India, June 25 -- By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik - Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist

The historical Buddha is largely an artefact of 19th-century European scholarship rather than a recovered fact, as per scholars like Bernard Faure. He argues that virtually nothing is known about the figure known as the Buddha and historical reconstructions are just as pious and imaginative as the myths and legends they claim to supplant.

Far from a transcription of a real life, the Life of the Buddha was originally a blank, which generations of hagiographers and historians have endeavoured to fill, turning it into a palimpsest. Tracing how the West filled that blank is, in effect, the story of how the colonial-era Buddha was invented.

The Buddha had...