The Death of the Buddha, Historical Facts vs. Mythology

hi this is a video talking about
Buddhism Buddhist philosophy how we know what we think we know about Buddhism from the study of ancient texts a small number of people who come to this YouTube channel are aware of my former life as a scholar of terra-that of Buddhism if you're not aware you can figure out how to spell my name and put it into Google and pretty quickly and easily find articles and other fragments from that life I lived um though it's a small number of people who watch the videos I make about Buddhism I'm aware that those videos can have quite a big impact on them I have had email from people about the ways in which my videos oh Buddhism have changed their lives however the purpose of this YouTube channel is not to preach Buddhism it's not to critique Buddhism it's not to talk about my former life and scholar Buddhist studies this YouTube channel on the one hand simply reflects whatever I've got going on in the present tense so for example when I was working on the politics of China several videos were uploaded here talking about Chinese politics when I was learning Chinese as a language I uploaded several videos about the Chinese language so that type of material is gonna change from month to month depending on what I've got going on in my life if I get a job at Starbucks it's quite possible I will start uploading videos talking about what it's like to work fine together of a Starbucks that's a thought man that might be a nice change for me right here unfortunately I'm vegan so it's not all that much at Starbucks I can make without a shudder of moral objection at any rate uh look so on the one hand this channel is about whatever's going on in my life right now and on the other hand this channel exists so that one day my daughter can see it I have a two-year-old daughter who lives in Europe whom I basically never get to see I'm hoping to see her this December and you may get videos about that but one day in the future she could know what kind of guy I was so with all that having been said look if you're watching this and you have no idea why you should pay attention to this bowl guy talking about Buddhism it's understandable you can do some Google searches I was invited to give a lecture on Buddhism at the University of Oxford at one point by the great Richard Gombrich I was invited to give a university at so as the University of London I actually took these invitations and gave those lectures by the way if you haven't guessed I also gave lectures on Buddhism actually in academic contexts in Cambodia and in Taiwan I remember giving lectures on Buddhism two lectures at a Buddhist University in Taiwan I have never given a lecture at a university in Canada not not formally and when professors talk to me here of a Buddhism they often are impressed after a short discussion that I know so much I have great depth of knowledge in the field and depth of practical experience and depth of useful cynical advice about what's going on the field and I point out to them well you know you could book a room and you could invite me to give a lecture here at the University of Victoria or what have you they don't do that so the type of ambition Canadian institution has to take advantage of the talent that it's got the talent that's already on campus it's very different from the way American and British institutions operate without even getting into the question of actually getting out of your chair and going and recruiting talent from elsewhere anyway that's a digression from within a digression this video is going to read out and respond to I'm going to add some spontaneous comments to an article I wrote back in the year 2012 this article is titled was originally titled descent from the top reading ancient Buddhist texts as historical evidence so as many of my writings my concern here is how we construct modern myths out of ancient myths and often how we convince ourselves that in reading mythology we are actually reading isolated historical facts you know one of the inoffensive examples I can give of that and that I often do use in conversation with people is the Greek god Heracles and nobody gets offended because nobody worships Heracles as a God anymore but Heracles really was a God Heracles has to take it very seriously historically as a major religious figure which does not mean that he existed does not mean we have any text or any painting or any decorated urn showing Heracles showing Hercules that really gives us a scene from history we doesn't mean we have any stories that were written even with the author's intent of describing a real historical figure as opposed to preserving mythology or telling a moral fable or serving some other attention of the author but it is very easy it is all too easy to slip into a mentality of sifting through a myth to pick out the portions that we wish to imagine to be historical evidence so what do I mean if you read a collection of stories about Heracles it's very easy to look at them and say okay the most supernatural stories are fiction and in certain stories the supernatural elements and impossible elements are exaggeration but that at the core of the story the core which is something we imagine something we ascribe to the story it's not something written in the story at the core of the story there are real historical facts that were later embellished upon exaggerated about transformed into legend and myth what have you today near 2015 some stories about Heracles are still popular are still widely remembered and others are virtually fraud the death of Heracles the tragic death of Heracles for some reason is not popular is not widely remembered but like most legendary figures in both most major religious figures his death is dramatic and you can describe his death in practical terms you could omit all of the supernatural material and just say you know heraclea is cheated on his wife he got a new girlfriend his wife was jealous and his wife poisoned him so he died now that sounds like it could be an historical event and it's very easy without even observing your thought process for you to slip into construing that myth as having originally beam of having been at its core a description of an actual king who was poisoned by his wife who betrayed his wife simply because that is believable from our modern rational scientific perspective now I can describe the scene myth to you by including and giving emphasis to the supernatural elements which is that the woman Heracles married was writing on the back of a scent or and Heracles shot the center with a bow while the center was swimming through water and while the center was dying as a dying curse the center told Heracles his wife to collect the blood from his wound and to use it as a magical potion if Heracles his heart should ever stray oh I may be getting some of the details of that myth wrong it's been many years since I read the drama of the death of Heracles but now instead this is obviously a richly symbolic abstract mythological tale and the intent of the author may be various things it may be written primarily to entertain children it may be written primarily with a a religious purpose encoded in religious symbolism we don't know it may just be a legend for the sake of a legend some of the stories we tell action-adventure stories exist just for the sake of the action-adventure but now simply by shifting the focus info by including these facts or were made before it's not credible to say this story began with a real historical event and the other elements arose as embellishments even if we were willing to believe that there were at some point magical creatures called half-man half-horse creatures that had poison for blood or something considered from a historical position the whole thing is preposterous and doesn't seem reasonable that the author is merely being inaccurate in recording real historical events instead it seemed to the author's intent has nothing to do with recording history so this article I wrote in 2012 which you as you'll see brooches some of these same issues within Buddhism where people are much more defensive and much less willing to discuss those questions in an open and constructive way begins as follows suppose someone formed their opinion of Buddhism based solely on the articles on my own blog a scenario only slightly stranger than meeting someone whose opinion of Buddhism is based entirely on kung-fu movies and yet much less common the question might then be asked given all this supernatural material in the Canon that you complained about other Western interpreters selectively ignoring etc why does anyone think of these texts as records of his specific historical events at all so that is the question why do we read mythology and think that we're seeing history our local continues in a roundabout way questions of that kind do reach me I received an utterly unexpected response from an established PhD wielding career academic specialized in Buddhism who felt that my work supported his own conclusion the Palli Canon contained no description of the Buddha as an historical figure at all nor in this professor's opinion