Donald S. Lopez Jr.: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Within Islam, within Christianity, there are things which are contested, of course. What’s the best way of thinking about what it is in Buddhism that is contested? For scholars, it’s when the Buddha lived. We don’t know with any precision the year of his death. So, in Buddhism, time is measured from the time of his death instead of the time of his birth. Sometimes we see Buddhist writings in which they have after the number AN, After Nirvana. According to the Theravada tradition, the Buddha passed into Nirvana in 544 BCE. When I have to write the death date of the Buddha, most scholars in the field will put something like “400 BCE plus or minus 50.” That’s an incredibly large range of time. The Buddhist traditions themselves, in Chinese Buddhism, we have a completely different number, so there’s really no consensus at all on the death of the Buddha’s life. There’s one text that says he lived till he was 80. That’s all we’ve got. Did the Buddha have 32 marks on him?…

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