Because the Buddha lived so long ago, there is little that we can know for certain about his actual life. As we learned, the picture of the Buddha as a real human has been obscured by layers of devotional and doctrinal content. Reflect on this issue in your discussion post. You can write anything about this topic that you like, but here are some ideas: 1. Who might or might not care about the history of the "real" Buddha? 2. To what degree is the reality of the Buddha important to Buddhists? 3 What if the Buddha never existed at all? Would that be relevant to Buddhism (or not)? Most scholars believe that the Buddha really existed: that his real life was extraordinary, and that his life inspired the biographical tradition. A minority of scholars believe that the Buddha's biography may be an amalgam of two or more real persons, or, on the other hand, that the founder of Jainism, Mahavira, and the Buddha may have been the same person. Another minority of scholars believe that the