I wasn’t surprised of this, because scholarly or academic study of Buddhism with textual criticism and historical approach is different from traditional approach. In traditional approach we believe the Buddha has taught the first discourse with the same content (Four Noble Truths & Eightfold Noble Path) as we have now in the Buddhist canon and all the Buddha’s discourses have been preserved by 500 Arahants in so-called the Buddhist Council in a cave near Rajagaha three months after the Buddha’s demise. But in historical approach, we cannot be certain about this. For example, there are scholars said that the First Council did not happened historically or the Four Noble Truths is not the Buddha’s first teaching. Yet, I have not found any scholarly work or academic paper about whether the five khandhas is early or late.
It is a known fact that the historical critical method emerged first in Europe as historical-biblical criticism. In the 18th century, it had focused on questions like Moses’ authorship of the Pentateuch, before evolving into the methods of literary and redaction criticism we see today. I was attempting to state fact, not lob insult.
Questions are great, but the framework in which those questions are asked isn’t completely irrelevant. Part of the assumption of the historical critical method is that we can mine texts to find truths beyond their face value. This works out OK for Christianity, but gets a bit harder for Buddhism due to basically less written material (compare thousands of versions of Christian texts to only a small handful of versions of Buddhist texts). I had referenced Ehrman as my personal hero who has used Christian textual criticism to do great things, showing us that the Gospel is not an accurate record of the teaching of Jesus. This is only possible in Christianity due to the rather extreme nature of Christian doctrinal development in relation to the trinity. Buddhism as of yet, has not produced an Ehrman who can totally upend what is already regarded by sensible people as basic presectarian Buddhism.
Nonetheless, comparing the nikayas across versions in Buddhism has also managed to yield some insights into textual composition and development, sometimes confirming the position if the commentary itself that text was added or changed. But even the people who are very good at this sort of thing and do it professionally haven’t shown the same type of radical doctrinal development as Ehrman. Doctrinal development in the nikayas is present but typically much milder. And also very obvious to people who read these texts professionally. I am only talking about development within the EBTs themselves though.
There is a kind of natural limitation to how far the text critical methodology can be stretched in the absence of more witness texts with different readings. I.e. textual criticism as “criticism” gets hard when all your witness texts say pretty much the same thing. There are methodological frameworks in which textual criticism works, such as using evidence external to the text itself, as well as internal evidence. External evidence might be something like a witness text with a different reading. In this case, it might be a version of the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta without the khandhas (i.e. the thing we don’t have). Internal evidence would be a hint from the text itself that development has occurred. There are a set of Latin maxims which describe this, like that the shorter reading is to be preferred.
Counting the number of occurrences of a theme in a given text, by itself, is not a particularly sound basis to make further inferences. This is because Buddhist texts have multiple genres, and the absence of a particular topic could equally be explained by genre features, or just the scope of the topic of the discourse.
So what we have here is, in fact…
The use of a methodology which was developed for Christian texts
…
Extended to a situation which does not have the kind of internal or external evidence on which this methodology primarily relies.
When people try to advance ideas without evidence in medicine, or who blithely overstep the methodological constraints of research based science, it can legitimately be called conspiracy. Especially when the credibility of a legitimate body is called into question without evidence.
When people try to do the same thing in Buddhism, in this case, calling the legitimacy of the core portions of the Buddhist textual account of the Buddha’s teachings across multiple canons into question, it is in the wider interests of the community to point it out as conspiracy.
While it may not be what you were after, I understand that answering the questions asked is also a legitimate use of the forum.
Nobody mentioned Theravada. I was talking about the basic doctrinal categories of presectarian Buddhism.
Insulting people by defilements is a specifically prohibited category of insult in Buddhism, termed a dubbhasita in the vinaya. Silabbataparamasa refers to perversions of morality which only arise in the absence of genuine insight into the nature of the khandhas. How could you possibly know whether another person is a puthujjana or not, when even the Buddha’s own disciples had to repeatedly ask the Buddha about this?