did the text depict him as a human being this was both astounding and hilarious as I then had to provide this professor with a link to one of my prior articles in reply I had already read an article titled the Buddha was bold to discuss the descriptions that we have in the Pali Canon that do indeed make the Buddha like a normal human being with nothing Supernatural about his appearance etc I have never heard back from that professor again Socratic method is dead apparently now it's worth noting this is part of the hyper fragility of western academia in dealing with Buddhism at the very beginning of that anecdote I said well in a roundabout way questions of this kind you reach me they should reach me directly it should be it should be the case that we live in a world where scholars deal with these questions head-on that these are issues of real debate original research a reconsideration of the ancient texts none of that's the case instead as in this case I have been talking to this professor about the possibility of my getting a PhD studying with him and this guy was so fragile so unprepared for any discussion of historical texts and evidence from historical texts that when he told me his pet theory that the pali canon doesn't describe the buddha as an historical figure as a natural human person he imploded as soon as i mentioned a well well written fully sighted fully referenced article to the contrary i don't know any other field of study that works that way you know i don't know you can't be in a department of physics and say to a student who's applying to get a PhD with you an advanced student who's applying to do graduate work oh by the way here's my here's my personal pet theory about the speed of light and the student writes back is okay well that's interesting but actually I've published a theory to the contrary and here are my source then shut it down no obviously even in a field like physics Socratic method is important scrutiny and debate and completing claims to the truth competing source of factual evidence have to be contrasted and that has to go on in the study of ancient Greek and the study of ancient Latin and the study of ancient Sanskrit I would hope it goes on in the study of medieval French Italian 15th century Chinese in any field but I got to tell you it is not going on in Buddhist studies and this is one of my main reasons for why I quit that field and why I've now started at you know chapter 1 page 1 with how to learn Japanese it was not my dream in life to become a scholar of modern Japanese but having studied so many other things that's the position I now find myself in and it is frankly partly due to the real failure of both Western academia and Eastern academia in Buddhist studies and these types of hyper fragile attitudes of professors who often are not capable of being honest with themselves about what their own beliefs were when they first got started in Buddhism and how the accumulated exposure they have to historical evidence has challenged those beliefs I will not say his name but another professor a professor in England he got started as a member of a notorious cult in Buddhism a he was involved with the Friends of the Western Buddhist order headed by an infamous white British monk who had numerous charges of sexual misconduct against them very well substantiated documented in an article by The Guardian newspaper and in other articles but in with that professor obviously at every stage of his involvement with Buddhism his attitudes had to change at one point he was a kid who didn't know that much who got involved with this cult aDNA whole he was when he got involved at some point his opinion of that cult changed I found just through Google I found some of his comments in the internet reflecting that time when he was losing his faith in that modern cult I don't know did he lose his faith in the ancient religion also or but his attitude must have changed and then he must have gone through a series of stages where in earning a PhD and in reading these texts how you view Buddhism at each stage of its historical development has to change to quote the infamous Joseph Stalin quantitative build-up leads to qualitative change when you read just one myth you'll have a view of it you'll have your opinion on that myth you may have certain types of excuses in mind and reading the myth like we just talked about with Hercules where you're sifting through the myth and choosing some elements and treating them as historical evidence and ignoring other elements when you've read ten myths a hundred myths a thousand myths your perspective on each of them is different your perspective on the whole is different and your perspective on different historical periods is different you have to develop as an intellectual now a lot of these professors like the ones I just told the standard about I think instead of trying to cling into the jejune faith of their lost youth they still want to believe the things they believed as a teenager or maybe that they believed in their early 20s but that they can't believe anymore because they know better and that is very sad that's very tragic but it's also very common to the religious experience I think there are a lot of people in Christianity who had maybe a childlike faith in Jesus a childlike faith in the Bible and when they were teenagers and decided to go to a seminary go to a religious College when they decided to earn a PhD in biblical studies they maybe still had this childlike faith in these teenage attitudes and then at some point as they got older they hit a breaking point where for example where you know so much about the Bible that you can't believe the Bible has supernatural origins you have to believe the Bible is written by human beings so do you go into a sort of deeper denial or do you deal with that and move on I certainly I mean unlike Christianity unlike Islam I certainly think it is possible to be a good Buddhist and to be a good Buddhist and to regard the ancient texts as being merely the product of human hands being written by human beings and as containing many errors and myths and fables I the nature of the evidence frame one is really read the stuff I don't know what other option there is but yeah in theory at least there are people who literally believe in the supernatural revelation of some Buddhist texts that some of the Buddhist texts were brought down from heaven by basically the Angels working for Indra by supernatural forces there are people who believe some Buddhist texts were hidden in a cave by magical dragons called Nagas and were then revealed from that cave I if you believe that as a child and then you ever engage in textual study I I don't see how any of those myths could be sustainable and I don't see how any view of the buddha as omniscient as god-like could be sustainable if you're just familiar with the diversity of texts about them anyway sorry so we we continue now with my old article Socratic method is dead apparently we should be debating these issues in Western academia and we're not we should be debating these issues in eastern academia more not I'm not all that upset about the failure of Western academia because I'm more upset about the failure of academia in places like Thailand Japan Hong Kong Asia should be the home of where original research on Buddhism is being conducted and it's not so the failure of Western Dvina is more important because of the failure of Eastern academia but believe me this kind of Socratic discourse is not taking place in journals of Buddhist studies published in Japan I can make a whole other video about my experiences with studies journals of Buddhist studies in based in Japan the question of whether the Buddha is described as natural supernatural or alternating between the two is a fairly narrow issue we have a broader problem in questioning his status as an historical figure in any of the texts or in accordance with any possible archaeological evidence etc even so the latter question is still narrower than the universal problem of why any one regards any of the ancient texts as real historical evidence as opposed to religious fables and why other texts in the same canon are disregarded as merely fables in effect modern interpreters end up selectively disregarding some text while insisting on the importance of others one of the real ghosts haunting a popular flaw philology and I'll say that again one of the great ghosts haunting popular philology is the criterion of embarrassment this is not a technical concept its origin is in a book sold in airport lobbies and it was neither narrowly defined by academics nor by religious authorities the criterion of embarrassment comes from this guy will Durant will do all and will Doron was not a scholar of Buddhism he was not a scholar of ancient Egypt he was not a scholar of anything but he wrote popular nonfiction nonfiction that was enormous ly influential it sold in airport lobbies it influenced you know BBC radio in influence documentaries that were recorded and played on the radio on television it was massively influential at that level of the popular mass media consumption of history dumbed down history and