The Buddha: Historicizing Myth, Mythologizing History (2024)

Varieties of Religious Invention: Founders and Their Functions in History

Patrick Gray (ed.)

Published:

2015

Online ISBN:

9780190264253

Print ISBN:

9780199359714

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Varieties of Religious Invention: Founders and Their Functions in History

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Nathan McGovern

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Pages

39–61

  • Published:

    September 2015

Cite

McGovern, Nathan, 'The Buddha: Historicizing Myth, Mythologizing History', in Patrick Gray (ed.), Varieties of Religious Invention: Founders and Their Functions in History (New York, 2015; online edn, Oxford Academic, 17 Sept. 2015), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199359714.003.0003, accessed 25 May 2024.

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Abstract

Buddhism is fairly unique among Asian religions in the degree to which it actually fits reasonably well the paradigm for a “religion”—a paradigm formulated by early modern scholars, who operated with tacitly Protestant assumptions about what constitutes a religion. This is in large part because it was “founded” by an identifiable historical individual, the Buddha. The identity of the Buddha as a historical figure, however, is largely a construction of nineteenth-century Western scholarship, having as its basis a set of Western assumptions about the nature of history and religion. This chapter explores the Western scholarly construction and subsequent deconstruction of the “historical Buddha,” and then compares it to traditional Buddhist approaches to the Buddha and Buddhahood.

Keywords: Buddha, Buddhism, myth, Protestantism, historical Buddha

Subject

East Asian Religions

Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

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