It’s obviously impossible to argue the facts about the life of the Buddha too hard because we only know them from second-hand accounts that were written down centuries after the events (though note this is true of many historical facts we take for granted).
So that in mind, assuming the stories written down in the Pali cannon are true, they fail to paint the picture of someone having the big insights of gaining consciousness, but rather, as Matt says, someone figuring out how to deal with the self-inflicted pain consciousness causes.
For your theory to be true, it would require that:
The Buddha is some real guy who lived circa 500 BCE
His big insight was gaining consciousnesses (or I think more properly, self-awareness)
In the following 500 years, his followers also figured out what we now understand to be awakening/enlightenment (the self we are aware of is not separate from others), and mythologized their findings into the story of the Buddha figuring it all out at once
I think 3 is pretty unlikely, as it would be more likely that someone else, let’s call him Buddha Prime, would get the credit for awakening on top of the Buddha’s original insight into self-awareness, but that’s not the story we get. Instead evidence seems to suggest it’s more likely that self-awareness appeared earlier (my guess would be >=12 kya), though I am sympathetic to the idea that it took until the Axial Age for almost all humans to be self-aware, as it seems to be a mental technology we have to pass from one to another rather than something that naturally happens to all humans (cf. feral children).
It’s obviously impossible to argue the facts about the life of the Buddha too hard because we only know them from second-hand accounts that were written down centuries after the events (though note this is true of many historical facts we take for granted).
So that in mind, assuming the stories written down in the Pali cannon are true, they fail to paint the picture of someone having the big insights of gaining consciousness, but rather, as Matt says, someone figuring out how to deal with the self-inflicted pain consciousness causes.
For your theory to be true, it would require that:
The Buddha is some real guy who lived circa 500 BCE
His big insight was gaining consciousnesses (or I think more properly, self-awareness)
In the following 500 years, his followers also figured out what we now understand to be awakening/enlightenment (the self we are aware of is not separate from others), and mythologized their findings into the story of the Buddha figuring it all out at once
I think 3 is pretty unlikely, as it would be more likely that someone else, let’s call him Buddha Prime, would get the credit for awakening on top of the Buddha’s original insight into self-awareness, but that’s not the story we get. Instead evidence seems to suggest it’s more likely that self-awareness appeared earlier (my guess would be >=12 kya), though I am sympathetic to the idea that it took until the Axial Age for almost all humans to be self-aware, as it seems to be a mental technology we have to pass from one to another rather than something that naturally happens to all humans (cf. feral children).