I don’t know anything about how Ven. Analayo learned Chinese, but it’s possible he simply taught himself to read the Buddhist Hybrid Chinese of the Agamas. That wouldn’t be very useful in understanding modern Chinese, especially sophisticated modern literary Chinese (which is the style Ven. Yinshun’s books are probably written in). While I don’t doubt Ven. Analayo is capable of learning enough modern Chinese to understand Ven. Yinshun’s books, he probably doesn’t think it’s worth the time or effort.
By the way, are any of Ven. Yinshun’s books available electronically?
If you read Analayo’s Comparative Study of Majjhima Nikaya, Analayo does know the Yin Shun findings, but he disagrees with Yin Shun’s hypothesis that the SA or SN is formed from three early angas and therefore is ancestor of other Agamas or Nikayas.
I’ve tried to read Yin Shun through the garbled lens of Google Translate and it’s simply too much work to glean anything.
Thank you. Apparently there is some disagreement about “importance” of MN, etc. Overall, the lengthy comment seems (?) to be a “chicken vs. egg” discussion without any dispute that chickens and eggs are useful in conjunction.
Cool. It’s interesting that Ven. Yinshun also supports “getting back to basics”. It’s almost H***yana.
If we forget about this essential true meaning [of self-discipline and purification], we cannot be regarded as universally applying Buddhism in daily life even though we may engage in the promotion of the dharma to benefit sentient beings through cultural, charitable, educational, and international Buddhist activities.
(wow. D&D would have me as reading your post before you posted it. )
There are some translated things. Including his “The way to Buddhahood” which has been published. This a standard Mahayana introduction though, not just EBT based.
Other scholarship on Yinshun translates short passages and discusses his work in general.
I cannot read Chinese, but I found this Yin Shun’s work regarding the formation of Buddhist canon. Using Google translate, it seems contain Yin Shun hypothesis of SA/SN as ancestor of other Agamas/Nikayas:
It’s ironic that arguably the most comprehensive, insightful, and interesting takes on the Suttas from mid-period Indian Buddhism come from Asanga, Vasubandhu, and Nagarjuna. The Sravakayana schools seem to have gone completely over to Abhidhamma by then. If we look to the inspiration behind Buddhaghosa’s work on Sutta commentaries, apart from native Sinhalese sources, the closest seems to be Asanga.
Of course there is much material lost, and much that I am not familiar with, but that’s how it seems to me.
That’s the way seems to me, too. I’ve looked at some of the Abhidharma texts in Chinese like the Satyasiddha and Abhidharma-sara, and those authors complain in their introductions about everyone reading “treatises” by teachers who are not, well, up to snuff. It does sound like the sutras had been largely passed over in favor Abhidharma texts that tried to summarize and systematize them.
I read a little earlier another post from you that showed great awareness of the effect that a reader/listener’s conditioning has on how a message can be received. It’s often pointed out how the Buddha skilfully adapted his teaching to the needs of the people he was talking to.
We we speak with people we know, we also adjust our message to some extent, and this is what makes online communications so hard. We write something with a particular person or group in mind, and then heaps of other people read it and misunderstand the intention unintentionally.
Is this list (as is or slightly amended) firm enough to place somewhere more prominent? It’s very useful for reference. (Will catch up on this Monks in CS soon.)
Is it not the case that at this point schools were not thoroughly divided by -yana? Even in the Nara period in Japan (710 to 794CE) there were still multiple -yanas in the Dharmaguptaka tradition. Especially in the case of Nagarjuna, he was a luminary and a Mahayanist, but most people in his school, or even his home monastery, likely were not Mahayanist.
And of course until the 12th century there were Sri Lankan maha- and vajra- yanists in the Abhayagiri Vihara, which was Theravada.
To me, taking the historical stance that the Mahayana Sutras were original compositions authored by human beings centuries after the Buddha’s death, it makes sense that their authors would be persons who had extensive experience with the historical suttas. This comparison sometimes gets used derisively, but really, it seems similar to the authorship of fan fiction - if you see someone has authored a work using pre-existing characters and similar style, you wouldn’t be surprised to discover they had read the originals extensively and written about them.
