Prince Gautama’s Countless Faces: On Philip C. Almond’s “The Buddha”

PHILIP C. ALMOND has a long and intriguing tale to tell: the story of “how the enchanted mythological figure” portrayed in early Sanskrit and Pāli biographies “became the disenchanted historical Buddha of the modern West.” He tells it very well, and like many good stories, this one has a twist at the end, in the form of recent attempts to “re-enchant” the Buddha. These are the result both of skepticism about what can be known of the historical, “earthly” Buddha and of recognition that it is the enchanted, “super-human” or “divine” figure that still largely “informs Buddhist faith and practice.” Skepticism about the historical Buddha does mean, however, that there is a certain irony in Almond’s stated intention to write a book, not about Buddhism, but about “the founder of the religion.” For the skeptic, the Buddha can only be whoever it was from whom the religion derives, since he (or they) ceases to have an identity independent of a set of teachings called “Buddhism.”

The Australian author of The Buddha: Life and Afterlife Between East and West (2024) is well qualified to tell the story. A prolific historian of religion, Almond’s other biographies include Mary Magdalene: A Cultural History (2022) and, more ambitiously, The Devil: A New Biography (2014), while his pioneering 1988 book, The British Discovery of Buddhism, is the basis for the later chapters in the new work. Almond writes clearly and displays a wry humor about the foibles and absurdities of many Western accounts of the Buddha. If, just occasionally, the reader feels mired in scholarly detail, generally the pace is lively.

The opening chapters provide a portrait of the Buddha drawn mainly from Indian hagiographies, like the Lalitavistara Sūtra, of the first few centuries of the Common Era. These recount the familiar narrative of a prince—Gautama Siddhartha, as he came to be known—who was cosseted in his father’s palace and whose belated encounters with disease, old age, and death inspired him to renounce home and family, and to seek enlightenment. When this was eventually found, seated under the famous fig tree, the man—now a buddha (enlightened one)—spent the remaining 45 years of his life teaching the truths about the conquest of suffering that he had discovered, and leading a community of disciples and followers.

What these biographies add to the narrative is a massive apparatus of miracles, myths, and supernatural events. The Buddha is said, for example, to have lived for countless eons in a 32,000-floor mansion in the Heaven of the Contented (“Tusita”), attended by millions of gods. The young Gautama is credited with amazing intellectual powers, physical skills, and the erotic stamina needed to live in the company of 84,000 dancing girls. Almond shows how these biographies replace the relatively “earthly” Buddha of earlier, orally transmitted tradition with a “super-human” and eventually “heavenly” one, to the point of stating that he magically knew everything at birth that he pretended to struggle to discover later in life.

It was this heavenly Buddha who would, in time, be replaced in the West by a historical, earthly one. But it would be a long time—almost two millennia from the first Western mention of the Buddha, by Clement of Alexandria in the second century, until the next mention, in the 19th century. Indeed, it would take almost that long for the Buddha even to be identified as the founder of a religion, a fact that Almond rightly invites us to find “odd,” even “astonishing.” It is certainly hard to explain why, for example, scarcely anyone before the 19th century recognized Prince Josaphat, converted to Christianity by Saint Barlaam in an extremely popular medieval legend, as being, in Almond’s words, “none other than the Buddha.”

Geopolitics goes some way toward explaining such ignorance. Both before and after the two centuries of Mongol ascendency, Islamic empires obstructed contact between Europe and Asia. It was no accident, therefore, that it was during those centuries that travelers like Marco Polo first relayed to a European audience information about the Buddha. The Venetian explorer, however, failed to recognize that the figure he was talking about was the founder of a religion practiced across Asia and comparable to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Like almost all other chroniclers, he inherited the tendency to lump together all religions, except for the three Abrahamic ones, under the umbrella heading of “idolatry.”

