Robert Thurman, Buddhist scholar, practitioner and professor of Religious Studies, has died in his home in Woodstock, New York, aged 84. After taking a PhD in Sansrkit, Thurman spent time under the tuition of the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, where he took monastic vows. On returning to America, he became a professor in the subject, co-founder of Tibet House (with Richard Gere and others) and author of many scholarly and popular books on Buddhism. He is father to actress Uma Thurman.
A gift link to his New York Times obituary can be accessed here.
Unlike Jesus who transfigured and Mohammed who ascended to heaven on a flying horse, the Buddha experienced mortality in the way most of us do. Mr. Robert Thurman.
I wouldn’t blithely assign ‘merely human’ status to the Buddha. Don’t forget that at the moment of his enlightenment, he recalled all his previous lives in detail, along with the knowledge that he was once and for all free of the cycle of rebirth and redeath. A Sketch of the Buddha's Life: Readings from the Pali Canon
I wouldn’t blithely assign an enlightened status to the Buddha. We know almost nothing about this essentially mythic character beyond the stories told about him, many written hundreds of years after the approximate period of his life.
We can’t reliably establish the exact dates of his life, whether he was a prince as traditional accounts claim, the precise circumstances of his alleged enlightenment, what he actually said, his personal motivations, or the supernatural elements of his biography. Faith, perhaps?
Buddhism isn’t clear on rebirth-death in samsara. It’s a point we discussed in great detail in my thread on Descartes-Buddha vis-á-vis anatman. You explained it to me satisfactorily as the madhyamaka betwixt eternalism and anmihilationism. Thanks again.
I also don’t have strong reasons apart from skepticism simpliciter to doubt the events surrounding Buddha’s nirvana. I read that he expired, was cremated and his relics were installed inside some stupas in India. There are no records of him appearing to witnesses postmortem, which is the whole point of being enlightened. After death, does the Buddha exist? not exist? exist and not exist? neither? No to all
Tom Storm is also being skeptical of extraordinary claims in re Buddha. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Tom Storm probably hasn’t read enough of Buddhism to understand your statements. Neither have I.
I didn’t think it was flippant. What makes you think the stories are true stories?
I wouldn’t put it in Sagan’s language, as you have here. It’s a more modest question: do we have any good reason to believe the stories told about the figure known as the Buddha? Whatever Wayfarer may have read is mostly beside the point other than providing more claims.
Surely. Many stories are apocryphal and even fantastic, such as various hagiographies composed by later generations. The Chinese monk who travelled to India in search of Buddhist scriptures told many such stories. But there are reasonable historical grounds for the basic outlines of the life of the individual Siddartha Guatama who became the Buddha. And those basic outlines are far from fantastic. High-born individual — said to be ‘a prince’ but probably the noble family of a clan—renounces his birthright in search of salvation from the vicissitudes of illness, old age and death. Learns from several historically-known adepts of yogic teachings, before eventually abandoning them for years of fasting and meditation in the wilderness. Found on death’s door by the side of a river by a milkmaid and given life-sustaining nourishment (probably curds). This period of Siddartha’s life is still represented iconograpohically:
Aftter this he realises the futility of asceticism and renounces it also (although still committed to a form of life that any modern would think ascetic.) He then sits under a peepal tree determined not to arise until he has penetrated the cause of life and death.
After his enlightenment, he wandered the roads of northern India (nowadays thought to be on the borderlands of Nepal) and taught all and sundry, gathering a following of at least several thousands bhikkus and bhikkunis (male and female monastics). His teachings were traditionally said to have been memorised by his faithful attendant, Ananda, and are invariably prefaced with the phrase ‘Thus have I (i.e. Ananda) heard’. The compendium of those teachings were over the next centuries transmitted orally and then gradually in written form in the various ancient scripts that have been passed down and translated by various scholars (one of them being Sydney University’s Prof Mark Allon whom I was fortunate to study under in 2011-12. Along with Richard Salomon he is a recognised expert in ancient Buddhist texts.)
Incidentally a note on the use of the term ‘enlightenment’. This word was chosen as the translation of the Buddhist term ‘bodhi’ which elsewhere is often translated simply as ‘wisdom’. The translation was by T.W. Rhys Davids, a retired British civil servant who originated the Pali Text Society in 1881 in (then) Ceylon. He and his peers had the view that the Pali texts of the Theravada school of Buddhism (‘Doctrine of the Elders’) were the nearest to those of the original teachings, although that can be questioned. He chose the term ‘enlightenment’ because of it’s resonance with the European Enlightenment, and his belief that Buddhism was more compatible with science than other religions (something else that can be questioned.) But the term has since become part of the rubric of modern spirituality and acquired many layers of meaning that are quite different to those found in the original texts from which it was translated.
