I merely tried to reconcile venerable’s illusory with emptiness as understood for example by Eihei Zenji on his reading of Prajña.
Indeed, it seems only buddhists would argue the fine points of experience being illusory or empty!
To my knowledge, earliest gandhari scrolls (which are the earliest buddhist material in existence) have both Prajña literature along with some mahayanalike agamas, but this might be wrong. Also attached is an article by Jayarava also explaining Prajña as a later development written around Abhidhammas, which is traditionally understood to be late. This is a (potentially disputable) working assumption. I merely mentioned it to show how emptiness metaphysics were ever part of buddhist tradition, from Nikaya/Agamas to later Ch’an/Zen.
Also, the post I reported (which mods took care of rapidly thankfully) mentioned this emptiness matter in a much unkind fashion. I tried to bring it up and reconcile the views to my best of manners and ability. Perhaps I’ve been unsuccessful so.
I think, while the reconstruction work is more important, most people are not able to appreciate the nuances of it, and potentially the discussion here would revolve around the english text. Perhaps that’s a shame.
From a soteriological perspective, to give to a friend for study, this might be true. But from an academic perspective, if somebody wants to understand what the chinese words mean in the translation, they wouldn’t be able to use it to understand that Chinese text is (probably, perhaps) mistranslating from original. In other words, a “correct” literal translation would encapsulate the artifacts of chinese misunderstanding (or deliberate creativity, whichever you prefer), if that’s the claim in the first place.
Which seems to be the tension between Venerable Analayo’s translations and venerable @cdpatton’s work. While there’s a time to understand the truth of the matter, there’s also a time to understand what the text literally means in translation. First is a form of interpretation, the second, translation.
Perhaps venerable @Jayarava you could’ve translated the Chinese literally, and seeing how it’s indian origin is a fictional event, the indian sutra could then be constructed and translated according to how you think the text should’ve been understood.
This would satisfy both the academic curiosity of What does the chinese text mean but also What does the text supposed to mean.
Most people are not going to make sense of the sanskrit, let alone the Chinese. So perhaps shamefully, moreso than his important work of reconstruction, venerable’s most noticed and debated work is undoubtedly going to be the english versions.
My original post wasn’t even a critic of venerable @Jayarava even, just adding my own view about it to read HS as part of the traditions that adopted a metaphysical understanding around it, offering a middle way to use a language that satisfied all parties.
I see it has been contentious.
I will yield away from this matter now and work on my silence.
This has nothing to do with the topic, but I thought you might find it helpful. “Venerable” is generally reserved as a conventional title for Buddhist monastics in English. In English-languge Buddhist spaces, I think that it is always reserved as a translation for monastic titles. Both Jayarava and Charles are lay people.
Maybe you are intentionally using a generally monastic title for lay people, in which case that is of course your decision. But I thought it possible that you were unaware of this because of the nature of internet discussions.
That was aimed at Patton, who continues to make snide and sarcastic comments on an article that he has not read and therefore cannot possibly understand. He’s so hostile that I prefer not to engage him directly in case the stink of it rubs off on me.
I think the 84,000 translation is from Tibetan. I don’t know Tibetan. In the end, their translation sticks to the historically dominant paradigm, especially wrt to Tibetan Buddhism. It was a pleasure to see that they acknowledged some of my early work on the Sanskrit text. But it doesn’t get to grips with my mature understanding as reflected in recent articles.
The opinion you credit to me not, in fact, my opinion; it’s your opinion about what my opinion is. You seem to think that you know more about my opinions than I do. Which is quite funny really, I suppose. You won’t even acknowledge that I’m the leading expert on what my opinion is, let alone my other expertise.
Early Buddhism and Prajñāpāramitā have nothing at all to say on the topic of “reality”. There is no such term in Pāli or Sanskrit (at least as we understand the term in English). If such a “reality” did exist, it would contravene dependent arising. “Reality” is a word that means something in English, and you won’t find that something anywhere in Pāli.
I’ve published on this topic more than once. I can’t make people read, I can only publish and hope. But I’ve done a lot more work on this than anyone will give me credit for.
