The Discourses in the Life of the Buddha

Buddhism does present the Buddha as an almost divine godlike figure with rather peculiar physical characteristics. But when you go back to the text that are the earlier source we have, that predate the arising of the different Buddhist schools, the different orthodoxies and so on, we start to get a rather different sense of what's going on. So many of the Buddha's teachings are not stated as kind of a final dogmatic truth, but they emerge in the interactions he has with the people of his time. When you read these texts, you really find yourself in a very human world.