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The Buddha: Biography of a Myth
From one of the world’s leading Buddhist scholars, a deeply researched and unprecedented portrait of the Buddha
Like Jesus and Muhammad, the Buddha is one of the most significant figures in history. But is he a historical figure? In this revelatory book, Donald S. Lopez Jr. explores this question and considers what is at stake in the answer. Using stories of the Buddha’s life—drawn from the earliest biographies, the work of other scholars, and his own research—Lopez traces a single narrative from the Buddha’s birth to his enlightenment to his passage into nirvana.
Unlike those who transformed the Buddha into a rationalist philosopher, Lopez seeks to “remythologize” the Buddha, restoring the rainbow that encircled the Buddha for centuries, radiating his teachings around the world. Complementing traditional Buddhist sources with insights from Gustave Flaubert, Oscar Wilde, George Eliot, and others, Lopez produces a rich, accessible, and unprecedented portrait of one of the world’s most important religious figures.
Like Jesus and Muhammad, the Buddha is one of the most significant figures in history. But is he a historical figure? In this revelatory book, Donald S. Lopez Jr. explores this question and considers what is at stake in the answer. Using stories of the Buddha’s life—drawn from the earliest biographies, the work of other scholars, and his own research—Lopez traces a single narrative from the Buddha’s birth to his enlightenment to his passage into nirvana.
Unlike those who transformed the Buddha into a rationalist philosopher, Lopez seeks to “remythologize” the Buddha, restoring the rainbow that encircled the Buddha for centuries, radiating his teachings around the world. Complementing traditional Buddhist sources with insights from Gustave Flaubert, Oscar Wilde, George Eliot, and others, Lopez produces a rich, accessible, and unprecedented portrait of one of the world’s most important religious figures.
256 pages, Hardcover
Published September 2, 2025
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About the author
Donald S. Lopez Jr.
71 books57 followersDonald Sewell Lopez, Jr. (born 1952) is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan, in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures.
Son of the deputy director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Donald S. Lopez.
Son of the deputy director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Donald S. Lopez.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 21, 2025
Immensely readable, fun, and thought-provoking. This book treads much of the same ground as Lopez's previous work. What is new is that he no longer hints at his views but now openly casts doubt on the Buddha's historicity, even as he defends the psychedelic, inhuman figure who emerges from millennia of pious accretions. "Defends" is perhaps too strong a word. While Lopez clearly prefers this Buddha to the pared-down Enlightenment philosophe version, he demonstrates a notable ambivalence in passages like this:
"The horror of enlightenment arises from this compulsive compounding of these qualities, these dharmas, sutured together to produce a body that is unimaginable, not because it is wondrous but because it is somehow monstrous. Perhaps this is why we feel the appeal of the 'historical Buddha,' the austere teacher invented by European scholars in the nineteenth century, who attempted the impossible: to visualize him without the bump on his head. Perhaps this is why we see the appeal of Zen masters like Dōgen, who said that to sit in the posture is to be the Buddha. Perhaps this is why we are inspired by the buddha nature sūtras, which tell us that there has always been a buddha inside us. We just don't know it. Perhaps this is why we remain transfixed by early Buddhist sculpture, where the Buddha is simply not there."
Following a survey biography of the Buddha, structured following the Buddha's speech in Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony, Lopez gives his first exposition for why he thinks the Buddha, most likely, did not exist as a historical person and why, from a Buddhist (or merely humanist) perspective, it doesn't matter. Buddhists, after all, take refuge not in the historical person whose body decayed but in the Buddha's dharmakaya, his "truth body," in what he represents. From a purely secular angle, Buddhist literature and ideas are testaments to the human imagination.
I largely agree with his conclusions. But I found his argument against his historical existence less convincing. For starters, the sort of existential dilemma at the heart of the earliest teachings on transitoriness, though certainly a universal theme, strikes me as particularly likely to have originated as the preoccupation of a singular mind despite its later communal elaboration. Though Lopez mentions the dissimilarity principle (the historical-critical criterion by which we come to assume that passages where Jesus says things like "Do not call me good; only God is good" probably have early provenance due to their embarrassing incongruence with later theological developments) and attempts to explain away numerous such early details that Buddhists are unlikely to have invented, I'd say he at best manages to show some are tossups.
Personally, I find many of these specifics quite persuasive. Given that they were up against the eternal voice of the Vedas, why would early Buddhists invent a human, and therefore ostensibly fallible, founder? And why make him of the warrior caste rather than a brahmin? Why have him die of dysentery in an obscure village? These are facts early Buddhists discourses have to address, and, indeed, addressing them is part of how we wind up with the cosmic, Godlike Buddha of the Lotus Sutra much later. But the process was already well in swing in the earliest sūtras, which were compiled hundreds of years after the Buddha's death (if he lived and died, that is). Lopez’s point that these are wielded to convenient ends doesn’t mitigate the sheer unlikeliness of inventing them whole cloth.
Lopez proffers his own alternatives, and, again, his fixations are always, always interesting: the aniconic dimension of early Buddhist art, the generic feeling of Buddha as both figure and term, and (perhaps most convincing to me) the wild swing of dates we have in various traditions regarding when he lived (sometimes by millennia). But, then again, figural representation of spiritual figures in India didn't kick off until later, his imaginal absence might be philosophically motivated ("selflessness" and all), of course the Buddha would employ many of the terms and ideas of his contemporaries and his early followers would have to struggle to distinguish themselves (much as Jesus, a virtual clone of John the Baptist in messaging terms, and his movement had to do the same), etc., etc. Even the dates can be made to make some sense, as we come to see.
