"Early Buddhism" and the Spin Zone?

Discussion
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I would like to post an example of a small quote, with some contextualization, for the purposes of analysis for its relevancy to EBT studies.

A while ago, I criticized an academic for what I believed to be poor scholarly practices in their popular literature, and I would like to post a more salient example of what I was talking about then, this time more directly related to EBTs and EBT studies.

In the interest of not starting an argument alternatively attacking and defending the merits of this text I am about to cite, I think it is best to avoid publishing the author’s name. The work I am about to quote is rather prolific and is easily searchable online, though, so no one should have any trouble finding it.

The subject matter is what constituted “Buddhavacana” historically in Buddhism (not necessarily in projected “Early Buddhism(s)”). It is the part about the Pāli Canon rather than the part about the 8th century text that I would like to direct your focuses upon, if possible:[quote][quote]Through four factors is an inspired utterance [pratibhāna; see MacQueen] the word of Buddhas. What four? (i)… the inspired utterance is connected with truth, not untruth; (ii) it is connected with the Dharma, not that which is not the Dharma; (iii) it brings about the renunciation of moral taints [kleśa] not their increase; and (iv) it shows the laudable qualities of nirvāṇa, not those of the cycle of rebirth [saṃsāra].

[Śāntideva, Śikṣāsamuccaya, 8th century][/quote]The sūtra explains that if an utterance has these four features then the believing men and women of a good family (an expression used for the hearers of Mahāyāna sūtras) will form the conception of ‘Buddha’ and hear it as the Dharma. Why?
‘Whatever is well spoken [subhāṣita], all that is the word of the Buddha [buddhabhāṣita].’

This apparent openness as to what count as the word of the Buddha can be traced in the Pāli Canon, for the assertion that what is well spoken is the word of the Buddha is also found in the Pāli Uttaravipatti Sutta (cf. Aśoka’s "Whatever is spoken by the Lord Buddha, all that is well said’). There may be here, however, a certain ambiguity:

[It] can mean that all of the good things in the tradition come from the Buddha, but is can equally well imply that buddhavacana [the Buddha’s discourse] is being redefined to mean ‘whatsoever be well spoken’, rather than meaning the actual words of Gautama.

(MacQueen 2005a: 323; 1981: 314)

Nevertheless elsewhere too in the Pāli Canon the Dhamma is characterized effectively as whichever doctrines lead to enlightenment [the author’s citation here is verbatim: “This occurs in both the Cullavagga of the Vinaya and also in the Aṅguttara Nikāya. It is quoted in, e.g., Nattier (1992:218-19)”].[/quote]Thoughts? Am I being hypervigilant in considering this a light sort of “spin”? A bit of what was presented here is taken back later in the text with caveats, but does that change that it was still presented?

For the sake of completeness, I followed up on the citation, which was from Nattier (1992:218-19), The Heart Sūtra: A Chinese Apocryphal Text?, at 218 we have:

The passage from which this oft-cited line is taken occurs both in the Vinaya (Cullavagga, X, 4) and in the Aṅguttara-nikāya (IV, pp. 280-281), in the context of a discussion between the Buddha and his foster-mother, Mahāpajāpatī. In responce to a request by the latter for the “Dharma in a nutshell,” the Buddha offers a number of criteria for determining what should and should not be considered his teaching. Each item is first stated negatively (i.e., in terms of what is not the Dharma), and then positively as follows:

[Of] whatever teachings (dhamme), O Gomati, you can assume yourself "these teachings lead to dispassion (virāga) [… quote abbreviated]

The Buddha’s reply thus offers a set of general guidelines for evaluating anything that purports to be the Dharma, while simultaneously undercutting the all-too-human tendency to grasp at any particular formation of the Dharma to the exclusion of others (a move which, we might note, serve to counter the notion of a “closed canon” of Buddhist teachings).

A lot of this is to do with Mahāyāna Buddhism, but as we can see, there is heavy intersection with what is essentially scholarship concerning itself with the same area of study as EBT studies. We have the Nattier source quote. Does it justify the phrasing of the first passage cited?

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Could you be a bit more specific about what aspects of the passage you are finding problems with. There are various possible bases for criticizing it. “Spin” in what sense?

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[quote=“DKervick, post:2, topic:6002, full:true”]

Could you be a bit more specific about what aspects of the passage you are finding problems with. There are various possible bases for criticizing it. “Spin” in what sense?
[/quote]I mean “spin” in the sense of “presenting something in a certain way as so that it appears to be other than it is”, but not necessarily “lying” outright.

