Thanks. Though, I do not see how this relates to the discussion. Sujato is criticising Schopen’s view of the texts. But I don’t see him criticising his work on archaeology. Let alone supporting the Wikipedia article over Schopen’s discrediting the 1960’s source for the claims in the Wikipedia article.
So it seems on this point, all we have is a claim from Wikipedia, and Schopen, a great authority on Buddhist archaeology, refuting it. No-one else had added to the argument either way, so, as it stands, it would seem most logical to adopt Schopen’s position and dismiss this source. But then, I don’t think we should be surprised as it’s only a Wikipedia article after all!
Thanks. It doesn’t give dates but does give periods I’m unfortunately unfamiliar of the dates of. But… it seems to me Schopen’s exhaustive work 40 years later should be more authoritative. No? he does deal with this specific case, as I quoted from him above.
I just randomly came back to this topic, which raises a range of interesting questions.
He most certainly is not. So far as I know, Schopen has literally never been to India or set foot on an archeological dig[*], nor has he any qualifications in the field. He’s interested in archeology to the extent that he can use it to discredit experts on early Buddhism with whom he disagrees.
Having said which, I don’t believe that the Jivakambaravana, nor at any other site, dates back to the Buddha. Maybe it’s an early pre-Ashokan complex, but even that is tenuous.
Oh well, let me oblige!
In the passage you helpfully provide, we find a typical Schopenism. He addresses the fact that one of the reasons the Jivakambavana is regarded as early is that there are no stupas, which are almost always found in later monasteries. But Schopen argues:
There are, in fact, a number of other “Elliptical Structures” similar to the Jivamabavana, and … at least two of them “are identified as stupas”!
For Schopen, it’s quite exciting that he can prove someone else wrong. The problem, though, is that a glance at the “elliptical structures” of the Jivakambavana shows that they are nothing like stupas at all. If he had seen them he would know this.
(Just to be clear, what you are seeing here is a modern reconstruction of the old remains. When excavating, archeologists will uncover the remains, then use the old stones or bricks around to cover the old work so that it doesn’t erode or get destroyed by tourists. I was recently at an ongoing archeological dig in northern Sri Lanka, where they were studying and protecting a nearly 2000 year-old monastic complex in this way.)
And I wanted to circle back to this quote from Wynne in the OP, after the (non-exhaustive) range of evidence provided by subsequent posters:
Ārāma in this kind of context describes a regular residence for monastics, supporting a large, established community with a prominent public presence, on valuable land donated by wealthy supporters, belonging to the private institution of the Sangha, upon which regular formal religious procedures were carried out, and, yes, supporting a range of buildings for residences, gatherings, and the like. In English, we don’t use the word “park” for this, we use the word “monastery”.
The idea that in the 45 years of the Buddha’s life, mendicants lived entirely or primarily in the open air is utterly unrealistic. They would have begun building huts as soon as it started raining. I’ve stayed in “parks”, and they’re great … until the rain falls. Then they’re miserable. Anyone who has lived as a monk would know this. There’s a reason why “dwelling in the open air” is a special and limited ascetic practice.
And for Wynne’s:
Buildings are hardly mentioned in the Suttas, but the Vinaya has more material on it - although this probably only indicates that the Vinaya is generally later than the Suttas.
Yes, the Vinaya is generally later than the Suttas, and represents a somewhat more settled and developed time. But it’s excessive to say this is the “only” reason for the difference.
The Vinaya explicitly deals with the material side of monastic life. In most cases in the Suttas, the kinds of building people lived in don’t really matter. When I’m teaching Dhamma, how often do I mention my dwelling place? I dunno, sometimes? But if I’m writing monastery regulations, I have to get a whole lot more detailed. That’s the point of the Vinaya.
So it’s not “only” lateness, it’s also the purpose of the text.
[*] I read an interview with him years ago where he said this. Maybe he’s been to India since, but he certainly hadn’t when he wrote his influential essays in the 80s.
Sorry to keep on banging on this point, but I realized I had overlooked something.
True, but also, the Vinaya is highly stratified, and the early portions are easily recognizable.
