There’s many DO lists collected in SA and SN, yes. The Mahanidana sutta and it’s parallel give us a window into the development of this longer list of twelve links. It’s seems to me that sutta originally places three different DO lists into a loose chain and then eventually, the first and third list was combined into a bigger list. And then at some point namarupa was replaced by avijja to arrive at the classic twelve links of DO. We can see it develop from one parallel to the next. DA 13 would be the end point of the evolution.
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I look forward to your translation. Hopefully at some stage we can have all of these versions of DN 15 translated and we can trace any changes as time went on.
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This seems to speculate that the three lists represent a progressive development, with some being earlier and others later: There was just one original or relatively early account of the lists/series, from which the other attested accounts developed later, either during or after the life-time of the Buddha.
I’d suggest reading the Theravada version (DN 15) and comparing it to MA 97, which has been translated by Analayo and Bucknell. You may notice what I’m saying. It’s rather difficult to describe it exactly without setting them side by side.
I should also say, now that I’ve drafted DA 13, that I’ve caught myself talking before doing the legwork regarding the Dharmaguptaka version. It’s even stranger!
It’s very close to the other parallels. While the Buddha lists out the later twelve links at the start, the actual analysis still has only ten links ending with namarupa > vijnana > namarupa. So, someone along the line thought that this sutra should present the twelve links, but they didn’t change the body of the text to match.
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It might be useful to compare it to other causal theories:
Smoking → Cancer
Smoking → Tar deposits in the lungs → Cancer
Smoking → Tar deposits in the lungs → Inflammation → CancerPeer pressure when young → Smoking → … → Cancer
Tobacco companies → … → Smoking → Cancer
Depending on your audience, you might highlight different aspects of your theory. To educators you might highlight the role of peer pressure, to medical researchers the role of inflammation, to activists the role of special interests etc.
A review paper might collect all these accounts and present an overview of the field. It makes sense that monastics would do this in the time after the Buddha, no?
This is a fairly common scientific endeavor actually; someone combs through the literature and lists all the antecedents and effects of some phenomena. As long as the previous literature isn’t distorted, this can be incredibly useful and worthwhile to read.
E.g. if the Buddha said A → B in one context and in another context said B → C, is it ‘late’ to compile this into A → B → C?
IMO it’s a totally different matter if the Buddha only said B → C, and someone else added the ‘A ->’ at some later point in time.
Another thing that’s fairly common in science is to – when you want to influence an adjacent field – present your theory using the terms of that adjacent field.
For example, a thing that’s happening right now is statistical physicists trying to influence how economists calculate average values.
Economists aren’t going to read statistical physics, so the physicists have to be like “hey economists, this thing that you care about (expected value) has to be calculated in this way, not that way!”
So it’s fairly common sense (IMO) that the Buddha would do the same e.g. when talking to people who were very concerned with namarupa. It’s a smart way to communicate a substantive finding.
Also, none of the above smoking → cancer causal sequences are contradictory accounts of cancer from smoking.
Edit: going into the details of a causal mechanism by describing mediators is, again, pretty standard science 
A contradictory account would be something like “actually, smoking is just a marker variable for a generally unhealthy lifestyle, which is the actual cause of cancer”.
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Thank you for this Erik. It’s a very reasonable and helpful way to think about what is going on here.
It definitely makes more sense to me that what is happening with these different lists is something like what you have described.
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I think this is applicable in many areas of the canon and it resonates well with me in the case of this discussion.
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I’m with @Javier in that I’m skeptical that the Atthaka-vagga is uniquely early. And even if it were, it’s poetic in format, so you wouldn’t expect a “dry” detailed list to appear in it. Like you said, other formulas don’t appear either.
The Sutta-nipāta, Dhammapada (both edited in Khuddaka-Nikāya), and Sagātha-vagga (in Samyutta-Nikāya/Samyukta-āgama) were composed in verse. The view that these texts in verse were composed earlier is based mainly on their relatively archaic language. But this reasoning is unsound, because verse always tends to be linguistically conservative in language.
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How interesting that Ananda used that phrase at this moment, considering the Buddha’s reply included only eight factors. I didn’t know that fascinating fact, not being a scholar of Pali, because all English translations I’ve read don’t include that phrase “twelve nidanas”, just “dependent co-arising”.
Thanks for the info, and a clearer view!
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I agree with @Phraalan
Sutta analysis like this, which uses syntactic structure analysis, feels naive. Instead of doing semantic, meaningful analysis.