For instance, let us say I were to present this from SA 550:

佛世尊、如來、應、等正覺所知所見，說六法出苦處昇於勝處，說一乘道淨諸眾生，離諸惱苦，憂悲悉滅，得真如法。何等為六？
The Buddha, the World-Honoured One, the Tathāgata, the Arhat, the Samyaksaṁbuddha, the one who is known, the one who is seen, teaches a Dharma that causes [living beings] to go forth from a place of suffering and to ascend to a victorious place. He teaches a one vehicle path that purifies living beings and causes them to be separated from all afflictions and suffering, causes sorrow and grieving to completely disappear, and causes them to attain the Dharma of true reality. And what are the six?

There is a word in the text above: ekayāna/一乘, or “one vehicle”.

Imagine I were to take this mentioning of 一乘 and then argue that Master Tiāntāi taught a dharma from the Lotus Sūtra congruent to the one above*, and were then to artfully/carefully start to draw more and more comparisons between Tiāntāi and EBTs in similar manners. That is one manner of spin I can think of like what I am talking about.

*incidentally, 一乘 is hugely important in Tiāntāi/Lotus Buddhism, which is why I chose this example (I just discovered that it is harder than it seems to “think” of a way to spin something intentionally wrong for the sake of example!)

Equating 一乘 here in the āgamāḥ (which is actually 一乘道 as a compound in Chinese EBTs, not just 一乘 as in Mahāyāna, see Nattier 2007: “One Vehicle” (一乘) in the Chinese Āgamas: New Light on an Old Problem in Pāli, itself an article not without its own controversies related to the OP), with 一乘 how it appears in Tiāntāi is a little like this claim from the text cited in the OP:

Nevertheless elsewhere too in the Pāli Canon the Dhamma is characterized effectively as whichever doctrines lead to enlightenment

There seems to be an underlying assumption about “what” can be determined to lead to enlightenment according to the Pāli and other EBTs.

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Sorry, I just meant to ask what particular spin you talking about in the original passage you quoted.

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[quote=“DKervick, post:4, topic:6002”]
I just meant to ask what particular spin you talking about in the original passage you quoted.
[/quote]The chief spin that inspired this post was the claim about the Pāli Canon in the OP, here:

Nevertheless elsewhere too in the Pāli Canon the Dhamma is characterized effectively as whichever doctrines lead to enlightenment

This is not wrong, per se, but I think, in its context, it is misleading. Hence my word “spin”, rather than something nastier and less accurate, like “lie” or something of the like.

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Yes. Well, “dhamma” seems be used in a number of closely related but distinct ways in the Pali Canon.

I notice, Santideva speaks about the word of the “Buddhas”. I suppose that if there really were a whole bunch of buddhas from time immemorial, as the religious tradition insists, then they said a whole bunch of things that can help a person achieve awakening. And presumably, given how many Buddhas there were supposed to have been, every bit of advice that can be conducive to awakening was articulated by some Buddha somewhere.

But if one’s scholarly goal is to extract the actual words of Gotama from the historical records we possess, then these reflections to not provide one with a very good methodology.

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[quote=“DKervick, post:6, topic:6002”]
But if one’s scholarly goal is to extract the actual words of Gotama from the historical records we possess, then the these reflections to not provide one with a very good methodology.
[/quote]It is a “we will reconstruct from doctrine” rather than “we will reconstruct from the texts themselves” approach, and doctrinal reconstructions are not an utterly futile endeavour, however yes, I agree with your statement above. It seems a less precise methodology.

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To say the least. For a group of scholars to apply the methodology, they would already have to know the totality of spiritual truth, and fully understand how to eradicate the defilements and everything laudable about nibbana. In other words, they would probably have to be enlightened themselves.

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[quote=“Coemgenu, post:3, topic:6002”]
佛世尊、如來、應、等正覺所知所見，說六法出苦處昇於勝處，說一乘道淨諸眾生，離諸惱苦，憂悲悉滅，得真如法。何等為六？
The Buddha, the World-Honoured One, the Tathāgata, the Arhat, the Samyaksaṁbuddha, the one who is known, the one who is seen, teaches a Dharma that causes [living beings] to go forth from a place of suffering and to ascend to a victorious place. He teaches a one vehicle path that purifies living beings and causes them to be separated from all afflictions and suffering, causes sorrow and grieving to completely disappear, and causes them to attain the Dharma of true reality. And what are the six?
[/quote]This translation is by Jan Nattier. She is using a different recension than what is hosted at SuttaCentral (this is very interesting, I will post more on this once I know more about it).