The main early portion, which is probably as early as the main suttas, is the patimokkha. And there we find several quite detailed rules that regulate monastic buildings. In particular, the sizes and types of building are limited, which indicates that there had already been a tendency to build over-luxurious residences. We also find a concern for the environmental consequences of building, the means of funding them, decision making procedures, as well as safety regulations. All this indicates that by the time of the patimokkha, there was already a long history of monastic residences. This backdates it, in all probability, to the Buddha’s lifetime.
Also, it probably shouldn’t need saying, but the examples that Wynne gives of the Buddha being “homeless” are in fact episodes when he was traveling.
Actually a great book, so long as you remember that Fogelin was influenced by Schopen, so his grasp of Buddhist history is shaky. Unlike Schopen, Fogelin is actually an archeologist, so his archeology is good. But for example, he refers to references to Ashoka in the Pali canon, but of course, there is no such thing.
Cool! And, sorry that I am so behind in responding to notifications, it seems to take me hours each time I come back to this wonderful site, and I never seem to catch up sufficiently!
Ok, interesting!
I’m not sure never going to India would invalidate all of his work. But you do go on to show a very relevant downfall of this regarding the ‘elliptical structure’ - thanks! I do also think that it’s great that he tries to discredit views via archaeology. Even if it would lead to wrong conclusions, hopefully the debate improves the overall understanding. I would love to see a well reasoned response to his ‘Bones, Stone…’ book! Some of the issues he raised seemed quite interesting, including for example the monastics offering large sums of money.
So it would seem at least that his work that I brought into this topic was valid, so far as it was discounting the claim raised about that site with regard to evidence of buildings at the time of the Buddha. So that seems useful at least.
Nice! Yes it looks as if he didn’t even check any photos or diagrams for that one, if indeed there were no other elliptical structures that come close to looking like stupas! (I even thin that any ellipse might be unlikely to be a stupa - I have myself at least never heard of a blatant ellipse shaped stupa!)
Oh thanks, that’s useful info. I will bear that in mind if I go to more sites! I tend to visit people more than archaeological sites, but I have ended up at a few.
Thanks for the explanation. However I suppose that still leaves open the question as to what the nature of the buildings was. In English we might easily assume a ‘monastery’ to be a large building. Whereas what you have written there leaves room for a broad range of possibilities, including a collection of individual huts, with or without walls, possibly with rather temporary leaf roofs. Possibly more akin to some hunter gatherer encampments.
So I’m not really arguing about the word choice, but more that that leaves open the possibility of something quite different from the image of what the word ‘monastery’ may conjure in the mind of an English language reader.
That’s interesting. Especially for the context of another discussion on the recent post I made about meat eating. What is your sense for a rough dating of… let’s say the bulk of the Vinaya?
Fair enough.
Yes, indeed. Although if we go by the earliest evidence, we still must be careful of seeing what the evidence tells us in the absence of our preconceptions, so I still find this topic interesting, and still have the sense that perhaps the buildings were… more rudimentary than we might sometimes assume? And I also wonder what kind of proportion we might have found amongst the Sangha outside of monsoon time, in terms of building-living vs. more open living.
Thanks! I will try to find the time to read that!
Cool. Do we have anywhere any kind of map (visual would be great!) of the Vinayapitaka (and Suttapitaka) showing which parts are the earliest? Also is there any chance of labels on the texts on this website to indicate if they’re from the earliest layer or not (or maybe even a more extensive categorisation into historical layers?) Could be very helpful for research!
Do you mean luxurious monastic residences, or secular ones? If the former, do we have any details from that earliest layer on the details of such buildings?
That’s fascinating! I guess I am particularly interested in any details about walls, if we have any?
I find his research often lacking in thoroughness, to be honest.
Asoka.-King of Magadha. He was the son of Bindusāra. Bindusāra had sixteen wives who bore him 101 sons.
The chief Pāli sources of information regarding Asoka are Dīpavamsa (chaps. i., v., vi., vii., xi., etc.), Mahāvamsa (v., xi., xx., etc.), Samantapāsādikā (pp. 35 ff. ). Other sources are the Divyāvadāna passim, and the Avadānasataka ii.200ff. For an exhaustive discussion of the sources and their contents see Prszlyski, La Legende de l’Empereur Asoka.