We know the Buddha was most likely to present the dhamma in various formulas. Then people who are known as experts analyze the structural presentation of dhamma as a basis for suspecting that this is later and that one is first.
@Bodhipaksa Thank you for your writing. I became interested in checking back on DN14.
The context of the part of DN14 which states “consciousness conditions the arising of mind-body, but also mind-body conditions consciousness”, is the contemplation and reflection (at that time) of the Bodhisatta Vipassi. The most important of these reflections was the conclusion that came to the mind of Bodhisatta Vipassi: “This consciousness returns to mind-body. Go no further.” That is, the causes and effects that occur so as to form the circle of rebirth all come from the mind-body, not from external causes.
Now let’s look at the “difference” context of consciousness as the cause of the mind-body and the one as the effect.
The first consciousness, which is the cause of mind-body, is the consciousness of rebirth. That is the consciousness that first arises after the moment of death. This is the first arising of consciousness after death and the type of consciousness is vipakka (fruit of karma). That is consciousness as the fruit of karma due to the existence of potential lust (anusaya tanha).
Because there is rebirth marked by the emergence of the first consciousness after death, it then encourages karma to bear fruit in the next form of consciousness which is accompanied by co-arising by the appearance of the material element originating from karmic maturity (kammajarupa). From this mind-body element arises the sense-base… and then comes contact… from this contact comes consciousness accompanied by vedana (sensation). Now, this is what the Bodhisatta Vipassi pondered:
“because (first) consciousness arises, then mind-body arises… which eventually conditions the next series of consciousness…”.
So it’s not meant for us to take it as a “new model” for the 12 mutually conditioning chains of life. Rather it is a mental conclusion from the 12 links: “from consciousness conditioned the physical mind… the subsequent consciousness is also not from anywhere, but is again conditioned by the mind-body too…”.
Haha! this is great!! more grist for my mill!!! I am slogging through an exhaustive analysis of every sutta in the NIkayas/Agamas that has jhana in it so I have something to compare other doctrines too, over in the are the aggregates late thread. Now when I finish that I can apply the same process to the 12DO in the 4N/A and get a sense of it’s relative "spread in the early material.
After that, sense bases.
I note for the moment that the 37 aides to enlightenment list, appearing in several places in the nIkayas, never appears in SN, and that the mahavagga of SN has for its first 7 chapters exactly the same list as chapter headings, so, my thought is that the mahavagga of SN is the Ur text for the “proto-abhidhamma” or “matrika”. i.e cattāro satipaṭṭhānā, cattāro sammappadhānā, cattāro iddhipādā, pañcindriyāni, pañca balāni, satta bojjhaṅgā, ariyo aṭṭhaṅgiko maggo
This would neatly explain the lack of aggregates and nidanas in DN and MN, and the broader structure of SN, where the mahavagga would have to be supplemented with these important concepts.
I’m excited!!
Well, exactly as @cdpatton asked before, what do we mean by “late”? Some scholars argue the 12-link sequence was formed later than the Buddha, quite non-convincingly, I belief. But to others, like Frauwallner, “later” just means it was not the earliest version of the principle (which was the noble truths) but was still spoken by the Buddha. Schmithausen is not committing himself either way.
This kind of simple (excuse me) instance counting and comparing between the Nikāyas seem to be proliferating on this discussion board, so I’d like to say that this says little if anything about the authenticity of certain doctrines. In this particular case most discourses on the 12 links are found in SN12 because of the very simply fact that they were collected there when the Canon was organized. If you collect things in one place, naturally they are not found as frequently elsewhere anymore. It’s like walking into a library and wondering why all books on mathematics are in one corner, and none found in the geography section. Well, simply because someone gathered them in one place!
Similarly, in AN8 we actually find no (or very few) discourses on the eightfold path. Why? Simply because most discourses on the subject were already put in SN45. This relative absence in AN says nothing about the authenticity of the eightfold path, which has to be one of the earliest doctrines. We do on the contrary often find the 10-fold path in AN10, which in turn is more rarely found in SN, for similar reasons that they were already put in the AN. May not be the best example, but you all get the idea.
It’s the same with the texts on aggregates, @josephzizys, which were generally collected in SN22, and therefore are much rarer elsewhere. There apparently also wasn’t a discourse specifically on the aggregates that was considered long enough to be put in the DN or MN instead of SN, which generally has the shorter discourses.
