“Merchants of (Buddhist) Doubt”, a reference to a documentary on climate change, the topic of this thread, also, I suppose.
Worry not. There’s no such a thing in Zen. They gave up Vinaya hundreds of years ago! 
[quote=“Gabriel_L, post:24, topic:6002, full:true”]
Worry not. There’s no such a thing in Zen. They gave up Vinaya hundreds of years ago!
[/quote]Only because the emperor made them!
I’m sure some of them kept it anyways, in secret. Maybe I am just optomistic.
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Here is a review of Beckwith’s book by Matthew Neale:
I’m reading the aforementioned Beckwith book and am about 40% through. The heart of it is the remarkable similarity between the Three Characteristics and Pyrrho’s Three Questions. This isn’t the first or only book to have explored the notion, though I didn’t know that before I started reading it.
The author considers some of the Ashoka pillars to be forgeries, notably the Lumbini one. As the evidence presented for that is in the appendices, I haven’t seen it yet. He doesn’t discount the Pali canon entirely and refers to portions of it that he considers early (like the Atthakavagga). He discounts the materials regarding Jains and such as being later additions, and is of the opinion that the other sects mentioned in what are usually considered EBTs did not actually exist at the time of the Tathagata. He proposes that a lot of the Pali texts that seem to be in opposition to Brahmanic practices are actually a reaction to Zoroastrianism. He repeats the assertion that I’ve seen elsewhere that the Buddha’s ancestry was Scythian.
Some of his assertions are based on archeology, and some on historical writings (mostly Greek, but some Chinese-- he says that the name Gotama appears in early Taoist writings?). The author is apparently a specialist in Silk Road era history, language, and cultures, and doesn’t claim to be a scholar of Buddhism specifically.
I’ll make a list of the theses in the book when I’ve finished it, and am interested to see what discussion it may generate.
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Oh boy. So what the author claims is that 老子(Lǎo zǐ) is an attempt, by the Chinese, to transcribe the name Gautama.
If the Dào dé jīng is still believed to be from ~400BC (although who knows! the author could be saying the text dates from about any time, given how radically he “questions” the dominant narratives), this name would be pronounced, possibly, something like this:
Apparently the large C indicates an unknown or unreconstructable consonant. This is from Baxter-Sagart’s Old Chinese reconstructions, which someone has wonderfully uploaded to wiktionary online.
To give an idea of the likelihood of this. In addition to this, 老子 is not anyone’s name, it means “old sage” or “ancient teacher”. It is a title. No one know’s 老子’s “name” in the sense that no one knows the Buddha’s “(personal) name”, Siddhartha being a later hagiographical addition, I think (but am not sure about that last bit about the personal name Siddhartha).
I really think you should read the relevant section of the book. I think you would find it more interesting than your guess at the argument makes out.
He’s saying that Gotama and Chuang Tzu’s “Lao Tan” are one and the same. Or that they might be.
This is what the book says. This is it’s argument, or rather, one of them only. I know because I read the full amazon page with the full customer reviews. Perhaps the reviewers are lying or misunderstand the author. But according to them, the author claims Laozi is an attempt to transcribe Gautama, or at least it’s first syllable.
It makes some sense. Gautama, Laozi. Unfortunately that is comparing modern Chinese to Sanskrit.
That’s not what the book says. Beckwith argues that the transcription is from 老 聃, lǎo dān, which he says is the “full form” of the name, well-attested in the Chuangtzu. Here is the full passage containing his argument:
"First, other than his foreign origin the only thing relatively concrete known about Laotzu is that the full form of his name— in modern pronunciation, Lao Tan 老 聃 lǎo dān— is very well attested in many instances in the Chuangtzu, where it is used interchangeably with the name Laotzu, which appears to be simply a standard “philosopher” version of his name. If so, it should be like those of many other ancient Chinese philosophers such as K’ung-tzu 孔 子 ‘Confucius’, formed by taking the first syllable of his name, K’ung 孔 kǒng (a surname), and adding tzu 子 zǐ ‘child’, master, philosopher’ to it. However, Lao 老 is unique in that it is not an ordinary surname or other proper name per se, but the ordinary adjective meaning ‘old, aged’; partly for that reason Laotzu’s names have been a fertile field for folk etymologies both Chinese and non-Chinese for a very long time, right down to the present. Yet the name Lao Tan not only occurs many times in the Chuangtzu as the full form of his name, it is given without comment and treated in the text strictly as a name. That means all the many folk etymologies proposed to explain the name, typically involving age and ears, are worthless. Moreover, its inexplicability and the involvement of variant characters suggest that it may be a foreign name— as the ancient Chinese thought too, and showed by their story of his return to his foreign home late in life.
