Will the real Buddha please stand up!

I thought I would stay away from blogging for a while.  A break.  Perhaps to also re-charge.

Wrong I am.

It is difficult.  Too. Damn. Hard.

I am reminded of a comment made by a former student, who is now a faculty colleague.  She loves dancing, and during the earlier years of her undergraduate years, she even toured with a dancing group.  Now, as a faculty, she works with a local dance theatre--I put her in touch with another former student who, too is dancer.  Anyway, she said, "we dancers have to dance."

It is not about being the best dancer ever.  It is not about becoming a star dancer.  It is about being a dancer. 

And I simply want to write.

So, here I am, hoping that an occasional reader might find something here.

Recall the story of the prince Siddhartha, whose mother had that vision when she was pregnant with him?  And the stark encounter of life provoking an existential crisis in the prince, which then leads the prince to ditch his royal luxuries in search for the meaning of life?  And how finally he became the awakened one--the Buddha?

What if all that story was, well, mere story?

Who was the real Buddha?

I suppose this is an example of how "religious studies" and faith diverge.  In the old tradition, it was often said, "ரிஷி மூலம் நதி மூலம் ஆராய கூடாது" (one should not try to find out the origins of the sage nor of the river.)  But, this is exactly what religious studies scholars do. Even when it pisses off the fanatics, as Wendy Doniger's experience demonstrates.

So, who was the real Buddha?

Bringing the reliable historical fragments together, and discarding mythic elaborations, a humbler picture of the Buddha emerges. Gotama was born into a small tribe, in a remote and unimportant town on the periphery of pre-imperial India. He lived in a world on the cusp of urbanisation, albeit one that still lacked money, writing and long-distance trade.

I think this Gotama becoming such a profoundly influential figure is far more impressive than the story of the princely Siddhartha growing up in a huge palace.

Impressive that from a small and remote place in that area between modern day India and Nepal, Buddha and his teachings have spread far and wide.  Of course, when the teaching spreads, ideas are morphed in a number of different ways.  The modern day mindfulness and meditation in the West too have their origins in the Buddhist teachings.  But, even the Buddha might not recognize and understand the contemporary practices of mindfulness!

The Americans who adapted mindfulness in the late-20th century drew on a 19th-century revival of meditation in Burma. And so rather than transmitting an ancient practice, they instead promoted a new spiritual discipline, formulated when Burmese Theravada was suffering in the shadows of the British Empire.
A feature of the modern mindfulness movement, inherited from fairly recent Burmese innovations, is its appeal to the laity, and hence its essentially therapeutic, rather than salvific, aim. Nothing could be further removed from the Buddha’s radical ideal of sagehood. By insisting on ascetic discipline and a life of homeless wandering, Gotama presented mindfulness as a total life commitment. Practised in this way, attending to the constituents of experience can be transformative: Gotama claimed it is a way of undoing one’s mentally constructed world, along with all its unsatisfactoriness and suffering.

Writing too helps me with the world "along with all its unsatisfactoriness and suffering."  Om!