On the 7.4% (or what to make of Walser's "anatta" data)

[BethL]

@josephzizys

A general update on my progress with this Quantitative stuff:

I’ll be taking a look at this. I’m toying with a way to visualize your data.

@Erika_ODonnell

It is not clear to me how this would work applied to the suttas. It would mean something like, imagine the Buddha kept on teaching for a really long time, what would be the true proportion of the time he would speak about anatta, and can we infer that from the suttas? Why would that be meaningful?

I agree. That would ostensibly be the only way to get population sampling in the true sense. And I’m not so interested in that level of speculation. I’m more interested in seeing patterns of teachings tailored to specific audiences.

(I’m decidedly NOT a statistician; the only college course that made me weep literally was statistics. Which is odd because I enjoy parsing data and statistics.)

@Khemarato.bhikkhu

Coincidentally I just read Stefan Karpik’s recent paper on Epigraphic Pali which starts with that parable:

Oh that paper looks delightful!!

@Erika_ODonnell

distinct flavor of conspiratorialism

Still, imagine the personality of a scribe. I mean, what do scribes do? Presumably they are paying more attention to the technical content relative to the people who were underwriting their scribing. I don’t think in any way, shape, or form this waters down the Buddha’s teachings.

We have the whole corpus (more or less) and can make reasoned conclusions about how he tailored his teaching IMO. Versus everybody else through the centuries.

So we may have a better shot at understanding the context. Of course, context plays no part in the Buddha’s liberation program. But it can help in other ways that influence how Buddhism is introduced to lay people.