I have been reflecting recently on what i am doing here and who I am trying to talk to and, inspired somewhat by some of @Jayarava 's posts, I have been trying to write up a proper introduction to and defense of my research Methodology.
Since I am not an academic, nor seeking academic publication, I think it is important to explain what I mean by a methodology, what I think my research means, and who I want to reach in talking about it.
My primary place for discussing these things is here amongst you whoās opinions, knowledge and wisdom I appreciate so much and who I wish to convince of the value of my approach.
Naming names:
@sujato is the proximate source of all my recent engagement with Buddhist Studies. His suttacentral website, source code, source data, and in the following case json files, provide the backbone for my research.
Discourse at suttacentral, also ultimately a manifestation of @sujato 's contributions to Buddhist Studies, is my primary platform for discussing these topics with other students of buddhism.
Amongst those interlocuters I must make special mention of @cdpatton 's immense erudition and brilliant, active research into the Chinese materials, especially in my case his work on the Agamas. Of other active users at the current time @srkris @Jayarava , @knotty36, @Vaddha, @Brahmali, @Ceisiwr, @Dhammanando, and many others have provided much food for thought.
Former, or at least as far as I can tell less active researchers like @Gabriel and others have also been an as yet ongoing source of information and ideas.
This brings me to the first aspect of my Methodology. My primary current reading in Buddhist Studies are you aforenamed (and all those whoās @ 's I couldnāt remember/find 
). This is a methodological point in the sense that I am seeking understanding and discourse from you, not form anyone in the academic arena, nor with any of the vinaya that I interact with in person.
The second aspect of my Methodology I should mention is me, that is I am engaging in this research to understand the four principle prose collections of āEarly Buddhist Textsā in order to share my understanding with you here not as fellow practitioners of a religion but as fellow researches into a corpus.
This is what I mean by my pun in the title, I am here to discuss with the aforementioned and others who want to discuss literal Texts in the āEarly Buddhist Textsā. Whatever may be true of the religion of Buddhism, or of a real person named Gotoma Sakya or whatever, If the Texts of the early buddhist texts establishes something, then it establishes something about the āliteralā buddhism of which we have note.
I think that literal words literally matter in literature. But for now I want to move from Words to Numbers, so I will finish my āliterature reviewā with a few words, omitting vast and often fruitless readings of anything from philosophy east and west to jstor etc I have mainly relied on, prior to suttacentra, Thanissaro and others on access to insight, and a few other websites, but mostly on books, having read in whole or in parts, or consulted the print editions of the Long Discourses of Walshe, the Middle Discourses of Nanamoli, the Connected discourses of Bodhi, the Numerical discourses of Bodhi, the Dhammapada of Narada. The Sutta Nipata of Norman, the Upanishads of Olivelle, the Jaina Sutras of Jacobi, The Wonder that was India by Basham, Siderits and Katsuraās Nagarjuna, Conzeās Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom, Warderās Indian Buddhism and Introduction to Pali, Rhys Davidās and Oldenbergs Vinaya, Prebeshās Buddhist Monastic Dicipline, Irelands Udana and Itivutakka, CAF Rhys Davids Theri, Pandeās Studies in the Origins of Buddhism, Kalupuhana, Gombrich and others. And especially inspired by Tominagaās Emerging From Meditation.
In terms of Numbers, or Quantitative Research, I will say more now:
Using as my other primary tool the Digital Pali Reader for searching the Pali, and coming upon certain patterns I thought significant, I formed the impression that the four principle prose collections, C, where clearly the product of multiple generations of pre sectarian buddhists, that significant textual development could be traced through them, and that this textual development was reflective of the chronology of the material.
In order to explain this thesis I must first introduce some Texts, some Tropes and some Terminology that clarifies what exactly my Methodology is and what I think my research means.
Some Texts: (ordered approximately by age)
Our āTripitakaā approx 40MB forms:
(Our Tripitaka size is estimated by taking the Pali files on Suttacentral in Json format. At another point we will have more to say on the relationships between the Prakrit, Sanskrit, Chinese and other sources and why taking the Pali tripitaka as our base line makes sense. For now though we present our findings rather than our arguments and evidence, which we will lay out after the results are presented. However we take it that only those Texts in the collection with Parallels in the Chinese, and only those Tropes that have Parallels in the Chinese, count as part of our reconstructed/imaginary āpre-sectarianā Tripitaka. the same idea will apply to the sub-collections, especially āCā. The argument presented here applies to both the Pali and the Chinese, and as far as I can tell the Sanskrit and other materials, and is predominantly Quantitative, however the Qualitative illustration of the argument will be using the Pali almost exclusively, except where it is helpful to clarify what the Chinese does not say, i.e as a check on the Pali getting much beyond circa 400ish CE.)
Tripitaka 40MB:
Po (certain poems to be discussed) These poems we take as circa 500bce (vedic prakrit)
P (Patipada) a 50KB text in D.
K (Silakhandavagga, the first vagga in D)
D (Long) 2MB in T
M (Medium) 3MB in T
S (Connected) 3.5MB in T
E (Numerical) 3.5MB in T
A (Abhidhamma) 10MB in T
V (Vinaya) 6MB in T
L* (Lesser) 10MB in T
B (Buddhaghosa) Not in T but fixing portions of it in the 5th century ce.
(*sans Po)
So including B we have a collection that takes shape over about a thousand years.
The Po, especially in L in Snp and in Sās Sagathavagga, but also often in D, M, A and elsewhere (Jataka Thera, Theri, etc) is very often very old, not merely preserving a language earlier than the prose, but also a more fundamental, radical, and non-doctrinal form of Buddhism than that in the bulk of the prose in C.