Are none of those sources regarded as part of ‘the Pāli’? And, if not, then is his mistake perhaps just in the accepted breadth of the term ‘Pāli Canon’?
Many scholars have refuted his work over the years, including myself. It’s not just a matter of interpretation, he regularly just omits sources or miscontrues evidence and when the facts are straightened out they seemingly inevitably lead to exactly the opposite conclusion than he wants.
Ok. But the basic meaning is just “where monks live”.
The patimokkha is early, the analysis was compiled over about 200 years or so. It largely differs between traditions.
Nope, too complicated.
Monastic.
Look up the relevant sanghadisesa rules for details.
Actually there are, but it would take a bit of digging. But even the patimokkha refers to building materials for walls.
No, none of them are in the Pali canon. Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa are Sri Lankan history texts, Samantapasadika is the Vinaya commentary, Divyavadana and Avadanasataka are late Sanskrit collections of legends. None of them are even close to canonical.
(FYI, on the phrase “in the Pali”, for the commentaries, “in the Pali” would mean “in the Tipitaka”. In modern times we treat Pali as the name of a language. So yes, some of these are in the Pali language, but they are not in the Pali canon.)
He’s an archeologist relying on secondary sources, and unfortunately since his secondary source was Schopen he was led astray. Still, he should have done due diligence, since all of this is basic knowledge in the field.
Oh thanks. Yeah to be honest I never got far into that book, it didn’t ‘feel good’ reading it. Maybe just as well!
Hmm, well the Oxford Dictionary defines it as:
a building or buildings occupied by a community of monks living under religious vows.
So I do think people take it as being more than merely that! Then regarding the size, I was careful to say might, but just to give some support to that, we use the qualifier forest monastery for the multiple small hut situation, I would say in part perhaps because without the qualifier, the assumption would be a large more permanent structure. I’m not saying I agree with Wynn in needing to say ‘park’ not ‘monastery’, but, also ‘monastery’ in some way perhaps hides some of the ambiguity or the broader range of possibilities of the situation in the Pāli? But anyway, this is a rather small point I guess. It was worth exploring for me anyway, in the quest for understanding the nature of the dwelling spaces in the Pāli.
Ah ok thanks. Does that 200 years start at the Buddha’s first teaching, or, at his time of death? And, do we date the early suttas at around 70 years after the Buddha’s death? So… perhaps the early suttas have a higher degree of reliability/earliness than the early part of the vinaya?
If there is some kind of list of ages of texts, if I can find the time I could perhaps make such a map and do my best to have the presentation simple, easy to visually access. What I don’t have time for is to collate the dating data.
Ok cool, so then this would seem to mean luxurious monastic buildings were being built some time within 200 years of {the Buddha’s first teaching or his death}.
Is that an archeology joke?
Ok, interesting. If anyone has the time to provide a link that would be awesome. I don’t know a way to search in Suttacentral through specific texts. I also don’t understand the structure of the Vinaya so I don’t know if this is from that or another part, but I found a story of a monk throwing her shit over a wall onto a Brahmin’s head: https://suttacentral.net/pli-tv-bi-vb-pc8/en/brahmali
It makes mention of ‘an encircling wall’, so maybe kind of ‘privacy walls’ or to keep out animals and unwelcome people. It also gives this in the definitions section:
An encircling wall:
there are three kinds of encircling walls: encircling walls made of bricks, encircling walls made of stone, encircling walls made of wood.
This other Vinaya text has a rule about nuns not being in a secluded place with a man. The wall mention only comes in the explanation at the end (later addition as a commentary?) Also they were standing so it would seem to me unlikely they were actually inside, but anyway here’s the explanation part:
A secluded place means: it is secluded by a wall built of wattle and daub or by a door or by a screen or by a screen wall or by a tree or by a pillar or by a sack or it is secluded by anything whatever.
Oh, no mention of wattle and daub in Brahmali’s translation of that, though the PED does mention it for kuṭṭa and in the entry for kuḍḍa it gives:
a wall built of wattle and daub
And a vinaya reference for other walls:
Three such kinds of simply-built walls are mentioned at Vin IV.266, viz. iṭṭhakā° of tiles, silā° of stone, dāru° of wood.
