Ah but i do!
for example I use the same idea to doubt the whole aggregates teaching:
rūpaṃ niccaṃ vā aniccaṃ (is form constant or inconstant) occurs
VN: 1
DN: 0
MN: 3
SN: 45
AN: 0
KN: 0
AB: 0
VM: 0
to conclude that the whole aggregates teaching is late (there’s more evidence see here for details).
and the same again here;
"What I am ““up to”” is taking a string of letters, in this case paccuppan and finding the most common words with that string;
paccuppannaṃ (137)
paccuppanno (69)
paccuppannārammaṇo (67)
paccuppannā (65)
atītānāgatapaccuppannaṃ (61)
paccuppanne (43)
paccuppannārammaṇā (37)
paccuppannārammaṇassa (31)
etcand examining their distribution across the pali Tripitaka plus the Visuddhimagga.
paccuppannamaddhānaṁ for example occurs 4 times across the Tripitaka plus the Visuddhimagga, at MN2, MN38, and twice in the Peta.
I therefore come to the conclusion that this compound is rare in the 4 Nikayas.
paccuppanno (69) occurs in DN9 and DN33, nowhere in MN, nowhere in AN, nowhere in VN, 6 times in SN (all in SN35) once in the Iti, then 54 times in the Abhiudhamma.
Here I come to the conclusion that the variant is rare in the suttas but common in the Abhidhamma.
paccuppannārammaṇo (67) Does not occur in DN, MN, AN, SN, VN, KN, then occurs 67 times in the Abbhidhamma.
Here I come to the conclusion that the variant is absent from the suttas but common in the Abhidhamma.
etc etc.
My conclusion so far is that the sequence of MN131 MN132 MN133 and MN134 reveal the introduction of a new poem to the canon, one that is almost certainly later than the time of the Buddha, one that almost certainly was controversial when introduced, and which uses many terms in inflections of case that are not seen anywhere else, except where they are seen in late KN books and the Abhidhamma. I therefore conclude that we likely have good reason to believe that this sequence of suttas is late, but due to the presence of parallels in the Agamas, that it is pre-sectarian, although the version that most obscures the controversy, MN131, lacking a parallel, is most likely a product of the Theravada* sect.
Your claim that paccuppan is common is not really relevant to my argument, however when I examine the root I find that by far the majority of compounds and inflections have the late material as thier centre of gravity frequency wise.
I therefore am wary of ascribing it to the earliest strata of material.
…
And then the same idea again to doubt the 12DO using namarupa as the search string;
I used to be of a school of thought that took paticcasamuppada to be an early phenomena and pañcaupādānakkhandhā to be a late corruption of it.
I am now coming round to the view that paticcasamuppada itself, at least in it’s ten and twelve link versions is a later elaboration and exemplar of the more general principle of conditionality.
I was of the view that namarupa was probably an earlier near synonym for upādānakkhandhā.
Now I suspect that it too is a somewhat later term.
Once again there is a pattern discernible in the way the term is distributed through the canon.
VN: 3
DN: 15
MN: 16
SN: 94
AN: 6
KN: 112
AB: 76
VM: 90The occurrences in the Vinaya are all in the opening of the Mahākhandhaka.
The occurrences in DN are all in DN14 and DN15.
The occurrences in MN are all in MN9 MN11 MN38 MN109 MN115.
The occurrences in AN are all at AN3.62 AN9.14 AN10.92.The word then occurs 94 times in SN, 86 of those occurrences being in SN12.
97 of the 112 occurrences in KN are from the late books.
55 of the 76 occurrences in the abbhidhamma are in the Vibhanga.So the basic pattern is that it’s rarely attested outside SN12, Vibhanga and Netti etc.
Basically it seems very tightly associated with the paticcasamuppada formula, where it seems to mean something like the object of consciousness. (““phenomena”” might be a good translation)
I would be inclined to ““read it down”” as a technical term, and argue that the links in the formula are really just given as examples, using more or less accepted folk psychology at the time, and that it would be a mistake to try and make much deep metaphysics, or even much deep psychology, out of them.
It’s just a word. It means whatever people using it mean by it.
I would not be at all surprised if the first people to use it where monastics living some time after the death of the Buddha, developing a scholastic psychology, that bears on the actual practice of the path the same way a race callers commentary bears on the race.
