Secular Buddhism Series : Talk 2: The Historical Buddha

If you walk into a Buddhist temple in much of Asia, you'll often see the Buddha depicted with a halo, sometimes with rays of light, sometimes as one of many past and future Buddhas stretching across cosmic time. That image is a religious icon, built up over centuries. Underneath it — or before it — there was a man. Almost certainly a real one. And the question for today is: what can we actually…