Sorry, this is a bit of a side topic…
I am in strong agreement with most of this, excepting when it was said,
Please forgive my entry-level Pali, but does a dvanda interpretation truly encompass the entirety of its meaning? Could it not possibly also simultaneously understood as a tappurisa? (“named form[s]”) Or as having a tappurisa facet to it?
(Perhaps tappurisa is not the most accurate compound classification; nevertheless, I think it should be clear what I am driving at.)
It sounds like what you are describing is an adjectival compound, a kammadhāraya.
But to move beyond just a conspiracy I wonder if you can give some Pāli sutta examples where this reading would be plausible. I’ve never heard or seen this compound described as anything but a dvanda.
For example here is Saṃyutta Nikāya 12.2:
Katamañca, bhikkhave, nāmarūpaṃ?
Vedanā, saññā, cetanā, phasso, manasikāro—idaṃ vuccati nāmaṃ.
Cattāro ca mahābhūtā, catunnañca mahābhūtānaṃ upādāyarūpaṃ.
Idaṃ vuccati rūpaṃ. Iti idañca nāmaṃ, idañca rūpaṃ. Idaṃ vuccati, bhikkhave, nāmarūpaṃ.
Yes, indeed. Thank you. This is the confusion I was alluding to: kammadhāraya (or [more properly?] kammadhāraya-tappurisa) as a subset of tappurisa, a distinction which I have never been (and still am not) wholly clear on. In any case,…
I assume by “conspiracy” you mean
To which, I would say that there are definite limits to a wholly text-based method of critical evaluation; we should be prepared to go beyond the textual record and employ other research tools such as logic.
Logically, then, in a compound which is indisputably and exclusively a dvanda such as sāriputta-moggallāna, we might imagine the two individual components as travelling along parallel vectors: that is, though they are coupled together by the author of the compound based on some shared relation, there is no logical intersection implied by the compound itself. That is, their relationship is not imagined to be one which includes any conditioning–either unidirectionally or mutually–taking place between them.
To the passage you cite, it is an exegesis despite its appearing in a sutta. As such, it is necessarily analytical: by which I refer to the idea of bheda in the Abhidhamma. Naturally, such a definition would present them as disjointed; for it is not–nor was it intended to be–a practical reflection of how nāmarūpa functions in the real world, which, according to my observation, is in a relationship of mutually conditionality. See, especially, the references to the functional definition of nāmarūpa given in DN 15 which were mentioned earlier in the thread.
Again, I am not arguing for not seeing nāmarūpa as a dvanda, but simply acknowledging that there may be other facets to the relationship implied by this compound besides just a parallel pairing.
My apologies @Gabriel; this went much farther off-topic for far longer than I anticipated. @stephen, if you (or anyone else) would like to continue this discussion, I’d be happy to begin a new thread with you.
I don’t know if this is useful to anybody, but here’s a link to Gethin’s “The Five Khandhas: Their Treatment in the Nikāyas and Early Abhidhamma.” It’s great, but it pales in scope and comprehensiveness to Vetter’s The Khandha Passages in the Vinayapitaka and the Four Main Nikayas, which I don’t think can be uploaded or linked to here due to copyright issues, but which is certainly accessible online, though it takes some looking.
(If I am mistaken and the aforementioned copyright issues are non-issues, please inform me.)
If these are not useful tools, feel free to disregard.
Just to add to some of the excellent comments made by others:
One of the criteria I use is not just the appearance in the Nikayas, but also in the Vinaya, the Abhidhamma, the late Khuddaka, and of course the parallels in Chinese etc.
Now in all these cases we do see the khandhas appear. In fact they were fundamental to the presentations of the Dhamma, being emphasized in the first and second sermons, and forming part of the foundation of many Abhidhamma treatises.
So what are we saying here? That the entire pre-sectarian Buddhist community conspired to invent a new teaching and impose it on every textual collection? Sounds weird! Who does that?
IMHO the more interesting question is the extent to which the khandhas are pre-Buddhist. The fact that they are mentioned a number of time to or by non-Buddhists and everyone just assumes we know what they mean suggests that were no innovation. But so far as I know there’s no mention of them in known pre-Buddhist texts. Perhaps they are something of a formalized scheme that derived from earlier ideas; we can certainly find most of them in the Upanishads in one way or another.