I use it to doubt MN22;
yampi taṃ diṭṭhiṭṭhānaṃ occurs:
VN: 0
DN: 0
MN: 1 (MN22)
SN: 0
AN: 0
KN: 0 (including the late books)
AB: 0
VM: 0 (Visuddhimagga)paripūro bāladhammo occurs:
VN: 0
DN: 0
MN: 1 (MN22)
SN: 0
AN: 0
KN: 0
AB: 1 (qouting MN22)
VM: 0attaniyaṃ me occurs:
VN: 0
DN: 0
MN: 1 (MN22)
SN: 0
AN: 0
KN: 0
AB: 1 (qouting MN22)
VM: 0na uppajjeyyuṃ sokaparidevadukkhadomanassupāyāsā occurs:
VN: 0
DN: 0
MN: 1 (MN22)
SN: 0
AN: 0
KN: 0
AB: 0
VM: 0diṭṭhinissayaṃ nissayetha yaṃsa diṭṭhinissayaṃ nissayato na uppajjeyyuṃ occurs
VN: 0
DN: 0
MN: 1 (MN22)
SN: 0
AN: 0
KN: 0
AB: 0
VM: 0ttavādupādānaṃ na samanupassāmi yaṃsa attavādupādānaṃ occurs:
VN: 0
DN: 0
MN: 1 (MN22)
SN: 0
AN: 0
KN: 0
AB: 0
VM: 0pariggahaṃ pariggaṇheyyātha occurs:
VN: 0
DN: 0
MN: 1 (MN22)
SN: 0
AN: 0
KN: 0
AB: 0
VM: 0ajjhattaṃ asati aparitassanā hoti occurs:
VN: 0
DN: 0
MN: 1 (MN22)
SN: 0
AN: 0
KN: 0
AB: 0
VM: 0
to express skepticism of the scholarship of the great Bhikku Bodhi;
accutapada occurs in
VN: 0
DN: 0
MN: 0
SN: 0
AN: 0
KN: 2 (both times in the Niddessa, which no one regards as an early work)
AB: 0amataṃ dhātuṃ occurs in
VN: 0
DN: 0
MN: 0
SN: 0
AN: 1
KN: 2
AB: 0So again, this is a very rare term.
amatapadaṃ
VN: 0
DN: 0
MN: 0
SN: 0
AN: 0
KN: 7 (once in the dhammapda, the other 6 times in latebooks)
AB: 0
to make the same point i am making here in another context;
anupalabbhiyamāne
DN: 0
MN: 0
SN: 3
AN: 3
KN: 1
AB: 1so this term is very rare in the early Buddhist texts.
natthi
DN: 118
MN: 194
SN: 178
AN: 159
KN: 930
AB: 1990this term is very common.
upalabbhati
DN: 1 (in the known to be open late DN16)
MN: 1
SN: 3
AN: 0
KN: 29
AB: 164This term, related to the first term, is very rare in early texts like DN, MN, SN and AN, but much more common in later collections like KN and AB (abhidhamma).
atthi occurs as a separate word 2613 times in the Vinaya, Nikayas and Abhidhamma.
in compounds it is of course much more common than that.
again here;
One other one that’s not in the above list is saḷāyatan which in DPR gives:
DN: 6 (ALL in DN14)
MN: 26 (in MN9 MN11 nine times in MN38 then MN115 MN121 MN137 MN142 MN149 MN152)
SN: 80 times (all bar 9 occurrences in SN12)
AN: 4 times (all bar one occurrence in AN3.62 the other occurrence being in AN10.92)it occurs once in the VInaya, 4 times in the Udana, and not at all in any of the other early books.
using the Digital Pali Dictionary gives:
Vinaya Pārājika 0
Vinaya Pācittiya 0
Vinaya Mahāvagga 1
Vinaya Cūḷavagga 0
Vinaya Parivāra 0
Sutta Dīgha Nikāya 7
Sutta Majjhima Nikāya 11
Sutta Saṃyutta Nikāya 66
Sutta Aṅguttara Nikāya 3
Sutta Khuddaka Nikāya 1 2
Sutta Khuddaka Nikāya 2 0
Sutta Khuddaka Nikāya 3 36
Abhidhamma Dhammasaṅgaṇī 1
Abhidhamma Vibhaṅga 23
Abhidhamma Dhātukathā 6
Abhidhamma Puggalapaññatti 0
Abhidhamma Kathāvatthu 7
Abhidhamma Yamaka 0
Abhidhamma Paṭṭhāna 0this pattern, of SN having a lot of mentions and then Sutta Khuddaka Nikāya 3 having a lot, and Abhidhamma Vibhaṅga having a lot is quite characteristic.