Well, its an age old problem. The Nikayas are pretty large texts, its hard to introduce people to the Dharma through them alone (especially true in pre-modern times where they had to be massive manuscripts). They’re also quite repetitive - ideal for memorization and maintaining the teachings - but not for basic instruction. They are also not organized in a step by step basis like religious catechism or textbook which would introduce someone to a faith’s basic doctrine step by step.
The southern tradition ultimately resolved this by switching over fully to Abhidharma. The north did this too actually, but it seems there was a concerted effort by Sautrantikas and Yogacaras to return the Agamas in certain ways, particularly by quoting them extensively (this can be seen in the Abhidharmakosha commentary by Samathadeva) or by writing extensive summaries (in the Sūtravastusaṃgrahaṇī of the Yogācārabhūmi-Śāstra. But these eventually fell out of favor in the Northern tradition and now they just have different things like Lamrim which introduce basic concepts in a step by step manner.
The problem remains in non-Abhidhamma based southern Buddhism. Even today, we have things like Bhikkhu Bodhi’s “In the Buddha’s Words” and the sutta compilations by Thanissaro as probably the most read EBTs, I doubt a lot of new Buddhists are rushing to buy the massive Bhikkhu Bodhi tomes of the Nikayas.
I’ve always thought it would be good to have something similar, like a paced step by step online reading guide or compilation, that introduces someone to the basic concepts and ideas found in the suttas on this site.
I bought one of these tomes as a gift. And as I leafed through the pages of my favorite MN1, it dawned on me just how well SuttaCentral does in presenting the Dhamma in the internet way, allowing us all to click here and there learning as we go. Ven. Bodhi’s tomes do, however, require no batteries.
Yes, when I’m not busy translating texts, I often daydream about what can be done with hypertext. With HTML and a dataset, the sutras can be put into multiple orders, sorted, cross-referenced, linked to in summaries, etc. The information can be made much more accessible than a giant, flat document. But that’s a major project by itself. In ancient times, writing was the revolutionary information technology, which allowed them to create documents that pulled information together into a rational order.
I do also wonder if this switch to Abhidharma was pushed along by a disordering of the oral tradition canon at some point, though it seems more likely that it happened with written copies. It’s easy to scramble the order of a bunch of pages, leaves, or fascicles if they aren’t clearly marked. How would that happen in an oral tradition? I’m not sure. So, perhaps both things happened when writing reached the Buddhist tradition.
Yes! This was happening in the first centuries after Christ. Early Christians like the Gnostics were doing the same thing as Mahayanists, writing alternative versions of traditional Christian mythology, like the stories in Genesis. And like the Mahayanists, they often turned the stories on their head to argue that the god of the Old Testament was actually the villain, and there was a higher god who sent Christ. It’s quite fascinating when taken in the larger context like that. Clearly, there was a period when mythological stories were treated like fiction, and also used to propaganda-like effect.
I was reading a bit about the life of Kumarajiva, and it was interesting to see that his education started with learning the Mahavibhasa and other Sarvastivada abhidharma at age seven. Then a few years later he went to Kashmir and learned some agamas. Then later he learned Mahayana texts. Much later he promoted teachings from abhidharma and Mahayana texts, but I’m not aware of him promoting the agamas.
Just the Mahavibhasa is about as large as all the agamas combined. And then there were seven older books of abhidharma that were considered canonical as well. That’s a massive system for presenting Buddhism.
The agamas are great, but they don’t lend themselves to being a single logical system that is easily defensible in a competitive religious environment. They also make new findings and insights difficult to preserve without resorting to some external system. Abhidharma was able to define the Dharma as a system, and also incorporate new insights.
I think in the middle period, the agamas were considered rather old and antiquated even among many conservative Buddhists. We tend to think of ancient religions as mostly static, but India had a hugely vibrant religious culture that was constantly developing new texts and competing. Consider all the different philosophies and texts that developed from 500 BCE to 1000 CE. We shouldn’t be surprised that they kept writing new texts.
In any case, if you were in India during the middle period and wanted to “destroy the heretics” in debate, and win glory and royal patronage, you would need to be able to draw upon a system of orthodox views and practiced refutations.
Analayo has talked about this as one of his major research conundrums - how oral texts get scrambled, not just externally (which sutta comes first) but internally as well (what’s the second item in this list?). To the best of my knowledge, the evidence indicates that both sorts of scrambling are totally normal and not necessarily a sign of corruption or mistakes.
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