part of the problem is not that it's dumbed down for the audience but that the guy writing it really does not know enough to be dumbing down something as contentious as ancient Buddhism and in this book I mean this book it's not like it's 80% right and 20% wrong and misleading it is 100% garbage but in books like this by wielder all you see the authoritative self-confident presentation of modern myths about Buddhism modern misconceptions not misconceptions that come from ancient texts but that people widely believe today being presented as settled fact this is from the 1950s but in the 1950s there was already we had a 100 year plus old tradition of Europeans making up complete [ __ ] about Buddhism and selling it to other Europeans so in here I mean this also contains a lot of propaganda for Mohandas Gandhi the political leader in India and so on I mean all all the kind of [ __ ] hippy misconceptions about the Orient about India China Buddhism Hinduism etc you can find the the proof the false proof for those notions in this popular book in all the writings of will Doron from the 1950s so again if you know the popularity of that the type of cultural influence that had it's not at all surprising that views that were prevalent in the 1960s were influenced by this these books in the 1950s and that did get recycled in documentaries and what-have-you okay but I'm specifically talking here about will Durant's idea of the criterion of embarrassment which again was not really it wasn't a technical scientific theological idea it was an idea that came from these popular books by this popular author who did not know what he was talking about and who made even more popular misconceptions about ancient Egypt ancient India Buddhism Hinduism you name it inspired a whole lot of people to take vacations in India I'm sure um I can use the same example from the top of the video about the death of Heracles the death Berkley's it's very easy to think okay Hercules was a real hero he was a strong man who became a king by killing a lot of people fought a lot of sword fights and when he died when he was poisoned by his wife his fans were embarrassed by this they were trying to compensate for this so they invented a myth they embellished on the embarrassing fact of his death so this is not embarrassment in a kind of common sense the point isn't the people were blushing and covering their mouths and giggling it's not embarrassment about you know sexual material in in mythology but this is construing the myth as an attempt to compensate for an inconvenient historical fact many people think this way without realizing it very easy to look at that myth of Heracles and say okay there must have been a real historical fact of him cheating on his wife and being poisoned and then the rest of the myth is to compensate for that is to deal with that so-called embarrassment so in terms of the influences had this has been massively influential in how all modern Western people think about history of religion many people are Meany old testament notice peculiar facts about Moses Moses in the Old Testament in Judaism Moses cannot speak well Moses has something like a lisp or a stutter Moses is described as having a a speech pathology a speech problem so he's not a public speaker many people look at that and say okay that's an embarrassing fact in this sense so the fact that the mythology compensates for this problem the fact that we have an explanation or an excuse for this means that there was a real historical fact there that's being compensated for ie therefore Moses is not a purely fictional or purely mythological figure that therefore there was a real person and this this criterion of embarrassment the fact that we can see a compensation for something inconvenient for the storytellers must entail that there was a real Moses now that is false if you think about each step of consideration there it is a completely false inference that's impossible to support that's not how we establish the historical reality of a person and if you apply that to mythology or the well-written fiction then almost any work of fiction becomes historical reality because it is Nat for people to create believable obstacles believable character flaws in their heroes even if you create a completely fictional hero why does Robin Hood lose in some of his battles Robin Hood loses in his fight with Little John they have a fight on the river isn't this an embarrassment doesn't this show that Robin Hood is a real historical figure no not at all even in works of pure fantasy even in works of the wildest imagination in fiction people create obstacles that the heroes can't overcome people create character flaws for mythological figures and also we have to admit our own alienness in the culture I do not know enough about ancient Greek culture to know why the story of the death of Heracles was so meaningful and so resonant what it reflected fanatically I don't know that much about there about the symbolism that may be involved in the poisoning and so on so and there's a certain arrogance if I as a modern person look at that myth and say oh well this can't possibly have any meaning aside from being an attempt to embellish a real historical event where a certain king in ancient Greece was poisoned by his wife over jealousy because the husband had cheated on the wife that's a modern that's kind of a modern hubris look at it that way the type of symbolism I mean the life of Moses in the Old Testament if you spend a little bit of time learning about First Temple Judaism ancient Judaism you realize that many of the events in the life of Moses many the events of the life of Jesus are really purely symbolic and they probably were very meaningful the people who wrote them at the time but they are not meaningful to us in the same way Jesus goes and visits a tree the tree doesn't have any fruit when it's out of season so Jesus asks God to destroy the tree I'm not going to get into it here but this is not an embarrassing incident where a real historical person got angry at a tree for having no fruit and said that God should destroy the tree it is an entirely symbolic Neher that was meaningful to people at the time and really reflects and concerns political conditions in Israel at that time the destruction of the temple Roman occupation etc get to the politics of the New Testament and what that reflects what resonated about it um there's a lot here is a lot to talk about but unfortunately this idea of the criterion of embarrassment was massively influential because it was popularized by this guy will durant who is now he's not remembered in the same flattering light that he was thought of during his lifetime and look I'm gonna give one concession sky I think his work is complete garbage complete garbage but it is true that he lived at a time when most of the Western world was intensely racist and intensely Pro Empire and even in giving his work this sort of title our Oriental heritage he is trying in his way to make people in England and America less racist less intolerant less dismissive in their attitudes towards religions like Buddhism and Hinduism so in that respect yes his heart was in the right place and yes I can see why the BBC the CBC probably in America you know the Disney Corporation why popular purveyors of documentaries popularizing history would fasten onto a book like this and say yes this is just what we're looking for this is just the flattering view this is just the angle of the history of India and history of China we want to popularize basically to try to make white people less racist basically to try to make people who were raised in a British or American education system more sensitive to the idea that Asia has its own written history its own religions its own traditions that are worth knowing about worth understanding their own terms that's it that's the only positive thing I've said but we'll deraad everything he says about Buddhism is garbage and it is misleading and it's pernicious and the legacy of that kind of writing its influence is still with us today hmm okay if you look around the internet for debates employing the term employing the idea of the criterion of embarrassment you'll find that they both demonstrate a diversity of implicit definitions of what it means and you'll also see that the authors often enough debate amongst themselves the problem of how exactly this criterion should be used I've heard me given that the term is legitimately contestable in its meaning and it's easier for me to give an example of how it applies to Buddhist studies than it is to define it Muhammad Allah no boy I'm out of practice in pronouncing poly maha Mogollon ah hey-up and pronouncing japanese lightly think about the list of languages of studied since I stopped learning poly I stopped learning pavley and I studied Cree a little tiny bit of a jib way Chinese and now Japanese I stay even more languages before that I worked on Palli Cambodian French German etc but let me tell you to say I'm rusty on poly is an understatement anyway Mahama galena is the name of a Buddhist monk and I am NOT correctly pronouncing the long a vowels here Mogollon uh yeah you're