Criteria for deciding if a text is an EBT

Greetings ,
Just enquiring , do we have an english translation version ? I tried search at SC no info .

No translations into English yet

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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.

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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 :pray: :stuck_out_tongue:

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.

Likely the Ekottara Āgama: Ekottara Āgama and the Mahāsāṃghikas - Discussion - Discuss & Discover (suttacentral.net)

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The wikipedia page on the school gives an overview of the main texts which have survived.

And yes, we have the Mahavastu translated (albeit a bit dated translation), we also have various Salistamba sutra translations (possibly Mahasamghika), the Lokānuvartanā sūtra has also been translated too.

Also, its possible that some Prajnaparamita sutras were originally composed by Mahasamghikas. Though they are not EBTs, they contain some EBT ideas, so these too could be surviving Mahasamghika texts. Some scholars have also argued for the same attribution for some Buddha nature sutras.

I’ve collected some Mahasamghika EBTs in a compilation, “Early Buddhist Teachings”.

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Honestly, I don’t think it matters much whether it was a long lost memory or not, but I think you’ve just laid down a superb case that it wasn’t merely the recalling of the rose apple tree experience, but that it was the realization that “severe and grueling work” wasn’t the way , rather the “rapture and bliss born of seclusion” is the path to awakening.

I also agree with you that it’s silly to think that he ate food, attained all 4 jhana and awakened all in one day.

There’s clearly written texts that show the mnemonic devices needed to memorize them. Even during the classical period when writing became common in northern India (after 0 CE), there were monks memorizing whole Agamas and reciting them for translation projects. So, yes, I am aware of the differences between a later literary work and a text designed to be memorized and recited.

The situation is more complicated than there being later literary works and older oral Agamas. The official canons we have today have been written documents for at least 1000 years, if not longer. It was only after block printing and printing presses were developed that they could be reproduced without the problem of human errors entering them each time they were copied. Over that time, they’ve been disordered, miscopied, edited, reformatted, had material inserted into them, and so forth that changed them.

And then we have another more subtle problem: What did the words in the documents actually mean in ancient times? Sometimes, it’s a difficult thing to discern. I’ve repeatedly discovered terms that modern Pali scholars insist mean one thing, but the older Chinese Agamas disagree. I even recently discovered a case of this in which the Theravada commentary agrees with the Agama translator, but modern scholars are convinced it means something else. It’s just bewildering, the complex web of issues that are involved with this.

Of course it is. But attempting to translate classical Chinese without being fluent in the language leads to issues as well. The language barrier has created a practical split of Buddhist studies in the world between Europe and East Asia. So, it’s difficult for scholars to get a full and accurate picture without good translations of the Agamas and access to the scholarship on their language that available in Chinese and Japanese. The same situation is the case for scholars like myself if we look at Sanskrit and Pali material. We’re improving on this, definitely, but it’s been a slow process. SuttaCentral has been a big step forward in bringing these two sets of language skills together in one place.

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Over that time, they’ve been disordered, miscopied, edited, reformatted, had material inserted into them, and so forth that changed them.

In relation to the Pali cannon isn’t that speculation? Unless of course you are aware of some substantial differences between the different retentions?

And then we have another more subtle problem: What did the words in the documents actually mean in ancient times? Sometimes, it’s a difficult thing to discern. I’ve repeatedly discovered terms that modern Pali scholars insist mean one thing, but the older Chinese Agamas disagree. I even recently discovered a case of this in which the Theravada commentary agrees with the Agama translator, but modern scholars are convinced it means something else. It’s just bewildering, the complex web of issues that are involved with this.

This is true. Personally I think this is where the Vedas and Upanishads come in handy. By understanding Yājñavalkya we could better understand the Buddha and the Dhamma.

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Bhante Sujato talks about this in a few of his books/papers. One example is the comparison of the structure of the Pali SN and Chinese SA. Yinshun himself did this research, and both Bhikkhu Bodhi and Bhante Sujato agree that the Chinese SA is most likely closer to the original ordering. The SA/SN seems to have originally been structured to mirror the 4 Noble Truths, but the Pali has lost this structure. I quoted Bhante’s book and took a screenshot of the comparison in another thread, but I forget which thread that was. Off the top of my head, I also forget which of Bhante’s books that appeared in.

Edit: Ah, here it is Discourses Structured According to the Four Noble Truths? - #20 by dayunbao

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Indeed, in AN 9.41 the Buddha indicated his attainment of 4 jhanas (and 4 formless spheres/arupayatana) happened not in a single day:

https://suttacentral.net/an9.41/en/sujato

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I’ve put together a Google Sheet that sets the four different versions of MA 1 in Chinese alongside the Pali parallel. There might be other versions in Sanskrit or Tibetan I’m not aware of, but this is a pretty unwieldy sample of parallels already. The texts haven’t been translated, however. I will do this as I analyze the content in later posts.

In this post, I want to give a rough overview of the parallels and describe the “big picture” differences related to how they are formatted.

