After the Buddha’s demise he came, little by little, to be seen as less the human teacher and more the super-human being. A number of major causes, each one reinforcing the others, can be noted for this phenomenon. The first was sectarian one-upmanship. As the Buddhists competed with their non-Buddhist rivals they would try to show that their founder was superior to their rivals’ founders. The latter would then counter with their own claims of superiority. This led to a spiraling of fantastic and ridiculous claims of supernatural powers and origins for these teachers. The human Buddha came to be seen first as semi-divine and later as fully so.

Second, Indian religious thinking did not accept historical or mundane truth. All truth had to have a divine source or be traced back into some beginningless historical past. Therefore, in order for the Buddha’s teachings (Dharma) to be valid it had to be assumed that they had an origin in a time well before he himself lived. This same scenario, point for point of course, was claimed for the other teachers by their followers. Thus, no less could be granted to the Buddha. In Buddhism this extension into the past took two forms. One was to declare that Gautama was just the last of a long series of Buddhas, each of which taught the identical Dharma. The other form was to give to Gautama, as well as all the other previous Buddhas, a long history of previous pre-enlightenment supernatural lives, in each of which the Buddha acted as a perfect self-sacrificing being, bodhisattva.

The third major cause for the super humanizing of the Buddha was the vagueness or mysteriousness of some of the early Buddhist teachings and the questions to which this vagueness lead. What exactly was nirvana? If the Tathagata (the Buddha) was not simply annihilated in nirvana, what happened to him or where was he? Did he perhaps still exist? What did the Buddha really mean by the doctrine of no-self? If there was no reality to selfhood was anything real? Were the Buddha and the Dharma real? If they were did they constitute a higher and authentic reality in comparison to our lower inauthentic reality? What was the Buddha’s Dharma (teachings)? It was said early on that the Dharma existed whether a Buddha came into the world or not. Did this mean that the Dharma took precedence over the Buddha, or that the Buddha was merely a personification of the Dharma? At the same time it was said that to see the Dharma was to see the Buddha. With the rise of Mahayana Buddhism the two were regarded as identical

The forth cause for the deification of the Buddha was both the monks and the laity’s need for popular devotion as well as the desire for supernatural assistance. The early Buddhist movement was for those few spiritually committed, who sought to work out their own salvation. But, as the Buddhist monastic order (Sangha) grew and required lay support, it had to offer something to the laity in return. The earliest such return, and the still dominant one today among Theravada, was the merit the lay people gained by supporting the monks. This could be used to aid in gaining a better rebirth. Also, the monks as individuals seeking to become the Perfected Man, Arhat, gave the laity a living object to venerate. Through such veneration, as well as through charity to the monks, lay persons vicariously gained a sense of high self worth and righteousness. Still, in the early tradition the venerated one was expected to be cool, devoid of passion, and only indirectly and abstractly able to help the devotee in their everyday problems. For some of the Buddhist monastic and lay community this was insufficient, and a more direct and concrete object of veneration was needed.

What if the Buddha was not just an ordinary human being? After all, the Buddha was said to have discovered the truth on his own, unlike the living monk who received the truth from another, namely the Buddha. Does this not suggest a greater than ordinary nature? If he were more than ordinary in his life as a human teacher, could he not have been more than ordinary before that and continue to be so afterwards? Considering the distrust of ordinary human nature that is a part of all Indian religions it is hardly surprising that Gautama would have had to be trans-humanized if his teachings were to be widely accepted in his homeland.

We might be wondered how a religious system that started out as denying the usefulness of gods and considered human enlightened persons to be measure of all things could evolve into its opposite. Perhaps the main reason for this was that early Buddhism lacked a theological ceiling. In a monotheistic religion God occupies a transcendental position that acts as a ceiling or barrier through which no other entity can pass and which allows no other to take its place. No such imposition existed to prevent a human from becoming transcendentalized and then divine in Buddhism.

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