"Buddha" before the Pali Canon?

[Steve Farmer]

Arun Gupta wrote:

> Does the following help qualify Buddha as more "historical" than Lao Tzu ?
> Does myth-building extend to creation of artifacts as well ?
.....
> "The account of the division (the Mahaparinibbana-sutta) of his relics gives
> us a detailed view of the extent of the Buddhist community, the number of
> adherents in particular places, and a synopsis of his teachings."
>
> In 1898, Peppé excavated an old stupa at Piprahwa and found an urn with an
> inscription from the time of King Asoka or before which stated that the
> contents were the remains of the Buddha. In 1958 another urn was discovered
> in Vaisali and, though without an inscription, has been identified as
> containing his remains on the basis of its similarity to the one found by
> Peppé."

Can't resist.

Sure it extends to artifacts. Think of Borobodur, where
the whole stratified history of Buddhism is, in a sense,
fossilized in successive layers - starting with the jaataka
materials chiseled into friezes in bottom layers to more
abstract doctrines in middle segments (surrounded by Buddhas
of all directions distributed in mandala patterns) all the
way to the grand vacant stupa at the top.

Temples of the sort you describe were also devoted to the
fictional Laozi (also to Hermes Trismegistus and other
mythic leaders of Mediterranean mystery cults.) A bit more on
what this means (nil) about the reality of these figures: we also
have detailed early accounts of Laozi's meetings with Confucius,
who is also an accretional construct - although one with more
chances of having a remote "seed" in a single personality:
E.Bruce Brooks's 1997 destratification of the Lun yu (Analects)
assigns a handful of unimpressive moral sayings (in current
Analects chapt. 4 [out of 20]) to the "historical" Confucius.
I argue with Bruce that even this is an unneeded bow
to tradition: The more critically you look at the evidence, the
more the idea of a single personality dissolves. You can see
the increasingly abstract ideas of "Confucius" emerge in
successive layers of the text that accrued over the next
two and a half centuries.

I'm fond of the stories of icons of different traditions
meeting, since this is linked to the kinds of syncretic processes
that helped transform "higher" levels of traditions in more
abstract directions than the "lower" ones (exemplified in a
nutshell in Borobodur, or in the mirroring levels of scholastic
cosmologies). Laozi meets Confucius, St. Paul and Seneca become
pen pals (letters still preserved), Aristotle becomes Alexander's
tutor, Jesus writes to Greek kings (see Eusebius!), Buddhist and
Hindu and Shinto gods enter each other's worlds as avatars,
Mesoamerican gods fuse with Christian demons or saints, etc. The
most extreme examples are found along trade routes (Indonesian
and Central and SE Asian stuff is great), e.g. in the amusing
gnostic hierarchies fusing Buddha, Jesus, Zoroastrian deities,
Moses, and more in Central Asia in late antiquity (see
Kleitman's terrific studies). Or, even better, Descartes,
Victor Hugo, and Lenin entering the pantheon in contemporary
Cao Dai cults in Vietnam. Recalling Lars Martin Fosse's post,
can Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok be far behind?

S. Farmer

Arun Gupta wrote:
>
> Does the following help qualify Buddha as more "historical" than Lao Tzu ?
> Does myth-building extend to creation of artifacts as well ?
>
> -arun gupta
>
> "The account of the division (the Mahaparinibbana-sutta) of his relics gives
> us a detailed view of the extent of the Buddhist community, the number of
> adherents in particular places, and a synopsis of his teachings."
>
> In 1898, Peppé excavated an old stupa at Piprahwa and found an urn with an
> inscription from the time of King Asoka or before which stated that the
> contents were the remains of the Buddha. In 1958 another urn was discovered
> in Vaisali and, though without an inscription, has been identified as
> containing his remains on the basis of its similarity to the one found by
> Peppé."