|
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.
|