Steve Farmer writes:
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.
Yes, I think that is right. I first came across many of the kind
of arguments you are citing in regard to Jesus and others in the
1960s. Some of them were already old. (Some of the examples you have
cited are of course based upon newer evidence.) They tended to be
rejected because of different attitudes. The change has perhaps more
to do with fashion than with truth. There is a tendency among some to
think that scepticism is the path of scholarly virtue and those
lacking that scepticism are uncritical. That's just ideology; we have
to examine and evaluate the evidence.
And, pace Lance, this is true as well of
Alexander, leaving aside
the barest facts concerning his
conquests and his approximate death
dates.
But it is those bare facts which establish his historicity. And
this is the point at issue. We need to establish the Buddha's date
and historical context. Without that it is very difficult to
determine exactly which texts are early and which ideas came in
later.
I will omit your points about Socrates, Aristotle, Confucius and
Lao Tsu for the sake of brevity. In fact, all this was well-known to
me and I imagine to many others on the list, although certainly not
to everyone. In fact, the argument applies equally strongly to
Mahomet, since many scholars argue that the Koran was written fifty
or more years after the prophet in Syria.
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.
Well, in response to your challenge, here is what I wrote in the
Penguin Handbook of Religions in the early 1980s:
"The reliability of the accounts we have of the life of the
Buddha is a matter of much scholarly debate. Our sources cannot be
shown with certainty to be sufficiently close in time for absolute
reliability. It is not that we know nothing. The traditional life
story handed down largely in common among all Buddhists is quite
full. We may be fairly sure that it contains much accurate
information of a historical kind. We are quite sure that it contains
later elaboration and additions. What we often do not know is which
is which.
The future Buddha was born as a princeling named Siddhattha in
the Gotama clan among a people known as the Sakkas, who dwelt near
the present-day border of India and Nepal. After a royal upbringing
he renounced family life, studied under various spiritual teachers,
went on to seek his own way, practised self-mortification for a
while, rejected this in favour of moderation and finally achieved a
spiritual realization after a night of striving beneath a tree at the
place now known as Bodhgayaa. He proclaimed his teaching to a small
group of disciples in an animal park at Isipatana (Sarnath) near
Benares and spent the remainder of his life giving spiritual
instruction both to the public at large and to an ever-growing body
of disciples. By his death in his eighty-first year his following had
become a large and well-organized community. More than this we cannot
say with absolute certainty. Nevertheless we should remember that the
Buddha legend which has inspired and motivated so many for so long is
enormously important in its own right."
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?
The date of his renunciation is not a reliable element in terms
of the evidence. The existence of a son named Raahula seems more
probable, but it is uncertain whether the tradition preserves the
name of the Buddha's wife correctly. Note that Asoka already refers
to a discourse addressed to Raahula.
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.
I was arguing in favour of using critical judgment. You need to think
out the actual mathematics of it. The probabilities are different
when the data is sparser.
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.
Lives of the Buddha and anything we could call a systematic
biography are relatively late developments. But there is a fair
amount of information in the discourses which tells us what people
believed about the Buddha at a much earlier date. From this it is
easy to reconstruct an historical context. There are all sorts of
reasons for believing that this literature is relatively close to the
date of the Buddha e.g. the Buddha is only depicted in a relatively
narrow geographical context. Later legends have him flying all over
the place, of course.
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.
Well, it is amazing what one can write in email ! I meant of
course the place of birth !
> 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."
I didn't argue that. The issue was his historicity i.e. did he
actually exist. That is quite different to questions about which
pieces of information are true.
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.
I don't think what he says on the issue is entirely consistent -
which may be why he feels 'misrepresented'. But the force of what he
says points to the end of his range of dates and he _does_ use an
expression like 'in the generation before Alexander'. This leads one
to suppose that he thinks a mid-fourth century date probable but not
provable. That would be close to Alexander in the sense I meant;
Alexander's invasion was in 327 B.C., I think. His position seems in
any case different to that of a majority of the other contributors
who are clearly thinking of a half-century earlier.
Well, perhaps (like all of us?) he is not very certain on the
issue and wants to keep his options open :-)
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.
The most up-to-date material on this topic (and, I think, the
best) is found in the various articles of K.R.Norman; see his
collected papers published by the Pali Text Society.
Lance Cousins
--
HEADINGTON, UK
CURRENT EMAIL ADDRESS:
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