The Buddha, a Virgin Born, Dying and Rising Savior God?

Birth of the Buddha

At the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and American Association of Religion I picked up Donald S Lopez Jr’s The Scientific Buddha: His Short and Happy Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013).  I was particularly excited about the book because it represented the published version of one of the most distinguished current scholars of Buddhism delivering one of the most distinguished series of lectures on religion, namely the 2008 Yale University Terry Lectures,  Lopez is the University of Michigan’s Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies. He has written more than 20 books.  As a Terry Lecturer he followed in the footsteps of such prominent thinkers as John Dewey (1933-34 ,A Common Faith), Paul Tillich (1950-51, The Courage To Be), Carl G. Jung (1937-38, Psychology and Religion), Jacques Maritain (1942-43, Education at the Crossroads), and Paul Ricoeur (1961-62, Freud and Philosophy). Lopez is the first Terry Lecturer to address the topic of Buddhism. 

The “Scientific Buddha” Lopez speaks about is not the Buddha of history, nor even the Buddha of tradition, but the Buddha of popular 19^th and 20^th century Western European imagination, a figure who supposedly beat the West in embracing a modern scientific world view.  Lopez, in other words, dedicated the lectures to setting to rest a widely believed myth about the Buddha in order to set it its place the Buddha of Buddhist tradition and, as much as possible, the Buddha of history.  This, on a much smaller scale, is what I am attempting to do here.

I want to say a few words toward laying to rest the myth of the virgin born, dying and rising crucified Buddha. No informed Buddhist or non-Buddhist who have taken the trouble to familiarize themselves with the stories about the birth and death of the Buddha will credit this myth.  Lopez himself sets it aside in passing, when he reports concerning the mother of the Buddha, that “she was not virgin” (Scientific Buddha, p. 22).  More on why he said this later.  And then when it comes to the Buddha’s passing Lopez writes: “…when he [the Buddha] died, he did not ascend into heaven.  He lay down between two trees and said to his monks, ‘All conditioned things are subject to decay.  Strive on with diligence.’  Then he passed away, like a flame going out.” (Scientific Buddha, p. 7).  

I will proceed as follows   

First, I will present in the case of the Buddha’s birth and death an example or two of writers who, in contradiction to what I have just quoted from Lopez, claim that Buddha was virgin born, and/or crucified, raised, and ascended.  For any who would wish to pursue the opinions of such writers further examples can easily multiplied by the hundreds by searching the internet.

Second, I will describe the actual traditional view of the Buddha’s birth, and

Third, I will describe the actual traditional view of the Buddha's death.

EXAMPLES OF THOSE MAKING THE CLAIM

Modern authors making the these claims have not come to them through direct study of the texts and sources of Buddhism, since the stories aren't there. Instead they reproduce lists of allegedly virgin born crucified saviors from other writers that include the Buddha in them..  In this case, for example, we have an author named Michael Dowd who makes the claims in his book Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Love and Our World  (New York: Penguin Viking, 2008).  Dowd speaks of the: “Born of a virgin: … Buddha” (p. 363).  Then there is Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong.  In his book, Born of Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Birth of Jesus, (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), we read that “Gautama Buddha, the ninth avatar of India, was said to have been born of the virgin Maya about 600 B.C.E.” (p. 56).  This claim along with the other names and details these two authors include shows that both write as total amateurs in the area of comparative religion. In Spong’s case we see this particularly clearly when he calls the Buddha “the ninth avatar of India.”  Had he been better informed he would have known to refer to Buddha as the ninth avatar not of India but of Vishnu. Furthermore we may ask why Spong would speak of the Buddha as the Hindus and not the Buddhists view him.  It was the Hindu’s who co-opted the Buddha into their own system by making him one of the avatars of Vishnu.   It is the same kind of thing they like to do when speaking of Jesus. In any case it is clear Spong did not come up with either of these statements himself, but rather simply copied them from his source without understanding. 

The ultimate source of Dowd's and Spong's information is likely the nineteenth-century book entitled the World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors, Or, Christianity before Christ (Boston, MA: Colby & Rich, 1876), written by Kersey Graves, a writer serious scholars of comparative religion took no more seriously then, than they would Spong and Dowd now.  Graves was, not to put too fine a point on it, and incompetent crank. Spong shares both Graves’ inept reference to the Buddha as the “ninth avatar of India,” and his unusual date for the advent of the Buddha (600 B.C.E.) (Sixteen Crucified Saviors, p. 59).  When we look at Spong’s larger list of allegedly virgin born gods we see a number of other points of contact with Graves, which strengthens the idea that he was either directly or indirectly depended on him.

