[Buddha-l] A candid question

[Franz Metcalf]

Gang,

I think that Joanna is right, the legends show Siddhartha following an 
established yogic path of austerity until his crucial insight that 
there must be a better way. So he was not fasting unto death. But I 
want to add that, in my view, Joy is also right on the whole: the 
Buddha's new teachings revealed him to be too iconoclastic to fit into 
any existing school. He had to be deemed founder of a new school. This 
then meant his school had to do several things to survive. Central 
among those was attracting patronage despite failing to provide 
wonder-working charismatic teachers (like various ascetics) and failing 
to provide deliciously self-mortifying samanas (again, like many 
ascetic schools, particularly the Jains--perhaps the sangha's greatest 
early competition).

Joy writes, "If the Buddha weren't a man but a movement, I would say 
that an important motivation of that movement was to give access to 
more inspiring paths of liberation to all varnas, but particularly 
Kshatriyas, and at earlier stages of life." I agree entirely with the 
latter half of the statement, but I'd add that "the Buddha," as we know 
him, *was* a movement. Yes, there probably was one single person who 
did some parts of what we attribute to "the Buddha," but what matters 
now, what we all look back to, what we discuss, what we draw on, what 
we even revere, is a movement. As you so delightfully say, a "soft 
reformist movement within Brahmanism."

If you can find them, Joy, you might want to take a look at Winston 
King's _The Buddhist Transformation of Yoga_ for discussion of 
meditative techniques. And G.S.P. Misra's _The Age of Vinaya_ for a 
sense of the proliferation of schools in competition at the time of the 
Buddha. These books are both decades old; no doubt there are more 
recent works on the topic; I'd love to hear about them.

Franz