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4 T H E B U D D H I S T A S C E S I S the imagined buddha In chapter 3 I showed how religious innovations are constrained within the limits of prior structures of thought. At the same time I also wanted to give agency and creative capacity to religious innovators, but I was constrained by the imprisoning frames imposed by prior scholarship and my own preconceptions. Although poorly documented, creativity and cultural innovativeness are found in small-scale societies—we know this from the early work of Paul Radin, the lives of prophets like Handsome Lake and, of course, the famed Ogotommeli.1 When we move to Greece in chapter 5, we will find scholarly constructions of the “real Pythagoras” from a mass of mythic data considered empirically unreliable. So is it with Empedocles ; but in him we can sense a passionately religious and creative mind actively inventing or reconstituting cosmological systems. The situation is no different in respect to the “historical” Buddha. The Theravada texts give us virtually no information on the actual life of the Buddha prior to his “Enlightenment.” Undeterred by this limitation scholars have constructed the real Buddha from mostly mythic material in the texts. And almost any text on Buddhism can give a good account of his life and death. I am not against this procedure; there are good reasons for understanding the historical Buddha, if that is in any way possible. Nevertheless, I want to adopt another strategy and take seriously the myths about the Buddha’s birth, renunciation, and Awakening (Enlightenment) for what they can tell us about his quest for salvation through specific forms of ascesis. 150 In my thinking the Buddha could be a historical figure without being a figure of the empirical historiography of the scholar. That is, Buddhists right down the ages thought that the Buddha was a historical being, and they believed literally in what we would call his mythos. Buddhism is also a historical religion in another sense: it traces its chronology from the death of the founder. It was immaterial from the subjective viewpoint of Buddhists whether different Buddhist traditions had different chronologies . In looking at mythic texts sympathetically I am arguing against a very powerful opinion among European scholars that Buddhism was a “rational religion” without a savior and a cult. This orientation of orientalists sympathetic to Buddhism had a double thrust. First, “rational Buddhism” was a way of holding up Christianity to critical reflection, especially its central mystery of the death and resurrection of Christ and, after Darwin, its creation myth. Second, Buddhism was a religion that went counter to the “irrationality” of Hinduism and of popular religions in both India and South Asia in general, and this included societies that were “officially” Buddhist. In this sense Buddhist rationality has to be understood against the backdrop of the larger discourse of orientalism in South Asia. Idealistically motivated orientalists arrested the negative images of South Asia fostered by orientalism and in its stead invented a rational religion, consonant with Europe’s own Enlightenment. In India’s general darkness Buddhism was the “light.” This idea was given poetic expression and symbolic recognition in Sir Edwin Arnold’s popular (and boring) Victorian poem “The Light of Asia.” It is no wonder that native intellectuals have begun to accept this Western scholarly definition of Buddhism as the “pure Buddhism” of the Pali Canon. Scholars and educated laypersons are aware of the seemingly miraculous elements in the Buddha mythos but only as accretions to a pristine Buddhism that can be elicited by a critical reading of the Pali Canon.2 Certainly Buddhism encourages a modern rationalist interpretation. On one hand, there seems to be no central mystery in doctrinal Buddhism such as the resurrection; it has no creator god, no theodicy. Yet, on the other hand, the Buddha appears as a mythic persona even in the earliest body of texts, and although this belief is not necessary for salvation, practically every Buddhist thinker believed that the Buddha was a supernormal , if not a supernatural, being, that he possessed the thirty-two marks of the Great Man (Mahàpuruãa), and that he was born in a miraculous manner, outside of normal bodily processes. Until modern times Buddhist thinkers never made the distinction between the rational and the miraculous elements in their religion. They did emphasize the historicThe Imagined Buddha 151 [18.191.189.85] Project MUSE (2024-04-20...

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