You have no idea when the Pāli texts were born. No one does. This issue is amply covered in my other recent essay on Historical methods. And as @yeshe.tenley points out, the physical Prajñāpāramitā literature is some 400 years older than the oldest Pāli text. Moreover, the second oldest Pāli text is from the 9th century.
Prajñāpāramitā also starts to appear in China by 178 CE. By contrast, the āgamas were only translated in the 5th century as part of the completist or encyclopedic efforts of Chinese Buddhists to obtain and translate everything. They were never important in China.
We have better primary sources for Prajñāpāramitā than we do for Pāli. And by the 2nd century CE they were already more important to Buddhists in India than āgama texts; long before Pāli even begins to register in the historical record.
If you think you can prove that Pāli is older than Prajñāpārmitā, then have at it. All you need to do is produce a primary source from before the 1st century. Good luck.
Not a claim I have ever made or ever would make. Another straw man.
I have no idea what you are talking about here. It’s word salad without any dressing.
“Most people” is not my audience for an article in an academic journal. In fact, my audience for this work is precisely people who read Chinese and Sanskrit. Yes? The editions are for people who can read the editions. Else, what would be the point?
I have never made my views prescriptive. I merely make a argument, a strong argument I think, for considering that this text can be read another way. I make a case, a strong case I think, that this reading has greater explanatory power applied to the history, philology, and philosophy of this material. Given this, there is a case, a strong case in my view, for exploring this alternative hermeneutic.
In making the strongest case I can, I’m simply doing what all scholars do, especially those who break new ground. But I don’t for a second make the mistake of thinking that because I have a strong case, that I am right. I’m trying to open a dialogue in which my ideas are taken seriously. If, on being taken seriously, it turns out that the evidence actually points elsewhere, then I will be the first to change my mind and endorse the better alternative. I have even taken to spelling out, in simple terms, what kind of evidence would refute my conjectures. While a lot of people are rude about it, no one has provided any evidence that refutes any conjecture of mine.
I’m not talking about quibbling over the translation of this or that character, I’m talking about evidence that refutes my conclusions. Whether I translate kōng as “sky” or “empty” or “absent” is a trivial sideshow AFAIC. It has no bearing at all on my thesis.
My philological work has always been focussed on the editions. My historical work has evolved but is now focussed on the earliest witnesses (the primary sources) and what they tell us about the provenance and evolution of the text. And my philosophical work is an extension of Sue Hamilton’s approach to Pāli: in the absence of any word for, let alone any clear discussion of reality, we have to assume that the texts were not about reality. As it happens, treating them as talking about experience and the cessation of sensory experience makes sense to the vast majority of seriou-minded people I know, whether scholars or practitioners.
I am not a “lay person”. I’m an ordained member of a Buddhist order, with a lifetime commitment to full-time practice.
Titles are elitist claptrap; a leftover of the evil British class system, which I repudiate with all my heart. If a conventional (class-based) form of (respectful) address is required then “Mr Attwood” is the convention. This is formal and accurately reflects my social class and attendant status outside of the hereditary aristocracy and those ennobled for services to the Crown.
From my point of view, calling me Jayarava is the most respectful form of address, because that is the name I received at my ordination from my preceptor and it is the name I prefer to be called.
I want to be clear about the distinctions being made.
If we are talking about the religion vouched for by the earliest PPM text evidence verses the religion vouched for by the earliest text evidence in Palī…
… can the texts from Gāndhāra written in Gāndhārī in the *Kharoṣṭhī script between 100 BCE and 400 CE be said to be an early witness for at least some of the content of the later Palī texts of 400 CE?
I feel this makes perfect sense. The list of things which ‘are not’ to be found within the state of absence is comprehensive. Even the four noble truths are jettisoned. The opposite shore being reached, the raft is no longer needed.
In responding at length, I did take into account your genuine enthusiasm and I didn’t take offence. But this is my life’s work we’re talking about. So, naturally, I feel strongly about seeing it accurately represented. I’m still open to discussing it.
