THE BUDDHA

Was there ever a living person behind the religious/spiritual figure of the Buddha?

Lopez, one of the foremost living scholars of Buddhism, ventures that the Buddha (“the awakened”) as we know him today is a demythologized “product of nineteenth-century Paris and the work of Eugène Burnouf (1801–1852), who saw the Buddha as a figure of history in a land of myth.” From Marco Polo down nearly to the present, European scholars viewed the Buddha as either a real person or as a pagan idol; Lopez focuses in particular on Gustave Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony, which portrays the Buddha as, at moments, much akin to Jesus. By Lopez’s account, there is abundant reason to believe that a figure called Jesus who was executed under Roman law actually existed; Lopez goes deeply into the possible historicity of the Buddha, examining evidence on either side while observing in passing that it is “authentically Buddhist” to “renounce the search for a self that was never there.” But was he never there? Lopez’s book is as much a lesson in how to evaluate scriptural, archaeological, historical, and genealogical evidence of any sort as it is an account of a search for the real‚ or not real, Gautama Buddha, whom Flaubert endowed with near-miraculous abilities to do just about anything a person could do, from knowing bird sounds to dyeing cloth and performing mathematical calculations. Along the way in this lucid but challenging book, Lopez also offers useful observations on the nature of Buddhist doctrine, such as it is, given Buddhism’s split into many schools: “Indian Buddhist philosophy is above all a theory of causation, showing how all things are constructed in the process of cause and effect, that behind this tenuous and transient construction there is no essence, no identity.” It’s a fitting approach to what might be an ultimately unanswerable question.

A deeply learned, provocative investigation into history and myth.