That would be most interesting. I happen to be interested in the subject 
Yes, I agree that finding documents carbon-dated to a particular time would offer more certainty than the above statement which does not seem grounded in much actual evidence and seems to more be a statement of faith and personal belief.
“They don’t yet come to the categorical conclusion: ‘This is the only truth, anything else is futile.’”
If someone has a particular understanding of a worldly matter like history due to what they’ve learned and what research is available to them but is opening to being corrected and adapting their view, that is different from dogmatic insistence on a religious belief.
Notice the sutta makes no mention of academic research or historiography. It’s a teaching in a particular context. Not that we can’t extend the principle, but would that not also be conjecture and personal interpretive preferences?
Agree it isn’t good to be dogmatic about a religious belief, but what I’m talking about is mistaking belief for fact or knowledge. I see danger in routinely mistaking beliefs (no matter how well motivated) for knowledge because this risks not being able to tell them apart. If you can’t distinguish between belief and knowledge and the latter comes along how will you recognize it?
I tried to relate the difference in another thread talking about the difference between believing that pi is irrational based upon the good faith belief in others having purportedly discovered this and the knowledge that pi is irrational by actually deeply following and internalizing the logic which reveals it so.
The proof that pi is irrational is not easy to understand. It involves very high level mathematics. So when people say they have knowledge that pi is irrational I see them mistaking belief or faith for direct and unmistakable knowledge. Do this enough and I fear people might have a hard time distinguishing between them. Does that make sense?
I agree it is good to avoid this in oneself, yes. Language and conversation are also complex matters, no? It’s possible that what one person says is not to be taken how we could interpret it.
Sometimes it’s also good to give people the benefit of the doubt.
1 Like
I don’t understand your questions. Pi wasn’t proved to be irrational until the 1760’s.
Knowledge is a justified belief that is also true, or according to a second definition, an idea or thought that can be matched with an appearance (empirical evidence).
The idea of a Unicorn is mere belief.
The idea of an infinite line is a justified belief that can not shown to be true.
The idea of gravity is a justified belief that can also be shown to be true.
Wow, this thread has gone spectacularly off the rails.
I will work backwards.
This has been demonstrated to be an inadequate definition of Knowledge since the publication of Plato’s Theaetetus in circa 350bce, so s hundred years before Ashoka.
more recently Edmund Gettier wrote “Is justified True Belief Knowledge?” in 1963 to remind everyone that the definition fails now just as much as it did thousands of years ago. That 3 page article, cited over 6000 times, is freely available online, and is worth reading by anyone who wishes not to sound like an ignoramus in the field of Epistemology.
This isanother canard, used once, long ago, as hyperbole, in an interesting article by Gregory Schopen, and then incessantly repeated over and over by people who have not read Schopen, or if they have did not understand his point at all, usually, as far as I can tell, by people with an emotional attachment to Mahayana texts or schools, who want to deny that the early Buddhist texts are in fact, very likely to be the early Buddhist texts.
Yes, the Pali texts as we have them now have grown since the time they diverged from the Sanskrit and Chinese and Gandhari. But they have grown in readily identifiable ways that make more or less no difference at all to doctrinal content.
To understand this, and by the way to learn an infinite amount more about early Buddhism than you will ever get from reading literally any number of wikipedia articles, simply read MN2, T31, MA10 and EA40.6, for one example. You will see that while the text changed from school to school, between languages, and between centuries (T31 being the oldest we have a date for being translated by An Shigao some time tin the second century), the text is readily identifiable as the same text, and the teaching is readily identifiable as the same teaching (different influences are to be overcome in different ways), and we may be therefore reassured that for the last 2000 years EVERYBODY thought that the “all the influences” teaching was a teaching of the Buddha.
If the differences between these texts seem too much to take in, then read DN2 DA27 T22 and EA43.7 and you will have a better idea of the similarities and divergences.
If you need more, just keep looking for suttas that have 2 or more parallels and READ THEM IN PARALLEL!!!
If you can’t read Chinese and can’t find a translation, ChatGPT does as perfectly adequate job when you just cut and past the Chinese paragraph by paragraph from suttacentral.
If you read a couple of hundred such parallels you will almost certainly realize one thing above all: THESE ARE THE SAME TEACHINGS. They emenate from the same ultimate root. They share in common vastly more than they have in differences.
I honestly struggle to think of one single doctrine that has been discussed here over the last 3 years that does not have examples in both the Nikayas and Agamas.
I hesitate to comment on this because it is getting to the limits of my area but I am pretty sure this is complete rubbish? At the very least it is deeply misleading.
Anyway @pather to summarise, the divergences in the schools, including schools we like to designate “Mahayana” nowadays, but including also “Therevada” and “Sarvastivada” and so on are really more or less absent, apart from where they are readily identifiable as “embroidery” from the actual suttas/sutras themselves, and the teachings, like the 4 noble truths, the 5 aggregates, the 8fold path the 12 links, jhana, satipathana, etc etc are all universally and repeatedly attested in all the earliest sources.
