Was Buddha Vishnu

7/30/2019 Was Buddha Vishnu

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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 somehowpart 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 Buddhist. The Buddha was too



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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



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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 real

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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Was Buddha Vishnu