T.W. Rhys Davids is probably correct because in its original form Buddhism, unlike Christianity, doesn’t prop itself up with miracles which are unscientific; relying rather on truths such as dukkha and anicca. Later on with the inevitable intermingling with other religions it began to also develop a miracle arm of itself.
Not so simple. It’s more that it will automatically be viewed with the suspicion that we moderns view anything associated with religion. The fact of the matter is that Buddhism is a religion, but what it understands religion to be, is very different from what it means in Western culture.
I’ve often seen questions on whether Buddhism is a religion or philosophy. Isn’t Buddhism part of the nastika (atheistic) tradition? God doesn’t figure in the creed and when they do they’re inhabitants of samsara, just like us.
I prefer ‘non-theistic’ — because for sure, Buddhism doesn’t accept a ‘supreme being’ but at the same time, it is very much centred around ‘the holy life’ and ‘release from worldly suffering’. And furthermore in Tibetan and East Asian Buddhism there are long traditions of deity–worship which are difficult to differentiate from polytheism in my view. Classical Buddhist scholasticism denied a Creator, but it saw a universe populated with devas, pretas, and other cosmological realms (including even other “life-bearing orbs”) — leaving plenty of room for the rich, devotional polytheism found across Asia that doesn’t fit neatly into Western secular categories.
That’s what I was referring to by intermixing of Buddhism with preexisting religions. The assimilation was 2-way: Hinduism considers Buddha a Vishnu avatar while Shiva is a dhammapala in Buddhism (?)
I’ve heard Buddhists refer to Christ as a bodhisattva and there’s the Christian story of the saints Budhasat and Barlaam. One version of Christ’s lost years has him travel to India and learn Buddhism. However there’s nowhere near as good a match between Christ and Buddha as there’s between Pyrrho and Buddha.
all good points, that last in particular. It seems oxymoronic that there could be such a thing as a ‘sceptical faith’ but that element in Buddhism comes close. It is based very much on an absolutely concentrated-but-disinterested awareness of the procession of thoughts and emotions that generally rule our lives so as to discern the underlying causal mechanism of ‘dependent origination’.
There’s also the ‘Silk Road’ element - that all these cultures met, intermingled and influenced each other along the Silk Road for millenia. An excellent book I discovered in the early days of forum involvement was Thomas Mc Evilly The Shape of Ancient Thought, a scholarly examination of cross-cultural influences in the ancient world between Greek and Indian culture. Likewise the ‘Greek Buddha’ tropes.
I read a rather critical review of Nagarajuna, accusing him of playing fast and loose with logic, distorting ideas so that the philosophy of madhyamaka would come out right. I felt a bit disillusioned about Buddhism after that but it still has a grip on me.
Buddha is beyond reproach to Buddhists, but there are allegations that Buddhism, with its sunyata and anatta, is at its core a nihilistic philosophy. It’s also a bit highfalutin as sunyata and anatta are difficult to grasp, putting nirvana forever beyond people who are less endowed mentally, no matter how good they are. Isn’t this and for other reasons why we haven’t seen any Buddhas lately?
It’s not a matter of being intellectual in the regular sense. There’s a Sanskrit term, more associated with Hindu than Buddhist thinking, ‘viveka’, meaning ‘discrimination’. In that context it’s discriminating the real from the unreal. That beings are caught up in the unreal because of their attachment to pleasure, habits, pride, and so forth, so they don’t see. Remember Within You Without You from Sergeant Peppers? ‘They don’t know, they can’t see, are you one of them?’ Like a lot of people from that generation, that song was the first I heard of Indian philosophy. As you know, the Beatles had gone to Rishikesh with Maharji by then. That song was George Harrison’s recounting of the ‘darshana’ with Maharishi.
As for nihilism, the Brahmins always accused Buddha of nihilism because he didn’t accept the authority of the Vedas. Nāgārjuna seems nihilist, but that’s because 'words are empty;. (I have a compendium of Jay Garfield’s essays on Mahāyāna called ‘Empty Words’. But there’s a saying in Mahāyāna that emptiness and compassion are the ‘two wings’. And that you can’t take flight on one wing.
Mr. Robert Thurman.