So to summerise, saḷāyatan appears to cluster in later suttas (numerically speaking) in MN and in SN12 and to basically be absent from DN, the VInaya and the early KN books, except where it occasionally occurs in the context of the idappaccayatāpaṭiccasamuppādo
All this seems to me to allow one to make an argument that several of the more ““analytic”” and ““philosophical”” doctrines (the aggregates, the sense bases) have their center of gravity in the final third of MN and in SN, and that SN shows an affinity with the later books of KN and with the abbhidhamma Vibhanga.
This as least makes it not unthinkable that SN reflects a period of Buddhism that moved from a more… passionate framing of kamma and jhana to a dryer and more analytic presentation centering around aggregates and not-self.
here from this thread is some more;
the Nikayas are approximately
DN: 173,906
MN: 294,643
SN: 357,384
AN: 388,889words long.
comparing the Nikayas for doctrinal terms in the Digital Pali Dictionary’s frequency tool gives:
arahant vs ariya:
arahant
DN: 367
MN: 336
SN: 255
AN: 340ariya
DN: 109
MN: 282
SN: 589
AN: 265So as a taster we have DN mentioning arahant more than 3 times as frequently as it mentions ariya, and mentioning arahant more often than the almost twice as long SN, while SN mentions ariya twice as often as it does arahant, mentioning ariya almost six times as often as the half as long DN.
In fact SN is the only Nikaya to mention arahants less than 300 times.
SN mentions ariya well over 200 times more often than the similarly long AN.
SN is the only Nikaya to mention ariya more often than arahant.
kamma/jhāna vs satipaṭṭhāna/upādānakkhandha/anatta:
kamma
DN: 142
MN 279
SN 73
AN 442Here we see a stark absense of kamma from SN compared to any of the other nikayas, with it mentioning kamma half as often as the half as long DN, and one sixth as often as AN.
jhāna
DN: 119
MN: 235
SN: 180
AN: 307Here we see SN mentioning jhāna with significantly less frequency than the other 3 Nikayas.
satipaṭṭhāna
DN: 22
MN: 34
SN: 185
AN: 45Here we see SN mentioning satipaṭṭhāna much more frequently than the other nikayas, 4 times as much as the similarly long AN for example, and if we control for the nearly identical foundations of mindfulness suttas in MN and DN, and the 37 aides list which merely enumerates topics, then the contrast is even higher.
SN is the only Nikaya that mentions satipaṭṭhāna more often than jhāna.upādānakkhandha
DN: 7
MN: 23
SN: 61
AN: 10As Pande points out the occurances of upādānakkhandha in DN are all pretty palpably late, so the difference here is again even more stark than the raw numbers indicate.
anatta
DN: 17
MN: 66
SN: 215
AN: 24Here again, SN mentions anatta almost ten times as often as the similarly long AN.
āsava vs avijjā
āsava
DN: 49
MN: 202
SN: 138
AN: 432avijjā
DN: 4
MN: 42
SN: 157
AN: 44Here again we see a remarkable and striking inverse, with DN mentioning āsava ten times more often than it mentions avijjā, and all the other 3 Nikayas mentioning āsava more often than avijjā, but SN the reverse, mentioning avijjā more often than āsava.
Finally for an example of the converse case, where the doctrinal term is distributed uniformly through the 4 principle nikayas in a way that grows with the length of the volume, here is a excerpt form the draft of the book I have been working on re my “numbers” argument:
NUMBERS
“yaṃ kiñci samudayadhammaṃ, sabbaṃ taṃ nirodhadhamman”
DN3 DN5 DN14 DN21 MN56 MN74 MN91 MN147 SN35.74 SN56.11 AN8.12 AN8.21 etc
“people keep telling me that word counts are meaningless, I have yet to hear one single reason why they are meaningless, with your efforts probably coming closest to actually articulating a position around the “leveling” and “audience” arguments. I do not in the end find even your picture of this convincing, and I am growing somewhat tired of people repeating the phrase, so I will try to be as clear and succinct here as possible: if a string of text occurs 10 times as often as another string, it is never, ever, ever, ever, ever meaningless. It is always meaningful. THe only question is what does it mean? Numbers matter. It matters if the first jhana is mentioned in DN more than twice as often as the four foundations, because it begs the question why is the culmination of the eightfold path mentioned twice as often as the preceding step in DN, but the preceding step mentioned more than twice as often as the final one in SN? btw if you control for the wings it is more like 4 times as often that DN mentions the first jhana than the four foundations, again, if the numbers are meaningless why is there this difference between the occurrences in DN MN and AN with the occurrences in SN, why is SN the odd one out? ALL the other Nikayas mention first jhana more than twice as often as the four foundations, ONLY SN reverses this pattern, what is the “leveling” argument that makes sense of that?