@Suvira I am not a monastic and therefore not prohibited from anything, however I apologise for my statement and withdraw it. I meant it to be taken as a reference to an attachment to scripture and not as a perversion. Again I apologise, I am still finding my way with regards to the kind of talk that is acceptable here.
Metta
Thanks to both Ayyā Suvira and Bhante Sujato for pointing out these things.
I had always assumed that the approach of thinking about the ‘self’ in terms of the Five Aggregates was an innovation of the Buddha, and have also not seen it mentioned in pre-Buddhist texts.
Perhaps it’s a case of being true until proven otherwise.
I’m thinking of things like the Brahmajala Sutta, where many of the ideas about the self are phrased in terms of the khandhas. “My self is percipient”, “my self experiences only happiness”, “my self has form”, and so on.
And this more or less agrees with what we find in the Upanishads, where several such theories are found.
Clearly at some point it was felt necessary to gather these disparate theories and organize them into the five khandhas. The question is, was it the Buddha who did this, or someone prior?
Incidentally, I gave a talk last night on the khandhas if anyone is interested!
It also seems relevant to ask if any or all of the 5A were ever viewed before from the perspective of being ‘taken up’ / ‘appropriated’/ ‘clung to’, which is fundamental to the Buddha’s conception of dukkha and (an)attā.
Wow! Could this possibly be the “true” or “original” function of the 5K teaching? (I’m being facetious with those two words; please, no one waste their valuable time responding to them.) This is the first I have ever heard or considered this viewpoint, but it seems that it would satisfy many of the disparate concerns we have here on this thread very nicely.
With regard to my methodology- I am not attempting to perform the textual critical method of Erham or anyone else, I am merely observing that the language used to explicate the teaching seems to differ in SN as compared to MN and DN, especially if DN22 MN10 and DN16 DN33 and DN34 are put to one side. This is true of the aggregates, I would also say that the language describing Dependant Origination changes from DN to MN and SN (although SN does give the 10 link dependant origination once alongside the 12 link version) The progression of “suffering arising ceasing path” to “truth of suffering…” to “noble truth of suffering…” is another example. The prominence of the monk koṭṭhika in SN compared to the other N. The relative prominence of the four foundations of mindfulness to the four jhana formula in SN compared to the other N. The structural similarity of SN to Abhidhamma matikas. These are the observations I have made so far regarding SN after this forum helped me to discover, along with suttta central itself, the wonderful tools of digital Pali reader and others that I have been using, and while my method has certainly not been rigorous my impression is that a rigorous methodology could be developed and used to underpin these examples.
So I think that I do have a collection of evidence that taken together could be used to argue that SN is intermediate between DN and MN and the Abhidhamma.
I am not claiming that any of these texts, including the Abhidhamma are not EBT’s, or that any of these teachings are not pre-sectarian Buddhism, or that we should interpret the teachings in any radical new way, just positing a sequence of development of those texts.
Metta
Joseph, if you were to give 40 years of oral teachings to a wide variety of audiences in many locations, don’t you think your language would vary a bit?
Hi @stephen ! I am getting to grips with the understandings and assumptions of all my new friends here in the forum and have perhaps been a bit quick to “snap” at people who’s views differ from my own so to clarify:
I do not believe that the 4 Nikayas where composed as we have them now during the lifetime or immediately after the death for f the Buddha.
I do not believe that the specific words and phrases asserted to have occurred at specific times and places in the suttas as we have them now are the specific words and phrases spoken by the Buddha at those specific times and places.
I do not believe that the Sutta Pitaka is what Ananda remembered the Buddha saying and repeated at the first council.
In not believing these things I do believe that my beliefs are in line with the current secular academic consensus about the Nikayas as we have them now.
BUT:
I understand that there are many diligent, genuine and serious people who do believe 1-3 above and I respect their right to do so and would love to continue to have fruitful and robust conversations with them that deepen my understanding of and engagement with the dhamma.
As a handy reference I find the following arguments unconvincing:
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That the differences in specific doctrinal terminology is explained by the 45 year period of the dispensation.