not gonna chant along with this video anyway mmm Mohammed gana was one of two monks who were expected to inherit the leadership of Buddhism as they then new religion at the time of the Buddha's death Kayson paused to be clear when the Buddha was alive he selected two monks and said these are my two chief disciples these are the best monks however you want to phrase it and the Buddha said that when he died these two monks should take over the leadership of Buddhism and obviously while the Buddha was still alive the idea of what Buddhism was supposed to be was still to some extent open and in contested and new right admittedly I'm presuming the Buddha is a real historical figure who really was alive in my description of these events and some of you might challenge me on that okay Socratic method is dead despite the fact that both of these monks were younger than the Buddha they both pre deceased him and Mahama galinha was reportedly murdered okay so this is massively significant for the history of Buddhism or even for the mythology of Buddhism if you regard this as containing no real historical facts but we have here the inconvenient fact that the two monks the Buddha selected to become the leaders after his death they died before the Buddha died even though they were younger than the Buddha okay in many ways I think the tension surrounding this story is much more meaningful than the sort of tension surrounding Moses why was it Moses was never allowed to see the promised land why was it that Moses couldn't speak I couldn't speak clearly why was the succession the control of the leadership of Buddhism contested at the time of the death of the Buddha why was it disputed who would inherit control of Buddhism the texts concerning Muhammad gana are full of the magical and the supernatural and the events surrounding his death are further embellished upon in the commentaries so for those you don't know there's the original ancient pally texts and then there are later texts called the commentaries that is not debated the fact that the commentaries are written historically later is not debated that is as close to an undisputed historical fact as anything gets in Buddhism so difference between text and commentary the Pali text and then the commentaries are also written in Pali but there's there are big differences between the two modern readers tend to regard the death of Muhammad Ilana as an historical fact even if they regard all the stories told about it as mythology how is that possible if your only evidence is myth why would you suppose that you have evidence of anything other than mythology well there is this dubious thing called the criterion of embarrassment in general modern readers suppose that the untimely death of both of the monks who had been appointed to inherit authority was a subject of embarrassment in the particular sense that required further explanation and justification even if the myths are largely fiction modern readers tend to suppose that the reason for creating the myth was real the supposition is that a story needed to be invented to explain away and it can be in fact however this whole attitude remains one of supposition departing from the text again we also have this problem of hubris that we as modern readers really know the the undeclared intention of the author's here so if the story concerning the circumstances of Muhammad Ana's death the death of this monk if that is an invention to conceal something to serve some other purpose how do we know what's being concealed how do we know what the author's intent was if we're even assuming that this is a real historical fact that this death this murder took place well you know to give one example that again we should have debate about we should have Socratic discourse about the the story we have the legend of the death that we have blames the giant religion which is also pronounced the Jain religion today j.a I am so the Giants are blamed for the murder of this important monk well there was real religious tension real conflict between Buddhism and Jainism as two religions in this period in the same historical period in India how do we know this story wasn't invented just for sectarian reasons just because the author the person who wrote it was a part of a real contest a real car between these two religions that's just a supposition that's just a modern thesis however it's not easily dismissed no likewise the idea that the story around his death was invented for any other reason for example someone might have created this myth just to explain why when the Buddha died Mahama gana did not become the leader of Buddhism that as the texts indicate there was some kind of struggle to control the Buddhist religion at this crucial juncture and the person who won that struggle was not the person the Buddha selected well he would be convenient to say oh that's because he was murdered and he was murdered by a rival religious order by the Giants by China's him so that's also convenient but we don't know and the accounts of his death are supernatural they are just as impossible to believe as the death of Heracles there's enough supernatural stuff involved that nobody could read that and possibly believe this is an eyewitness account of a real historical fact now also if you read that story I'm not gonna get to the details it's not even clear who could have witnessed it because nobody is there and he magically teleports and it's like so who's telling the story and who was it who witnessed these impossible events to tell the story given that he's alone when these things happen and the magic involved so you get into kind of surreal self contradictory logic even if you want to believe that it's a real historical event okay we're turning to the text here many people who don't use the term criterion of embarrassment nevertheless share in this basic attitude towards textual evidence and many people complain that the word embarrassment itself is poorly suited to the meaning of the phrase and is an unwanted distraction etc the point here isn't that ancient Buddhists were embarrassed for the death of Mohammed Mohammed Amin itself rather the assumption is that modern readers can infer that the invention of the myth served as a type of compensation for a real historical event and that we can further infer what that real event was that the authors are compensating for it all seems so obvious and yet it is really very dubious was Muhammad gana really murdered by Giants if we have a myth stating that he was couldn't his texts reflect tensions between the two religions Buddhism versus Jainism at the time of the myths authorship rather than recording a prior historical event can we really selectively disregard supernatural elements of a story that would tend to categorize it as myth simply because there were other 'mo elements that seem to us with modern eyes to indirectly reveal real events could it be conversely that these myths cover over something completely different that we can't guess at from the mere supras supposition that something is concealed hey sorry I tripped on the word supposition there so again coming back to an example like the myths around Moses or Jesus praying for the destruction of the fruit tree a very small number of biblical scholars have unpacked the symbolism from that culture at that time the implied meaning and the significance of of those events of course they're still debated and disputed but the point is a normal modern person reading in English English translation could not read those myths about Moses and Jesus and understand the ancient Jewish cultural assumptions and social conditions what have you that surround the myth and that inform the author's purpose and that really reveal to you the significance of the myth so with some areas of ancient Buddhist texts these are also real stumbling blocks where sometimes we have a story but we don't know why the story is being told or what it's hinting at sometimes we have a criticism of another religion but we don't really know what's being criticized or why throughout the pally can and you know the Sun worshipers people who worship the Sun they have a really bad reputation I've never seen an explanation within the Canon for why for what was the problem and I don't know why maybe in that period in India the Sun worshipers were engaging in some sort of rituals that were extremely offensive to Buddhists whether animal sacrifice rituals or human sacrifice or sex which I don't know but there are some cases where the texts preserve evidence of a religious and cultural nature that I have no further way to interpret okay so these are the ways in which even a very simple text can be complicated you know that scene in the New Testament with Jesus condemning the fruit tree it's only a few sentences long it's not involuted it's not it's not complex when you look at on the page in English but to understand what's going on there why the myth exists and what it's trying to tell the reader in the period it was originally written what it's trying what it means in that context that is complicated so we can have some of the same problems in looking at ancient Buddhist texts could it