Editing The Buddha (section)

===Understanding the historical person===
Scholars are hesitant to make claims about the historical facts of the Buddha's life. Most of them accept that the Buddha lived, taught, and founded a monastic order during the [[Mahajanapada]] period, specifically during the reign of [[Bimbisara]], ruler of [[Magadha]], and died during the reign of Bimbisara's successor [[Ajatashatru]], thus also making him a contemporary of [[Mahavira]], the Jain [[tirthankara]].{{sfnp|Smith|1924|pp=34, 48}}{{sfnp|Schumann|2003|pp=1–5}}

There is less consensus on the veracity of many details contained in traditional biographies,{{sfnp|Buswell|2003|p=352}}{{sfnp|Lopez|1995|p=16}} as "Buddhist scholars [...] have mostly given up trying to understand the historical person."<ref>{{Cite web |title=Was the Buddha an awakened prince or a humble itinerant? |last=Wynne |first=Alexander |website=Aeon |url=https://aeon.co/essays/was-the-buddha-an-awakened-prince-or-a-humble-itinerant |access-date=9 May 2020 |archive-date=15 May 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200515175755/https://aeon.co/essays/was-the-buddha-an-awakened-prince-or-a-humble-itinerant |url-status=live }}</ref> The earliest versions of Buddhist biographical texts that we have already contain many supernatural, mythical, or legendary elements. In the 19th century, some scholars simply omitted these from their accounts of the life, so that "the image projected was of a Buddha who was a rational, socratic teacher—a great person perhaps, but a more or less ordinary human being". More recent scholars tend to see such demythologisers as remythologisers, "creating a Buddha that appealed to them, by eliding one that did not".<ref>[[John S. Strong|Strong, John]], ix–x in "Forward" to ''The Thousand and One Lives of the Buddha'', by [[Bernard Faure]], 2022, University of Hawaii Press, ISBN 9780824893545, [https://books.google.com/books?id=t-GSEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA150 google books] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221102071254/https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Thousand_and_One_Lives_of_the_Buddha/t-GSEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA150 |date=2 November 2022 }}</ref>