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Bodhi-cheating The art work of early Buddhism shows what early Buddhism and the Buddha was like. He is not depicted but represented by a pair and sandals, or an empty cushion and so on. He is surrounded by dancing and singing, by nature spirits including voluptuous female nature spirits, and naga serpents. This is a shamanistic scene. Buddha was a shaman who imparted knowledge. A few centuries after his death the great king/emperor Ashoka appropriated Buddhism because it gave a chance of a way out of the otherwise inevitable consequences of the wide-scale slaughter he had perpetrated as part of his empire building. He felt sorry for this - sorry for himself in fact and wanted to save himself from the hell realms. The state subsidised Buddhism he introduced was, unlike the original Buddhism both scholastic and monastic. Early Buddhism had no written texts but under the new Buddhism the collections of texts became everything - where liberation came from listening to the text being read, thinking about them, meditating on them and so on. State funding institutionalised Buddhism into monasteries and universities - much as Constantine did to Christianity - and created a new form of Buddhism which emphasised intellectual learning and religious hierarchies. Early Buddhist monks wandered in groups no larger than three, lived and worshipped in close connection with the local communities on whom they depended for food and supplied services such as healing and spells for good harvests and so on. But for the monastics the text became everything in a kind of 'sola scriptora' approach. Attempts by modern Buddhists to re-find 'early Buddhism' fall into the trap of trying to abstract ideas from the texts and end up with a kind of desiccated secular mental exercise. Oddly to us moderns the closest thing to early Buddhism would be vajrayana even though it has much later historical roots. And it is the main criticism of vajrayana that it introduces magical, yogic and deity practices which places it much closer to what the Buddha was actually like.