We thank Bernat Font for his kind permission to repost this article, which originally appeared on his substack, Berni's Dharma, on November 2, 2025.

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Almost every Buddhist tradition, if not all, has reinterpreted the earliest teachings, which means it has disagreed with them, even if they wouldn’t necessarily put it in these terms. There’s usually a story justifying that those were not the final teachings. Sometimes this story involves trips to the heavens, divine serpents, or the Buddha or another figure manifesting to a practitioner and revealing secret doctrines. Sometimes there’s a burning house. Or it’s about holding flowers and smiling.

One of the most Buddhist things ever is to innovate by pretending to be conservative, which echoes a quote by the famous Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí: ‘originality consists in going back to the origin’. We see this in jazz history too. When New Orleans jazz was tamed into commercial swing tailored to white sensibilities, musicians responded with bebop, reclaiming it as art rather than entertainment: fast, dissonant, deliberately undanceable. When that then grew too cerebral, they brought it back to the roots by emphasizing blues elements—hard bop was born.

Buddhists have been doing the same for ages. However, today there’s an important difference: historical awareness. This is often posited in secular Buddhist circles as an advantageous feature, which in many senses it is. Historical awareness allows us to understand the evolution of doctrines and practices, see Buddhism’s flexibility and empty nature. But when it comes to recovering early Buddhism and to the understandable quest for the flesh-and-blood Buddha, things get tricky.

Today’s early Buddhism is not a reconstruction but a re-creation, an originality through going back to origins. This is why I have defended calling it “neo-early Buddhism”—it’s more honest. Also, why should we hide our creativity? The problem of dressing it in historical arguments is that a scholar can come along and point out without much difficulty that such and such an idea is not what the Pali suttas say or reasonably mean. And then we’re confronted with the fact that historical accuracy was never our concern but a device, and that we still value and wish to keep the (re)interpretation.

The second problem, as I wrote in Tricycle (Winter 2021 Issue), is to inadvertently set the stage for students’ confusion, as they go to the texts themselves and discover a strong renunciant flavour, with statements like “One who, being mindful, avoids sensual pleasures like side-stepping a snake’s head, transcends attachment to the world” (Snp 4.1), or “It would be better, foolish man, for your penis to enter the mouth of a highly venomous snake than to enter a woman” (Vin i 36, addressed to male mendicants).

This applies to the human Buddha we want to recover and relate to. I do believe he’s there, having back pain during a dharma talk and getting exasperated at disciples who gossip around or fail to get his teachings. But he coexists with a supernatural Buddha and it is only us who draw a line between these two.

There has been scholarly debate in the last few years over this question. David Drewes has argued we cannot consider the Buddha a historical figure. Others, like Alexander Wynne and Oskar von Hinüber, have replied that’s nonsensical skepticism. Drewes says these scholars simply want the Buddha to be historical, and that even Hinüber kind of accepts the sources do not prove historicity.

Very recently, a heated discussion has erupted in academia.edu, which like all platforms today (including Substack) has been victim to the inherent enshittification of the internet. Scholars and non-scholars alike have joined in on the comments section, at times even not having read Drewes’ papers. His point is not that the Buddha did not exist, but that we cannot claim he did following the criteria currently accepted by modern historians to consider something ‘historical’.

Simply put: we have no written evidence for the Buddha by contemporary witnesses. Full stop. All we have, if we’re generous and consider the oral suttas, are ‘texts’ that speak of someone who supposedly lived a minimum of 150 years earlier—in fact, tradition itself sees the Buddha as having lived earlier, and therefore even further from Ashoka, whose pillars are often used as earliest evidence of Buddhist suttas.

Bhikkhu Bodhi made some interesting contributions to that debate, questioning to what extent the modern criteria for ‘historical’ are good enough to be used here. Granting the Buddha existed, though, it’s hard to establish much about him in the modern sense of history. Historical awareness doesn’t seem to be such an ally after all.

The big question for practitioners is: What is at stake here? What if the Buddha was not the thinker suspiciously aligned to modern sensibilities we take him to be? Is all this about history for us? Have we put our faith there, and if so, why?

Some bibliography for my nerds—most findable on academia.edu:

• Attwood, Jayarava. 2024. ‘On Historical Methods in Buddhist Studies and the Disputed Historicity of the Buddha’.
• Drewes, David. 2017. ‘The Idea of the Historical Buddha’. Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 40: 1–25.
• Drewes, David. 2023a. ‘A Historical Buddha After All?’ Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 46: 401–16.
• Drewes, David. 2023b. ‘Toward Blue Skies Ahead’. Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 46: 431–37.
• Faure, Bernard. 2022. The Thousand and One Lives of the Buddha. University of Hawaiʻi Press.
• Lopez, Donald S. Jr. 2025. The Buddha: Biography of a Myth. Yale University Press.
• Von Hinüber, Oskar. 2023. ‘The Historical Dr. Drewes and the Buddha’. Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 46: 417–30.
• Wynne, Alexander. 2019. ‘Did the Buddha Exist?’ Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies 16.