When you decide to look deeper because these numbers strike you as being definitely not meaningless and actually very hard to explain you look deeper and find that the four foundations in the other three Nikayas practically evaporate before your eyes with just about any constraint you care to put on them: insist on parallels, you lose instances, insist on parallels form the same collection (the debate is about this after all), you lose more, insist on the Buddha as the speaker, more still, it just goes on and on. (exclude the 37 wings for example, as being most likely an insertion of the earliest matika, and you lose well over half of them in a single stroke, including their entire presence in the Vinaya, you don’t, strangely enough, lose a single instance from SN, I wonder why that would be? Because this is the table of contents for that exact collection of course.)
As I showed above, this simply does not occur with the jhanas, which you can easily find in all 4 principle collections, spoken by the Buddha, with parallels that sit in the same collection in both traditions.” - Are khandhas early or late EBT? - #173 by josephzizys
In what follows V is the Vinaya, D the Digha, so on through to B for Abhidhamma.
A word search will return results for all the compounds (strings with the search string as a substring) for example, “anattā” will return:
agahanattā (1)
aroganattā (1)
anattā (78)
tadanattā (16)
anattākāraṃ (3)
dukkhamanattā (1)
anattākārena (1)
dukkhamanattāti (1)
anattāti (79)
dhanattā (1)
anattādhīno (3)
pekhuṇiyanattā (1)
anattānaṃ (2)
bahuputtanattā (1)
anattānupassanaṃ (2)
bhavanattā (1)
anattānupassanā (36)
manattārahena (1)
anattānupassanāñāṇaṃ (9)
migāranattā (4)
anattānupassanāya (17)
migāranattāraṃ (3)
anattānupassanāvase (1)
meṇḍakanattā (3)
anattānupassanāvasena (1)
yadanattā (21)
anattānupassanatthāya (1)
vedanattāya (1)
anattānupassino (1)
vedanattāyaṃ (1)
anattānupassī (8)
sekhuniyanattā (1)
A word search will not return all the words used for the idea, due to the constraints of Pali grammar and text string searches.
This fact makes no material difference to the evidence in any case, which is broadly statistical in nature, so we will press on.
The lengths of the 4 core collections:
D: 173,906 M: 294,643 S: 357,384 A: 388,889
We will start with 2 strings samuday and nirodh and observe the results in the Pali canon:
samuday:
V 26
D 69
M 122
S 269
A 82
K 342
B 712 nirodh:
V 43
D 101
M 205
S 587
A 257
K 624
B 505
So here we have two terms, arising and ceasing, they both occur frequently in all the ebt and all the later material, there seems to be more talk of ceasing than of arising.
Pretty straightforward and nothing controversial here. we will conclude by assuming that these terms are uncontroversial and that Arising and Ceasing are important concepts in Early Buddhism.
We will also note a pattern for later; that the frequency of these words both increase in the order they are listed, from V to B, with the exception of the “odd duck” A.
This pattern is unsurprising, especially if we restrict out attention to DMS since D is shorter, M is longer, and S is longer still, therefore we should expect, if each volume is teaching the same things, that the terms would grow as the length of the books grow.
Ok, some more ground rules regarding the meaning of the concepts that these strings are indicative evidence for:
We will take the absence of a term from a volume as a weakening of it’s claim to universality.
We will take the diminishment of a term when chinese parallels are sought as a weakening.
We will take the significant diminishment of a term when speakers other than the buddha are removed from the sample as a weakening.
Finally and most importantly, where we are faced with having to explain a buddhist concept (as opposed to a text string), we will take it that we should explain more weakly evidenced concepts by recourse to more strongly evidenced concepts and not the other way round. This is not to confuse text strings with concepts, merely to present evidence of and a statistical argument for the idea that a certain arrangement (S is the earliest) of the carts and horses being mistaken.
