Buddha
Buddha (‘ the awakened/enlightened one’, , c.485–405 bce)
The title given to Siddhārtha Gautama, the historical Buddha, and, from an outsider's perspective, the founder of Buddhism. He was born just inside what is now Nepal, but spent his pedagogic and monastic life in the Brahmanical heartland of Northeast India. Traditional accounts of his career prior to his enlightenment show him renouncing his married life as a prince to undertake a period of religious experimentation amongst the unorthodox śramaṇas and ascetics active at this time. Eventually adopting a ‘Middle Way’ between asceticism and worldly indulgence, he achieved enlightenment after a period of intense meditation. His career as a Buddha began when he formed his group of followers into an order of monks and nuns under his tutelage. While accepting the general renouncer view that human existence was governed by the laws of karma and rebirth, and the soteriological need to free oneself from saṃsāra, much of the Buddha's teaching was formulated as a deliberate response to orthodox Brahmanical values and to the kinds of doctrines about the nature of reality and human beings found in the early Upaniṣads. Using the same technical vocabulary as his opponents, but radically redefining it, he rejected the authority of the Veda, and so the brahmins' claims to religious and ritual superiority through birth. For the Buddha, the ‘true brahmin’ is the Buddhist monk, and it is he, rather than the priestly brahmin, who is worthy of receiving donations. Similarly, the effects claimed for the Vedic sacrifice are delusions: the significant, saving action (karma) is ethical not ritual. Just as there is no equation between the sacrificer and the cosmos, so there is no equation between a permanent, unchanging self (ātman) and an absolute universal power (brahman): both self and brahman (or God) are illusory. Liberation (nirvāṇa) is the extinction of the fires of greed, hatred, and delusion that fuel this false sense of self.
In the wake of centuries of religious and cultural rivalry, but also of co-existence, the later sectarian Hinduism of the Purāṇas integrated the Buddha into some of the lists of Viṣṇu's avatāras. It is perhaps significant that this occurred (c.10th–12th centuries ce) at the time when Buddhist influence was starting to wane in India, and, according to some, losing its identity in pan-Indian Tantric forms of religion. From one perspective, therefore, the Buddha's ‘descent’ as an avatāra of Viṣṇu was perhaps simply an attempt to bring an increasingly theistic looking Buddhism under the Vaiṣṇava umbrella; from another, the Buddha avatāra was viewed not as a saviour, but as a destroyer, whose appearance was necessary to encourage latent atheists (nāstikas), such as the Buddhists to declare themselves openly and so accelerate their own destruction.