Hopefully that’s useful for anyone trawling this thread for references! If I had a way to search just the vinaya, or even better just the patimokkha, I would continue my efforts but I don’t know a way to do that.
Ah ok. Maybe he just misunderstood the term ‘Pāli Canon’, or as you seemed to have suggested, mistakenly taken Schopen’s word for it.
Yeah, thanks. I sometimes use it in the former sense but more often just when I am referring to a specific passage comparing the Pāli with the English.
I don’t know if the usage has yet infiltrated into archaeology, but among social scientists specialising in Buddhism it’s become common to use the term “Pali canon” in a revised sense, meaning the de facto rather than the de jure canon. Whereas the latter is limited to the Pali Tipiṭaka, the former encompasses any Pali sources that have (or have had) significant influence on the world view or the quotidian life of those living in the Theravadin cultural milieu.
In Thailand, for example, the de facto canon would include the Phra Malai Kham Luang, in Myanmar the Abhidhammatthasangaha (a text popularly memorised as an act of merit) and Ledi Sayādaw’s Paramatthadīpanī (a major influence on both vipassanā traditions and the weizza cults), and in Sri Lanka the more important vamsa texts. Works like the Visuddhimagga, Milindapañha and Dhammapada Atthakathā would be de facto canonical in all Theravadin countries.
The distinction derives from a seminal paper by Steven Collins: On the Very Idea of the Pali Canon (1990), though Collins’ preferred terms are “closed canon” and “open canon”.
Ah thanks for clarifying that. In which case it would seem he is not at fault at all on this point.
Ah yes I think I read or skimmed that paper at some point.
Well, using colours or patterns, or spatial differentiation, one could make a map that included the relative level of certainty of age given, and breadth of age range estimate, and one would have the choice of how broad to make the age differentiation also. For example the most simple, low res. method would just be to classify as EBT or non-EBT (or ‘uncertain’). We seem at least to have some certainty that some texts are not EBTs, or that some portions of some texts are not. It could be handy to see that visually. For example, if we could see a visual map of the KN set out like that, that would be handy. And possibly adding hyperlinks so you can see which sections are old, then click on them and be brought to that section (Dhammapada or whatever) on Suttacentral.
If one could link this with a search function that would be even more amazing!
As it is for example, take the Vinaya - I have almost no familiarity with it. I quotes from it above, SuttaCentral but to me the pli-tv-bi-vb-pc8 in that URL means nothing. The top of the page says * Home - Monastic Law -Tv Vi - Bi - Confession Bi Pc 8 so for me it’s only the ‘monastic law’ part that tells me ok, I am probably in the Vinaya right now. But I have no idea of the ‘geography’ of where I am nor, more importantly, the age. I’m quite a visual person so seeing a map or at least an indication of age, would be very helpful. And being able to search within a specific section would be eminently useful, like one is able to do with the old Pāli Reader. Kind of essential for deep dives into researching any topic in the texts for me really. It makes research almost infinitely more easy. That may sound like an exaggeration, but often I find myself simply not even researching things when this functionality is unavailable to me due to the immense difficulty that brings. I expect I may not be alone - if a task is too difficult it may not be entered upon at all. But, the digital tools available have extremely high potential for furthering the field of dhamma study, and combining search functions such that the Pāli Reader or… I forget the other one which was good I think… have, with Suttacentral’s amazing collection of texts and translations, would make it the top tool for research, the go to tool. And some dating graphics could bring it up even a notch further. Dating texts, even if only roughly or if only those we have a fair degree of certainty about, is very important if one is wanting to contextualise ones research. Just for example, some terms’ meanings change over time, so if one is researching a specific term, then one may want to find all occurrences from the EBTs and study them systematically - I have done this myself with some terms and it has been very fruitful. For that, one best not include post-EBT texts in the analysis as if they are EBTs, otherwise that will cause great problems and can ruin the analysis, giving false conclusions. (For an easy example, if one wants to understand the Buddha’s usage of the term ‘bodhisatta’ one would go quite wrong if including later texts as if they were taught by the Buddha!)
