[Buddha-l] [Fwd: PEACE Quote]

[Blumenthal, James]

Is there any way of knowing, more or less of course, what the Buddha did 
say?

The Jesus Seminar seems to have had fair success in determining Jesus' 
words; would anything similar be possible in Buddhism? Or perhaps it 
has, and I'm not aware.


Michael



Historical Jesus scholars have done an excellent  job of unpacking the historical and philological evidence pertaining to Jesus and the gospels that has enabled them to put forth well thought out theories about who Jesus was and what he might have said.  One of my colleagues at OSU, Marcus Borg, was a prominant member of the Jesus Seminar and has written extensively on related topics.  It is facinating to speak with him about the processes Jesus scholars use to make critical judgements about what he might and might not have said.

There has not been a lot work like this on the historical Buddha.  I think it would be a much different and more complicated project for a number of reasons including our limited knowledge of the historical period, the lack of historical records from the period, the vast quantity of materials attributed to the Buddha compared with that attributed to Jesus, minimal information on the canonization process and the process of translating texts into Pali, Sanskrit, etc.  I think it would be important work also to attempt to reconstruct a historical Buddha to whatever degree that is even possible, though  I think the Buddha's lifestory has been mythologized even more than Jesus' life in some ways.

Jim



James Blumenthal
Oregon State University
Department of Philosophy
102-A Hovland Hall
Corvallis, OR 97331