[Buddha-l] Best Buddha bio?

[Richard Hayes]

On Thu, 2007-10-18 at 10:20 -0600, Mr Michael A. La Torra wrote:

> I am looking for your recommendations on the best biography of the 
> Buddha. Two books that have already been recommended to me are:
> 
> "The Life of the Buddha : According to the Pali Canon" by Bhikkhu 
> Nanamoli
> 
> "The Historical Buddha: The Times, Life & Teachings of the Founder of 
> Buddhism" by H. W. Schumann (Author), M. O'C. Walshe (Translator) [out 
> of print]
> 
> Any comments on these volumes?

I am partial to the Schumann biography, because it shares some of my
tastes and prejudices. I may not be unique in being the sort of reader
who loves what the Buddha reportedly said about a lot of things but who
skips over the passages in which the Buddha levitates, telepathically
knows the thoughts of people many kilometers away, instantaneously
transports himself to distant places, heals potentially fatal wounds by
just thinking about them and so on. I want a buddha who was pretty much
like me, except for being slightly less prone to throwing coffee mugs at
the television set. I don't have any room for either the supernatural or
transcendence, so I want a biography of the Buddha that has been purged
of everything that even hints at the supernatural and transcendental. 

Another preference that I have is for really boringly linear accounts of
what happened in what sequence. I want some sense of what the Buddha was
like when he was just learning how to be a buddha, and what he learned
during his forty-five years of heading up a disorderly order of ragtag
monks, many of whom were social misfits. I want a buddha who struggles
with existential questions and who wonders whether he did the wrong
thing in making some of the decisions he made. I want some sense of how
the guy responded to scandals, such as the potentially embarrassing
event of having a dead prostitute show up inside the precincts of a
monastery. I want someone who fails and find a way to deal with his own
failures. I want a buddha who is horrified when his best friend is
beaten to death by thugs from a rival cult. I want a buddha that could
be played convincingly by Robert de Niro (featuring Morgan Freeman as
Ananda, Anthony Hopkins as Devadatta, Jane Fonda as Kisagotami and David
Hyde Pierce as Sariputta). No other kind of biography would appeal to me
at all. I want a biography, not a hagiography.

For all these reasons I quite like Schumann's story of the life of the
Buddha. I like Michael Carrithers's life of the Buddha for much the same
reasons, but Schumann has quite a bit more detail. I also like
Schumann's attempt to situate the story of the Buddha in a geographical
context by describing the topology of the places where the main events
of his life took place, and I also like glimpses into the different
peoples who were living in what we now call India at that time.

Perhaps most of all, I like the fact that Schumann's book is not written
by an academic. In other words, it is readable, even fun. Needless to
say, the fact that the book was written in German, a language in which
it is grammatically impossible to say anything untrue, gives me even
more confidence in it as an infallible source of knowledge.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico