The Page 99 Test: Philip C. Almond's "The Buddha"

Monday, January 1, 2024

Philip C. Almond's "The Buddha"

Philip C. Almond is Emeritus Professor in Religious Thought at the University of Queensland and a renowned specialist in the nexus between religion

and the history of ideas. His recent publications include Mary Magdalene: A Cultural History (2022), The Antichrist: A New Biography (2020), God: A New Biography (2018); Afterlife: A History of Life after Death (2016), and The Devil: A New Biography (2014). His earlier, pioneering book The British Discovery of Buddhism (1988) has gained a reputation as a landmark study in comparative religion and intellectual history.

Almond applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Buddha: Life and Afterlife Between East and West, and reported the following:

Page 99 gives an account of the Greek historian Megasthenes’s encounter with the ‘Sarmanes’, one of the two groups of Indian Philosophers that he encountered while he was at the court of the Indian king Chandragupta around 300 BCE. Was this one of the first encounters of the West with the followers of the Buddha? Well, perhaps! Page 99 indicates the way in which, from the time of Alexander the Great until the nineteenth century, the story of the Buddha came to the West in a series of glimpses and hints, of occasional insights along with many false trails – of the Buddha as an incarnation of the god Vishnu, as the equivalent of the Old Testament Noah, as an African deity, or as the Eastern equivalent of the gods Mercury, Wod, and Oden.

So, this is a book about the fourth century BCE founder of Buddhism, Gautama, and how his life was imagined both in the East and the West. It shows how the enchanted mythological figure of the Buddha in the ancient East became the disenchanted historical Buddha of the modern West.

We begin with two chapters that give an account of the life of the Buddha constructed from the earliest Eastern biographies of the Buddha. The next five chapters explore how the West came to its current understanding of the life of the Buddha and the religion that he founded, beginning with ‘the naked philosophers’ of India that Alexander the Great’s expedition encountered, and then on to the medieval encounters of Marco Polo and other travellers to the courts of the Mongols. The next chapter deals with the little-known story of how the Buddha became a saint in the Eastern and Western churches by the end of the first millennium, followed by the ‘discovery’ of the Buddha during the ‘age of discovery’ when accounts from Catholic missionaries in China and Japan began to reach the West.

The last two chapters deal with the discovery of Buddhism in the modern West when the textual traditions of Buddhism began to arrive in the West. In the nineteenth century, ‘Buddhism’ became recognised for the first time as a world religion alongside Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The final chapter shows how the Buddha became one of the ‘great men of history’ – the Light of Asia, the Indian Luther, the philosopher of a new form of rational philosophy, a very human figure, neither God nor superman. It demonstrates how a new form of ‘naturalised Buddhism’ has become available to the modern Westerner.

Thus, this book aspires to tell the story of how a human life devoted to finding the solution to the problem of human suffering in ancient India and to teaching others the path to freedom from it can prove just as inspiring in the modern West as in the ancient East.