Where SuttaCentral has this [quote]佛世尊、如來、應、等正覺所知所見，說六法出苦處昇於勝處[/quote], the first 六 in Nattier’s text is a different character.

The SuttaCentral texts reads, instead of Nattier’s [quote]“The Buddha, the World-Honoured One, the Tathāgata, the Arhat, the Samyaksaṁbuddha, the one who is known, the one who is seen, teaches a Dharma that causes [living beings] to go forth from a place of suffering”[/quote], it says:[quote]The Buddha, the World-Honoured One, the Tathāgata, the Arhat, the Samyaksaṁbuddha, the one who is known, the one who is seen, teaches six dharmāḥ that cause [living beings] to go forth from a place of suffering[/quote]This makes the last sentence of the excerpt (“And what are these six [dharmāḥ]?”) less of a non-sequitur. Additionally, the SuttaCentral recension may well invalidate the above claims related to this āgama, as now there are six, not an endless amount (or “one perennial Dharma”), of dharmāḥ mentioned.

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[quote=“Coemgenu, post:5, topic:6002, full:true”]

I am loath to comment on my own post (I always feel narcissistic doing so) but I realized that the issue I took with that quotation in the text cited in the OP:

Nevertheless elsewhere too in the Pāli Canon the Dhamma is characterized effectively as whichever doctrines lead to enlightenment

Was that it seemed to imply (and this is me being epistemologically humble, IMO it “implied”) that the Pāli was advocating overt perennialism.

I started a parallel thread for further inquiry into that intersection.

It should be noted that I have no special distain for perennialism as a belief, but to retroject it onto texts where we have no concrete proof of perennialism at work as a philosophy, strikes me as, at best “a less precise methodology”.

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Logically, these seem like separate issues. Assuming those later authors meant “Buddhist enlightenment” when they referred to views conducive to enlightenment, there is no reason to interpret their remarks, whatever other merits or demerits those views might have, as endorsing a belief in a perennial and universal philosophy.

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[quote=“DKervick, post:12, topic:6002, full:true”]
Logically, these seem like separate issues. Assuming those later authors meant “Buddhist enlightenment” when they referred to views conducive to enlightenment, there is no reason to interpret their remarks, whatever other merits or demerits those views might have, as endorsing a belief in a perennial and universal philosophy.
[/quote]This text is using the Pāli quote to justify Mahāyāna Dharma on the basis that is “leads to enlightenment” and thus fulfills the requirements of the Pāli stipulations.

I myself have perennial leanings, and I can therefore call Mahāyāna, Theravāda, and Early Buddhism alike, at least in theory, “doctrines that (can?) lead to enlightenment”, however many others are not of such a view.

The “spin”, IMO, is that Mahāyāna in its present totality, due to that Pāli quote, is justifiably by the standards of “early Dharma”. Mahāyāna has many brilliant teachings within it, IMO, but “early Dharma” it is not.

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I’d like to contribute if I may by giving some more background on the Uttaravipatti Sutta, AN 8.8, cited in the OP. My comment here grew rather long, so I have made it into a separate post here:

But the basic point is simple: AN 8.8 is the only sutta in the EBTs to claim that what is well spoken is spoken by the Buddha. But it is clearly a late sutta, and is not evidence that this idea is original, but that it was a late addition. Moreover, it is spoken by a narrator who may well be unreliable.

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Apparently the Buddha wasn’t even Indian anymore!

The Buddha was a “not-Greek” Scythian who lived in Northwestern China. He also founded Daoism apparently. More to come once I have delved further into these astounding “new findings” :sweat_smile:.

http://www.middlewaysociety.org/books/the-middle-way-in-buddhism-books/greek-buddha-by-christopher-i-beckwith/

In case no one else enjoys drinking the Kool-Aid as much as me, I’m cutting and pasting a list of the book’s claims from the site that I linked to. Should make someone’s day:

[quote]1. The Buddha was not Indian (though nor was he Greek – the title of the book is misleading). Instead, the Buddha was Scythian (people living to the north of Persia and in contact with the Greeks), and he was called Shakyamuni because he was a Saka, a type of Scythian.
2. The Pali Canon, being composed and written more than 500 years after the death of the Buddha, offers very little reliable information about the Buddha. Most of the information in it has been made up to fit later models of what ‘Buddhism’ is that developed after about the first century CE.
3. The Buddha did not teach karma and rebirth, but only the balanced sceptical argument (Pyrrhonism) of the Middle Way, and the release he taught was not from the rounds of existence, but rather from the polarising constrictions of metaphysical views, both positive and negative.
4. However fundamental the Four Noble Truths and Noble Eightfold Path may now seem to Buddhism, these are later additions attributed to the Buddha.
5. Lao Tzu may be one and the same person as Gautama the Buddha, so that Taoism is effectively an early form of Buddhism in China.
6. Early Buddhism reacted not against Brahmanism but against Zoroastrianism.
7. Buddhism was the first religious movement to emerge in India, and others, such as Brahmanical Hinduism and Jainism, have copied it and sought to compete with it by claiming similar antiquity.
8. Buddhism did emerge in a setting with developing cities, but in Gandhara (north western India, more subject to Persian and Greek influence), not in the still-rural Ganges valley, even if the Buddha then travelled to the Ganges valley.
9. Pyrrho’s Scepticism was so radically discontinuous from other Greek philosophy that it must be considered (early) Buddhist rather than ‘Greek’. Pyrrho’s visit to India with Alexander’s armies thus becomes one of our key sources of information about early Buddhism.[/quote]A particular highlight:

The big problem with Indian texts from this period is that they lacked all historical sense, and are thus neither datable nor reliable.

So only rock edicts, alleged Greek & Persian EBTs (can someone fact check this claim?) and the some of the āgamāḥ make it as a “reliable” testament to the Buddha.

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Lol, thanks for the chuckles. It is, however, somewhat distressing that this nonsense is apparently published by a “reputable” University. Thus far has American Buddhist studies sunk into the mire.

What, on a funny meter? Less funny than Monty Python, more funny than today’s headlines.

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Unfortunately I’ve had discussions with interested people at both a general and a scholarly level (without significant Buddhist studies background of course), and have virtually nowhere to point them when it comes to rebutting this nonsense. There is one short article out by Bronkhorst (“Was there Buddhism in Gāndhara at the time of Alexander?”) pointing to a number of faulty claims in the book, but apparently its having been published by an academic with an academic press makes it nevertheless catnip for any who wish to throw dust into the eyes of mainstream scholarship.

Are you aware of any decent, scholarly attempts to deal with the book’s claims?

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[quote=“dougsmith, post:17, topic:6002”]
Are you aware of any decent, scholarly attempts to deal with the book’s claims?
[/quote]It’s Princeton University Press. They’ve (and the author has) picked a pretty big bouquet of oopsy-daisies. Then again, other popular authors (such as the author who inspired the thread that inspired this thread) get away with all sorts of contrivances with regards to religious history and are New York Times Bestsellers and have never been disciplined for blatant academic mispractice by their supposedly responsible employers in the academic institution.

Its a pretty sad state of affairs. At least we can chuckle.

I’m definitely going to read this book but I refuse to pay for it. I am sure I will find it in a secondhand store, I know a good one in Toronto.

I can’t for the life of me wait to find out what wizardry the author is going to pull justify disqualifying all Pāli, Sanskrit, and Gāndhārī texts.

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Well, see the problem is that this has already been largely achieved by Schopen et al. Not that their work even remotely achieves this in actuality, but it is received as if it has done so. So works like this already have a pre-built mythos in which to fabricate their fantasies.

I was going to write to Prof Gombrich and ask him to respond, but the problem is that those of us who actually want to work don’t want to waste our time with this silliness. It’s like climate change: the scientists want to get on with doing actual science, not with countering yet another denialist argument.

It’s amazing how, even in the brief skim of that review, this work ticks all the boxes of classic denialist argumentation. Brahmali and I in Authenticity made the case that we should be talking of “Buddist denialism”, and this is a worthy addition to the canon.

If you do get around to reading it, maybe you’d be so kind as to summarize important factual claims here so we can while away a pleasant rainy morning in rebutting them!

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[quote=“sujato, post:19, topic:6002”]
It’s amazing how, even in the brief skim of that review, this work ticks all the boxes of classic denialist argumentation.
[/quote]I had the best meme, but I couldn’t post it, because it involved using a picture of a poor anonymous Zen Bhikkhu, for what was ultimately a joke that is common in our society, but perhaps unethical, given that memes generally use peoples’ likenesses without their consent.

Suffice to say there is a common pattern with “Early Buddhism Conspiracies” (EBCs): the evil sangha. Here to conveniently alter your Buddhavacana before the textual tradition inherits it. Conveniently untraceable.

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Yes, this is kind of what I was suspecting. Nevertheless thank you bhante. At least we have the Bronkhorst piece, short though it is.

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