For example, the reasons that new editions were required are quite important, if only because they point to systemic failures, biases, and blindspots amongst professional Buddhist Studies scholars.
And on a personal note, had I encountered a error-free Sanskrit Heart Sutra text in 2012, I would never have pursued this topic. Up to that point, as one can see from my publications up to 2015 and a little after, I was a Pāli-wallah. I learned Sanskrit to improve my Pāli. I learned Chinese to compare Pāli and Āgama texts. I’m not particularly interested in Mahāyāna.
“PPM” is supposed to be prajñāpāramitā?
Such questions are a bit off-topic here and more related to threads on historicity.
I’m not sure we are talking about “the religion vouched for” in any texts. The claim I was responding to was Dogen’s comment: “It is very hard to pin point when Prajña literature was born compared to the corpus that gave birth to Pāli and Chinese Canons.”
This is not a question of “religions”, but of dates.
My point was that we have much earlier evidence for the origins of Prajñāpāramitā than we do for Pāli. Thus Dogen’s claim cannot stand.
That said, you are right to invoke the other Gāndhārī literature contemporaneous with the Gāndhārī Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā.
The fact that Gāndhārī literature has both some Early Buddhist sutra-like material and some Mahāyāna material is problematic for the claim that the sutra-like materials are older, or that they are evidence for the antiquity of Pāli. The supposedly different strata of Buddhist doctrine co-exist in Gāndhārī. They are contemporaneous.
In addition, I’ve argued—in “The Cessation of Sensory Experience and Prajñāpāramitā Philosophy”—that we can see the evidence of an approach that very much resembles the Aṣṭasāhasrikā in some Pāḷi suttas, for example the Cūḷasuññata Sutta (MN 121) and the Kaccānagotta Sutta (SN 12.15). And those suttas that talk about the goal of Buddhism being “the end of the world” (loko anto). Maybe also the Sabba Sutta (SN 35.23) and the one following it which argues that sensory experience (sabbaṃ conceived of as rūpa/cakkhu, saddo/sota, etc) is to be abandoned.
Gomez and Wynn have written about “proto-Madhyamaka” and such ideas - though following Hufeng “Old School Emptiness”, I am wary of the implied teleology in “proto”.
Few examples of meditation instructions survive in Pāḷi. We have the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta and the Ānāpānasati Sutta. And we have the Cūḷasuññata Sutta. And we have hints that the methods in the Cūḷāsuññata Sutta predate Buddhism since this seems to be what the Buddha learned from Ālāra the Kālāma and Uddaka Ramaputta. This suggests the possibility that approaches later characterised as Prajñāpāramitā are every bit as old as the approaches we think of as “Early Buddhism”. They are simply represented differently due to bias in constructing the Mahāvihāra canon.
One cannot argue that the absence of Mahāyāna ideas from canonical Pāli makes the Pāli Canon “earlier”. Apart from the fact that arguments from absence are typically weak, we know that Mahāyāna was practiced in Sri Lanka alongside Theravāda for some time. There was even some Vajrayāna. Subsequently, Sri Lankan Buddhism was deliberately and systematically purged and reduced to Mahāvihāra orthodoxy (of the day), and that other versions of Theravāda were also suppressed. So the absences in the texts may simply reflect this purge. We have no Pāli texts from before the 5th century, so we don’t know what they looked like before this. In fact, in terms of collections of suttas, the earliest evidence is likely much later still (the 5th century gold manuscript described by Janice Stargardt is a Vinaya text). I don’t know the oldest physical Nikāya text. Does anyone else?
We definitely don’t know the extent of texts that were not preserved in Pāli. But if Pāli was contemporaneous with the Gāndhārī literature then we would have to posit that a great deal of it is missing: all of the Mahāyāna material, for a start.
Moreover, the idea that collections of suttas were important outside of Sri Lanka in the few centuries spanning the beginning of the Common Era is contradicted by the failure to preserve such collections in Gāndhārī and their late arrival in China ca 4th or 5th centuries. The earliest Chinese translations, like the Gāndhārī texts, are a mixed bag, much more pluralistic in character and already including such Mahāyāna classics as Aṣṭasāhasrikā.
