Anatta plays a central role in all the Buddhist traditions that I’ve ever encountered. So, that question is easy enough to answer. Even the Mahayanists who railed against the Sarvastivada’s svabhava (essence) concept were extending the anatta concept to encompass dharmas as well as sentient beings, adopting the word sunya to express this wider idea.
For your second question, I’m not sure how to answer it. I think most early Buddhist schools understood anatta in the same way as Theravadins; i.e., as the lack of a permanent and unchanging thing that underlying sentient beings. The concept of emptiness appears more frequently in other EBT canons vs. the Theravadins, for whatever reason, which makes it difficult to connect these dots if one only reads Pali sources. The early concept of emptiness appears to have a relationship to meditation and cessation instead of the later controversies about the existence of dharmas. So, this may have some tangential relationship to what you are seeing in these texts - the word “sunya” just hasn’t been put to use in them.
I’m not sure if this really what you are asking about, but here’s some further reading on the topic of the early meaning of emptiness in Buddhism:
I think that it is important to note that the concept/doctrine of anatta was being extended after the Buddha because of intersectarian innovations and reactions to them. Extending the concepts/doctrine forces a change in the practice. I believe that is what we are seeing when we compare the Atthakavagga and the Parayanavagga. The attainment required for liberation went from completely understanding sanna to the cessation of vinnana because the Parayanavagga moved the goal posts extending the concept/doctrine to include not consciousness.
This kind of thing doesn’t happen because someone is talking to a different audience as @Vaddha suggests. That might change the language or metaphors someone uses to get the message across, but it does not change how liberation is achieved despite what later attempts at harmonization say. Complete understanding of sanna is not the same as the cessation of consciousness.
Actually, I don’t need to show it is better. The mainstream view is that only one reading is possible. By showing that another reading is possible and even plausible, I have arrived at a definite result: the hegemonic view is not the only possible view. As open minded students of Buddhism we may now wish to debate the the relative merits, but that is a separate exercise.
This sounds incoherent. If we cannot cite the only evidence we have, then the discussion will be very short, no?
Again, offering an alternative explanation of processes that have only been considered as chronological is an important first step to a broader discussion. In people won’t admit to alternatives then they won’t discuss the issue, or at least not sensibly. Religieux are famously unwilling to consider alternatives and Buddhists are no better in this regard.
Moreover, offering an alternative does not imply that the hegemony is wrong. By highlighting alternative explanations in terms of regional variations, I am not saying that no chronological processes are occuring or possible, and taking that as my message would seem disingenuous. What I’m saying is that implicit bias towards seeing chronological processes as the cause of changes in doctrine limits the discussion unreasonably. History is always complex.
Part of plausible is probable. You can separate them if you like, but without going into what you are calling a separate exercise, you are only providing half an argument. So why is your interpretation better? BTW, my views are not mainstream either.
You have stated the conclusion. Now, show your working. If a good case can be made, then let’s see you make it and show your working.
Ironically, @sujato’s explanation was to cite regional differences to account for the difference in how the Pārāyana and Aṭṭḥaka were distributed. Demonstrating that sometimes a regional explanation is better than a chronological one, eh?
The common ancestor came first. This is using regional variation to demonstrate chronology. Yes, innovations happened and innovations happened on top of innovations. These are branches and twigs off the trunk. This is what evolution looks like.
Added later: when you say local variation, what do you think the variation is off of? A common ancestor? That implies a chronology.
Well, if you are interested in pursuing it further (and not merely in trolling people), I’ll have to suggest that you do some homework on your own time because I don’t have time to do it for you. I have a full-time job that requires my attention. And, besides, I’ve noticed over the years that people tend to learn more by doing rather than by being shown. If they have the desire, of course. If they don’t have the desire to learn, then there isn’t much point in either, is there? Chinese sources are woefully underutilized by Indic language academics such as yourself, so nosing around in the Taisho will probably be a good experience, regardless of the conclusion you might reach in the end.
I see you’ve written papers about the Heart Sutra relying on Chinese sources, so I assume you have the language and research skills required. Follow the link to the post where I listed a number of passages mentioning parallels to the Atthakavagga. Those passages will provide you with several different Chinese titles, some translated and some transliterated, which would indicate they were in Prakrit languages that treated S. asta and S. artha as homophones. Sometimes quotes from these parallels are also provided. Both can be the basis for further research and text searches. Be sure to take the time to consider the sectarian affiliations of those passages, dates of the texts, and the types of texts. It’s quite a cross section of sources, really.
Bhante, I’m curious as to your opinion on its authenticity then. If the Pārāyana is mainly a regional text, not shared as we would expect by all sides of the tradition in the same way the core Nikāyas are, do you find it likely that it is less likely to originate from the Buddha and his lifetime? Or how do you see this regional variation playing out (potentially)?
