I mean before what we have today. At this point, we have fragments from 1st c. BCE that were the basis for a re-orientation in how scholars of Early Buddhism understood why Chinese Buddhist translations are very different from the late Sanskrit texts that they were compared with, and so forth. We could compare them to Gandhari fragments, and they matched! Aha! That’s why Chinese transliterations are so different than Sanskrit words sometimes. And so on. We didn’t know these things before that.
It was similar to the discovery of Gnostic texts and the Dead Sea Scrolls for Christian scholars.
And, yes, I agree that it looks that may be the limit of what can be discovered because of the climate of India and the distance in time.
Yes, it’s significant that we can see certain teachings appear to be newer than others because the lists are disordered from one canon to the next. That is important. Disordered lists though are common outside of that solid core like the five aggregates and eightfold path, and they often agree on the beginning and end.
You’re right that the number ten seems to have become popular at some later time. Ten paramitas developed later, and there’s a list of the eightfold path that adds two items to make ten. And there’s the famous Avatamsaka Sutra that uses teachings in the tens of tens throughout.
Isn’t that interesting, Gene? Yes, SA 684 is the one I mentioned that I think might have originally been five powers for arhats and five powers for the Tathagata. Then it turned into ten somewhere along the line.
Thanks for the other references. I haven’t tried to study all of these various lists of powers (bust translating for the most part!), just the one that became the Tathagata’s ten powers. Interesting that in the Theravada the arhat was given ten powers by expanding the five from the 37 factors, but in SA they don’t reach that number equal to the Tathagata’s.
We see the development in existing sutras in this case. Isn’t there a smaller list for the Tathagata somewhere in Pali? I tried to find when I wrote the post about it, but couldn’t at the time. Time! What a constraint it is.
Sorry that was a typo, I meant contents, not contexts! It seems you got my meaning though.
That is a statement hard to understand for me. It doesn’t answer the question.
Great! So we agree that studying early parallel texts is very useful for understanding the past.
Yes, and the popular 10 bhūmi scheme, though there are many other sets of bhūmis. Also - regarding the ‘10-fold path’ - I remember in the suttas somewhere, simply the 8fold path plus the 2 fruits. It’s funny because some people, anti-jhāna people, go on and on about jhāna not being the ‘goal’. Well, yes, that’s true, but the Noble Eightfold Path is the jhāna path! And no-one seems to be vehemently warning everyone away from the Noble Eightfold path because it’s not the goal! As a remedy for this confusion I think putting the path together with its 2 fruits into a 10fold system is a good idea to make thins very clear.
Going back to the story of the earliest manuscripts we have… I’ve seen many Mahayanists mistaking discoveries of early Mahayana texts as proof that their tradition is older than the EBTs. This is of course an erroneous position. So I do think that it’s vital not to confuse the evolution of written compositions, with the evolution of oral compositions.
Yes. I’m glad you realized I wasn’t arguing something like that.
I don’t know. I think the earliest bodhisattva texts are pretty old, but they aren’t Mahayana in the sense that their authors thought of themselves as Mahayanists. Still, Mahayana arose out of those texts, so I’d say they are derived from EBTs. I mean, there’s a Maitreya sutra in the Madhyama Agama. Apparently, it wasn’t considered Mahayana when it was incorporated into the Sarvastivada canon. Then, again, it manages to be a Maitreya sutra without actually mentioning bodhisattvas. It’s an odd duck.
This has been an incredibly difficult thread to follow–indeed, one I find I may have to re-read and re-read to grasp all the nuances of all the arguments. I feel I will benefit from understanding both of your arguments irrespective of whether I come to agree with either of you. So my gratitude to both of you for sticking it out this far. That said, I wanted to mention this,
I really like this! Can we talk more about this? Perhaps an entirely separate thread would be needed? Forgive me, but, this is too pregnant a statement to let pass without remark.
Thank you very much for this kind response and link. It shows me, however, that my post was not specific enough. What was intriguing about @Senryu 's post was the claim that
Even with the caveat that jhāna is not “the goal,” this is still a somewhat bold, categorical statement–or, at the very least, one that calls for some discussion, I think (unless there’s already some discussion in the archives).
It sounds as if you mean anything pre-Mahayana is ‘Early Buddhism’? I feel sure that is not how ‘Early Buddhism’ is used as a term in the field of Early Buddhism.