be conversely that these myths cover over something completely different that we can't guess at from the mere supposition that something is being concealed human nature being what it is we might say at least hypothetically that there could have been a power struggle to determine who inherited control the religion around the time of the Buddha's death as such it could be that the myth isn't concealing the Incan inconvenient fact of Mahatma Gandhi's death but instead that it's concealing the convenient fact that the death itself was a myth if we started from the skeptical assumption that Muhammad olanna might not have been dead prior to the Buddha's death we would then interpret the written myths as offering an explanation of his absence ie his exclusion from power thereafter that would be wholly speculative however the problem with the criterion of embarrassment is that every theory it supports is wholly speculative we cannot reduce the degree of speculation even if we employ Occam's razor there is absolutely no reason why the simplest available explanation for the invention would be more true than a convoluted one so pause here this also relates to the nature of concealment if you know I'm lying to you if you know I'm concealing evidence about something then there's no reason to assume that my reason for lying will be the simplest reason possible quite the contrary my reasons may be complex so if a myth is not written for sincere and direct reasons if it's not telling us what it openly and overtly and directly is telling us then the simplest explanation is irrelevant why did people write this myth about Jesus damming a fruit tree asking God to blight to destroy a fruit tree the point was not to tell us that you can have the magical superpower to destroy a fruit tree the actual point is convoluted is complicated it's not the simplest available explanation cuz that's how we thought she works and you know again it might have been simpler obvious to the audience that it was written for in that historical period but I mean likewise even if you read Shakespeare sometimes the joke in Shakespeare like there's a concealed joke it's very convoluted it's very difficult to explain today what the joke is it was obvious to some people in the audience at that time but the symbolic references the cultural references that have been forgotten today so you can't use Occam's razor for this sort of thing now there is an overall sense in which we do use Occam's razor when we look at the historical figure of the Buddha you have to ask what is the simplest explanation is it simpler to imagine that ultimately there was an historical figure or is it simpler to imagine there never was an historical figure and these myths were created without a unique person existing to inspire the mythology most people who have profound long-term exposure these ancient texts tend to say yeah it's easier to assume there really was a guy ultimately who inspired this literature and that some of his idiosyncrasies some of his personal decisions are reflected in the literature that we have although the mythology about him is very indirect was there an historical Herakles was there an historical evolution Tess Farah so aval oka tetra is another Buddhist God and we know for a fact that this God never existed as a person the origins of that God are symbolic and abstract so even then even with this type of very basic theory such as the Buddha was a person it seems like an incredibly simple theory actually Occam's razor is irrelevant actually the question of what we do with mythological evidence is very complicated and difficult unlike the pure sciences or even the Medical Sciences neither mythology nor history are susceptible to Occam's favorite famous principle the simplest explanation for why Napoleon went to war with Russia may be utterly false his reasons may have been extremely convoluted etc and the simplest explanation for various myths that have been made up about the ensuing war may also be false propaganda isn't counted as one of the pure Sciences right so that's a good point I forgot that I made what I've just said about history what have you said about mythology is also true of history we can't make Occam's razor inferences about historical decisions that we know are real historical decisions any more than we can of a mythological decisions why did President Nixon decide to continue with the Vietnam War the reasons may be really complicated and the fact that you can come up with a very simple explanation single reason at a single time may be completely irrelevant so we can't these types of inferences do apply to the pure sciences but do not apply to mythology religion history politics given that we're looking at an uncertain mix of mythology in history the principle of parsimony is doubly misleading so the principle of parsimony is another name for Occam's razor unlike the laws of physics were investigating a story that intentionally conceals something the motives of the authors may be complex we don't even know to what extent they regarded themselves as writing fact fiction or a mixture of the two so again this is why the intention of the author is so important when you read an ancient Greek author like Thucydides we know that his intention was to get rid of mythology we know that he was trying to write real history and real record real political decisions and political facts but when you're looking at mythology that may have been written mostly to entertain children or may be written in order to inspire a certain type of ethical lifestyle or just to inspire people to care about certain rituals so they know the importance of performing magical rituals the intention of the author is not to record an historical fact in the 21st century if it were to speculate as the inspiration for a particular songs lyrics the simplest explanation has no reason to be more true than a convoluted one and looking for historical facts that may be masked within a work of art simplicity need not correlate to accuracy although simplicity may make our analysis seem more logical our conclusions are not any less speculative for that reason so anyone who has a background in art history would know sometimes the reason why a painting was created and the symbolic meaning of features and paintings can be extremely complicated and direct if you are looking at a painting that has a concealed or hidden message and sometimes by the way paintings the the hidden message is just to thank the donor to thank the patrons thank the people who paid for the painting but it can be very convoluted returning to the question that opened the essay why does anyone regard any of this stuff as historical evidence of anything at all well as a broad aesthetic tendency I think that most of us ie modern readers really do share in the mentality of the criterion of embarrassed and the canonical text offer us various critical and self-critical remarks about the imperfect development of early Buddhism that seemed all too easy to believe in it isn't the case that all of the monks in the canon are Paragons of virtue instead we have many acrimonious dialogues preserved in which the monks disagree of a philosophy or sometimes accuse one another of ethical lapses and moral misconduct so again I just pause this is the sense in which many people who read the parody Canon feel that it is much more historically authentic than the Old Testament of the New Testament just the human fallibility the human imperfection of many of the characters the fact that you see Buddhist monks criticizing and complaining about other buddhist monks you see Buddhist monks going and complaining to the Buddha this monk is a jerk this monk is doing something bad so again as with the the case of Moses stuttering are not being able to speak clearly those types of human and professions very often have an effect on the readers of convincing them that these books as a whole are recording historical facts as I've already said that is very misleading and it's not appropriate to let yourself fall into those assumptions in an unexamined way you have to be rigorous and self disciplined in your evaluation the evidence so I write here there is no real reason why we should regard a story about a bad monk as more historically real than a story about a good monk but this is a natural human bias if I read a story in the newspaper about a corrupt politician I am probably going to believe it simply because it seems plausible to me that the politician is corrupt if I read a story in the newspaper telling me that a certain politician is a paragon of virtue he is not corrupt in any way he's completely honest he's completely accountable and he's doing a great job I will most likely disregard that or be very skeptical or critical so this is a bias on the part of the reader and both of those newspaper stories may be entirely true or accurate both of them may be false and misleading okay so when we look at the Pavley cannon why do we assume that stories about bad monks are accurate and stories about good monks our mythology or propaganda or misleading whatever okay we should be aware of this tendency of thought that elects to do