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It is well known that
the Buddha is one of the
avatars of Vishnu. What
is not so well known is
that this avatar is not
about the historical personage
known to the Buddhist
faith. This is something
else altogether, a peculiar
attempt at cooption which
took the form of a badly
designed myth. Buddhism
was driven out of the
land of its birth and
rendered almost extinct
there too, but the sheer
greatness of the Buddha
required a cultural adjustment,
if not downright assimilation.
It was an intolerable
humiliation if such greatness
was not somehow part of
the Great Tradition and
remained forever as a
powerful heresy that actually
reduced the mother faith
to a minority status for
a while. The inclusion
of the Buddha in the avatar
cycle was a somewhat confused
attempt to include aspects
of spirituality that had
seemed to have had bypassed
the Hindu Weltanschauung.
The avatar story as it
exists in the texts is
unique in that it is not
a grand narrative as are
the other avatar stories.
There is more than a modicum
of sheer embarrassment
at the nature of this
engulfing invented narrative.
The Bhagvata Purana,
for instance, has only
four paragraphs devoted
to the most important
avatar ever known to India
after Krishna. It
is not even a myth, for
the nature of a myth is
that it is rarely real
but always true. This
is an afterthought, an
alternative explanation
for a faith that swept
the land and was reabsorbed
only by integrating all
its features to the extent
that the man who contributed
the most to the process
of re-establishing the
intellectual dominance
and popularity of Hinduism,
Adi Shankara, was called
a hidden Budhhist. The
Buddha was too important,
too influential and too
obviously a genuine spiritual
giant to be disregarded
- once the faith itself
was rendered sterile.
Only by making Buddha
an avatar of Vishnu could
any backsliding be prevented.
 The
stories about Buddha are
simple and also, alas,
somewhat insulting, reflecting
as they do the medieval
degeneracy of intellect
in India that could not
rise above such productions.
The core narrative usually
goes something like this.
Danavas and daityas, demon
enemies of the gods, had
gained supremacy over
the sacred cities of the
earth through their exemplary
moral conduct and control
of the fire sacrifices.
(Moral conduct is following
the rules of theology,
not genuine goodness,
which explains why the
demons often had an advantage.)
To win back the supremacy
of the gods, Vishnu incarnates
on earth as the Buddha
and preaches a doctrine
that there is no soul,
fire sacrifices and other
sacred rituals are useless,
the Vedas just priestly
scribbling, the caste
system a useless contrivance,
while the body is supreme
and should be indulged
as there is no life after
death. Convinced by these
pleasurable doctrines,
the demons sin often and
mightily, fall from grace,
and the old religion was
reinstated with relief
by a people who were ostensibly
yearning for it all the
while. In some other versions,
notably the Skanda Purana,
Vishnu resorts to this
trickery to get back the
sacred city of Kashi for
Shiva, who had been driven
from it by the unbearable
power of austerities practiced
by the King Divodasa.
In yet another version
in the Shiva Purana, the
Buddha is an incarnation
of the sage Gautama. This
worthy was too saintly
and great for his jealous
Brahmin neighbors to bear
with equanimity and they
conspired to drive him
away on a false charge
of cow slaughter. The
angry Gautama retaliated
by propagating a faith
that smashed Brahmanical
privileges and reduced
their social influence
drastically. This is an
attempt to explain away
the phenomenon that was
the Buddha, by playing
with the similarity in
names, for the Buddha's
original name was Siddhartha
Gautama. It also grimly
concedes a ressal fallout
of the Buddhist faith,
the Brahmins came very
close indeed to being
marginalized forever.
It is worth recording
here that the Swami Vivekananda,
who was indulgently tickled
by all alternative versions
of sacred stories in India,
used to lose his temper
when ever he considered
what had been done to
the Buddha's life -going
so far as to say that
the Hindus were the real
demons for making up such
scandalous tales about
the greatest religious
figure India had for many
thousands of years. Such
tales were Hinduism's
backhanded compliment
to the greatest man to
ever arise from within
its body and offer a credible
challenge with an alternative
viewpoint of spirituality.
The Buddha remained
an inexplicable, perpetually
threatening counterpoint
to the Great Tradition
until he was covered over
by the obscuring mass
of the mythology of Vishnu.
Most Hindus today are
innocently unaware of
these developments and
really believe, in total
sincerity, that the Tathagatha
of the Sangha is identical
to the avatar of Vishnu. |
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