The Historical Buddha? A Critique of Nakamura Hajime's Biography

The meaningfulness of the Buddha depends in part on his historical life - though we cannot know much about it with certainty - and in part on the later images superimposed on Gotama. Ultimately, the newer and the older strata are inseparable; a fair study of the Buddha, emic or etic, must take both into account. The effort of Nakamura Hajime to remove the layers of mythical imagery in search of an authentic historical character may thus result in a loss of significance. Whether as a monastic or academic, the Buddha built up, as a concept, an image, a character, is what one has available. While study of course entails deconstruction and picking apart of this totality, one must not lose sight of the whole Buddha in the course of one's study, as it is the richness of the whole as it has come down to us in which the significance lies.

Nakamura's reasons for trying to define a historically veritable account of Gotama's life and person should be examined before a conclusion that his presentation of the Buddha wants meaningfulness is reached. It may seem from the opening sentence of his introduction that Nakamura's objective is simply to describe Sakyamuni as a historical figure. While this is clearly the case, presenting a historical account of the Buddha is not his sole aim. Nakamura's central concern "is to elucidate how Gotama Buddha ... the historical figure ... lived his life and taught his doctrine." (Nakamura pp. 15) He goes on to say that in response to growing worldwide aspirations to spiritual understanding, "we must ascertain in a scholarly way what the historical Gotama Buddha actually did and what he taught, so that we may understand the spirit that pervades his deeds and doctrines." (Nakamura pp. 16, italics added) Nakamura is seeking to present the Buddha in this historical manner not to establish a Buddha biography with especial veracity, but to make Sakyamuni's teachings palatable to a new audience: the many modern people whose aspirations to spiritual understanding are growing.

To this end, throughout his work Nakamura repeatedly interprets various passages so as to suggest or emphasize Gotama as a human character, insisting several times that an enlightened person is still subject to "temptation." A prime example of such an instance is his comments on the Buddha's struggle with Mara: "even an enlightened person, one who has become a buddha, is exposed to unceasing temptations and intimidation. ... Enlightenment does not mean perfection. Attempts to understand Gotama in human terms can be seen everywhere in the early Buddhist writings." (Nakamura pp. 288) The pseudo-apotheosis of the Buddha is dismissed by Nakamura as a later addition to this human understanding. While this may well be the case, it must be kept in mind that Nakamura's intention in making this point is less to draw a historical portrait of Sakyamuni and more to present Buddhism through a Buddha whose spiritual achievement is not supernatural, or more to the point, superhuman, but is quite within the reach of anyone.

Having seen Nakamura's hand - he is not hiding it, fortunately - our concern becomes about what may be lost in the process of demythologizing and humanizing the Buddha. The greatest possible loss takes the form of misrepresentation, that is, this image of Gotama, contrived by a single author in a single book, is not the multifarious composite image of Sakyamuni Buddha, built up over more than two millennia by innumerable contributors, which exists in the living traditions of Buddhism. For the emic student, monk or layman, the mythological aspects surrounding Gotama are crucial parts of the religion: the hyperbole of surreal happenings in texts like the Vimalakirti Sutra serve to illustrate sophisticated, complex ideas in a manner much more easily grasped than a hard metaphysical treatise. The rich iconography and extensive cast of characters in texts and art similarly serve both as bases of practice and aids to understanding. For the etic student, all of these things are the very objects of study, and the examination of each offers a different avenue to understanding a facet of orthodoxy or orthopraxy. Stripping the Buddha of these valuable mythological trappings would be a mistake, from either an emic or an etic perspective.
Nakamura, however, does not seem really able to do so. The composite cluster of images and ideas that is the Buddha is an integral whole, with the mythological strata fused onto the skeletal memories of the historical Sakyamuni's life, whatever historicity those old memories may have. Indeed, this mythological growth is so thick that Nakamura's inability to separate such elements is not surprising, especially with the lack of any (surviving) material which can be definitively identified as historically accurate. The best he can do is interpret the mythological and historically dubious parts of the various accounts as metaphorical. Deities and demons are rendered as psychological phenomena, as in the instance of Sakyamuni's leaving the palace to become an ascetic: "Perhaps the metaphor of the deities was used to indicate Gotama's peace of mind and clearheadedness once he had made his decision [to renounce the world]' (Nakamura pp. 114); or as when he is urged by Brahma to preach:

Brahma's lament for the future of the world may reflect Gotama's own acute feelings. ... Gotama, his body weakened from his ascetic practices, was susceptible to hallucinations, and perhaps he personified his concern as Brahma's voice. ... [the Buddha's decision to teach people at large, contrary to prevailing custom] required resolution and courage, which he may have gained by means of such psychological phenomena as quelling Mara and hearing Brahma's encouragement. (Nakamura pp. 235)

Such psychological interpretations of mythological elements are the best that Nakamura can do. To be fair, such is probably the best anyone can do, so long as their objective is presenting the supernormal persons and happenings in accounts of Sakyamuni's life as having some sort of quality by which they make sense as part of a historical narrative. That is, since the mythic buildup cannot be separated from what may be the veracious account, little else can be done with that buildup other than view it as metaphor, short of disregarding and discarding it entirely.

But to do away with the mythic elements would be misguided, as discussed above. Furthermore, completely ignoring them and privileging only what seem to be the plausible parts of the tale of Gotama's life would leave a story rather full of holes - which is, of course, exactly what exists, at best, as far as a possible account of the historical Buddha goes. As noted, though, this is not Nakamura's real aim. A claim to historicity is not the end itself, but the means by which the teachings of the Buddha may be presented to curious new students, many of whom may be tired of religiose religion, encrusted with supernatural happenings, fixated on supra-mundane metaphysics, and touting superhuman exemplars seemingly beyond possibility of being emulated under one's own power, unassisted. In this, Nakamura can be seen as an odd academic emic, making a peculiar effort to promulgate the memeplexes of Buddhism by trying to apparently divorce the essential paradigmatic core of the tradition from the irrational elements which may inhibit the transmission of that core to certain individuals.

Nakamura, however, is not a missionary, howsoever much his work may be seen as emic scholarship; a scholar he remains. Neither is his book meant to convert masses of people to Buddhism. It remains a scholarly work, though clearly not an etic one. It is meant for students, and we receive it as students, and whether we incline emically or etically, as students we must keep in mind that we can really only study the whole Buddha. The Buddha we receive is both the memory of a real person and an immense treasury of fable, metaphor, and ideal which are all from each other inseparable. We are not able, nor should we be desirous, of taking away the collected imagery and ideas that have accumulated as constituents of Sakyamuni. Nakamura perhaps recognizes this inseparability, and, far from wishing to actually divorce the mythology from the man, means only to distance and disarm it with etic-style interpretation, that the core significance of the Buddha may be thus made more acceptable to picky new audiences. If this be the case, Nakamura's move raises the question of whether that significance can be understood, if not entirely apart from the mythic elements then at least with them vastly downplayed. As a scholar of the whole Buddha, one must cautiously conclude that with the richness of the mythology that is part of Gotama subsumed, the whole meaningfulness of his figure, in its various splendor, is liable to diminution.