The doctinal fights start later, in the layer of literature we call either “Abhidhamma” or “Mahayana” depending on our biases.
If you want to understand the differences and divergences you need to read the originals, and you need to realize that practically every person here, with the exception of @cdpatton, is a partisan for the school they where raised in or fell in love with, and that this will color and corrupt their position in this debate.
Suttacentral exists to show people how these texts are all ultimately the same texts, and it does a brilliant job if you just read them.
Once you do you realize that apart form the need to incessantly replace bits of texts with the “standard” versions of passages, the Pali really is perfectly representative of the early texts, as are the Chinese agamas, of all the schools and from all the translators.
Failing to come to grips with this is just failing to come to grips with the fact that your favorite common era interpretation of these texts (Therevada, Mahayana, Sarvastivada, or anyone else’s vada) does not in fact go back as far as the texts themselves.
Good luck with your journey!
Metta.
3 Likes
I did not deny anything other than what has not been proven has been proven; that conjecture is fact; that belief is knowledge. To state something is ‘very likely’ is to state a probability and in this case we have no idea about the distribution that ‘very likely’ is attempting to qualify. What is left is conjecture, hypothesis, and various arguments.
The same is true of the extant Mahayana documents. Other than the radio carbon dating of fragments of old documents we have no proof that the vast majority of the Mahayana canon is any earlier or later than anything else. We don’t know very much at all.
Sorry @yeshe.tenley but this is all rubbish.
I also think it is deeply intellectually dangerous.
Positing that the only “proof” you will accept about this issue is “radio carbon dating” just demonstrates beyond any possible doubt that what you are engaged in is religious apologetics masquerading as (quite naive) epistemology, and not scholarship.
You can’t use apriori epistemology to reduce to nothing the centuries of scholarship done on these texts in order to simply by fiat put whatever you happen to believe today on equal footing with it and expect anyone of intelligence and good faith to take you seriously.
We apparently live in a time when every deluded religionist has been emboldened to pour scorn on the long and difficult work of actual comparative scholarship and research with bromides about “proof” and “not knowing anything”.
So be it. But it is a sad day when people raise up blatant ignorance in place of hard won knowledge, and when religious sectarianism takes the place of wide learning.
I grow more and more discouraged here that there are really any voices left that share as much passion for actual research on these corpora as they do for idiotic sectarian nonsense about “proof” and “Knowledge by carbon dating”.
There are a few left, and I live in hope that the tide will turn, but in fact I suspect that the lunatics have taken over the asylum, and that this will soon become a place of interest purely for the archival research preserved from it’s heyday, and will otherwise be indistinguishable from those other wretched hotbeds of blow-hards, dhammawheel and dharmawheel. Sad.
1 Like
Okay. You win.
1 Like
Just to be clear, I am in a pugnacious mood at the minute, and I value your presence on the board very much, and I am using your recent posts on this thread as my straw-man for a tendency here that you are not the most guilty of and in fact usually don’t succumb to at all, so please bear my tirades with patience and know that I appreciate your ideas!
Metta
2 Likes
This is really very unhelpful.
Far from a fact, highly debatable, and highly inflammatory.
2 Likes
According to Ven. Yin Shun’s The Formation of Early Buddhist Texts, there were two phases in Early Buddhism (Pre-sectarian Buddhism):
- ‘Samyutta/Samyukta Buddhism’ based on saṃyukta-kathā 相應教 (had its origin in the first Saṅgha council, shortly after the death of the Buddha)
- ‘Nikaya/Agama Buddhism’ based on the four principal Nikayas/Agamas (originated at the second council, one hundred years after the death of the Buddha)
However, the extant Nikayas/Agamas are sectarian texts. One can seek an understanding of early Buddhist teachings by studying them comparatively.
Cf.: Choong Mun-keat:
The Fundamental Teachings of Early Buddhism: A Comparative Study Based on the Sūtrāṅga portion of the Pāli Saṃyutta-Nikāya and the Chinese Saṃyuktāgama (Series: Beitrage zur Indologie Band 32; Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden, 2000).
“Ācāriya Buddhaghosa and Master Yinshun 印順 on the Three-aṅga Structure of Early Buddhist Texts”, Research on the Saṃyukta-āgama (Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts, Research Series 8; edited by Dhammadinnā), Taiwan: Dharma Drum Corporation, August 2020, pp. 883-932.
I look forward to reading your viewpoints about this Pali issue.
1 Like
Thank you for referring to them as “viewpoints”, as that is exactly what they are. Not ‘facts’.
But as you well know, this subject has been discussed at great length and a search will easily call up many references to various viewpoints.
1 Like
Thread closed for moderation.
1 Like
This thread is now open again. We are asking you to use right speech and stay on topic when posting. Thank you
3 Likes