And yet, is there not a high degree of consensus regarding certain sections of KN for example, not being EBTs? Or at least not being taught by the Buddha, being later?
Sometimes it can be nice to wait until there is more certainty or until all the texts or sections have been dated. But then, we may all be dead before that happens. So sometimes it may be best to work with what we have. But just be open about the level of uncertainty, and if possible/convenient, include the different opinions, or at least those that have merit. Otherwise it can be that all the dating work just remains fragmented, scattered here and there in obscure papers that almost nobody reads, thus the community not deriving the benefits. Whilst the potential is there to collate the data, and also update it as the field progresses. Maybe similar to how we have timelines of the different variations of Homo sapiens over time, though we also update these as research continues.
Happy to use another English word if it fits better.
I mean roughly more or less. The latest date actually mentioned in most mainline Vinaya texts is the Second Council, which was 100 years after the Buddha. At that time the differences between factions was resolved. Yet the Vinayas as we have them show substantial differences, which shows their compilation was ongoing in the early sectarian period, which means after Asoka, which means another hundred years at the very least. The Pali parivara, which is an appendix to the main Vinaya texts, was compiled in Sri Lanka.
I mean I would say the bulk of them stem from the Buddha’s lifetime, were somewhat edited along the way, and a few were added up until the Second Council, as attested by the commentary, or even a bit later.
There is no data, only opinions.
Text markup should be restricted to objective features of a text. For example, one might mark text up as “attributed to the Buddha”. But we can’t say it was “spoken by the Buddha”. Or one might say that “this verse is of such and such a metre”, and from historical studies we might know that that metre is a late one. It is a reasonable inference to conclude that the verse is late, especially if that is supported by other criteria. But the lateness is not a “fact” about the text, it’s an inference drawn from it.
Scholars make inferences from such data, and sometimes those inferences are widely shared and lasting. But even a stable consensus opinion is still just opinion.
History is not a set of facts, it’s a story. When we discuss earliness and lateness, it becomes part of a story that we tell, which has a certain meaning and coherence within that framework. It can’t be just extracted out. The appropriate place for such things is an essay or other discussion, not metadata annotation.
The patimokkha rules were almost certainly laid down in his lifetime, so these rules applied while he was still living.
Indeed. I’ve seen and prefer the term “semi-canonical” for e.g. Buddhaghosa’s works to distinguish them from “The Canon” proper while still indicating their status.
Yes, I think it’s quite a useful concept, at least from an etic social scientific point of view, but they’ve given it a bad name. Perhaps “Theravāda Canon” would have been better. Or a nice pretentious Germanism like “der wirkungsgeschichtliche Pali Kanon” (“what counts as Pali canon from the point of view of impact history)”.
I had a look, it does give ‘Chronooic tbe of Buddhist iterture
from the Buddh’s time to the time of Asok�’ on page 63. Oh, seems copy and paste doesn’t work well on that link! But hopefully it’s understandable. It also says of that:
This is obviously meant as a simple aid to orientation among the material, not as definitive or exhaustive.
I don’t know if there is a more detailed list in there somewhere, but I think as a community, we do know more than that, including which texts are older and younger within individual nikāyas, and also sections within individual suttas. Collating that info (if it hasn’t been done already?) would be super useful I think for many researchers and the fruits they could potentially offer back to the community.
Ah now I see the quote you gave was from a different post, and I had a brief read of some of that. That does give this list:
The Four Buddhist Āgamas in Chinese – A Concordance of their Parts and of the Corresponding Counterparts in the Pāli Nikāyas - by Anesaki
(Cred: @Javier)
But that still suffers from its lack of resolution, hence that will include much non-EBT material. I also see on that post others seeming to also call for such a list, e.g.:
And some discussion of difficulties relating to that. I also see @sujato answering a question there:
Speaking for myself, I would be very happy with an extensive list on the basis of their judgement. And sure, if there would be disagreement from other reliable experts, integrating the opposing opinions into a visual chart (or even a simple list!) could be nice too. Though even if it’s just @sujato and @Brahmali 's opinions, I think that would be a wonderful resource.