When I was working on Āgama texts, I noted that the Chinese versions seem more organised and systematised than the Pāli counterparts. But was this a development in time, or were the Gāndhārī Buddhists at that time simply more organised and systematic? We don’t know.
A lot of very poor methodology has been employed around such questions. Religious scholars are an unreliable bunch because their religion is more important to them than scholarship. Or worse, they equate their religion views with “truth” and simply ignore counterfactual evidence and/or bend the evidence to fit the hypothesis.
It’s so blatantly obvious that Prajñaparamita is relying on earlier material which corresponds to what we find in the Āgama and early Abhidharma literature. And it’s clear that the audience would have been familiar with this literature, at least some of it. It’s embarrassing if scholars would think otherwise.
This doesn’t mean the Pāli or Chinese Āgamas as a whole are earlier. They may have been open to editing much later than, say, certain sections of Prajñaparamita literature. And it isn’t to say that some of the intended meaning or ideas are not also representative of ideas in early Buddhism as well. But from the unexplained lists of dharmas, the character dynamics, the ideology of the Buddha, his disciples, and his biography, etc., the Prajñaparamita literature is not early Buddhist literature. This much we should be clear on.
As I understand the arguments made above, what seems to be stated is that there is no way to tell if the Pali sutta and abhidhamma pitakas, as we have them today, predate the Wisdom texts. Certainly there seems to be a later response to an earlier body of texts, but who can say what they were?
Perhaps the S and A pitakas were closed after the Wisdom texts appeared.
Eh? Why is it so blatantly obvious. Explain your reasoning and evidence please. I don’t think it has been demonstrated at all. You’re calling upon hyperbole to make the case and not any kind of actual reasoning or evidence. Do you have any?
Thanks for this. I did think you were a bit harsh on @Dogen but I did not want to comment as I respect you too and understand you are naturally “passionate” (if you will excuse me using this word) about the Heart Sutra.
Reading the Gandhāri texts also woke me up to the realisation that Pali texts are not “early” - they just represent a heavily censored version of the full range of what the Buddha may or may not have taught. Reading your translation of your editions made me realise the Heart Sutra is every bit compatible with what I consider to be the Buddha’s “core soteriology” (where the word “core” does not imply historic or “early” but a consideration of what seems to be a set of integrated and related teachings that are internally consistent and non contradictory - all based on my opinion only obviously).
I also agree the Chinese āgamas seem to be a little more logically organised and may hark back to an earlier revision of these texts, without the “bloat” that is in the Pali canon. The Abhidhamma Vibhaṅga also seems to allude to an earlier, more logically organised subset of what was considered the Buddha’s core teachings.
Haha. I think we’ve seen a lot of that in these forums too. Which is why I decided recently I am not a Buddhist, indeed, I probably never was, judging by the behaviour of typical “Buddhists.” But there are always exceptions, and I count some people in this forum as having the maturity to be tolerant and open to critical analysis of the Buddha’s teachings without the necessarily of “sutta-flinging” (a phrase I borrowed from @Dogen) or “I am right and you have wrong views” opinions.
The Pali texts may represent earlier teachings compared to Mahayana, but in my (probably not so humble opinion) they all show signs of redaction, editing and modification, so whether they truly represent Buddha’s teachings or not is debatable. Various scholars, including Gombrich and even Sujato, point to evidence of even such doctrines as the 4 truths and the 8fold path indicating presence of modifications.
My hypothesis (unproven) is that the Pali canon at some stage went through a “censorship” process whereby suttas not deemed to be “authentic” were discarded from the canon. Unfortunately what is regarded as authentic or not represent personal opinions of the editors. The canon was then “padded out” with new suttas that are generated/synthetic in order to reinforce what were the core beliefs of the editors. As such, the Pali canon today represents a highly biased view of what the Buddha taught. They are neither “early” nor “late” but “different.”
It is beyond my capability to determine what the Buddha taught vs what was added on or modified. I have opinions of course, but my opinions can be challenged.
