The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (448 page)

(1878–1961).
Founder of
Moral Re-Armament
. A
Lutheran
pastor in Pennsylvania, Buchman embarked for Europe in 1908 after a disagreement. There he began a campaign along evangelical lines. In Oxford in 1921 he founded the ‘First-Century Christian Fellowship’ or Oxford Group Movement, the chief activity of which was house parties including group confessions, prayers and listening for God's guidance, having as their aim the ‘changing’ of lives. The Oxford Group became Moral Re-Armament in 1938.

 
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(P
li, Skt.; Chin.,
fo
; Jap.,
butsu
; Korean,
pul
)
1
An enlightened person, literally, ‘one who has awakened’ to the truth. Traditional Buddhism teaches that there are two sorts, samyaksa
buddha (see
SAMMASAMBUDDHA
) and
pratyekabuddha
; and that
Gotama
is one in a series of the former kind.
Mah
y
na
Buddhism extends the notion of a buddha into a universal principle: all beings possess a ‘buddha-nature’ and are therefore prospective buddhas.
2
Title applied to Gotama
(Skt., Gautama), the historical founder of Buddhism (hence, the Buddha Gotama or Gotama Buddha).
Gotama Buddha is also known, especially in Mah
y
na, as Buddha
S
kyamuni
(i.e. the Wise One, or Sage, of the
akya clan). There are uncertainties about his dates. According to the Long Chronology, he lived just over 200 years before
A
oka
, giving approximate dates of 566–486 BCE. According to the Short Chronology, he lived 100 years before A
oka, i.e.
c.
448–368. He was born Siddh
rtha Gotama or Gautama, in
Kapilavastu
, in modern-day Nepal. After his enlightenment, he became known as the Buddha, the Enlightened One. Although many stories of his life are told, and immense bodies of teaching are attributed to him, it is not possible to reconstruct his biography or his own teaching with any historical certainty—nor, from a Buddhist point of view, is it in the least desirable. The Buddha is a physician who diagnoses illness and suggests treatment; but the worth or the value lies, not in the biography of the physician, but on whether the patient is cured.
Buddhist biographies are late (
see e.g.
Buddhacarita
,
Lalitavistara
). They, and texts in the
P
li canon
, suggest that Gotama was brought up in a royal household (perhaps son of the r