“The name Lao Tan 老 聃 ~ 老 耽 MSC lǎo dān, from MChi ☆ law2 ☆ tham ~ ☆ tǝm/ ☆ tam can be reconstructed fairly clearly for Old Chinese. A Tang Dynasty Taoist commentator, Chang Chün-hsiang 張 君 相, is quoted in the Peking edition of the Shih chi as saying Laotzu is not the master’s name, but an epithet, and more significantly he says, “老， 考 也.” 33 ‘Lao is K’ao.’ Though not cited in the notes to this comment, it is a verbatim quotation from the Shuo wen chieh tzu (ca. AD 100), a famous and authoritative Han Dynasty work, which tells us that lao 老 MSC lǎo is the same as k’ao 考 MSC kǎo: “Lao 老 is k’ao 考,” and vice versa. Similarly, the Shih ming (a later Han Dynasty work), says that lao 老 is pronounced like hsiu 朽 MSC xiǔ, the phonetic of which is k’ao 丂 MSC kăo. The two words are thus equated in sound and in meaning in these early texts. Moreover, “From a study of its occurrences in ancient oracle bone and bronze inscriptions, we know that” the character now written and pronounced lao 老 ‘old’ “was originally written with another” character, k’ao 考 ‘old’, “that had a similar appearance but faced in the opposite direction and is now pronounced k’ao” in Modern Standard Mandarin. “The change from k’ao to lao has never been satisfactorily explained.” Therefore, the name could equally well have ended up being written and pronounced today as K’ao Tan 老 聃 MSC kǎo dān, from Early Middle Chinese ☆ khawtam or ☆ khawtham. Because the expected reconstruction of the onset of k’ao 考 in Old Chinese is either an aspirated *kh- or a voiced *g-, the first syllable of the name can be reconstructed for Central dialect Old Chinese as either *Khaw or *Gaw. However, it is extremely unlikely that it had the aspirated onset [kh] (which is difficult to justify reconstructing as a phoneme for Old Chinese), and much more likely that it had the plain voiced onset [g], as did countless other words before the Early Middle Chinese period, when they began to be devoiced and, often, aspirated, depending on dialect and other factors. The most likely reconstruction, therefore, is OChi *go ~ *gu ~ *gaw (or *gau) ~ for the first syllable, giving Old Chinese *Gotam ~ *Gutam ~ *Gautam. With the recent discovery that many Old Chinese morphemes, even in the Late Old Chinese period, were disyllabic and had a short final *a that was lost when Chinese underwent canonical monosyllabicization of its remaining disyllabic morphemes in the process of becoming Early Middle Chinese, we can restore the expected final vowel *-a, giving us *Gotama ~ *Gutama ~ *Gautama or *Godama ~ *Gudama ~ *Gaudama, any one of which is a good Chinese transcription of the personal name of the Buddha, which is attested several centuries later in the early Gāndhārī texts (from about the first century AD on) as Godama ~ Ghudama (and later in Sanskrit as Gautama), bearing in mind that organized Buddhism was transmitted to China in the early centuries AD from Central Asia, and the texts were in Gāndhārī. The Chinese adjusted the peculiar semantics of the original transcription of his name by writing the same sounds— in Old Chinese— with different characters to make more sense out of it as Chinese, despite the still unusual semantics, ‘Old Long-ears’.”
I suppose there is where the key departure from Baxter-Sagart, Zhengzhang, and almost every other reputable scholar of Old Chinese that I am aware of, lies.
Baxter-Sagart reconstructs this (kǎo/lǎo dān) as
, at the time. Very far from *go ~ *gu ~ *gaw (or *gau).
The reconstructions that the author gives of Old Chinese look more like the Chinese of ~500-1000 years later, Middle Chinese, but that is just my old opinion.
In Middle Chinese, 考 is khɑux. Baxtar-Sagart does not include 聃 in his (their, I keep treating them as one person, bad habit of mine) Middle Chinese reconstructions, but we can assume it is closer to Modern Chinese, which indeed sounds a lot like “Gautam[a]”.
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Does this author cite this recent discovery that many Old Chinese morphemes were bisyllabic? I have been looking for a while, and I can find no mention of it in any of the databases I have searched, and I have access to quite a few via my university. I might have missed something though.
The author, in the quoted material above, argues for a theory of Ghāndārī source texts for the Chinese āgamāḥ. If I may present another perspective, from Marcus Bingenheimer:
(Marcus Bingenheimer, Studies in Āgama Literature, starting at page 32)
I was recently reading an essay entitled The Abhidharma: The Origins, Growth and Development of a Literary Tradition, by Leo M Pruden. The essay is included in his English language rendering of the French translations of de Vallée Poussin of the Abhidharmakośabhāṣyam which is available for-free online via a Google search. This is an older translation of an even older translation (nineteenth century), if that helps contextualize the odd scholarship you are about to see.
On page xl (40 of the introduction), there are some ‘interesting’ claims made about the ‘early’ Buddhist community.
Let us say a few words first, however, about the religion of the early Buddhist canon, the religion of the Āgamas.
According to de Vallée Poussin, all the teachings of the Buddha were not publicly given out. Instead, much of the philosophy and the more subtle forms of the teaching were embodied in texts which were reserved for the study of monks in their monasteries; and the Āgamas (or Nikāyas), the earliest form of the Buddhist sermons which have been preserved for us, are such philosophical texts are were transmitted from one generation of monks to those of a subsequent generation. Such texts are then “clericalized” texts, and in these texts we see only a small bit of the popular side of early Buddhism.
