The Buddha: Biography of A Myth

Donald S. Lopez Jr. Yale University Press, New Haven, 2025

To inaugurate a Buddhist book review series, I thought it appropriate to begin with the most recent treatment of the life of the Buddha—Donald Lopez’s latest book, The Buddha: Biography of a Myth.

This book is certainly going to stir some emotions. In the introduction Lopez writes:

The goal of so many biographies of the Buddha is to find the man behind the myth. I argue in this book that that man cannot be found.

Lopez’s book is not about the life of the Buddha per se, rather, it is about two things: (1) the reception and construction of the person of the Buddha by western authors in the 19th century and (2) a review of the historical evidence for the existence of a person called the Buddha. In this wide-ranging book, Lopez addresses the formation of the Buddhist canon, the rise of Mahāyāna, and the way in which Protestant attitudes connected with the 19th century textual criticism largely determined how the Buddha was received and interpreted by 19th century scholars, and so on.

He introduces his goal as follows:

In a real sense, to argue that the Buddha in all his glory, like all the buddhas that preceded him in all their glory, was not a historical figure is an argument that is authentically Buddhist. We need not abandon the search in despair. Instead, we renounce the search for a self that was never there (italics mine).

In Lopez’s book, the Buddha is a void, conspicuous through his absence in any written sources that can be dated prior to Aśoka. Lopez offers a compelling narrative of the attempts to fill that void, presenting the differing narratives which can be found both in “mainstream” Buddhist sources as well as Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna sources.

In the first part of the book, The Buddha Tells His Tale, Lopez takes a novel approach—he uses the fifth chapter of Gustave Flaubert’s novel, The Temptation of St. Anthony as his framework. Through Flaubert, Lopez guides us through the standard features of the life of the Buddha up to the Buddha’s awakening and the weeks immediately following it—reviewing Western scholarship and contrasting and comparing Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, and Tibetan sources.

In the second part. entitled Did the Buddha Exist?, Lopez reviews the historical record to unearth any conclusive evidence for the existence of someone called “The Buddha.” In this section he exposes the difficulties of trying to pin down the historical existence of a person for whom the first evidence in writing anywhere occurs more than one hundred years after their passing.

His goal, he explains:

[I]s to celebrate the human imagination and its power to conjure a figure of such marvel; to see the various lives of the Buddha not as a cacophony of contradictions but as a chorus that together inspires us to remythologize the Buddha and allow ourselves to delight in myth, to be moved, to be inspired, to be liberated.

Lopez’s writing is brisk, dense, but never boring. The Buddhist reader will find much to reflect upon, especially in terms of how the West has received Buddhism and the assumptions that determined how it was received, and how we perceive the Buddha. The non-Buddhist reader will find a treasure trove of historical information and also a spotlight focused upon our colonial biases and preferences.

While no doubt intended to stir controversy, Lopez’s book is valuable addition to the legions of books already concerning the life of the Buddha. The interested reader will find virtually all of the traditional biographical sources in the life of the Buddha referenced here. If one were to read only one book on the life of the Buddha, it would be The Buddha: Biography of a Myth.