precisely that we tend to teach em pardon me we tend to treat text as factual if they contain criticism self-criticism conflict and explanations for what seemed to be inconvenient facts we tend to regard the absence of these things in an otherwise grandiose narrative as mythical if the Canon described everyone as levitating and radiating magical beams all the time etc nobody today would believe any of it nobody would really be interested in it and the whole Canon would probably be thought of as quite boring in contrast to the human drama of other ancient sources such as the myth of Heracles however the Pali Canon does preserve very down-to-earth reflections on the state of the religion alongside the supernatural narratives and sometimes mixed in with them indifferently this is the sense in which Buddhism is frankly more interesting than the myths of Heracles the religion was intensely aware of its own corruption from the outset and it was intensely concerned with a misunderstanding of its own philosophy even within its first group of core followers the Canon preserves a record of many of those concerns debates complaints remonstration etc although these are not separate from the mythological material in the texts themselves and they definitely do not comprise an earlier stratum whereby anyone could or should disregard the mythological material as later strata more fundamentally we should admit to ourselves that we have no clear criterion as to what may be called a myth anyway nor of how or why anything should be separated out from the text as a non myth instead readers just operate on the basis of their own sentiment and something like the criterion of embarrassment returning to the question of who inherited power at the time of the Buddha's death look very briefly at the example of maha kassapa whereas the two months sorry pregnant whereas the two monks appointed to inherit power did not do so reportedly due to their untimely demise Casa fo was the man who actually did take over control of the religion was he appointed to do so from the Buddha's deathbed no reportedly he wasn't present however as the myth goes in the mahaparinirvana sutra which is a certain within the palate cannon isa tanta within this corpus of ancient text the fact that he was intended to take over the leadership was indicated magically by the fact that the wood stacked up for the buddha's funeral pyre refused to burn until maha kassapa arrived to attend the funeral no i'm not making this up the question is who did and why okay now i'm going to presume that my audience does not believe that divine intervention actually prevented the wood from lighting on fire which is what the texts say is that the gods plural the gods of ancient india the gods would not allow the buddha's funeral pyre his funeral ritual to proceed until maha kassapa came and took over the leadership that doesn't just sound like a myth it sounds like an excuse and a bad excuse the more you know about what ism it would be much more convenient if while the buddha was dying he said that he wanted maha kassapa to come to his funeral or if the buddha said that he wanted mikasa to become the leader of the religion but the buddha did not say that we don't have a myth anywhere with the buddha endorsing the leadership maha kassapa instead we have the Buddha endorsing the leadership of two other people who did not become the leaders now finally I mean again you may or may not know Buddhism as well what Buddhism is based on the instructions of the Buddha ET is not based on the instructions of the gods the gods plural the gods do say things the gods do also have debates with the but uh another Buddhist monks there are interactions with the gods but what the whole pali canon denies is that the gods know anything that's really worth knowing so Brahma is spoken to but it's very explicitly said in the pala Canon that Brahma doesn't know something that the Buddha doesn't know Brahma and Indra they don't seem to know anything that intelligent human beings would not know so in that sense they're similar to the gods of ancient Greece they're not omnipotent and omniscient they are super-powered like our comic book characters like superheroes today they can fly through the air and they can kill you by throwing a lightning bolt at your head Indra actually does that in the pally Canon by the way he throws lightning bolts at people's heads and kills them once in a while um but Buddhism is absolutely not based on revealed principles or instructions from the gods it is based exclusively on the field principles instructions from the Buddha so even if the gods did choose maha kassapa to be the leader and they did this through the incredibly indirect method of preventing a fire from being lit not a very impressive form of divine intervention that would still not be valid in Buddhism there is no way that succession or monastic leadership even today even in Buddhism as it exists now you are not supposed to select your leaders on the basis of divine intervention or funeral rituals or magical fire lighting rituals this is one of the differences between Buddhism and other religions how leadership is selected by the way for a monks who are still alive today or for people in the last 1,000 years there are some very boring texts you can read that outlined the sort of legal principles of who is in charge when and who makes what decisions in a Buddhist Sangha in a Buddhist religious community either immense religious community or women's religion many in a monastic group okay so this myth apart from being preposterous and seeming to conceal something is also doctrinally invalid which is to say even if we are completely uncritical pure believers true believers in all the magical and supernatural elements of Buddhism it's still not valid for the gods to have made this decision that they allegedly made funny Oh divine intervention is so so often through invisible and suspicious means I'm okay yes theoretically it is possible that this is an actual historical event but I don't think that anyone alive today interprets the text in this manner not even the most pious of monks and I've met many conversely if the point of the myth were to legitimate the power of maha kassapa the question deserves to be asked why didn't someone simply fabricate a decision on the part of the Buddha on his deathbed saying that cassava should take over control of the religion it may also be noted that the wood and the pyre does not speak with its own voice another important monks a sermon partly another important monk Aniruddha offers the explanation that the gods were preventing the fire from alighting until cassava could arrive so again we don't even have a myth of Indra coming down from the sky and delaying the funeral ritual we just have another human being a monk named a Neruda standing there and saying no no you can't light the fire until this other monk arrives and takes over the leadership of the religion okay so yeah the story of divine intervention very much seems like an embellishment on a very believable scenario of a power struggle for who should attend the funeral probably who should preside over the rituals of the funeral at the the Buddha's death and ultimately who would be present to debate and decide who was going to take over the leadership of this new religion right again it is tempting to imagine that this myth preserves anniver to support for maha kassapa inheriting power and that it is indirectly depicting the fact that a Narada wanted to delay the funeral proceedings and tell Kasbah and his supporters could arrive to advocate for his leadership however we don't know this it is speculation of the crudest kind my cassava isn't even mentioned in the text so the Martina Bannister that is the text until after the Buddha's death he enters the narrative with the description of his absence explained in reference to this issue of the funeral pyre remaining mysteriously flame-retardant conversely sari put the one of the monks who definitely wasn't appointed to inherit power so sorry put that is one of the two monks the Buddha named so far only named the other monk commercially sorry puts out one of the two monks who definitely was appointed to inherit power is mentioned in the same text as speaking to the Buddha shortly prior to the Buddha's death yet more than three months before apparently when the Buddha is still in Nalanda so in Congress Li we have the Buddha praising the wisdom of sari pata as part of the Buddha's death narrative and then sari put the simply disappears in the story with no mention of the fact that he was supposed to take over the leadership nor any statements of the Buddha's disappointment that this wouldn't happen sariputta isn't mentioned again neither as alive nor dead nor dying nor is he present at the funeral nor is his absence of the funeral mentioned as significant meanwhile Mahama galinha isn't mentioned even once in the whole story although he was the other man appointed to inherit the leadership and he allegedly died subsequent to sari put up but still prior to the put Kay this is complicated especially if you're not a scholar of ancient Buddhist texts if you are a