Such is the case, to be sure, in any religion, and this is especially so in the case of Indian religions. Any Indian religion has two sides to it: a clerical, well worked-over doctrine, and a popular aspect of the religion, which includes many elements brought over in the mind of new converts to the religion. But the most important point to remember is that the extant literature of any religion is the technical literature used in the monasteries. The real face of early Buddhism in all of its aspects cannot be gotten at only through its literature, but must also be obtained through archaeology, art and chronology (_Le dogme et la philosophie du Bouddhisme, 1930, Chap. VII). Such a mass Buddhism was the Buddhism that preceded the canon, “precanonical Buddhism” (Bouddhisme precanonique). Its contents were not only a darśana - a systematic school of Indian philosophy, a consistent world-view - but a faith concerned with spirits and the release of these spirits from the round of birth and death, having, according to scholars, little in common with the doctrines of anitya, anātman, and duḥkha so often expressed in the Āgamas.
There you have it folks! Stop worrying about the 3 marks of existence, they, like the rest of the Buddhadharma, apparently are later innovations!
Three questions:
Why doesn’t he allow for the possibility that the monastic and popular forms of the religion evolved side-by-side? Everything we know about the evolution of the Buddha’s teaching suggests that it was preached and developed by religious wanderers first, and only later preached to lay followers. Even if one accepts that the canon that has come down included many doctrines and organizing systems that were developed in monasteries later, surely the early bhikkhu sangha had some core of teaching that formed the basis of their practices, disciplines and devotion.
Second, what does he think about the Jatakas? Aren’t those a plausible place to look to find some picture of the spirit of popular Buddhism? Isn’t that what the architectural record suggests as well? But isn’t it also clear that this tradition developed somewhat after the formation of the original core of wandering renunciants?
Third, what does he make of texts like the Dhammapada and the narrative-filled Dhammapada commentary?
Looks like they’re using the “Elite Religion vs. Popular Religion” heuristic, and assuming it’s true for the purposes of making conclusions about pre-canonical Buddhism.
Here is some modern discussion of this from Xian Studies:
https://boydellandbrewer.com/elite-and-popular-religion-hb.html
Taken together the essays in this volume challenge conventional understandings of a simple and sharp dichotomy between elite and popular religion, instead highlighting the ways in which participants from across the social spectrum could take part in a shared religious culture - albeit often for different reasons and with different resonances - and emphasising how elements of that culture were appropriated by different social groups.
So, Pruden is using an early version of this heuristic, and therefore I’m not so sure that he’s claiming that pre-canonical Buddhism didn’t have the Three Marks doctrine. I see him claiming that the elite religion of the monastic Sangha was preserved with much more fidelity than aspects of popular faith & devotion, and that to have his contemporaries focus on the elite side misrepresented (pre-canonical) Buddhism.
Therefore,
I think he does. The Jatakas angle is also one I bet he knew about, but his effort is to discuss pre-canonical Buddhism, and that wasn’t going to have Jatakas at all. Not sure about the Dhp, but I’m going to wager that this early stage of Western scholarship is going to have a lot of lacunae.
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He mentions them immediately after the section that I quoted:
…little in common with [the marks of existence] so often stressed in the Āgamas (see de La Vallée Poussin’s Nirvāṇa, 1915, p. 85, 115, 131). The spread of Buddhism was dependent upon its moral teaching, the personality of its founder, its wisdom embodied in memorable sentences and couplets (the Dhammapada or Udānavarga), coupled with popular animal tales (the Jākatas) (see The Way to Nirvāṇa, 1917, Chap V). Buddhism was also closely related to ancient Indian nature worship, the worship of certain trees, and the veneration of snakes.
The whole paper is here: http://lirs.ru/lib/kosa/Abhidharmakosabhasyam,vol_1,Vasubandhu,Poussin,Pruden,1991.pdf
Incidentally,
based on the tenor of the text, and the age of the translation that it is translating (de La Vallée Poussin is rather old), and the content of the Buddhology presented, I had wrongly believed Leo M Pruden to be fin-de-siècle, but he is a completely contemporary writer writing some time between 1988 & 1991. Oh my!
de La Vallée Poussin could well be “using an early version of this heuristic” though.
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Well, for not having read any of it, I didn’t do half bad 
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Gautama 瞿(ju)昙
This translation you can find it in Mahayana sutra .
Gau if paring 考/老 ,
not seen at all .
Therefore , it seems that
Gautama & Laodan(Laozi)
not really compatible .
70 years and above is considered 老Lao
老(Lao) also meant father
In order to differentiate Old and Father
from
老 (Lao) refer to old
to
考 (Kao) refer to father
Later development ,
考 Kao only refer to the deceased father
The author is making his claims based on the alleged Old Chinese pronunciation of the characters.
The reconstructions of the author are very different from most other reconstructions I have seen coming from the area of historical linguistics.