Sure, the bodhisattva concept is older than the Mahayana. But it’s not from the Buddha’s teachings. It must have taken a while for this misunderstanding to develop. (The misinterpretation of ‘bodhisatta’, them taking the adjective ‘satta’ meaning ‘sakta’, to be the noun ‘sattva’). Incidently, the Buddha only used this adjective in describing himself specifically in the period after he left home, until he became enlightened. I.e. all the time he was striving for (sakta) enlightenment.
Once that concept was popularised, and many stories added to the collection of teachings, such as folk tales supposed to be the ‘lives of the bodhisattva’, the logical conclusion became that if there are two paths - the path the Buddha taught his disciples, resulting in arahantship; and the 3 countless aeon length path of the bodhisattva, to become a Buddha, then, it’s logically to want to have a go for the better, higher goal. Especially since as time went by, the level of the Buddha had been progressively increased, as is the natural tendency of religions regarding their founder.
So ‘arahant’ was still great, but ‘buddha’ was becoming increasingly better. And now you have a category of being, created by a linguistic misunderstanding and the tendency to mythologise, who are on the path to that bigger better goal. Is your mouth watering yet?
So, a few textual compositions were created, for the few men who were fanatic enough to want to undertake this 3 countless aeon long path. They would even have to avoid even attaining stream entry, for all that time until their last life or last few lives (attaining stream entry automatically and immediately limits your number of future lives). But they were into the idea. So, this new movement arose, only for men, and was explicitly not meant to be followed by most people. They were meant to follow the standard teachings, the arahant path. And that was seen as the proper thing to do for most people, and also what they would themselves teach their disciples in that extremely distant future when they become a buddha in a land devoid of Buddhism.
Now, it took a while for that to catch on. Centuries. I heard it caught on abroad first, probably because the local people didn’t know what was what, it was all new to them so they didn’t know these were newly created ideas. And I guess the Chinese elite liked magical thinking and the various fancy elements of these new teachings. Eventually popularity spread back to India, and when they had enough dominance, they pushed the difference between arahants and buddhas even more, demoting arahants as selfish and not really enlightened, etc. And that path, which the Buddha taught, they then named ‘Hīnayāna’, the vile/despicable/deficient vehicle/path.
So yes, there are old bodhisattva texts. There are also old abhidhamma texts. But the Buddha did not even use the bodhisattva concept.
Sure. What do you want to know?
Ah, about that. Well, the Buddha tried various methods, none of which succeeded. He then remembered being a kid entering jhāna. To cut a long story short, he concluded 'that (jhāna) is the path to enlightenment.
He then practiced jhāna and as a consequence, became enlightened. And then he taught the jhāna path to his disciples. Specifically, in the formula of doctrine, this is expressed as the Noble Eightfold path, which he specifically taught as being a path of successive steps, each one being requisite for the next. Well, what is the final step? Jhāna. (Sammā samādhi is specifically defined as the 4 jhānas - see Mahāsatipatthāna sutta for example). That is the whole point of the path, it is specifically to get you to the last step. And what is the result of that? The 2 fruits.
Every argument against this I have ever seen, has failed to stand up to analysis.
The problem with the presentation that you’ve made, which is well done by the way, is that it has no solid data to place these logical events in time. When we say “later” it could mean a year or two after the Buddha’s Parinirvana or it could be a couple centuries later. We don’t actually know these specifics because there’s no way to judge beyond looking at textual canons that were put together when writing became more common.
Some of the trouble we still have I think is, again, I’ve looked closely at the Chinese materials and I come from a different background than say, Bhikkhu Analayo. It’s great that Pali scholars are involved in this; they have important perspectives to add. But we still haven’t had much input from the other side of Buddhist studies beyond Yinshun and a few scholar who followed up on some of his ideas.
Okay, something I’d like to do next is to get back to looking at actual parallels. It may take me a couple days to put together the post, but I want to present a full set of parallels for a small sutra, MA 1 (AN 7.68 for Pali readers). It’s a lot to compare, so I may end up creating a Google Sheet or something. Then, we can think about the specifics and the issues that arise from the picture that we see in front of us, rather than endlessly summarizing well-known consensus theories and critiquing them.
Even more difficult and problematic in all this is that, most of the texts we are comparing are Sthavira texts. We have very few Mahasamghika texts (relatively speaking, though if EA is Mahasamghika, we have way more than we think). So even if we compare, say, all the parallels in Chinese, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Gandhari and Pali, most of these are Sthavira. So, to be really sure that a text was shared by all or most early schools, we’d need something from the Mahasamghika to compare it with, since they were the other main school after the first schism.
