Did the Buddha Exist?

C. van Gog, 28 October 2019

19th-century Burmese folio depicting the Buddha's death and passing into parinibbāna at Kusinara.
19th-century Burmese folio depicting the Buddha's death and passing into parinibbāna at Kusinara.
Source: "The Buddha and Buddhist Sacred Texts"

How can we know if the Buddha existed as a historical person? I think we should consult the field of Buddhist Studies. It turns out that there has recently been some debate about the matter in this field. David Drewes argued that “no basis for treating the Buddha as a historical figure has yet been identified” (Drewes 2017, 1). However, I’m going to be bold here, and follow Bronkhorst (2019) in saying that Drewes’s arguments have been refuted by Wynne (2019) and von Hinüber (2019) (the latter is cited in Dhammadinnā 2018, 303n55). Cf. also Levman (2019).

In line with the articles by Wynne, Levman, and von Hinüber, and considering Wynne (2005) and Sujato & Brahmali (2015), in further cuboids I will assume that (i) the Buddha was a historical person and (ii) it is possible to know about his life and teachings by critically examining the early Buddhist texts (Sujato & Brahmali 2015).

References

  • Bronkhorst, Johannes. 2019. “What can we learn from Musīla and Nārada?” Indian International Journal of Buddhist Studies. 20: 1-19.
  • Dhammadinnā, Bhikkhunī. 2018. “When Womanhood Matters.” Religions of South Asia 12 (3): 274-313. https://doi.org/10.1558/rosa.39890.
  • Drewes, David. 2017. “The Idea of the Historical Buddha.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 40: 1-25. https://doi.org/10.2143/JIABS.40.0.3269003.
  • Hinüber, Oskar von. 2019. “The Buddha as a Historical Person.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 42; when published online, the article should appear here: tinyurl.com/r3wqy3q
  • Levman, Bryan. 2019. “The Historical Buddha: Response to Drewes.” Canadian Journal of Buddhist Studies 14: 25-56. https://thecjbs.org/.
  • Sujato, Bhikkhu, and Bhikkhu Brahmali. 2015. The Authenticity of the Early Buddhist Texts. Supplement, Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies 5. https://ocbs.org/the-authenticity-of-the-early-buddhist-texts-2/.
  • Wynne, Alexander. 2005. “The historical authenticity of early Buddhist literature: a critical evaluation.” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens/Vienna Journal of South Asian Studies 49: 35-70. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24007653.
  • Wynne, Alexander. 2019. “Did the Buddha exist?” Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies 16: 98-148. https://jocbs.org/index.php/jocbs/article/view/193.

Shortened URL: cuboids.page.link/buddha.