scholar of interpreters texts this is pretty simple the point is look reading this text this famous text the Mahabharata bonus is that reading the description of the Buddha's death these elements don't make sense and please understand I'm not evaluating this text as having supernatural origins I am reading this text as something written by human beings who sat down and tried to write a legend tried to write a coherent story surrounding the circumstances of the Buddha's death and indeed what happened to the religion who inherited power who took over once the buddha had died these are themes dealt with but in looking at that story it is not actually compatible with the explanations or excuses we have for why Buddhism was not led by the two people the Buddha appointed as leaders instead it seems like this legend the description of the death of my partner been asserted that this legend was not even aware of the excuses that people made up including the claims that both of the people selected to be the leaders the religion were already dead on the contrary with sorry put this case it very much seems in the text if you just read the text not the commentary the original Pali text it very much seems that sorry put is still alive he's there and the Buddha talks to him a very short time before his death and if sorry put the had suddenly died and the Buddha was aware of it if Muhammad oh and I had suddenly died if the two people you've appointed to inherit the control their religion if they had died the Buddha would have discussed that or addressed that in this exact context so it's suspicious and well I do not want to give in to Occam's razor one explanation for the aspects of these texts plural that are incoherent that don't match up is that Buddhists were having a difficult time giving a cohere accounts of what happened when leadership was taken over at the Buddha's death that mythology such as the gods preventing the funeral pyre from being lit was added to this story in order to make a more pleasing coherent legendary mythological narrative I would have some somewhat inconvenient and confusing facts that people are still somewhat in denial about today I might think in terms of the chronology wasn't sorry put that's supposed to be dead all along in retrospect we are supposed to believe that both sorry pizza and Mohammed McGowan ah died just a few months before the Buddha's own funeral and that news of the shocking turn of events reached the Buddha and yet their death their deaths are not mentioned within the same text if all of those deaths transpired in such rapid succession within the last three months of the Buddha's life why would there be absolutely no mention of such an important drama in the midst of the very myth that details the last three months of the Buddha's life so again if the if the text if the legend even said oh wow isn't this amazing isn't this surprising or inconvenient that all three of these people died at the same time that would be another story but it doesn't do that it doesn't even acknowledge this so the the pieces do not seem to match up okay these were the it would be it would be big news it would be big shocking news if these two guys had died one of them murdered one of them died of from from murder at exactly this point in time the history religion it would be a big deal and the at least would have mentioned the fact that they were not attending the funeral because in theory you could say well maybe the Buddha didn't know about it yet although the Buddha is supposed to be omniscient and have magical psychic powers to know these things know exactly these kind of things to know about the deaths of Buddhist monks even cheap nirvana supposed to be aware of this stuff but anyway on a more humanistic level you could say well maybe they didn't know well definitely at the funeral and the council the the proceedings that been afterwards definitely would have been known and talked about at that time and we have a very difficult to account for silence okay these were the two chief disciples of the Buddha who were supposed to be in command after the Buddha's death are we expected to imagine that their own deaths are simply omitted as unimportant from this narrative why would it not be mentioned it seems almost irresistible to imagine that we can unravel what the myth means and also what it conceals the truth is that we can't we don't know whether or not it was written to conceal anything and we can never verify what it is concealing in particular if these myths were written to serve a simple political purpose maha kassapa would instead be mentioned in the Buddha's final orations and he would be unambiguously named as the intended successor throughout the Canon but he isn't instead the Canon preserves an incongruous and ambiguous situation at the time of the Buddha's death despite the mythological and grandiose tropes that are built into the narrative nobody who studies the Pali Canon as a whole could have the sense that Maha Kaba firstly that maha kassapa succession was obvious or uncontroversial sorry to repeat that nobody who studies these texts as a whole would have the feeling that maha cassavas leadership was something obvious uncontroversial that happened by default on the contrary we have indications that know this this was controversial and this was not what the Buddha planned and we know the Buddha's opinion of each of these monks and of controversies accusations made against maha kassapa we have some very interesting fragments of disputes shall we say which again leads us to think that these are real historical events because of the prejudice I mentioned earlier when we read a newspaper story about a corrupt politician we tend to believe it and we tend to be skeptical about a story that a politician is completely blameless and faultless and wonderful so these very fragments of accusations and counter-accusations give us the feeling that we're looking at an imperfect record of real Oracle events even though that same record contains completely magical stuff like the Buddha flying up into the sky and radiating flames out of his body and monks going and talking to Brahma and Indra and in this case a very modest form of divine intervention in the gods preventing a fire from being lit mmm we're left with fragments of many strange controversies and that inescapable feeling that we're looking at an imperfect record of real historical events even though we're only looking at myths that we supposed to very indirectly reflect those events within the Pella Canon Maya cusp emerges as a very interesting and very human character who deserves to be written about a greater length and I would do here maha kassapa offers some of us sorry maha kassapa offers us some of the most striking examples of descent from the top within the Canada he complains very directly about what he perceives to be wrong and corrupt within the religion this also tugs at our sense of the criterion of embarrassment although we really have no evidence at all the nature of the complaints themselves just seems so human and so believable that we easily take them as indirect evidence of something actual so again why is there no Socratic discourse well that's why is there no really legit but a scholarship discussing this stuff we actually do have evidence that maha kassapa had his own ideas about what the Buddhists what the Buddhist religion should be even while the Buddha was still alive and then obviously if he took over leadership he would have informed and reformed and influenced what the religion became so we should have evidence within the Canon from within that period of time of how maybe the religion was different under the leadership of kassapa and under the leadership of the Buddha and I think we do I think we actually can look through the text and find the influence of various monks nah there were probably only a few examples but yeah we do have a sense of different personalities different priorities different religious ideas and different ideas about monastic discipline monastic rules monastic practice and we concede of some extent different human influences tugging at the legacy of Buddhism during the formative period when people were first creating the code of what Buddha what Buddhism would become what Buddhism should become and one of the reasons for that by the way is that all these people were members of different religions before if you had been Hindu before converting to Buddhism you would have a different set of cultural assumptions about monasticism about the religious life then someone who converted from Jainism someone who converted from a an animist religion from sun-worshipping from worshipping spirits that are in the trees and the rivers and again if you've read the pala Canon you see that kind of diversity there was tremendous diversity in the ethnicities languages religious backgrounds of the people who first joined Buddhism during the first generation of followers their religion had so naturally around the time of the death of Buddhism competing notions of how the religion should operate would be contested and also these are these are going to be eccentric people you can see