The Buddha as an Avatar of Vishnu - Times of India (2024)

THE story of Gautama, the Buddha (the enlightened one), is well known. He expounded the four noble truths (Arya Satya) concerning suffering, its cause, its destruction and the way to the elimination of sorrow. He was against the extremes of both self-indulgence and self-mortification. A Middle Path was advocated consisting of right views, right aspirations, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right contemplation.

He rejected the authority of the Vedas, condemned ritualistic practices, especially animal sacrifice, and denied the existence of gods. Buddhism flourished for more than a millennium and spread to foreign lands also. But a decline set in after the Golden Age of the Guptas (4th to 5th centuries AD).
Foreign historians, with limited knowledge of Indian philosophical systems, have attributed the decline of Buddhism in the land of its birth to the advent of Adi Sankara. The 68th Sankaracharya of the Kanchi Kamakoti Math, Shri Chandrasekharendra Saraswati, has effectively nailed this canard. According to him, Sankara was more concerned with setting right the errors in Saankhya and Meemaamsa philosophies of Hinduism which denied the importance of Isvara though basically subscribing to the Vedas. Even where he specifically dealt with Buddhism, he condemned only its denial of the existence of God. Then how did the religion decline? It was because of the vehement opposition to Buddhism on philosophical and religious grounds by Meemaamsakas and Taarkikas (logicians).
The point is also that, even as people admired Buddha and turned to his religion, they did not give up their old beliefs and ritualistic practices. To give a contemporary example, many call themselves Gandhians but in their lives, official or personal, they follow a path just the opposite of what he showed! King Ashoka (2nd century BC) did much to propagate the religion within India and without. Still in his rock edicts he calls himself as "Devanampiya" or "the beloved of the gods". There were no gods in Buddhism at his time. So obviously he was referring to Hindu gods. In other words, he continued to believe in Hindu religion even as he admired Buddha. Buddhist texts written by bikshus have a Saraswati stotra in the beginning paying obeisance to the Hindu goddess of learning. It is not unusual to see an idol of Lord Ganesh in a Buddhist temple.
Adi Sankara accepted the tenets of Buddhism at the level of pure consciousness. The ultimate stage in his philosophy was the giving up of rituals and concentrating the mind on the infinite. Buddha wanted his followers to take a quantum leap at the initial stage itself to this ultimate goal, something which is difficult to expect of ordinary men and women. Sankara advocated abiding by the karmas, as stipulated by Meemaamsa, to begin with, and proceeding gradually to the stage envisaged by Buddha of giving them up altogether. However, Buddha did believe in two cardinal principles of Hinduism, viz. the transmigration of the soul and the law of karma (that our actions have consequences). Thus fundamentally there is little difference between the two religions except that Buddha conceived his as an ethical and secular way of life.
Perhaps the most important reason for the decline of Buddhism as a separate religion was the absorption of its founder in the Hindu pantheon of gods - indeed an irony for one who denied their existence! There are many incarnations of Vishnu of which the Dasavatar or the ten incarnations are the most well known. In the Southern tradition they are: matsya (fish), koorma (tortoise), varaha (boar), Narasimha (the man-lion), Vamana (the dwarf) Parasurama (the angry prince), Rama (the perfect human), Balarama, his younger brother Krishna (the divine statesman) and Kalki (the redeemer of righteousness in the kali yuga, who is yet to appear). In the Northern tradition Balarama is replaced by Buddha who appears as the ninth avatar after Krishna, his mission being to purify Hinduism. Srimad Bhagavatam (circa 900 AD, according to Farquhar) takes the stand that Krishna is the original form of Vishnu and the incarnations were all his. In its list of Dasavatar, which many consider as the most authentic, both Baladeva (or Balarama) and Buddha appear. Krishna is not mentioned because he is the original god. The Dasavatara Stotra of Jayadev (12th century), parts of which are included in Adi Guru Granth compiled by Guru Arjun Singh, follows the list of Bhagavatam. In this scheme, Buddhism was like the reformation movement of Martin Luther in Christianity. Once Buddha himself became an incarnation of Vishnu there was no need for the religion to exist separately in this country.