Buddhism as actually practiced for the last 2500 years ascribes all kinds of deity-like features and the supernatural to the Buddha – travel Asia and you’ll see people praying to Amitabha Buddha in order to be reborn in his Pure Land, and even Theravada Buddhism that doesn't go whole hog with pantheons still holds that the Buddha was divinely immune to fire, poison, and drowning. A non-supernatural Buddha is largely a feature of the twentieth-century West, which thought it could get something in tune with a more rational era by reviving, so it thought, “original Buddhism” with questionable results. Even non-revival, supernaturally charged strands of Buddhism have their converts in the West.