THE CONCEPT OF THE BUDDHA IN EARLY BUDDHISM

In the earliest Buddhist literature, namely the Pali NikAyas and the Chinese Fgamas, the Buddha is portrayed in two aspects: the human and the superhuman or supernormal. In the first aspect the Buddha is seen to have constantly interacted with his disciples as well as with other religious groups of his time. In the second aspect, the Buddha is seen as an object of religious worship for his followers, a saviour of the world.2 These two aspects intermingle to such an extent that it is extremely difficult to separate one from the other without doing injustice to the concept as a whole. The more rationalist Buddhist scholars attempt to minimize the ‘irrational’ by claiming that the occurrence of miracles in Buddhist literature was due to apocryphal accretion and interpolation. At the same time, some early Western Buddhist scholars may have overstated the superhuman character of the Buddha, asserting that it was simply a solar myth.3 After vigorous research into both literary and archaeological sources, most Buddhist scholars today accept the historicity of Gautama Buddha. However, the superhuman and supernormal elements of the Buddha may have coexisted from the very beginning of Buddhist literature or even during Gautama’s lifetime. It is problematic thus simply to dismiss any of those elements outright, because all the miracles performed by Gautama according to the sEtras are within the six modes of higher knowledge which, according to early Buddhism, can be attained through meditation. According to the sEtras, Gautama confidently believed this to be so. Even some modern scholars such as Gokhale assert that such miracles are possible when the mind becomes concentrated and clear through the practice of meditation.4 These two aspects of the Buddha may have existed side by side from the inception of Buddhism, and may have served as a foundation for the later development of the concept of the Buddha. These two aspects form the subject of inquiry of this chapter.