Because of this, we need a lot of comparative studies on the Mahasamghika texts that do survive (and how they compare to the other EBTs), but there’s not that much work being done on these (or zero…?), like the Mahavastu, Salistamba sutra, Mahasamghika Vinaya, Śariputraparipṛcchā and so on. I don’t even know of any comprehensive survey of all the surviving Mahasamghika material (does anyone else know of any recent scholarship which looks into their surviving texts?). That’s sad because they are a very important missing link in comparative studies, since they are the other big branch of early Buddhist schools.
You may certainly be correct, but it’s super important to consider what the Buddha learned from recalling his childhood jhana experience.
I think that there’s a good chance that the Buddha didn’t suddenly recall a long lost memory of his jhana experience as a child. Since the Buddha was brilliant and penetratingly inquisitive in his path towards awakening, I find it hard to imagine that he completely forgot about a first jhana experience. The key was that he finally questioned his assumption that any pleasure was to avoided.
Here is a quote from chapter 9 of Analayo’s book “A Meditators Life of The Buddha” where the Buddha’s trajectory towards awakening is culminating in discovering the path:
"The mistaken notion that happiness needs to be avoided at all costs comes to the fore in a passage found next in the Mahasaccaka-sutta, according to which the future Buddha thought to himself: “Why am I afraid of that happiness which is a happiness apart from sensuality and unwholesome states?” This imples that earlier he had indeed been afraid of happiness, even of the type of happiness that is not related to sensuality or other unwholesome states.
The type of reasoning behind such apprehensions recurs in a discussion with Jain ascetics, reported in the Culadukkhakhandh-sutta and its parallels. In the course of this discussion, the Jains assert that happiness cannot be gained through happiness, but instead requires going through pain. The belief that happiness is to be gained through pain comes up again as an opinion voiced by a prince in the Bohirajakumara-sutta and its Sanskrit parallel, in a reply to which the Buddha then relates his own pre-awakening quest. In the Pali version, the Buddha leads over to this account of his former practices with the following statement:
"Before my awakening, when still being an unawakened bodhisattva, I thought as well “Happiness is not to be reached through happiness, happiness is to be reached through pain!”
(end of Analayo quote)
In the next paragraph, Analayo goes on the say that was at this point where the Buddha recalled his childhood jhana experience and was ready to change his belief about happiness through pain, that no longer being afraid of wholesome happiness could be the way.
I think there’s a good chance that it wasn’t that he didn’t remember the experience, but that putting happiness back into jhana is what changed and opened up the path for him.
For the Indic material, your sentence there is basically simultaneously referring to 3 different periods in history hat all all separated by centuries:
the time the/a canon was formed
the time it was first written
the/a canon we actually have available to us now
I mention this because I wonder if you noticed, and, I felt before that you sometimes don’t seem to differentiate in your thinking between oral and written traditions and it seemed to be potentially causing issues in the reasoning.
Well, I’ve only been writing forum posts - there’s limit to how much detail I can provide here! Most of my time is spent in deep analysis of the evolution of music… but is there something specific you want a time sequence for? Now of course we can’t usually tell exactly which person on what date changed a specific idea millennia ago! But as with biological evolution of species, we can observe trends and narrow down various changes to specific regions in time and space, with varying degrees of tolerance.
And of course for the evolution of Mahayana doctrine, the Chinese is very useful for dating! Since they made multiple translations, and had a habit of caring about dates, which the Indians didn’t seem to care about! Though for me personally, exact dates do not interest me. The trends of evolution are more interesting for me, and the earliest period is the most interesting for me. So I don’t require a high degree of exactitude in dating for my purposes.
Oh also aside from the Chinese, there are other ways to narrow down dates of course. Such as mention of kings, and towns and cities in the texts which we know to have not existed before a certain time, etc.
What do you mean by ‘the other side’? And I would think scholarship in Pāli and or Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit would be rather essential for adequately translating the Chinese Āgamas, no? In fact the most suitable language to translate them into might be one of those two languages! I mean, if we want to understand what they *mean, then that would be the most logical step. The Chinese is an attempt to convey the Indic which it translates, so really, the Indic is the primary meaning, the Chinese a reflection of that. So to translate to English, the best option would seem to be to put it back into the original Indic first, and from there translate it into… say English for example.