I’m now reminded of Islam’s system, classifying the Hadith as either ‘sound’ (ṣaḥīḥ ), ‘fair’ (ḥasan ), ‘weak’ (ḍaʻīf ), or ‘fabricated’ ( mawḍūʻ). These are largely based on examination of the line of transmission of the Hadith.
This is really important because they can only use Hadith to form Shariah law in the case where the Hadith are confirmed to be reliable. I’m not sure if they only rely on the most confirmed reliable category, ṣaḥīḥ, or if some might accept some from the somewhat less reliable category ḥasan, but they explicitly reject any from the other categories.
Buddhism on the other hand builds doctrine on the basis of extremely unreliable and plainly fabricated texts. And Buddhists in general build their view of who the Buddha was, what he did, and what he taught, on similarly flawed methodology. As EBT aficionados, most here on this forum will naturally have an attitude more akin to that Islamic attitude of wanting to build our views and understandings on the basis of texts which are established to have reliability of transmission. The difference however, is that the classification of the Hadith is readily available, whereas it is not, for the Buddhist texts. (And bear in mind for the Hadith this is generally at the resolution of individual paragraphs! - Individual
Hadith are short!) So having such an accessible list as I am proposing, or even adding such info to each page on this site (even if that means adding ‘Not sure about this one’), would at least start to put us on the same direction as Islam’s efficient approach to their texts. I guess in that regard we are many centuries behind Islam!
Ah yeah, I had forgotten about that. Seems I had this same idea all the way back then! At least I’m consistent @sujato did reply to that comment of mine:
I wonder if that conflicts with his other statement:
By choosing what to include or exclude on SC on the basis of judging what is or is not EBT material, that would seem to already inherently be opinion-based. And I am fine with that since I respect his opinion as a highly qualified expert on this topic! But also I hope that the Islamic example I gave, lends some more weight to my proposition. Not to mention the high potential value of making an easy means of channeling the fruits of the extremely hard labour of generations of communities of scholars, back to the Buddhist community, by making their conclusions accessible to the public. Or at least to us nerds reading SC and using it to do further research!
And if it was made in some kind of wiki fashion with well respected enough people allowed to add to it or edit it, it could be an evolving system that gets better and better as research on dating deepens. As it is, so much work on dating has been carried out but it seems to me for the most part it remains inaccessible to all but the most well read who get to pour thousands of hours pouring through research papers and the like, and even they are limited by their memory or their ability to create private lists of the information. It’s as if we have kilos of gold, but it’s in the form of dust mixed with the earth beneath our feet. A little bit of panning and refining could, in my opinion, go a long way towards presenting the community with some solid bars of at least relatively pure gold - gold awaiting further purification as time goes on.
I’m really not so invested in this point and I was kind of just exploring the ground between your view and Alex’s. And I am totally unqualified to offer an alternative. But if I allow myself to think aloud, and ponder ‘anāthapiṇḍikassa ārāme’ as ‘Anāthapindika’s park’ vs. ‘Anāthapiṇḍika’s monastery’, I wonder about… ‘[the monastic encampment at] Anāthapindika’s Park’?
I also wonder, when you say:
Ārāma in this kind of context describes a regular residence for monastics, supporting a large, established community with a prominent public presence, on valuable land donated by wealthy supporters, belonging to the private institution of the Sangha, upon which regular formal religious procedures were carried out, and, yes, supporting a range of buildings for residences, gatherings, and the like. In English, we don’t use the word “park” for this, we use the word “monastery”.
That makes me wonder, was this not called ‘anāthapiṇḍikassa ārāme’ before there was any monastic building there? If so, this would imply to me that ārāma doesn’t mean ‘monastery’. Just to give an example, there might be a house called ‘Partridge Farm’, that was once a farm, but stopped being a farm 300 years ago. Now it’s a house. So ‘Partridge Farm’ refers to a house, but, ‘farm’ still doesn’t mean ‘house’, and translating it as ‘Partridge House’ would be a mistranslation. To give another example, I know of a road called ‘The Vineyard’. That can confuse some people if you say ‘I’m going to The Vineyard’, if they are not familiar with the area! However, I would say this is largely an oral problem. And by this, I mean, we do not hear ‘capital letters’. For example, in writing, I can write ‘I’m going to the vineyard’, and we know it is an actual vineyard I am going to. But if I write ‘I’m going to The Vineyard’, then we know ‘The Vineyard’ is a proper noun, not merely a noun.