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That the atthakavagga metre and vocabulary can be explained by an appeal to poetry often being “old-timey”
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That the differences between DN, MN, SN, and AN can be explained by appeal to an “intended audience”
These arguments are often put forward by monastic scholars and while they may be convincing to believers in 1-3 above I doubt they appear convincing to any secular academic.
Lastly on my own position:
I understand myself to be a practicing Buddhist who has been convinced of the truth of the teaching and am working to mindfully observe and extinguish greed hatred and egotism from my life.
I think that from the atthakavagga to the prajnaparamita and beyond the teaching is fundamentally consistent, congruent, useful, illuminating different facets in different works.
I think that contemporary non sectarian scholarship is a legitimate way to engage with the material, on equal but not superior footing to traditional approaches - I think that since I was raised in a non-Buddhist country that the secular academic tradition of scholarship probably IS my native tradition so I am merely practicing my Buddhism within my tradition.
Lastly I think that for me trying to be a decent person in my daily life and trying to find time for secluded meditation are equally as important to reading and understanding the texts.
Metta
I just want to second your entire post, but this bit is the basic takeaway for myself, who’s been comparing parallels for a while as I translate them. The upshot isn’t very remarkable when it comes down to doctrinal development. Basically, there’s additional ideas added by Abhidharmists around the periphery of the EBT canon that extended ideas or fleshed out practices, but it’s nothing earthshaking. It’s more like filling in intellectual gaps or trying to curtail debate over ambiguities. The big revelation is long since passed us in Buddhist Studies, which is that Mahayana Buddhism is a later development not as old as the “sravaka vehicle”. As I’ve said elsewhere on the forum, without any older witnesses of Buddhist texts that the fragments from 1st c. BCE, we’ve hit the limit of our knowledge.
Oh, and I just remembered another thing I wanted to say; The experience for me with regard to applying the “text-critical” methods to the EBT’s rather than the Christian texts has been to greatly deepen my conviction in the EBT material, not because there are no results at all, I have indicated in my other post some of the things I think are evident, but rather that to me, even though there is evidence of terminological and language development and therefore evidence that the (word for word) literature does not all originate with one historical figure, the truth, or “underlying philosophy” (I use that term for want of better) remains absolutely consistent across the material, even when the language or terminology seems to shift, the thing being taught remains totally consistent. (which for me is the most profound evidence that the thing being taught was the teaching of a singular individual)
Another example not so much from textual criticism was for me the ten link to twelve link dependent origination thing which was really troubling for me for a time until I saw that the teaching is not essentialist and mechanical, rather phenomenological and analytic, and so of course mind and body depend on one another and of course mind depends on choices made from ignorance and of course mind depends on what is clung to, all of these are true and perfectly consistent - in fact it was reading Nagarjuna and Madyamika that helped me overcome my tendency to want to see the teaching on Dependent origination as some kind of substantive mechanical ontology - so I had this wonderful experience where I not only realized that what I had thought might be a contradiction in the EBT teaching, and therefore evidence of something rotten in the state of denmark was actually evidence of the depth and flexibility of the teaching and its applicability not just to “ontology” but psychology and to rebirth and all these other things, and it was a “Mahayana” thinker who made me realize this, which led me to seeing that despite obvious textual evolution and change in emphasis, that actually a lot of the Mahayana material was in deep agreement with the EBT’s.
So I guess I just wanted to say that while we may take different approaches to the material I think we arrive at similar conclusions, that is that the EBT’s present a coherent and consistent teaching conducive of liberation from suffering. We just maybe disagree on on what we take to be the guarantor of that fact, with me finding much comfort in interrogating the material and continuing to find reassurance when my shaking of it fails to shake out any contradiction, and you no needing such reassurance having already gained the conviction and confidence in the teaching that I am still working towards.