The parallels texts are:

  1. Pali: AN 7.68 (date?)
  2. Chinese: MA 1 (398 CE)
  3. Chinese: EA 39.1 (385 CE?)
  4. Chinese: T 27 (223-253 CE)
  5. Chinese: T374 (Nirvana Sutra) excerpt (420 CE)

I arranged the texts from left to right based mainly on how similar they are to AN 7.68. The Mahayana sutra excerpt is the least like it for obvious reasons, lacking the mnemonic features and being edited into a Mahayana context. I should also note that I’ve omitted a lengthy definition of the 12 kinds of sutras in T374 and used only the material that’s directly parallel to the Agamas.

One thing to notice right away is that most of the Chinese parallels were translated around the same period of history. The date of EA is problematic (in my opinion it’s earlier than 385), but it’s not likely to be much older than T 27.

Before I continue, I should also note that the list of seven dharmas in this sutra is found in the mātṛka sutras of at least three sectarian canons. In the Theravada, it appears in both the Saṅgīti and the Dasuttara suttas of DN. In the Dharmaguptaka, it appears in the Dasottara sutra of DA. In the Sarvastivada Abhidharma, it appears in the Samgitiparyaya and the Mahavibhasa. (However, it doesn’t appear in the Śāriputra Abhidharma, which was the Dharmaguptaka commentary on the Saṅgīti sutra.) It also appears in the Mūlasarvâstivāda Vinaya. And it’s mentioned in the Chinese Commentary on the Large Prajna Sutra in a list of seven dharmas. So, this was clearly a well-known teaching.

Format

When I look at parallels, the first thing I notice are issues that don’t have that much to do with content. Texts from different canons often have different formats and arrangements. In this case, some of these texts were clearly intended to be recited (AN 7.68 and MA 1) and some of them weren’t (EA 39.1, T27, and T374). T374 in particular resembles what we see in Abhidharma, a simple list with added commentary.

What are some of the mnemonic features we see in AN 7.68 and MA 1? In both versions, we see repetition in triplicate. Each definition of each of the seven dharmas is repeated in full. There’s a positive statement, a negative statement, and then the positive is restated. The result is burdensome to literary readers, but it would help a reciter remember the passages correctly, and it would also help an audience to fully understand them.

Another mnemonic device that appears in AN 7.68 is a running summary of the items stated as each is completed, which is built up by added a keyword for each item as the sutta progresses. This would serve as another level of error correction and serve as a reminder that cues the next item in the list. This is not found in MA 1.

Given that the Sarvâstivāda placed this sutra first in their Madhyama collection and the mnemonic devices we find in both it and AN 7.68, I would imagine that this sutra was used as a training text for new monks at some point in history that’s been preserved in both canons. It’s seems designed for beginners to learn to memorize texts, and the teaching itself reminds them of their training.

By contrast, we also have versions of the sutra that don’t have this recitation format. We do see varying levels of repetition, but the definitions aren’t repeated each time. EA 39.1 has three statements for each item, however, it paraphrases after the first one. T 27 only has the negative statement after each, making it the simplest version among the Agama sutras.

Arrangement

This a simple list-based sutra, but it does contain the basic features that give it some context with an introduction and a conclusion. When we look at how the five parallels introduce and conclude the sutra, we start to see a starker difference between the Chinese sutras and the Pali version. This is likely because the Chinese versions all come from Central Asia or northwest India, so they share common features, while the Pali represents the tradition in southern India. So, even when the Chinese versions appear to come from different sectarian canons, they still have features in common that are missing from the Theravada version.

Introduction

Each of the parallels aside from the Nirvana Sutra excerpt has an introduction. The four Chinese versions all agree that the import of this teaching is that it leads to the end of the asavas, i.e., liberation. The Theravada introduction is different, saying that a monk who knows these seven things is worthy of offerings and veneration. Both imply that the monk will become an arhat using two different definitions of the term.

The Teaching

All five versions agree on the seven items of the main list. The first and last items are themselves sub-lists, and the parallels all agree on the nature of these sub-lists, but not on their items. For example, AN 7.68 has a list of nine kinds of sutras while all the Chinese versions have twelve. The sub-list that compares kinds of people varies across all the parallels. The list of seven dharmas itself is a little bit disordered in the middle when we compare the Theravada to the Chinese versions.

If I use MA as the point of reference, the order of the seven dharmas in each parallel looks like this:

Sutra Dharma Meaning Time Moderation Oneself Assemblies People
MA 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
EA 39.1 1 2 3 5 4 6 7
T27 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
T374 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
AN 7.68 1 2 5 4 3 6 7

This disordering of the middle of lists is very common. It seems that beginnings and endings are easier to remember, and the more distant parallels are from each other in canonical lineage, the more difference we see in their orders.

Conclusion

Here, again, we see greater divergence between the Pali version from all the Chinese parallels. In the Chinese sutras, the three Agamas all use a parable of ghee to illustrate how the virtues of each pair of people becomes more and more refined until finally perfection is reached. The Mahayana sutra doesn’t use this particular parable, but it still stops to praise the highest person of the list: They are like the wishing jewel that’s the best among gems or the taste of immortality that’s the best among flavors. The Pali version instead restates the introduction to the sutra, which praises instead the monk who knows these seven things.