THE NATURE OF THE BUDDHA'S BIRTH

In the traditional stories the Buddha’s birth is undoubtedly miraculous.  He springs from his mother’s side, fully self-aware and at once begins walking and talking.  Nor does it always appear to be made explicit in the stories as to what part, if any, the Buddha’s royal father contributed to the pregnancy.  Could we then say that even though the Buddha’s mother might not have been a virgin, this particular conception did not involve the father.  In the context where he denied the virginity of the Buddha’s mother, Donald S. Lopez was correcting a misimpression held by the fourth century Christian writer Saint Jerome who said that “To come to the Gymnosophists of India, the opinion is authoritatively handed down that Budd[h]a, the founder of their religion, had his birth through the side of a virgin.” (Against Jovinianus 1.42). To this Lopez had responded: “According to the traditional story, the future Buddha did indeed emerge from under his mother’s right arm. But she was not a virgin, nor were Buddhist monks gymnosophists, that is ‘naked philosophers,’ a term that would more accurately describe certain Jain and Hindu mendicants.” (Scientific Buddha, p. 22).  I asked Professor Lopez why he felt Buddha wasn’t born of a virgin, and he kindly replied as follows:

Regarding the Buddha’s mother, there is no tradition that she was a virgin at the time of his conception. She is portrayed as the consort of a great king, and great kings in ancient India were known for their virility; this was also the case with Prince Siddhartha, as we discuss in the Barlaam and Josaphat book.  In a number of accounts, on the night of the conception, Mahamaya tells the king that she will be keeping the vow of celibacy that night, implying that this was not a vow she usually kept.  There is also a tradition that she died seven days after the Buddha's birth because it was not suitable for the mother of a Buddha to engage in sexual relations after his birth.  All of this suggests that Mahamaya was not considered to have been a virgin. (email 6/20/15)

[The “Barlaam and Josaphat” book Professor Lopez refers to is David S. Lopez Jr. and Peggy McCracken, In Search of the Christian Buddha, How and Asian Sage Became a Medieval Saint (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2014).  Just as an aside anyone who is interested in the claim that Jesus was buried in Kashmir should read this book, which contains the simple key to the whole problem. This in spite of the fact that Lopez does not explicitly mention the claim in the book, since, as the professor most correctly informed me, he is “not aware of a scholar who gives any credence to the ‘Jesus went to Kashmir’ story. (email, 6/21/15)]

THE CLAIM THAT THE BUDDHA WAS CRUCIFIED.

Kersey Graves describes the death and resurrection of the Buddha in this way:

"His [the Buddha’s] enemies, becoming jealous and fearful of his growing power, finally crucified him near the foot of the Nepaul mountains, about 600 B.C.  But after his death, burial, and resurrection, we are told he ascended back into heaven." (Sixteen Crucified Saviors, p. 107)

Notice that Graves gives the same date for Buddha’s birth as for his death, (compare pp. 59 and 107)

THE NATURE OF THE BUDDHA’S DEATH

Sadly Graves has got it completely wrong.  The Buddha wasn’t crucified, he wasn’t buried, and he wasn’t resurrected.  He died in the presence of his disciples and afterward was cremated.   The veneration of his relics (sharīra) were enshrined in bell shaped monuments called stupas.  

After the Buddha had been cremated his relics were divided first into eight parts which, along with the remaining ashes and the container used to divide the relics were enshrined in ten stupas.  Tradition says that a few centuries later the Emperor Ashoka opened these stupas and redistributed the relics into eighty four thousand stupas (See Lopez and McCracken, Christian Buddha, p. 51, which I mainly follow here).   The traditional depiction of the Buddha’s death, the parisnirvāna showing the Buddha in the prone position as if resting or sleeping, sometimes alone sometimes surrounded by his disciples, is one of the chief motifs of Buddhist iconography.  

The Parisnirvāna, The Buddha's Entry Into Nirvāna

CONCLUSION

When these false ideas about Buddha's supposed virgin birth, death, burial, and resurrection, were first circulated duruing the late eighteenth and ninteench century among those who do not have access to the crucial Buddhist texts as we do today, the aim was to turn Jesus into a mythical figure.  It is ironic that today there are a some who appeal to these alleged parallels iuntending to prove that Jesus never existed by comparing him to the Buddha. Today of course the vast majority of scholars have no doubt that both Jesus and the Buddha were historical figures.  In the case of their respective biographies. All four Gospels were written within living memory of the historical Jesus whereas the stories of the birth and the death of Buddha date to many centuries after the historical Buddha lived.  As Lopez writes: "Texts that we could classify as biographies of the Buddha did not begin to appear until several centuries after his death.  The first of the Pali biographies, from the tradition that Victorian scholars thought most represented 'original Buddhism,' dated from the fifth century, almost a millenium after the Buddha's passage into Nirvana." (Scientific Buddha, p. 42)