"Buddha" before the Pali Canon?

[Jan E.M. Houben]

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Farmer <saf at SAFARMER.COM>
To: INDOLOGY at LISTSERV.LIV.AC.UK <INDOLOGY at LISTSERV.LIV.AC.UK>
Date: Wednesday, September 20, 2000 12:52 AM
Subject: Re: "Buddha" before the Pali Canon?


snip
> And I've pretty much
>exhausted what I have to say, in any case, and seem to be a chorus
>of one voice only.
snip

Steve, for other voices in your chorus you may look into the history of
Buddhological scholarship: Before Hermann Oldenberg wrote his Buddha: sein
Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde (first ed. 1881), a large number of
Indologists was very sceptical about the historicity of the Buddha: Emile
Senart, for instance, emphasized the structures of the myths and
de-emphasized the historical reality of the characters, just as, a few
decades later and on a more general scale, his compatriot C. Levi Strauss
and other structuralists would do. The one after whom our Indological
Institute in Leiden is called, Hendrik Kern, propounded theories about a
"solar Buddha myth" informed by astronomical knowledge. Oldenberg gave
several useful references in his scholarly bestseller (see in the index
under Senart, Kern, Franke). If you are not satisfied with voices beyond the
grave, anthropologist G. Obeyesekere in a lecture in Leiden ca. one year ago
emphasized the life and use of the Buddha-legends to such an extent that the
Buddha's historical reality became absolutely irrelevant. Unfortunately I
don't have more exact references to this lecture than the traces it left in
my memory.
Best wishes, Jan Houben

Jan E.M. Houben,
Research Fellow of the
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences,
Kern Institute, Leiden University,
P.O. Box 9515, NL-2300 RA   Leiden
jhouben at RULLET.LeidenUniv.NL