Again, all this says nothing about authenticity. We have to realize that the suttas existed before there were the different Nikāyas. It’s not the other way around, at least most of the time. So instead of spending time on this counting stuff in different books, we’d better spend it on studying the actual content of the texts, then comparing it with the Chinese—and suchlike study which can actually say something about authenticity.
So that the 12-fold chain occurs most in SN12 says nothing about it being inauthentic. On the contrary, we could say it was deemed important enough to get it’s own Saṃyutta.
See also Vetter’s Zwei Schwierige Stellen Im Mahānidānasutta: Zur Qualität Der Überlieferung Im Pāli-Kanon, which compared DN15, DA13, MA97, and T14 and T52. His conclusion iirc was that DN15 is overall later, but Ānalayo for good reasons wasn’t convinced (in his Dīrgha Āgama studies.) He does point out some interesting things, though. As far as I know online it’s only available on Jstor, but you can get a free non-downloadable preview there.
Vetter discusses some Sanskrit fragments too. SC lists SF 240, SF 138, and SHT Sutta 23 as parallels to DN15. Anybody has access to those and able to share them, or know where we can find them?
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Yes, this is very good point indeed about the books, the collections of suttas: Nikayas/Agamas.
According to Ven. Yinshun, Saṃyukta-āgama/Saṃyutta-nikāya was at first not being termed as nikāya or āgama, but generally named as the ‘Connected Discourses’ 相應教 Saṃyukta-kathā .
See:
About the term Saṃyukta-kathā, see p. 899, note 21 in “Ācāriya Buddhaghosa and Master Yinshun 印順 on the Three-aṅga Structure of Early Buddhist Texts” (2020) by Choong Mun-keat.
Calling the Saṃyukta/Saṃyutta discourses as āgama/nikāya ‘collection’ was until when the other three nikāyas/āgamas (MN/MA, DN/DA, AN/EA) were gradually developed and expanded from it (相應教 Saṃyukta-kathā) (Cf. pp. 10-11 in Choong Mun-keat’s Fundamental Teachings of Early Buddhism (2000)).
Yup, and it seems to me that SN 22.56 is a simple treatment of, roughly, the four noble truths (pain, cause, cessation, path) referred to, differently, as catuparivaṭṭaṁ, and dependent origination, (e.g. Form originates from food. When food ceases, form ceases. Āhārasamudayā rūpasamudayo; āhāranirodhā rūpanirodho) in relation to the five aggregates (which, implicitly, are pain).
Worrying about conceptual imputation (i.e. nama-rupa) and Buddhist nominalism is quite philosophically advanced for most people I think.
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But this is not at all what we find with regard to the jhanas for example, or the danger gratification escape pericope, or a whole bunch of other features we find in the material.
And its not simply that there is a lack of discourses about them outside SN, its that there is an almost complete lack of even the mention of them.
Ive noticed that quite a few people like to say this, but am yet to hear a particularly convincing reason why, with the “all mentions are collected in one place” seeming to be more or less the counter-argument, which I just dont find very convincing.
I will give this se more thought and repsond more thoroughly later i think.
So? It seems not unlikely that some central doctrines, like the jhanas, were more prone to being directly connected with others, so couldn’t be fully isolated in a book; others were probably not significant enough to get their own book in SN, like the danger pericope.
There is just no justification to judge the lateness of doctrines by how they are arranged in the Nikāyas. It’s just logical that the suttas existed before the different Nikāyas. The sangha wouldn’t have started with an empty set of Nikāyas before they had the discourses. Also, I can’t remember the suttas ever mentioning the Nikāyas, yet they do mention other suttas. This also shows the Nikāyas were later.
You can also compare the Pāli canon to the Āgamas and see that certain suttas are arranged differently, like put in the Majjhima equivalent rather than Digha, or Saṃyutta rather than Majjhima and so on. Again, where the suttas are placed says little or anything about their lateness, because this placement happened after the suttas were created. This is a commonly agreed upon fact, so don’t be surprised nobody is going to lay it out for you here. You can do some research into the matter yourself, some links were already given earlier. You’ll also see that scholar don’t judge the lateness of a text or doctrine purely by which Nikāya it is mainly found in.
But to get back to the topic at hand, I do also tend to think that the 12 membered formula was not the first formulation of the principle—although I do belief it goes back to the Buddha. Cdpatton earlier mentioned that quite interestingly in some Chinese parallels to DN15 there are two separate chains which are never directly joined together like they are in the Pāli. (MA97 and T52)
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I really don’t care what people commonly agree upon as thier facts. I am interested in the actual facts, whether anyone agrees upon them or not.