These are all generalizations, rules of thumb; we can’t make strong inferences from isolated cases.
From the time of the First Council (!) there has been an explicit acknowledgement of geographical variation in the canonization process, this is historical criticism 101. And note that not only was there variation acknowledged back then, but it was explicitly said to have been a monk who was in the Dakkhinagiri.
The fundamental sources of all texts are defined geographically, not temporally, which reflects the fact that for early Buddhists, different teachings were given in different places: that is the primary fact. Only later were they brought together; the entire process has been both coming together and moving apart, before finally solidifying in the (relatively) fixed spheres of influence of the later schools. Literally everyone in Buddhist studies knows this and discusses the geographic significance of textual transmission. To say otherwise is just a fever dream. Purely as a random example, here’s Oldenberg in 1879 discussing geographical questions in relation to early text development.
The most regional parts of the Parayanavagga are the opening and closing portions, which everyone agrees were added later. The actual sixteen questions, which are of course set in Magadha, don’t define their geography, but as I have shown, they implicitly agree with the location as stated in the Introduction.
The location listed in the intro is Sāvatthī though, not some southern area out of the way. Of course geography is important in understanding historical development and canonization. But these poems are supposed to not only be rather early, but also given in the central place where hundreds if not thousands of the Buddha’s discourses were consolidated and shared among all early canons.
If the Pārāyana is rather ghostly in the North and it is associated with the South in various ways, maybe it is not as early as previously thought is what I’m wondering. Even if it were a more regional collection that was more relevant to the southern bands of monastics, the early Buddhists and geographical sects clearly cared about consolidating the Buddha’s teachings from all over, especially these early metrical / monastic ones. We can see this in how popular the Atthakavagga, Dhammapada-Udāna, Khaggavisana Sutta, etc. were among the early Buddhists. And if the Pārāyana were early but regional, it (presumably) quickly would have spread to other monastics even in the early period and been shared by many.
So maybe the regional relevance of the text is part of its coincidental lack of presence in the North despite its relative earliness. But I also find it relevant that, for example, Bausch has done extensive research in showing how these ideas relate to Kosalan Brahmanism — in the Sāvatthī area — not originally the South, where Brahmanism was newer and less wide-spread anyway (for example, the Atharvaveda, despite containing very early material, did not spread to the South formally and survive as it did in the North, so far as scholars can tell).
It may all be too skeptical and far back to say, but I’m just trying to get an idea of a rough history of the collection, geographically and temporally. I do think it seems rather likely or possible that the Northern parallels were just lost, probably due to them not having compiled something like the Sutta Nipāta which the Theravadins did (and, as you demonstrated, was a Southern consolidation). We have evidence that other versions of these floating Khuddaka Nikāya texts were lost, for instance much of the Itivuttaka.
I think the hypothesis that geographical location of the sutta determined how widely it became distributed amongst other Buddhist schools over time can be easily tested. We just need a data collecting fiend like @josephzizys to gather the data on each sutta location and where its partial and entire parallels can be found amongst the different schools. If there is a strong correlation between sutta location and parallel distribution you have a point. If not, not.
Added later: I would be willing to help in the data collection.
This is a good idea and i think it is a great project for someone other than me to at some time get around to.
It should at least be possible to somewhat automate this using data already available at sc.
Sc has the parallels info, and it should be fairly straightforward to scrape the location data.
I suppose my caveat is that we basically in most cases have just 2 sources, the Chinese and the Pali. The sanskrit fragments are so fragmentary that they almost certainly will degrade the quality of data not improve it. (When 95 precent of the canon is missing getting a location tells you five percent of duck all).
Still, this would be useful info, as would the ability to ask questions like “outside of savatthi, how many times are the nidanas mentioned in each location” and so on.
There is such a vast amount of basic work to be done in terms of the digital buddhist corpus that it boggles my mind. The fact that there is no online source of the pali that dosent have commas is indiicitive of just how far we have to go.
Suttacentral is a beacon of whats possible and a promise of the great things to come.
Unfortunately I will probably not be able to contribute as much as i would like, having recently bought a bookshop thats open 7 days a week and still needing to write up my “the samyutta is pre-sectarian abhidhamma” thesis
I agree it would be an interesting project. You’d have to basically start by figuring out a way of dealing with Savatthi, since both internal evidence and direct quotes in certain Vinayas make it clear Savatthi was considered a default location. Perhaps it would have to be run by both including and excluding Savatthi to see how large this effect is.
All this means is that you’re unwilling to prove your own assertion. I’m not interested in proving it for you. Your are the one making the claim, the burden of proof is on you.
