets' nests to see what would come out (a
comparative historian's trick to get data fast) - and wouldn't
seriously compare my knowledge of early Buddhist texts
with those of specialists like Lance Cousins or others on
this list.

This said, I'm not convinced at all that
belief or doubt about traditional accounts of the life
of "the Buddha" has much to do with specialized knowledge of
Buddhist texts. It concerns instead methodological attitudes
about what *kinds* of evidence are acceptable in reconstructing
ancient biographies. If the situation is radically different
in the case of "the Buddha" than in the case of "Confucius,"
"Aristotle," "Jesus," etc., I'd appreciate it if Lance or
someone else could point out the circumstances
that make it unique in comparative history in ancient times.

I wrote:

>In general, ...I take arguments about the
>historicity of "the Buddha" with deep skepticism, since ancient
>biographies of figures like this (cf. "Confucius," "Aristotle,"
>"Jesus," etc.) were invariably late constructs.

Lance Cousins wrote:

> 'Invariably' ? This is an extremely strong claim. So strong that one
> example is sufficient to refute it. How about Alexander ? Can we
> conclude from the proliferation of the Alexander legend that we
> should have 'deep scepticism' as to the historicity of Alexander ?

All I suggested (see my lines again) is that
the *biographies* of these figures were late (better: compilational)
constructs. It would be difficult to argue with this
conclusion, since multiple (and indeed conflicting) biographical
accounts of their lives exist. My point about being skeptical
about the historicity of these half-mythical figures was to
suggest that because of the way their biographies were compiled,
even when it is clear that one of these figures existed, we can't
say much or sometimes anything about their lives.

And, pace Lance, this is true as well of Alexander, leaving aside
the barest facts concerning his conquests and his approximate death
dates. Check out sometime the evidence of Alexander's famous
(and almost certainly fictive) relations with Aristotle, whose
biographies are even more suspect. Indeed, a number of
classicists since the late 19th century have argued against
traditional scholars, I think on firm grounds, that
the Aristotelian corpus was compiled over several hundred
years, the same as (we know now) the Confucian _Analects_ -
that it was a "school" product and not the
creation of the eponymous creator of the school. This view
undermines a huge part of the biographical data about Aristotle
found in Diogenes Laertes and other traditional biographies.

The case for veracity in biographies is even weaker in respect to
religious reformers or philosophers who left no texts of their
own behind. Sometime compare the conflicting pictures of Socrates
in Xenophon and in the Platonic corpus and other sources. Within
a decade or so after his traditional death date, "Socrates"
was, for all practical purposes, a fictional character on whom
everyone was tacking his own ideas ad libitum. One way to get
your views accepted, in fact, was to ascribe them to "Socrates"
in a convincing literary treatise. (They even trained people to
imitate Socrates in the schools!) What did the real Socrates believe,
insofar as he existed at all? Was he the nosey busybody we find
in Xenophon's _Memorabilia_, prepared to give advice to everyone
(in one passage, we see him telling a whore to hire a pimp if
she wants rich clients)?  Supposedly, Xenophon knew Socrates
well, but *his* Socrates who offered gossipy advice to
whores and carpenters is *not* the learned-ignorance Socrates
that the history books have quietly adopted
as the real historical figure. Tradition opted (for
reasons of historical decorum, not evidence) for the Socrates
found in the _Apology_ and _Phaedo_ in the Platonic corpus
(but not the Socrates in *other* parts of the Platonic corpus,
e.g., in the _Cratylus_ or _Timaeus_.).

The case is of course much worse for
figures like Laozi (= Lao Tzu = "Old Master") who few
scholars today (except for traditionalists in China, the
sinological equivalent of indology's OITers) think existed at
all. A generation or two ago, however, his
historicity was taken for granted by just about everyone - on
grounds not much better than those re "the Buddha" = "the
Awakened."

Same for the "Confucius" in the _Analects_. Only in the last decade
has it become widely accepted that the portrait of "Confucius"
seen in that text was not the product of his immediate disciples,
but the creation of 240-odd years of accretional processes
developed in rapidly shifting school environments. Indeed,
now that we know more about the way the text was stratified, we
can watch key elements in his traditional "biography" emerge
in layer after layer of the document.

Where does "the Buddha" fit in on the continuum between Alexander
and Socrates and Confucius and Laozi? Exactly what
biographical facts about him do we really know? Would anyone here
dare to list these biographical facts (I raise this as a genuine
challenge)? I doubt that the list would be long. Even the very
short list offered by Vetter (after E. Lamotte) is filled with
highly questionable and undocumented elements.

Can one safely say that he was a teacher of meditation born
somewhere in the sixth or fifth centuries someplace in Eastern
India, dying at some undefined time in the fifth or fourth
centuries? If that's the limit of our knowledge, how can we
distinguish him in any meaningful way from other meditation
teachers from the same general period? In teachings? Which
ones? Many schools of meditation were arising throughout
Eurasia in the 4th century, largely in reaction to
scholasticizing trends already at work in stratified traditions
in China, India, Greece. I don't see anything in the early
Buddhist teachings that I can't find in China or the West
in the 4th century - and presumably in countless other
anti-Vedic reformers in India.

Did he indeed have a wife and a son named
Raahula? Did he abandon domestic life for a mendicant's life
around his thirtieth year, as per some traditional accounts,
or was this a "must have happened" story reconstructed later,
based on expectations about how an ideal mendicant would act? Did
he visit all the places mentioned in his lives, or are
these there because these are the literary settings of Buddha
stories (certainly most of them fictional) retold in the early
suttas? We know that invented biographical elements like this
were *quickly* inserted into the life of Jesus, as Lars Martin
Fosse even suggests in one of his posts. Indeed, a lot of recent
scholars claim that all that we legitimately know about "Jesus"
consists of a handful of sayings devoid of all historical
context in lower strata of the so-called Q document, and
that *all* the biographical details - even including
the crucifixion, according to some - were compiled from
hints in earlier messianic writings and "must have happened"
stories about how messiahs were *supposed* to live and die.

