Verse-glorification of the Buddha from the second canto of the Bhagavata Purana

Abstract

This article is devoted to the study of the Buddha’s image as it manifested in the pages of an important Sanskrit text of Hinduism, perhaps the most influential Purana – the Bhagavata Purana, or Bhagavata, which contains descriptions of various avatars of Vishnu-Krishna. This study is limited to the analysis of the second stanza in the Bhagavata Purana that glorifies the Buddha. Among the approximately eighteen thousand stanzas of the Bhagavata Purana, the person of Buddha is mentioned seven times. The most conceptual moment of this verse is the notion of upadharma (literally, “semblance of a teaching,” i.e., something that resembles the true teaching, but is not it in the absolute sense).

 The article presents an analysis of this stanza by various medieval and modern Indian commentators (Sridhara, Vishvanatha Chakravarti, Madhva, Vallabha, Jiva Gosvami, Viraraghava, Vijayadhvaja, Sukadeva, Giridhara, Vamshidhara, Bhaktivedanta). According to many of them, a verse from the second Canto of the Bhagavata Purana mentions a personality of Buddha different from the historical Siddhartha Gautama, who lived 2500 years ago. It may be noted that later interpreters of the Bhagavata text began to treat Buddhism more tolerantly than medieval commentators (the same tendency is observed in Buddhism in relation to Hinduism).

This article is a continuation of a previously published study concerning the analysis of the mention of the person of Buddha in the stanza-glorification from the first Canto of the Bhagavata Purana.