We will return to Po later, but our focus shall be on the Prose in the āPrinciple Prose Collectionsā;
C (Collection) of āEarly Buddhist Proseā 12MB forms:
D 2 / 30t
M 3 / 200t
S 3.5 / 1500t
E 3.5 / 1800t
t is for Texts, i.e suttas.
D Texts are approx 70KB on average.
M Texts about 15KB On average.
S about 2KB
E about 2KB
Stylistically there are 2 sorts of prose in C, the longer āNarrative Proseā in D and M, and the usually much shorter āNumerical Proseā in S and E.
We will show in this series of posts that the fundamental relationship between Narrative and Numerics is that the Numerics depend on the Narratives and not the other way round.
Again, because this is an unfamiliar finding to some with previous faith commitments we will spend much time below establishing the fact, but for now, we merely present our findings.
Structurally there are also 2 divisions in C: D and E, the āfirstā division and M and S, the āsecondā division.
To see that E follows D and S follows M, and also that M follows D will require significant analysis, which will be outlined below. For now we will simply present our findings in the most succinct way possible.
The D tradition emanates from the text P which is a commentary on the Po at DN3:1.28.2 (DN27, MN53, SN6.11, AN11.10) and thereby fixes the chronology of C post Po. P, assumed to be some text originally even more terse than the example at PP6 but not so much as in ANXX, is thereby a more or less exact description both functionally and doctrinally of buddhist praxis at that time.
It centers on a concept X that can be found already across Po.
This prose text P on X, the notion that sensual influences disturb the mind and that undisturbed by these, the mind knows the truth, constitute the first canonical account of how the authors of Po understood the life of renunciation. C as a collection is a commentary on P and Po first and always. The division of the 2 traditions is apparent by comparing the jhÄnaį¹ Trope distribution to the satipaį¹į¹hÄnÄ Trope, and other such trope distributions, which we will now address.
Some Tropes: (ordered approximately by age)
P Patipada
X Asava
H Dukkha
J Jhana
N Nisranca (escape)
Y Abyakata (unspeakables)
B Brahmaviharas
S Senses
R Aruppas
O Links of arising and ceasing
F Satipathanna
W the 37 WIngs of awakening
5 Aggregates, Annatta, Sunyuta, Etc
An example:
We will first give 2 search stings of 6 and 11 letters in length; jhÄnaį¹ satipaį¹į¹hÄn
| Str: | jhÄnaį¹ | satipaį¹į¹hÄn |
|---|---|---|
| Po | 5 | 6 |
| P | 1 | 0 |
| K | 12 | 0 |
| D | 57 | 11 |
| M | 140 | 28 |
| S1 | 11 | 1 |
| S2 | 43 | 134 |
| E | 130 | 38 |
| A | 655 | 78 |
| V | 108 | 17 |
| L1 | 7 | 6 |
| L2 | 112 | 230 |
| B | 103 | 19 |
| T | 1384 | 568 |
Our list is as before but we have split S into SN1-21 (S1) and SN22 on (S2) and we have split L into Early (L1) (up to Theri) and Late, (L2) Ap, Nett, etc)
This sort of table is the basic building block of my Methodology.
Here we see many salient features of our strings. For example satipaį¹į¹hÄn is rare in P, K, D and S1, and common in S2 and L2.
If we remove these our new totals for both strings are 1193 for jhÄnaį¹ and 204 for satipaį¹į¹hÄn.
We will define our first Term T to be the global or Tripitaka wide frequency of a string sans S2 and L2. We will rarely use the full tables and instead take specific slices, in particular C, to examine Strings, their Tropes and the Texts
In our terminology the presence of jhÄnaį¹ is five times the size of the presence of satipaį¹į¹hÄn in the early buddhist texts. We will now turn to some more Terms:
Some Terms: (ordered approximately by importance)
paį¹hamaį¹ jhÄnaį¹ and cattÄro satipaį¹į¹hÄnÄ are strings that locate most, but not all, instances of their respective teachings, of perhaps the two most famous meditations in all of Buddhism, but the distribution, length, frequency and depth of the texts attached to these two terms is very different:
The trope J in the Patipada, the Silakhandavagga, the Long, the Medium, the Connected and the Numerical, found by searching for the string paį¹hamaį¹ jhÄnaį¹:
J: paį¹hamaį¹ jhÄnaį¹
P 1
K 12
D 24
M 54
S 24
E 61
C: 163
The trope F in the Patipada, the Silakhandavagga, the Long, the Medium, the connected, the Numerical, found by searching for the string cattÄro satipaį¹į¹hÄnÄ:
F: cattÄro satipaį¹į¹hÄnÄ
P 0
K 0
D 10
M 11
S 48
E 18
C: 87
By String I mean a string of letters in the Pali.
By Distribution I mean how the frequency of a given trope differs from D to M to S to E.
By Length I mean the length of the Trope that the string searched for occurs in.
By Frequency I mean how many times the text or string or teaching is given in C.
By Depth I mean how many previously introduced Tropes and in how many layers does the Text that is home to the Trope associated with the String, rely on.
So String, Text, Trope, Distribution, Length, Frequency, Depth, Permutation and Parallel are our Key Terms.
Using our data tables to determine the Context of each string and identify Tropes, we will, in our next post in the sequence, continue with our example Tropes of jhÄnaį¹ and satipaį¹į¹hÄn, determine the relationship between them, and demonstrate what Texts can be taken to depend on what other Texts in our C and our T.
Until next time!
Metta.
