Donald S. Lopez Jr.: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Webbed hands or fingers? Exactly. Webbed fingers and toes. We have no reference at all to the Buddha ever swimming, so we don’t know why that is. Art historians have speculated — sometimes when you see Greek and Roman statues from that period — it’s very hard to carve fingers in marble. The fingers will almost always break off in the process. Sometimes you see that the stone has been left between the fingers to preserve the actual fingers. I think some people saw this and thought, “Oh, he had webbed fingers and webbed hands.” Do we think the Buddha died of dysentery?…

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