I’ve suggested to @Dogen that it may be possible to do cluster analysis (k-means or otherwise) to group the texts by literary style, but this is complicated by the need to have a working and adequate Pali embedding model, which in turns requires a good Pali lemmatisation algorithm.
Then, based on analysing these clusters, perhaps we can isolate and trace the evolution of Buddhist thinking. Whether such analysis will result in being able to work backwards to what might be the “original” thinking by a “historic Buddha” is completely open at the moment. I would love to see someone attempt to do this.
What to think of all these endless sutta’s to see the khandha’s as not me, not mine, not my self, anicca, dukkha, anatta. Or the elements, or the senses, the sense contacts, the sense vinnana’s, the intention arising based uon them? Are those sutta’s not about meditation instructions?
Or all those about developing this or that perception? Or, those about developing metta, karuna etc?
Prajñāpāramitā is routinely said to be a complete break with the past and entirely novel.
The idea that Prajñāpāramitā draws on Abhidharma is, in my view, simply false. I see no signs of this at all.
Gosh, if you have evidence for who the audience of Prajñāpāramitā was and how they reacted I would very much like to see it.
And yet, they mostly do think otherwise.
None of this makes sense to me. It appears to be based on unspoken assumptions about what Early Buddhism was, that are largely based on naive views of the dating of the Pāli canon. As I say, we have no evidence of a Pāli canon from before the 5th century CE. We may conjecture that it was composed earlier than this, but we don’t know.
Strictly speaking the prajñāpāramitā literature is contemporary with the oldest forms of Buddhist literature: i.e. the Gāndhārī manuscripts, which reflect considerable pluralism.
Prajñāpāramitā has been broadly misunderstood because it has been interpreted through Zen and Madhyamaka lenses, and thus suffer from what Huifeng Matthew Orsborn has called the “Madhyamka telos”. D. T. Suzuki and Conze played a huge part in this, but were not solely responsible. Suzuki had his own thing going on, and Conze was heavily influenced by Tibetan mythology (and magical thinking).
Every time I go back to the primary sources to try to confirm something that scholars have declared settled, I find evidence that contradicts the settled view. I think Orsborn’s Old School Emptiness is the most comprehensive and reliable attempt to address such questions, but it remains a rare book (I got my copy directly from Matt) that few people have read.
The existing paradigms for understanding the history, philology, and philosophy of Prajñāpāramitā are largely bunk, and certainly in the case of the Heart Sutra they are completely bunk. A great deal of deliberate deception has occurred in antiquity and modern times.
I don’t think anything about this is as clear as you seem to think. The one thing that is lacking across the board is clarity.
To try to wrench this thread back on-topic, this is part of why I decided to revise the existing editions of the Heart Sutra. The existing editions were plagued by errors ancient and modern that contributed to the unclarity. And Orsborn’s observations—especially on the phrase yǐwúsuǒdégù 以無所得故— were key to unravelling it all.
The only “closed” canon of Buddhist texts that we know of is precisely the Mahāvihāra canon of Pāli texts aka “the Pāli Canon”.
No such canon was ever transmitted to China. None has ever been found or alluded to in India. The Chinese and Tibetans invented their own, very different, canons. The Gāndhārī texts are a mixture of Hīnayāna, Mahāyāna, and hard-to-classify texts. And note that the distinction between small and large vehicles texts was not at all clear in China and it wasn’t until the 5th century, and the influence of Kumārajīva, that they really got a handle on the difference.
As for other texts, they seem to have continued to be “composed” while there was life in Indian Buddhism.
So the whole idea of “canons of Buddhist texts” appears to be a false generalisation based on taking the Mahāvihāra canon as representative.
It’s possible that the Āgama texts were organised and standardised by the Chinese translators, since we don’t have originals for them.
@Mods, no one seems to be discussing the stated topic and most seem to be more interested in the history of Prajñāpāramitā. It should be a separate thread.
Orsborn’s book Old School Emptiness is available as an e-book/kindle format on a famous bookselling website.
(Sorry to be roundabout here, but trying not to appear to be advertising any particular site on the web).