Although I'm inclined to think, on balance, the Buddha probably was a historical personage, we simply can't know as things stand, and I nonetheless share Lopez's fondness for the symbolism and imagination put into his exaltation and what it says for practitioners about their world and their potential for boundless, cosmic compassion. Certainly, what we arrive at is hardly historical or even recognizably human (then again, neither was John's Jesus, another notably generic figure, perhaps just what happens when pious writers invest individuals with too much "significance").
In a way, though, the big Lotus Sutra-style reveal of the final chapter was not so much that the "Buddha didn't exist and that's okay," but, rather, Lopez's coming out of sorts as the English lit scholar he's always been deep down. Our author is on the record saying his initial track was as a Shakespeare scholar, and it shows. Oscar Wilde gets three pages in the final chapter. The structure of the book is Flaubert. You almost sense that Lopez, given his "complicated" (his words) relationship to the Buddhist lore he also clearly loves, is happier just to dispense with the history altogether and finally have what he wanted all along: texts, symbols, significance, none of that pesky other stuff.
"The horror of enlightenment arises from this compulsive compounding of these qualities, these dharmas, sutured together to produce a body that is unimaginable, not because it is wondrous but because it is somehow monstrous. Perhaps this is why we feel the appeal of the 'historical Buddha,' the austere teacher invented by European scholars in the nineteenth century, who attempted the impossible: to visualize him without the bump on his head. Perhaps this is why we see the appeal of Zen masters like Dōgen, who said that to sit in the posture is to be the Buddha. Perhaps this is why we are inspired by the buddha nature sūtras, which tell us that there has always been a buddha inside us. We just don't know it. Perhaps this is why we remain transfixed by early Buddhist sculpture, where the Buddha is simply not there."
Following a survey biography of the Buddha, structured following the Buddha's speech in Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony, Lopez gives his first exposition for why he thinks the Buddha, most likely, did not exist as a historical person and why, from a Buddhist (or merely humanist) perspective, it doesn't matter. Buddhists, after all, take refuge not in the historical person whose body decayed but in the Buddha's dharmakaya, his "truth body," in what he represents. From a purely secular angle, Buddhist literature and ideas are testaments to the human imagination.
I largely agree with his conclusions. But I found his argument against his historical existence less convincing. For starters, the sort of existential dilemma at the heart of the earliest teachings on transitoriness, though certainly a universal theme, strikes me as particularly likely to have originated as the preoccupation of a singular mind despite its later communal elaboration. Though Lopez mentions the dissimilarity principle (the historical-critical criterion by which we come to assume that passages where Jesus says things like "Do not call me good; only God is good" probably have early provenance due to their embarrassing incongruence with later theological developments) and attempts to explain away numerous such early details that Buddhists are unlikely to have invented, I'd say he at best manages to show some are tossups.
Personally, I find many of these specifics quite persuasive. Given that they were up against the eternal voice of the Vedas, why would early Buddhists invent a human, and therefore ostensibly fallible, founder? And why make him of the warrior caste rather than a brahmin? Why have him die of dysentery in an obscure village? These are facts early Buddhists discourses have to address, and, indeed, addressing them is part of how we wind up with the cosmic, Godlike Buddha of the Lotus Sutra much later. But the process was already well in swing in the earliest sūtras, which were compiled hundreds of years after the Buddha's death (if he lived and died, that is). Lopez’s point that these are wielded to convenient ends doesn’t mitigate the sheer unlikeliness of inventing them whole cloth.
Lopez proffers his own alternatives, and, again, his fixations are always, always interesting: the aniconic dimension of early Buddhist art, the generic feeling of Buddha as both figure and term, and (perhaps most convincing to me) the wild swing of dates we have in various traditions regarding when he lived (sometimes by millennia). But, then again, figural representation of spiritual figures in India didn't kick off until later, his imaginal absence might be philosophically motivated ("selflessness" and all), of course the Buddha would employ many of the terms and ideas of his contemporaries and his early followers would have to struggle to distinguish themselves (much as Jesus, a virtual clone of John the Baptist in messaging terms, and his movement had to do the same), etc., etc. Even the dates can be made to make some sense, as we come to see.
Although I'm inclined to think, on balance, the Buddha probably was a historical personage, we simply can't know as things stand, and I nonetheless share Lopez's fondness for the symbolism and imagination put into his exaltation and what it says for practitioners about their world and their potential for boundless, cosmic compassion. Certainly, what we arrive at is hardly historical or even recognizably human (then again, neither was John's Jesus, another notably generic figure, perhaps just what happens when pious writers invest individuals with too much "significance").
In a way, though, the big Lotus Sutra-style reveal of the final chapter was not so much that the "Buddha didn't exist and that's okay," but, rather, Lopez's coming out of sorts as the English lit scholar he's always been deep down. Our author is on the record saying his initial track was as a Shakespeare scholar, and it shows. Oscar Wilde gets three pages in the final chapter. The structure of the book is Flaubert. You almost sense that Lopez, given his "complicated" (his words) relationship to the Buddhist lore he also clearly loves, is happier just to dispense with the history altogether and finally have what he wanted all along: texts, symbols, significance, none of that pesky other stuff.
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