Indeed, other stories attached to Jesus's "lives" demonstrably
came from stories of *other* wisemen or common currency of
battling schools coopted by the Christians. Do you want
a homosexual Jesus in the mode of Platonic philosophers? Or
portraits of Jesus as a magician, like his (supposed)
contemporary Apollonius of Tyara? They are there (along
with portraits of Jesus as an ascetic and condemner of
magic) in the early biographical literature. Even a good
percentage of the words attributed to
Jesus come from Old Testament passages, apparently
ascribed to him by early biographers looking for
hints in the old canon to flesh out the skimpy list of
detached sayings from "Jesus" that they possessed.

There may be somewhat less variation in early images of
"Buddha" due to monastic constraints, but there still seems
to be plenty of it.

We see this kind of conflation of early historical figures
everywhere else in Eurasia - and massive fusion of Jainist
and Buddhist ideas as well in later periods. It would seem
normal to me to assume that the same kind of conflations
existed in the case of "the Buddha" at an early date -
resulting in his "lives" being a composite of stories
taken from multiple sources. Isn't
this, in fact, exactly what we see in the Jaatakas?
Why shouldn't the same mythologizing/conflational processes
exist at the earliest stages of the religion? You can't
just strip the miraculous elements out of the
traditional lives and accept the ordinary sounding (to
our ears) biographical data as "real," modernizing the
myths. (That is the standard trick used in
reconstructing the lives of "Confucius," "Alexander," and
other figures of this sort from the hagiographical mess we
inherit from tradition: bad philology.)

Lance writes further:

> It would be a mistake to insist on 'well-controlled evidence' in this
> context. That would simply amount to a concealed argument from
> silence. The kind of criteria you seem to want to use are those
> appropriate to a time and place where we have a lot of data. If a
> figure supposed to have existed in 16th century Europe is not
> mentioned until the 18th century we would rightly be very suspicious,
> especially if he is claimed to have been well-known, etc. At that
> time we have a lot of information and the absence of evidence is very
> significant. At other times when we have very little data mere
> absence of evidence tells us little and even priority may be an
> artifact of mere chance survivals.

I don't know what "a concealed argument from silence" is,
but I certainly differ with the rest of your paragraph.
You can't turn off critical judgment and accept traditional
stories just because the evidence is scarce. Otherwise, why not
accept with the OIT crowd the evidence in the Puranas and
Mahabharata concerning early Vedic history?! (Bad company!)
Those have as much credibility (= near nil) as the early
Buddha lives as historical documents in the narrow sense.
If we were to loosen demands for evidence in this fashion
everywhere in ancient history, we would be led to accept Laozi
too as an historical figure. Recently, however, we've found
good evidence (in comparing the Mawangdui and Guodian tomb
versions of the Laozi with the received text) that the texts
ascribed to him were pieced together at a very late
date from earlier, and apparently originally unconnected,
sources. Attempts to find a single author for the work led to
the invention of "the Old Master."

The case of "the Buddha" may not be as extreme as that of
"Laozi," but the parallels with "Confucius" are suggestive.

I wrote:

>Hence I view the redatings of early Buddhism by Bechert et
>al.(which I fully support) to be redatings of the Pali canon and
>not of "the Buddha."

Lance responded:

> This is just wrong. These redatings are nothing to do with the Pali
> Canon which doesn't exist before the early first century B.C. at the
> very earliest. They are not even redatings of the earliest texts
> contained in the Pali Canon, since such issues are mostly not being
> addressed. They are attempting to locate the date of the historical
> figure whose place of death was marked by Asoka in the third century
> B.C. with a pillar at Lumbini. Note that there may have been people
> alive at this time who had spoken to people who met the Buddha in
> their youth.
>
> This is particularly true if one follows Bechert himself who adopts a
> very late date 'close to Alexander' (or something like that) or
> follows the traditional Sarvaastivaadin dating uncritically as do
> Charles Willemen and company.

(1) I wasn't speaking of the time when the Pali canon was written
down, but of the period when the works in it were orally composed,
which was long before the early 1st century BCE, as I understand
it; at a minimum, the canon contains data supposedly associated
with the historical "Buddha"; (2) The statement "there may have
been people alive at this time [the time of Asoka] who had spoken
to people who met the Buddha in their youth" - besides being
obviously conjectural - says nothing about the veracity of
biographical accounts of his "life." The same was even *more*
true of people who were alive when the many
early (and sharply conflicting) "lives" of Jesus (many as old as
any found in the synoptic gospels) were written down.
Same for the stories of Socrates, of course (see above).

Correction of the dates that Lance claims are given by Bechert
for the death of "the Buddha": In all of Bechert's papers in or
after the 3 vols. of _The Dating of the Historical Buddha_, he
places the dates roughly between c. 400 and 350 BCE, and
does NOT endorse a date "close to Alexander." Bechert vehemently
*denies* that the dates can be given more precisely than c. 350
to 400 BCE, claiming that he has been misrepresented in the
past on this issue.

Thanks again to Lance Cousins et al. for the criticism and
data, especially re his views of the language of the Buddha. I'll read
the Bechert volume on that topic ASAP. This is probably my last
post in the thread: I must get back to my own research (these posts
were written on breaks, on a whim). And I've pretty much
exhausted what I have to say, in any case, and seem to be a chorus
of one voice only. Eppur si muove (maybe)!

Steve Farmer