So first, I want to point out that kamma is not like samudaya nirodha in the ebt:
kamma: (keep in mind we are taking about hundreds of different words here)
V 1110
D 195
M 365
S 185
A 555
K 1386
B 1586
The string is well evidenced in all volumes, but one volume stands out as having vastly fewer kamma strings in it than all the rest. (Point 1.) Karma words are strikingly less frequent in SN than in any other book including the much shorter D and M.
Note that this pattern is definitely a different pattern to the samudayanirodha pattern. In that pattern, if we ignore A, the mentions run basically VDMSKA in order, with the numbers getting larger and larger as the books get longer and longer.
Along with nirodha we have the sequence:
dukkha:
V 89
D 123
M 455
S 919
A 463
K 1209
B 1617 anicca:
V 2
D 9
M 43
S 247
A 69
K 208
B 400 anattā
V 8
D 2
M 18
S 73
A 15
K 114
B 19
Note here that dukkha etc again follows our “original” pattern, where the term gets more frequent with each volume DMS. so samudaya, nirodha, and dukkha are all well evidenced in all collections, and kamma is weakened in S.
We are then left with a question. Should we take it that kamma is weakened by S, or do we need to accept kamma and thereby accept a weakening of S as a text.
Note finally that each term occurs less frequently in all books than the last, so dukkha is more frequent than anicca and anicca is more frequent than anatta, and this is true of all books except V.
Lets look at another word, this time combining aspects of both our patterns (weak kamma in S and concept growth in dukkha):
āsavā:
V 26
D 72
M 117
S 94
A 262
K 306
B 287 avijjā
V 13
D 40
M 85
S 173
A 77
K 379
B 1027Like kamma, another universal buddhist theme is suppressed in SN, asavas are clearly evidenced in all the collections, they grow in the direction of subsequent volumes like before, but they have many fewer mentions in S.
Contrast this to avijja, which grows exactly the same way as samudya, nirodha, dukkha, getting bigger as the books progress (excepting A). Note also that every book mentions asavas more than avijja except for S, K and B.
What is going on here? One more example, this time to do with the two great meditation styles of contemporary buddhism;
catutthaṃ jhānaṃ:
V 19
D 27
M 45
S 19
A 61
K 43
B 135 satipaṭṭhānā:
V 3
D 10
M 17
S 95
A 23
K 85
B 39
So the jhana are well evidenced in all collections, but.
Every volume except S and K mentions Jhana much more often than satipatthana.
Once again we have a puzzle, all of the Vinaya, long, middle, numbered discourses, and the abhidhamma, mention Jhana far more often than satipathanna, why is SN different?
So to qoute you again;
this is precicely what I do, I infer from these distributions that SN is later and more scholastic than the core of DN and that abayakata/jhana/kamma buddhism is earlier than anatta/aggregates/satipathanna buddhism, and I think the difference is so stark and deep that the one must emanate from a rural environment and the other from an urban one and that the two are almost certainly seperated by generations.
So the above covers your 3rd and 4th points.
I hope I have cleared this up for you, my antipathy is not to these 2 particular suttas, but to the entirety of SN/SA and AN/EA as collections, and even the significant parts of MN, with MN148 being a glaring example of what I take to be late, mechanical, scholastic, and more or less certainly the product of a time and culture radically different to the buddhas.
I think they are problematic because in my opinion they obscure a deep and profound philosophy with a shallow and nonsensical one. I should probably add at this point since I am using strong language and hyperbole that in fact I don’t think the problem is with these suttas themselves per se, it is rather with how they are interpreted by contemporary Therevadins in a way that is incompatible with the abayakata which they downplay and ignore where it suits them, and I think that the statistical evidence is overwhelming that the abayakata was the earlier version of the teaching and that therefore the interpretation of these suttas has to be in line with that and not the other way reound.
yes but when you actually look at them they lack the specific argumentation that makes the particular sutta problematic, and while I do think that the Pali has plenty of evidence where this sectarianism emerges, i think the broader and deeper point is that before there was sectarianism there was scholasticism, and this scholasticism downplays jhana, kamma, abayakata and seeks to paritally replace them with a new set of ideas in the anatta/aggregates/satipathana and that these are subsequently misunderstood by those who fail to see thier dependence on the earlier ideas.
I have not, but my main issue with “conventional truth” is that I see no evidence of the idea in the ebt, and especially no evidence of it in the part of the ebt i consider to be the earliest (athakkavagga, parayanavagga, DN1, DN2).
I hope all this helps to show that my position is not quite as simple as just “disliking” one or two particular suttas, and that I have done more research than you perhaps give me credit for.
Metta.