The World-Honored Enlightened One

Question: What place does the Buddha hold in Asian myth? In Chinese myths the Buddha was portrayed as the supreme authority the gods turned to when they couldn't find a solution on there own like with Son Goku. So how would that work in game, since the Buddha was either a human teacher like Muhammad or an avatar of Vishnu?

Big question that needs a big answer. The Buddha takes a lot of forms over a lot of religions and is an important figure for the Hindu, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and Tibetans to name just a few, but he's never quite treated as the same across the board. It's one of those situations where Scion needs to make a choice (it hasn't, so instead STs get to) and different games may want to handle it completely differently.

The easiest way to handle the Buddha, and what we generally do for our games, is to give Vishnu the benefit of the doubt and decide that the Buddha really was one of his avatars, specifically arriving on earth in order to create religious confusion and discord and separate the truly faithful (i.e., Hindus) from the weak of will and easily led astray (i.e., everybody else). Historically, of course, this is a great example of a religion doing some quick and savvy political maneuvering to deal with a rival; when Buddhism became popular, Hindu leaders basically incorporated the idea of the Buddha as an avatar of Vishnu in order to in a single stroke paint the younger religion as both totally false and ultimately under the control of their own gods. As a religious rhetoric move, it was pretty ingenious. But from Scion's point of view, the original core of Buddhism ignores gods, and that makes it, like monotheism, a religion that really doesn't fit in the setting well; so, since there already is a mythological precedent for the Buddha as an avatar of Vishnu, that's what we go with. Easy as pie, and the resulting massive spin-off sprawl of Buddhism becomes merely humanity running with an idea on their own and incorporating indigenous gods into it as time goes by.

Buddhism in China, however, takes a lot of different forms thanks to mixing with and adopting deities from Taoism and Shenism over the course of centuries. It's no longer really the same animal that it was in its long-ago Hindu days; you could, as above, just rule that it's a human invention and make that the end of it, but then what about the boddhisattvas? This can be a fun place for historical editorializing in Scion - if Buddhism is originally a human-focused, god-free religion (or at least one that features its founder arguing against the existence of gods), why wouldn't gods move in on it to make it their own? Indigenous Chinese gods might have found the vehicle of Buddhism perfect for spinning off and making a name for themselves outside the rigid bureaucracy of the Shen, and it makes perfect sense for gods imported from India, such as Guanyin or Nezha, to become revered in the religion that also had its roots in their homeland. Philosophical Buddhism may have been a non-deity religion at its inception, but it certainly isn't now and hasn't been for a very long time; there's no reason gods couldn't have taken advantage of the situation for their own political benefit. Japan is much the same story, and could lead to interesting game politics if, say, Emma-O of Buddhism starts trying to lead a concerted assault on Underworld territory traditionally owned by Izanami of Shintoism.

You might also decide that Buddha is actually a god, messing around with founding his own religion for his own inscrutable reasons. Good candidates for this besides Vishnu would include Budai, the fat, laughing Buddha of China that has managed to rise from relative obscurity to being recognized even by those with no knowledge of eastern religions thanks to his association with Buddhism, or Tonpa Shenrab, an indigenous Tibetan god who has managed to become renowned as a (or the) Buddha despite being the founding deity of Tibetan mythology.

Another option, and one you may want to pursue if you're going with the idea of monotheistic religions as human inventions, is just that Gautama Buddha was really and truly nothing more than a normal human with a philosophical message that became incredibly popular and spread across Asia as a religion after his death. It would certainly underline the idea of human belief being important in the world despite its lack of direct effect on gods, and forcing Vishnu to invent an entire new persona to combat a religion created by mere humans is pretty entertaining.

It's a per-ST choice, like a lot of things in Scion; there's no clear answer and the books, despite using Buddhist deities in their eastern pantheons, tend to avoid the subject even more thoroughly than they avoid monotheism, so we're on our own as far as deciding that goes. We personally like the Vishnu avatar choice, since it keeps Buddhism's roots tied to the Hinduism it grew out of and emphasizes what dicks Hindu gods can be sometimes, but any of them are valid avenues to pursue for Scion.