This is exactly where we disagree. I say, where a sutta is;
- spoken by the Buddha.
- to a public audience.
- in a named location.
- where there is an Agama parallel.
- and that parallel occurs in the same collection.
- and agrees with the location.
- and contains the same doctrinal pericopes
That we have every right to claim that there is circumstantial evidence that the sutta is early. In contrast where a sutta is;
- spoken by a disciple (especially if that disciple is not Anada or Sariputta of Mahakassapa) or
- to a private audience (like “deep in the woods” or to a “gravely ill monk”) or
- does not name a speaker or location (or simply says “at savatthi”) or
- has no Agama parallel or
- that parallel is placed in a different collection. (because by the time it was considered canonical the schools had split and decided on different placements) or
- the parallel gives a different location (or different characters, for the same reason as previous) or
- has different or missing doctrinal pericopes (implying the sutta was still being edited in the sectarian period)
we can reasonably raise doubts about the earliness and universal endorsement of the material.
Similarly if a doctrine or periscope is found ONLY in one Nikaya, or ONLY in that Nikaya and then locations outside of it that are disputed by the schools, then we may legitimately ask the question whether said doctrine is in fact as indisputably early as the jhana formulation.
I don’t care what “scholars” of Buddhism do or don’t do, it’s not rocket science, I don’t really care if God himself thinks that the frequency and distribution of technical terms in a corpus isn’t relevant to stratifying that corpus, if he can coherently explain to me why he thinks it is meaningless then I will give that argument my full consideration. So far all I have heard is a tacit claim that every sutta in the Pali NIkaya must predate any collection of them, a position that seems to me manifestly false, and a claim that the reason some doctrinal terms occur in SN and almost nowhere else with Agama parallels in the same texts is because they where collected that way, an argument that also does not stand up to scrutiny for the obvious reason that if the agamas and nikayas differ on where the rare occurrences do occur then they cannot be explained by collection in a pre-sectarian period.
So what would you say it was about jhanas that make them obviously different to say the four foundations of mindfulness that caused them to be spread throughout DN/DA and MN/MA in a way that mindfulness wasn’t? what is it about situational awareness that allows it to be widely distributed while the four foundations are not?
Other people can, and very obviously do, believe whatever they like, I believe that there is an enormous amount to be gained by a more complete and rigourous study of the frequency and distribution of known pericopes in the nikayas and agamas with specific reference to the points 1-7 mentioned above, and I intend to continue pursuing this line of research and to continue to post my ramblings on here as long as I am allowed, because I still hope that there are some few people, now on this board or in the future dipping in to look at ti, who will see the value in what is being presented.
The irony of this given that the distribution of the 12 link version and the presence of differences in the parallels are practically the only evidence we have to suggest that this is in fact the case is quite… well, it makes me feel feelings… bemusement maybe?
Anyway, I love your work @Sunyo, but as i’ve said before, I can usually rely on you to disagree with me on any given point, so keep up the good work! I am loving the opportunity to robustly debate with people I respect (but respectfully disagree with).
Metta.
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It matters if those people are highly regarded scholars. It’s why there are such things as peer review and collaboration. Sure, you can create your own principles to judge authenticity, but then the burden is on you to prove that they are valid.
Prove how your methods are valid rather than assuming they are, and people may give you more credit and attention.
Can’t you see how that’s problematic?
For one thing, you can learn and improve by caring what others do.
Those are questions not easily answered in a brief forum post. however, that there is no simple answer is not a reason to make assumptions about lateness of other doctrines based on where they are found.
You’re also placing the burden on us, which is unfair given that you’re the one using the unique methods.
You can and by all means do. But I hope you are aware that people are reading along who are very ill informed about the history of texts, who also have no way to tell our credntials. That’s the reason I care, honestly. I don’t mind what you’re doing or thinking privately.
Just for the record, I never said every sutta. I specifically said “most of the time”.
But how exactly is this ironic, given that the brief argument I gave is not based on the location of the text but on their actual content? In fact, these texts I mentioned appear in different collections in the Chinese and Pāli, which actually supports what I’m trying to say, that the place in the canon is quite irrelevant.
I respect you a lot as well, just not your methods. 
I think I’ve made that clear enough—again, not to convince you, but at least other people see the different perspective.
This is not a topic of discussion that particularly inspires me or makes me want to practice or study, so I hope you don’t mind I leave it as this. I’m just putting it out here as a bit of counterweight, for people to consider.
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