Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.4

c8.4

That ingenious student of Indian antiquity who has occupied himself most closely with this question, Emile Senart,† answers it with an absolute NO. A Buddha may have lived somewhere at some period, but that Buddha, of whom Buddhist tradition speaks, has never lived. This Buddha is not a man: his birth, the struggles he undergoes, and his death, are not those of a man.