Thirty_Years_of_Buddhist_studies,Conze

12 Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies
that no decisive argument can be found for either alternative.
Nor is this really surprising. A hundred and forty years after
the Nirvana this very same question was already debated, no
agreement could be reached on it, and it led to the first split
in the community. Now, 2,500 years later, how can we hope to
reach any certainty on this issue?
This brings us to the Life of the Buddha. Can we, with our
present knowledge, separate legend from fact? In 1947 Prof.
Lamotte showed 1 that the historical facts are beyond our
reach, and that we must be content to study the successive
stages of the Buddha legend. In 1949 appeared A. Foucher's
Life of the Buddha, 2 the last work of the great archaeologist.
This is a real masterpiece, and the truest and most convincing
account we have had so far. It is based not only on the texts of
all the schools, but also on the numerous works of art, dating
from the second century B.C. onwards, of which Prof. Foucher
had over fifty years acquired an unrivalled knowledge. As a
vigorous traveller, M. Foucher had spent many years in India,
had become thoroughly familiar with Indian conditions and
habits of thought, and had himself made the Eight great
Buddhist pilgrimages. The inspection of the locality of the
legends throws a surprising light on many of their features,
for not a few of our traditional accounts are stories told to
pilgrims by their guides. As no one before him, Prof. Foucher
has thus succeeded in re-establishing the actual Indian tradition
about the Buddha, and in describing the state of the legend
as it existed at the beginning of the Christian era.
We may conclude our account with a few words about the
relation of early Buddhism to the Upanishads. This is important
for the question of the anaUa doctrine, which is, of course,
central to any understanding of Buddhist doctrine. There has
been a persistent tendency to attribute to primitive Buddhism
the Upanishadic teaching of the Self, or dtman. Little can be
adduced from the existing Scriptures in support of this thesis,
but it has been the curse of Buddhist studies that people will
persist in believing that the Buddhists must have radically
1 La Ugende du Bouddha, Revue de l'histoire des religions, cxxxiv,
PP- 37-71-
2 La vie du Bouddha d'apris les textes et Us monuments de I'Inde, 1949,
383 pp.