[Buddha-l] Photographs of buddha-l regulars

[Richard Hayes]

Dear denizens,

It always amazes me how little resemblance there is between how people 
actually look and how I imagine them to look on the basis of hearing them on 
the radio or reading their messages on buddha-l. I couldn't resist taking a 
peek at Erik Hoogscarspel's website (http://www.xs4all.nl/~jehms ) and 
looking at his photograph. The photo did not look at all like the image in my 
mind, except for the very general feature of a pleasantness that I knew had 
to be there.

I have looked in vain for on-line photos of a few other of my favorite 
buddha-l contributors. For reason's I'll never understand, a search for a 
photo of Lance Cousins turned up, among other things, a picture of Jane 
Goodall kissing a chimpanzee---which makes me wonder just exactly how Google 
works.

Right next in queue behind the mystery of Google is the mystery of how we form 
images in our minds of people we've never met. For several years I 
corresponded with Jim Peavler and had a picture in my mind of someone that I 
now realize was a likeness of Dennis Weaver; I assume the rough similarity in 
sound between Peavler and Weaver was behind that. When I finally met Jim I 
discovered that he doesn't look much like Dennis Weaver, and he learned that 
I look more like Andrew Weil than like Richard Pryor. Neither of us would 
have picked the other out in a crowd on the basis of our preconceptions.

One thing I have spent too many idle moments doing is trying to imagine what 
the Buddha looked like. I'm guessing he may have been an Indian, so I like to 
go through my mental photo gallery of Indian friends I have had over the 
years, and then through a gallery of Indian celebrities. For some reason, I 
cannot find any matches. Then I try to imagine what the Buddha's voice 
sounded like, or what his demeanor was like. He usually comes out in my 
imagination with a fiery personality and a scathing wit, someone always at 
the ready to cut a fool into mincemeant. That's how he always sounds to me 
when I hear the Pali canon in my mind's ear. Starting from there I go to a 
voice that would fit such a demeanor with some success. But the face always 
eludes me, as does the body. Did he look something like Gandhi, or Nehru, or 
Ambedkar? Or was he more like Keannu Reeves or maybe Ravi Shankar or Sri 
Aurobindo or Swami Vivekananda? 

Or was the Buddha even an Indian? After all, we have excellent iconographic 
evidence that he looked like a slender Greek god, or a chubby Korean. In 
another century or so I'm sure we'll have iconographic evidence that he 
looked like a Dane, perhaps a bit like Ole Nydahl. 

I'm guessing we'll never know for sure what the Buddha looked like, because he 
probably instructed Ananda to break the cameras of all the paparazzi who 
followed him and other samana celebrities around the Ganges valley. Which 
makes me think he probably looked a bit like Frank Sinatra. With a turban in 
place of a Fedora.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes