Buddhism teaches that each person comes into their present life from an earlier one and that most people will have another life when their present one ends. This process of being born, dying and being reborn is called samsara and only ceases when one attains a state called awakening, bodhi, more commonly known as Nirvana. Like everyone else, the Buddha had many lives before his final one as Gotarna, and the Buddhist tradition created fictional biographies of over five hundred of these former lives, recounted in a book called the Jätaka. What is unique about the Buddha is not that he had former incarnations, fictional or otherwise, but that in the centuries after he attained Nirvana devotees and admirers have continued to ‘reincarnate him in a sense, by creating new ‘lives’ for him, some of these more incredible than his former ones as recounted in the Jätaka. Although physically and in a number of other ways the Buddha was an ordinary human being, some participants at the Third Buddhist Council, which took place around the middle of the second century BCE, asserted that such was his purity that his faeces had a fragrant smell. There were, however, those who maintained a more realistic view of the Buddha and who gave a common sense rebuttal to this claim. If this were true, they argued, it would have required the Buddha to eat perfume,