So a potential solution to this could be to say ‘Anāthapindika’s Park’. Though if one really wanted to specify the implicit meaning of going to the monastic encampment which is in Anāthapindika’s Park, one could say [the monastic encampment at] Anāthapindika’s Park. (Although I know square brackets to indicate what material has been added to relieve ambiguity not specified in the original, is unpopular outside of academic writing). I guess that would be similar to rearranging someone’s statement to ‘I’m going to [the house called] Partridge Farm’, or ‘I’m going to [the road called] The Vineyard’. Maybe useful for someone first encountering those proper nouns, like someone first encountering Anāthapiṇḍika’s Park, though cumbersome for all those already in the know!
However, if the Pāli does mean ‘Anāthapindika’s Park’, and the inference is known because those listening (in the Buddha’s time) knew the context, then we could also potentially rely on the English readers’ knowledge of the context, as the Pāli seems to for its readers?
Ah I see, thanks, so 200+ years after the Buddha’s death.
Ah yeah. I guess I meant, well… my sense was that we can establish them back that far and then our assumptions take them back to the Buddha. By which I guess I mean we are more certain back to the point at which the schools started diverging, and on that basis, we have some fair assumptions about them going all the way back to the Buddha but lack evidence for differentiating, although it seems we still see evidence of arguments between positions in texts, which seems to indicate divergence appearing on certain topics and so potentially can see some different historical layers even before the school divergence. I remember some divergence of opinion regarding the importance of certain meditative training for example, though I forget exactly whether those arguments are the same in parallel texts.
I don’t think I personally class opinions as non-data. For example, if there is an opinion that passages which exist in parallel schools which have been separate from each other since shortly after the Buddha died, indicates that said passage is an EBT, then the data on which passages have such parallels, is highly significant data for me. And would seem to be for SC too, right? So for me, evidence-based opinions such as these are really useful. And even being easily able to see which passages have parallels, would be very useful for me and I believe others. I’ve sometimes tried to work this out for individual suttas I’ve studied, but this generally has meant clicking on the tab to show parallels, then clicking on the individual parallel texts linked, then running them through auto-translate and trying, often in vain, and potentially taking hours per text with no guarantee of any reliability of results, to determine which passages are in that parallel or not. Whereas for example, if there were a background colour on the English text for each section showing me which parts have parallels or multiple parallels, and which parts have none, that would be eminently helpful. Basically this would be an extension of the parallel function of SC.
Sounds great to me! If there were a tab to switch on and off whether SC attributes passages (or even just whole texts) to the Buddha or not, I would surely be clicking on that option a whole lot! Just as the makers of Shariah law take care to not include unreliable or known inauthentic Hadith in their judgements, so too would I like love an easy way to exclude texts and passages known by (or we can say judged by) SC to be unreliable or inauthentic from my analysis of what the Buddha taught.
For me, and I would suppose many others, then it would be extremely desirable to present that judgement. And there is no need nor desire to present it as fact. Merely present it for what it is - a judgement, an inference. Such inferences are extremely useful. But as yet, extremely inaccessible to the masses. Sharing that would in my opinion be a huge positive, and a kind of democratisation of this almost ‘secret’ knowledge hidden in the minds and works of wonderful experts such as yourself. Now I am not implying there is any motivation to hide it. I am just offering my humble suggestion of a way in which this valuable information could be made readily accessible and digestible. What may be common knowledge to a very small community of experts (such as ‘There is wide consensus that such and such passage is late for X Y and Z reasons’) may actually be far beyond the reach of accessibility to individuals reading said passage and trying to find out what the opinions are regard its age. Just to give an extreme example, it seems most Mahayanists are completely unaware of the vast mountain of evidence of the inauthenticity of the Mahayana sutras, and those with slight knowledge of research are often convinced that the evidence actually shows Mahayana texts are older than any Pāli texts! But the example perhaps more pertinent to this conversation would be me, having read many scholarly sources specifically on EBTs, but still deeply struggling when it comes to wanting to know what the opinions and/or evidence are on even a single sutta or passage from one of the ‘reliable’ nikāyas, as I illustrated about. Even if I had no access to elaboration of evidence and only a simple opinion given by yourself as to even rough date on the scale of what century, that would put me leagues ahead of where I might be and would cause great gratitude and add great value.