within the Canon some of them really believe very strongly in supernatural experiences they believed in seeing ghosts in seeing demons in communicating with ghosts and demons and that material is preserved in the Pali Canon and there were other people who were authors contributing to Pella Canon who were of a more skeptical and scientific mindset so you see those contrasts within the Canon you even see some people who were skeptical about meditation and meditative revelation or experience and of course there are other authors who were not skeptical at all who were enthusiastic in the religious sense so yeah the Canon the written Canon is a mixed bag because it preserves these kinds of contrasts and debates that were ongoing at religion at the time when everything got written down and declared to be holy and impossible to change however other forms of Buddhism like my anabolism did make changes they did continue to make changes and they basically ultimately ignored the written canon and invented a totally new religion in China in Tibet in what's now Afghanistan and of course in Japan so spoilers um one of the most interesting complaints offered to the Buddha was in the sadhana pottery route Picasa tanta as I mentioned my ability to pronounce poly has gotten a bit rusty you can see the original article to get the correct spelling of the name of that Setanta and the textural edition anyway in this Siddhanta Mahapatra klein of the religion still within the lifetime of its founder and i say here see the poly tacks displayed in the first illustration so again these complaints about the corruption of buddhism already existed apparently while the buddha was still alive but at any rate while the ancient texts were still being written so you know it's like you found a new political party but within 10 years or 20 years you already have problems of corruption you can have problems of political corruption when you start a new religion within the first one year I'm you know within the first ten years no problem sure so anyway but that is that type of debate is preserved in the canon and maha kassapa is a critic we have him complaining and resting he's a critic who took over the leadership dissent from the top in the past he complains the number of rules was few but the number of monks who became properly trained was many now by contrast there are many rules but few of the monks are really becoming accomplished in the training okay so this pause this is interesting so this would give us the belief that maha cassava was of the of the school of thought that buddhism should not have an elaborate legal code describing in many many rules what monks can and cannot do and that's what we do have now even in tera vaada buddhism we have specific can you wear shoes when you can and can't wear shoes but generally it's ain't the whole religion is very easy shoe believe it or not there are some exceptions you can wear boots in the cold maybe about not using an umbrella about whether or not you can talk to someone who is carrying a sword who is wearing a sword there are many minut and particular circumstances that this legal code covers exactly what a monk should do if he is seduced by a beautiful woman under what circumstances and tremendous detail but anyway this is an interesting text because it suggests that maha kassapa was of a more anti-illegal bent that you know he was interested in virtue not legislation we know from other textual sources also that some of the monks felt that the the minor rules should be abolished that basically there should be major rules you know like don't kill anyone etc there should be a shorter list of rules for monks but that following the Buddha's instructions that the more trivial and detailed rules should be taken away but that did not happen that side lost the debate so that arrested I mean if anyone was doing legitimate scholarship on Buddhism and there were real free intellectual discourse we would have Socratic debate about the stuff we would have Sakura we would have contrasting views between professors and students and Buddhist monks and we would have progress and we would have exciting new research on ancient Buddhist philosophy and we would have original modern philosophy inspired by and appropriating from Buddhism but doing new and different things from it because believe me the future of Buddhism is not going to be worshipping indra and his council of gods on the top of Mount Meru some aspects of Buddhist philosophy are still inspiring and important today and others are not people are not going to go back to worshiping Indra and the people who are attracted to Buddhism today are normally people who are rejecting either Christianity or Hinduism or some other religion and they're not getting involved with Buddhism because they want to worship Indra the same way they formally worship some other God so it is what it is so in the past he complains the number of rules was few but the number of monks who became properly trained was many now by contrast there are many rules but few of the monks are really becoming accomplished in the training this is descent from the top one of the foremost monks and the one monk who eventually took over the leadership of the religion it's complaining that the rules don't work that is a fundamental challenge to Buddhist orthodoxy to Buddhist Manasses this is not trivial if you care about doctrine if you care about history the religion Buddhism is a religion built on rules the complaint against the prolix monastic code from one of its foremost proponents is significant the fact that the Canon preserves dissent of this kind mixed in with supernatural narratives all the rest of it is even more significant this is a religion that preserve dissent as part of its Bible including some of the reasons that would be convert stated for rejecting the teaching of the Buddha the words of ex monks who formerly accepted but later rejected the teaching as well as the arguments of rival philosophers who criticize the Buddha as in the case of mahakasyapa we even have evidence of dissent from the top so is this stuff historical evidence of anything at all in general the people sorry in general people answer that question in accordance with their own evaluation of human nature although it is easy to imagine that a religion would invent myths to glorify itself it simply seems difficult to imagine that they would invent myths to criticize themselves within their own Canon conversely there is absolutely no distinction between myth and historical fact within the texts of the core Canon as I choose to put it and we need to be keenly aware of the subjective and emotional nature of the decisions we make in disregarding some Texas fictional and in a store is store sizing others treat historical evidence period that's the end of the article but the sad fact is in closing this monologue I've got to refer you back to the anecdote at the beginning of the article which is that it was impossible for me to even have a completely respectable completely academic debate with a university professor of Buddhism about the descriptions of the Buddha's physical appearance which is not that philosophical it's is just not that big a deal nobody cared that much about whether the Buddha was dark-skinned or light-skinned or tall or short but it is interesting that we do have texts describing the Buddha as a human being and what do you look like to some extent um many people observed that the New Testament takes almost no interest in what Jesus looked like the Old Testament takes almost no interest in what Moses look like but yeah we do have some descriptions of the Buddha as a normal human being not as having fantastic supernatural features in his appearance as being indistinguishable from other monks and so on we know some things about this new beggar but in the 21st century it is impossible for me to even even with my background even with properly cited sources from primary source texts even when I've already done the hard work as a scholar it's impossible for me to even have a conversation with about that with a white Canadian professor of Buddhism that's how fragile these people are and these institutions are for dealing with the discussions that inevitably arise from the honest and open examination of the historico evidence so given that example at the start of this article obviously we are not making progress and we are never going to make progress in the re-evaluation of the poly canon as historical tax it's very sad I lost I don't know ten years of my life or more as a scholar of Buddhism I did a lot of other stuff during those ten years also if you look at my resume I had quite a few interesting jobs I lived in addressing places I lived interesting life at the humanitarian work I got out and saw the world or at least one very interesting part of it in Cambodia Laos Yunnan etc but yes Socratic method is dead and the sudo discipline of Buddhist studies of academic but ology is profoundly unprepared to deal with the types of really fascinating and compelling issues that arise out of reading these texts that's why I quit now I've got to get back to doing my Japanese 101 homework