Hacker News Reader

Comment by larnmar | Hacker News Reader

I’m confused why the article doesn’t consider the initial question of whether the historical Buddha existed at all. Given the amount of ink that has been spilled over the existence or otherwise of the historical Jesus, and the even spottier historical sources about Buddha (we can’t even nail him down to a specific century), isn’t this question worthy of consideration?

View on HN

I gess because there wouldn't be much of an article at all.

I mean you basically wrote the whole article in your comment above by saying: "whether the historical Buddha existed at all"

I'm betting he probably did exist, because when you take all the personal anecdotes in the scriptures, many of which are mentioned in the article, they make coherent sense as the life story of a single human being.

The little details and the personal quirks all add up.

I'm really far from an expert on this, but I've read quite a lot on the subject and my understanding is that there is considerably more historical evidence for Gautama-the-Buddha being a single real person than for Jesus Christ, that "we can't even nail him down to a specific century" notwithstanding. In the case of Jesus the timing isn't much of a question because of the well-accounted for political events of the time, whereas perhaps India at the time lacked sufficiently standard date-keeping system for us to synchronize the writings now.

But as I understand it the Buddha is mentioned in a lot of completely independent contemporaneous texts whereas Jesus is basically only mentioned only in the Bible. In itself that doesn't prove anything... the Buddha was active as a spiritual leader for many decades, and Jesus only for 3 years, and maybe the wider society around Jesus was just much more interested in political events whereas Indian society as a whole at the time of Buddha was exploring more spiritual and philosophical dimensions. But I've always had the impression that there are proportionally more history scholars who question the existence of Jesus as a single real person than that of the Buddha.

Yeah, that’s the kind of thing that should have been in the article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com