Otherwise, taking it straight from Chinese to English makes it 2 steps removed from the original. That would be trying to convey (English) what a text is trying to convey (Chinese) about what a text is trying to convey (Indic). Thus likely straying further and further away from the intended meaning of the original text.
Now of course it’s not necessarily an easy task to do that! And realistically, it’s probably easier to do those steps simultaneously. So I’m guessing that the āgama translators know both ancient Chinese and Pāli and maybe BHS in order to do their work? It would seem a huge disadvantage to not know Pāli or at least BHS in such a task.
Sounds like a worthy cause! Do we have any of their āgamas? If not, how many early suttas do we have from them? Are there parallels on Suttacentral? And, please translate them
Well let’s check what the Buddha said, in MN 85 after giving up Jainism:
But I have not achieved any superhuman distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones by this severe, gruelling work.
Na kho panāhaṁ imāya kaṭukāya dukkarakārikāya adhigacchāmi uttari manussadhammā alamariyañāṇadassanavisesaṁ;
Could there be another path to awakening?’
siyā nu kho añño maggo bodhāyā’ti.
Then it occurred to me,
Tassa mayhaṁ, rājakumāra, etadahosi:
‘I recall sitting in the cool shade of the rose-apple tree while my father the Sakyan was off working. Quite secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unskillful qualities, I entered and remained in the first absorption, which has the rapture and bliss born of seclusion, while placing the mind and keeping it connected.
‘abhijānāmi kho panāhaṁ pitu sakkassa kammante sītāya jambucchāyāya nisinno vivicceva kāmehi vivicca akusalehi dhammehi savitakkaṁ savicāraṁ vivekajaṁ pītisukhaṁ paṭhamaṁ jhānaṁ upasampajja viharitā; Could that be the path to awakening?’
siyā nu kho eso maggo bodhāyā’ti. Stemming from that memory came the realization:
Tassa mayhaṁ, rājakumāra, satānusāri viññāṇaṁ ahosi:
‘That is the path to awakening!’
‘eseva maggo bodhāyā’ti.
Well, that’s the only actual evidence we have. So we can either go by the evidence, or we can imagine something different. The choice is ours!
Yes, indeed, he was obscured by his cultural conditioning that pleasure is bad. It was at that point that he reevaluated his preconceptions. The sutta continues:
Then it occurred to me,
Tassa mayhaṁ, rājakumāra, etadahosi:
‘Why am I afraid of that pleasure, for it has nothing to do with sensual pleasures or unskillful qualities?’
‘kiṁ nu kho ahaṁ tassa sukhassa bhāyāmi yaṁ taṁ sukhaṁ aññatreva kāmehi aññatra akusalehi dhammehī’ti? Then it occurred to me,
Tassa mayhaṁ, rājakumāra, etadahosi: ‘I’m not afraid of that pleasure, for it has nothing to do with sensual pleasures or unskillful qualities.’
‘na kho ahaṁ tassa sukhassa bhāyāmi yaṁ taṁ sukhaṁ aññatreva kāmehi aññatra akusalehi dhammehī’ti.
Now as we have seen, the world abounds with anti-jhāna PR warning us against it. But the Buddha clearly said it should not be feared. So, as Buddhists perhaps we would be wise to abandon that mistaken preconception that the Buddha specifically abandoned! Also, this is precisely why jhāna is the middle way, beyond the two extremes of indulgence of sensual pleasure, and self-harming asceticism. Because it is pleasurable but it is not sensual pleasure. [Ah, I now see you also explained a bit about his preconceptions… sorry since I am writing as I read.]
I think Anālayo is silly to translate that as “an unawakened bodhisattva” since he is aware that this is based on a misinterpretation. I propose a better translation being something like this:
“Before my awakening, when still being unawakened, striving for enlightenment…”
You cannot attain jhāna without attaining happiness. So I cannot follow your logic there. Plus, his own narrative has him experiencing jhāna only one single time before leaving Jainism, when he was a kid. And his narrative makes perfect sense. So, why would you disbelieve it?
One thing I do recommend disbelieving is that the day he realised this, he ate some food, attained all 4 jhāna, and became enlightened. That’s just silly. But for that we do have an alternative sutta narrative, of him actually needing extended time to even retrain himself in the first jhāna. And then, gradually, through the next 3. Likely for weeks of months though the passage is not specific. It’s in his instructions to Anuruddha and his buddies, and has Chinese paralell/s.
