8 - A Buddha for the West

Summary

Chapter 8 examines the way in which the life of the Buddha was ‘demythologised’ so that he was then worthy of comparison with other great men of history. He became the Light of Asia, the Indian Luther, a competitor of Jesus, and the philosopher of a new rational philosophy and a this-worldly ethics for a disenchanted age. This was now a very human Buddha, neither a god nor a superman. This historical Buddha was to become normative within the West in the twentieth century, available for absorption into new forms of enchanted and disenchanted Western spirituality. The chapter ends with a discussion of the relation between myth and legend in the life of the Buddha in the modern West. It argues that the ’historical Buddha’ cannot be found behind the Buddhist texts.