Is This an EBT?

It seems likely that the list of seven items is quite old, but the sutras may not be as old as the list given how much variation there is between the Theravada and the Chinese parallels, which to me indicates regional differences.

In the next post, I’ll look more closely at the content of the sutra by offering translations of the parallels. It’ll be time consuming, so I may break it up into a couple posts.

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Please consider to post it as an essay rather than buried in this post. I think there are interesting general implications which are good to look up separately (not just for the question of EBT).

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All in all the teaching contained here seems quite rare. One Pali sutta contains, without further elaboration, items of the list:
AN 5.131/132: 1. Meaning - 2. Dhamma - 3. Moderation - 4. Time - 5. Assemblies

And this variant doesn’t seem to have any parallels.
It is peculiar that the sutta chosen to be MA 1 would have content otherwise hardly represented in the Pali suttas.

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Is it really fair to penalize teachings which appears only one time as possibly not genuine? Is there some system or website to analyse which concepts/ teachings appear only once, and which ones are repeated so many times?

For me, I am glad to discover something new in the suttas which I haven’t learnt before, instead of viewing them with suspicious eye.

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Such singular suttas are genuinely in the canon. In that sense they’re EBT. Which means the sutta could have originated from a bhanaka, an earlier teacher, a direct disciple of the Buddha, or the Buddha himself.

Yes, there is something to discover in a singular sutta, but not what the Buddha said. That assumption depends on what I’m ready to accept as the word of the historical Buddha. And here obviously different people have different criteria or approaches - which is fine if one discloses one’s criteria.

Generally, I hope we agree that blanket statements like “Everything in the suttas is the historical Buddha’s words” or “Nothing in the suttas comes from the historical Buddha” are ingenuine. It’s a continuous effort to specify, define, convince myself and others of the criteria that we have chosen.

For me, repetitions throughout a nikaya/agama, and across nikayas are (next to other criteria) important factors for a possible earliest teaching. But even a single occurrence for me shows that some early teacher taught it.

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Yes. I think there’s different ways to look at the situation with MA 1. If we were to assume there was a parent canon for all these versions of the sutra, then we might decide that the Pali version is the closest to it because it hasn’t had expansions added like the parable of ghee. It’s a straightforward list sutta, whereas the parable of ghee adds a literary touch.

Something I’ve noticed is that sometimes the Pali parallel is simpler, and sometimes it’s an Agama that’s simpler. It’s been hard for me to clearly decide, “Ah, it looks like the Majjhima Nikaya is older than the Madhyama Agama.” Or something like that for the other collections. Instead, individual sutras seem older or newer than each other. I haven’t tried to statistically analyze it because I’m focused on translation, but someone certainly could if they haven’t already.

An explanation that has occurred to me is that perhaps a given sutra was popular in one tradition but not in another. Sutras that received more attention were more likely to be improved by adding to them. The sutras that were largely passed over remained in a simpler state.

This may be the case for MA 1. It seems clear it would have been important to the Sarvastivadins, having pride of place in the Madhyama Agama. But in the Pali tradition, it may have been no more important than other suttas in AN. MA 1-10 are all parables or lists of seven, most being found in AN 7. It’s not until MA 10 that we finally encounter MN 2, completing an arc from the introduction to being a mendicant to how one ends the asavas.

Myself I think it’s also possible for sutras to be lost at some point and reconstructed from details that survive like a list in the mātṛka sutras. That would explain the differences we see between the Pali and Chinese parallels, too. I think it’s less likely but not impossible. In that case, the simpler version might not be the older one.

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Why do you think that? It’s possible. If we think when the master died the sangha was quite spread out. Some communities of monks and nuns wouldn’t see each other for quite some time, possibly years. When he died there would have been a gathering of suttas known to the elder monks and nuns in the vicinity at the time. They were obviously aware of the distant communities who had not heard the Buddha had died, but yet had their own retention of the Dhamma as taught to them. There must have been some kind of criteria agreed for organising the teachings and how to incorporate new material that did come from the Buddha, but was held in these distant communities. Different contacts between the monks and nuns who were there when he died, as they spread out and news spread, and these distant communities would then result in some teachings that were universal but others that would be found in one cannon but not in the other. I think this is a valid hypothesis of what happened, which explains why we have a common method of organising material (the Nikayas/Agamas) with many parallels but also individual suttas/sutras. A single sutta/sutra then is not necessarily late. It could come from these far flung communities, directly from the Buddha himself. Based on this hypothesis we need not reject a sutta/sutra because it has no parallel. We also need to look to see if it matches what is agreed to be earlier material.

Just my thoughts on the matter.

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Yes, it’s possible. What I meant is how some people argue their point, by finding a single sutta and then claiming: “In AN x.y the Buddha said”. The argument here would be basically ‘there is a sutta, so the Buddha said it’. And this would be a naive conclusion.

It hinges on many assumptions, but so do all theories that try to make sense of it all. I like that at least you present a transparent model with some variables.

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I wouldn’t necessarily call it naive. Depends on the reasons for claiming the Buddha said it. But anyway, I’m digressing somewhat.