Even in the 18th century, when Sanskrit texts became available for study and a European presence had been established in South Asia, ignorance concerning the Buddha remained startling. William “Oriental” Jones, for example, a pioneering translator of Sanskrit texts, was able to identify the Buddha variously with Vishnu and Odin, to postulate that there were “two Buddhas”—an early Hindu Brahman and a later rebel against Brahmanism—and even to speculate that the Buddha was African, partly on the ground of his supposedly “woolly hair.” More generally, Almond points out, increasing familiarity with Hindu texts served, ironically, “to obscure more than illuminate the Buddha.”

For Almond, the crucial change came with the coining of the term “Buddhism” in 1800. This marked, in a sense, the “invention” of Buddhism itself. It’s not that there had never been anything there to label, but the name helped to “determine the nature, shape, and extent of that collection of ideas and practices” that Western students would come to explore. With Buddhism recognized as a distinct religion, albeit with several “churches,” and further canonical texts now available, a serious attempt could be made at last to trace the man who had founded the religion and whose words the texts allegedly reported. The search was on to find dates, locations, people, and events associated with his life.

While Buddhism was understood as a collection of both ideas and practices, the scholarly focus was firmly on the former. “True” Buddhism was to be found in the ancient texts, and it became a commonplace among Victorian scholars that, throughout Asia, the religion as now practiced represented a corruption of the faith, a superstition, in effect. The predominant European perception of the Buddha was of someone who combined healthy empiricism, acute psychological analysis, atheism, admirable self-discipline, and outstanding moral virtue. This was the perception, further entrenched in the following century, of an “earthly” or “naturalized” Buddha, an “exemplary human being.” Not only was little attention paid to his “divine” aspects, but those teachings that fit badly with the rationalist image—about rebirth and karma, for example—were also ignored or themselves naturalized. Nirvana, for example, became no longer “something to aim for in the afterlife” but, according to a documentary quoted by Almond, a “quality” of moments in everyday life “seen directly.”

With remarks like that, the Buddha was now close to the entirely disenchanted figure that he has become, especially for young people, in contemporary Western culture: the ever-smiling, compassionate teacher of tranquil, “mindful” attention to “the moment,” occasionally spiced by bursts of political and environmental activism. No longer the deeply pessimistic and quietistic figure struggling to understand the world’s all-pervasive suffering described by Arthur Schopenhauer, Hermann Oldenberg, and other 19th-century thinkers, today’s bright-sided Buddha is the prototype mindfulness therapist and eco-protester.

It is legitimate to dismiss such unlikely images of the Buddha, but what the historical Buddha was really like, Almond concludes, is anyway something we know disappointingly little about. Indeed, he writes, there is “no evidence available that could decisively determine that the Buddha existed.” Gautama’s fate, it seems, is to join the ranks of such nebulous figures as Homer and Zoroaster. This historical uncertainty is a reason Almond gives for renewed interest in stories of the Buddha, including those in which he is invested with “super-human” or “heavenly” qualities.

There is another reason, however, for attending, if not to the divine, then to the super-human Buddha—because it serves as an antidote to easy acceptance of the pale, anodyne, disenchanted, and bright-siding portrait of the Buddha that now prevails. One would never guess from this portrait of an “exemplary human being” just how remarkable, according to the texts, enlightened beings—buddhas, bodhisattvas, arhats—must be. They are, the texts tell us, no longer subject to “the eight worldly conditions,” such as concern for praise and gain, around which human life revolves. They have “given up all likes and dislikes.” They are without any inclinations or perspectives that might distort perception and understanding, and hence exhibit perfect equanimity and objectivity. Enlightened beings, we are told, have “transcended worldly existence”; their existence is “supra-mundane.” Put differently, they are no longer (“merely”) human: their form of life is without desire, feeling, and material pleasures. Like Nietzsche’s Übermensch, though in a very different way, they have “overcome” the human condition.

We cannot, of course, judge whether, in his actual life (if there was one), Gautama was, in the above sense, super-human. But, as Almond would surely agree, this is no more reason to ignore the texts on super-humanity than the general uncertainty about Gautama’s life is for ignoring any other Buddhist teaching. Indeed, it is a great merit of the story Almond tells of the reception of the Buddha in the West that it invites challenge to received and comfortable versions of the dispensation associated with his name.