And if the policy of SC is specifically to not reveal such evidence-driven opinions, then perhaps my idea of an easily navigable map of the dhamma-vinaya with opinion, even including divergent opinions of different scholars (by column for example, with texts in rows laid out in order of their appearance in the pitakas and even with sub-rows for constituent passages) held on a different site or a wiki or whatever, could be a way of making such information accessible off-site.
The reason an essay would in my opinion be less appropriate, is because of the dilution of the information. Visual presentation is in my opinion key to accessibility. Something specifically easy to navigate and interpret. Though hyperlinks to essays and articles could be very valuable of course, for those who want to examine the reasoning behind the conclusions. In many cases however, the conclusions are the valuable thing people need access to, and may only have time to examine. Kind of like noise vs. signal. An essay dating a text isn’t noise to someone wanting to know all the ins and outs. But for someone needing to quickly check the expected dating of a bunch of texts, having that info right there on the text itself or as available for display as an option in settings, or lacking that, a table of chart of that specific information available somewhere, would be invaluable.
Perhaps I misunderstood when you wrote:
So I guess this means ‘the analysis’ is something that is not the patimokkha.
So I guess you’re saying that there are many differences in the vinayas of different schools, but not in the patimokkha? In which case this would imply there were luxurious monastic buildings before the schools split, and potentially before the Buddha died. So that leaves me to wonder at what point in the Buddha’s teaching career that started, and makes me wonder if the early community may have been more akin to hunter-gatherer lifestyle but perhaps became more ‘urbanised’ as the Sangha grew, in the Buddha’s later age? I think I got similar impressions around the hardcore nature of the Buddha’s Sangha when he was starting out, and maybe a greater tendency of lazy people joining up as it became more mainstream, like the report of the guy relieved that the Buddha was dead, was it perhaps among a group of monks travelling with Sāriputta? Plus the seeming tendency away from jhāna practice in what seems like the later layers of what might still be EBTs, scholars arguing with meditators. So it would make sense to me to see a tendency towards acquiring comfortable lay-type lifestyle and status among the lesser-sincere members as the community grew and lay support for such types proved stable. I wonder if the Sangha acquiring slaves (so I read?) and Brahmin-like status of scholars, and on to feudal-like monastic systems in Tibet also, may represent an extension of that tendency.
I have no qualification to chip in on this but I will anyway foolishly say that I rather like that. It seems to me that some Theravādins seem to take Buddhaghosa’s work as definitively authoritative, relating to the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of ‘canon’ being:
a collection or list of sacred books accepted as genuine
I’m reminded of Rahula’s work ‘What the Buddha Taught’ for example, which Gombrich remarked would better be entitled ‘What Buddhaghosa Taught’! But I will leave such decisions to others! I totally get the point about wanting academics to stick to the insider definition of ‘canon’.
This is Islam’s emic view of its ahadith, but it doesn’t seem to be the view of modern secular scholars. For the latter, all the ahadith, including those which Muslims class as ṣaḥīḥ, are, as putative historical sources, every bit as dodgy as, say, the historical content of the Pali commentaries.
Also throwing doubt on the doctrine that common use of hadith of Muhammad goes back to the generations immediately following the death of the prophet is historian Robert G. Hoyland, who quotes acolytes of two of the earliest Islamic scholars:
“I spent a year sitting with Abdullah ibn Umar (d.693, son of the second Caliph, who is said to be the second most prolific narrator of ahadith, with a total of 2,630 narrations) and I did not hear him transmit anything from the prophet”;
“I never heard Jabir ibn Zayd (d. ca. 720) say ‘the prophet said …’ and yet the young men round here are saying it twenty times an hour”.