Metta
I am not sure this is totally fair, at least it’s certainly not what I see asserted here, @Suvira asserts that the material can be reliably attributed to the Buddha, which pushes the limit of knowledge several centuries earlier than 1st c. BCE. intermediate to that position @sujato marshalls plenty of good arguments (and IMHO a couple of bad ones 
) to locate the bulk of the texts prior to Ashoka. The Ashokan edicts themselves which are certainly pre 1st c. BCE at the very least confirm that someone called Rahula was a figure in a teaching. Numismatics and epigraphy and archaeology can and have been used to put forward arguments that inform many aspects relevant to the content of EBT’s.
While we might not have physical manuscript witnesses to anything prior to the time you indicate we certainly do have the texts themselves, and it’s not like that’s a small corpus, we are talking about thousands of suttas that can be compared to each other and to their parallels, my view is there is decades if not generations of fruitful scholarship to be had here, my own pet thesis of the moment, which i have re-christend form “DN is the earliest” to “SN is intermediate between DN/MN and Abbhidhamma” is something I have not seen presented in academic publication before, and that is just one angle of approach amongst many that I am sure could be used to justify Honors or Masters or PhD thesis’ going forward - which is something I very much hope to see happen, as while I think Theravada appears to be thriving in my home country of Australia, I am not convinced that the same can be said for “Buddhist Studies”
Metta
I think people are expecting way too much when it comes to trying to differentiate between “early” and “late” EBTs. It’s enough to recognize the EBT canons as the earliest genre of Buddhist scriptures that exist. Are they the earliest canon to exist? No, they represent a stage of development beyond that point in history. They are the closest thing to it that we have. We can weed out later influences from abhidharma, jataka, and avadana writers. That’s true.
We can also do cross canon text critical work, which I think is largely what scholars like Analayo have been engaged in. Which is to say, looking for evidence of corruptions in the Pali suttas by looking at their parallels.
We can also trace a general history of how Buddhism developed in that middle period when Mahayana Buddhism was still incubating, Abhidharma reigned supreme, and sutras became less important. We can try to untangle the relationships between the different EBT canons a bit, though it’s ultimately a conundrum because we are missing large chunks of the parallel canons. But there is a great deal of material to work with. Too much, really. Way too much. I personally feel there are some interesting things we can learn if we could process all of it, perhaps there is some way to statistically discover the earliest EBT suttas. Anecdotally, it’s pretty frustrating to do that because all the canonical material looks varyingly old and new. It’s just difficult to say much more than, “Well, this parallel is more developed than that one.” Or: “Wow, all these parallels are pretty different. This sutta must not be from the oldest strata, else why would that be?” It’s a wondering kind of business.
Ayya @suvira — I don’t think I understand your point about Christian vs. Buddhist historical criticism at all. I’m saying this as someone who has a lot more familiarity with Christian than with Buddhist historical criticism, fwiw.
I don’t agree with this. Textual criticism is not really the main reason why our knowledge of early Christianity has ben upended. Biblical manuscripts don’t vary that much, at least no more so than the Suttas/Agamas….if anything, there is less variation between the different manuscripts of the New Testament as there is between the Suttas and Agamas. Yes, there are some interesting additions (like the Johannine Comma), but most of it’s stuff like a few words missing here and there that don’t really change the meaning of the text.
What’s more important is analysis of what’s there even in just the “received” text. Take, for example, the Pauline Corpus — there are 13 letters in the New Testament that claim to be written by Paul. But scholars today can only be confident about Pauline authorship of 7 of them. The reason for that is not because of discovering discrepancies in the manuscripts. No….it’s from looking at the received text and realizing the writing style, theology, and historical situations seem to vary from letter to letter. It’s kinda like the work some Buddhologists do when they determine whether the meter of a certain Pali verse is “late” or “early,” or when they try to detect proto-Abhidhammic material in a sutta ( which would betray lateness).
I’m confused by your point here…. the doctrine of the Trinity was developed generations after the Gospels were written. The Trinity is to the gospels as the Bodhisattva path is to the Suttas. Establishing that the Trinity is late has nothing to do with the reliability of the gospels.
I agree….but how is this different than the Bible?
FWIW, to be clear, I’m deeply skeptical of the claims here that the 5A are late. I’m just not at all getting your point about Biblical vs. Buddhist historical criticism.