As I read the Buddha-karita (attributed to Asvaghosha) again in connection with my class on South Asian Civilizations, I cannot help but wonder what it would have been like if our only accounts of the birth of Jesus had been stories from centuries later, such as are found in the apocryphal infancy gospels (e.g. the Infancy Gospel of Thomas). The comparison between such materials in the Christian tradition, and the accounts of the birth of the Buddha (Gautama), would be much more a case of comparing like with like. Nevertheless, the comparison does show how ancient traditions in general tended to highlight the significance of an individual by making their birth more and more miraculous, even though in both cases the story ends up being in tension with the apparently mundanely human origins of both Jesus and Siddhartha Gautama as adults.
It is unfortunate that our good fortune to have relatively early sources in the case of Jesus is used by some to make unjustified claims of certainty in a fundamentalist fashion, rather than to engage in serious historical research. The less elaborately developed miracle stories in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ infancy are not proof that they are straightforward historical narratives, but simply evidence that they were less far along in the process of development that led to the very similar elaborations found in both Buddhist and Christian traditions several centuries after their births, as their significance was considered with the benefit of hindsight.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In