After a very long break from this forum, and experiencing some life-changing events (cancer), I’ve decided to go back to school for Buddhist Studies. I’ll be applying to Fo Guang University’s MA in Buddhist Studies with the long-term goal of getting a PhD and working in academia. I already know what I’m going to base my PhD thesis on, and have been spending my time researching that. Along the way, I encountered the term 歲三月六. This is an abbreviation for 歲三齋月六齋. So it describes a tri-annual and six times monthly fasting practice. I have amassed a large number of occurrences of this term throughout the Taisho canon. I have a good idea where the 月六 portion comes from, but not the 歲三. I have some theories about the possible the origin of this tradition, but I’m still missing the vital link.
I should mention that this is very close to the edge of what might be considered EBT-relevant, or perhaps just crossing the line. I haven’t found any Agama or Vinaya source for the 歲三. The 月六 is also on very shaky ground, but I can show that it is an expanded version of the 三齋 (a term not always used). 三齋 is shorthand for fasting on the 8th, 14th, and 15th of each month, and it is usually paired with observing the 8 lay precepts. This concept is found in sutras and Vinaya in the Chinese canon.
So, I was wondering if anyone can point me in any new directions? @sujato I don’t believe there is anything in the Pali about a tri-annual fasting observance, correct? I certainly don’t remember ever hearing about that.
Full disclosure, I am thinking about writing a research paper on this. I nearly have enough material/sources to do that, I believe. There are some papers by Japanese scholars that might shed some light on this topic, but I don’t have access to their work at the moment. I’ll have to wait until I have access to a university library to check them. I am willing to privately share a lot more of the information I’ve gathered on this topic with the right person. I will credit them should their information prove useful (and if I do actually write a paper about this).
I’m guessing you may have discovered this in your own research, but it looks to me like the triannual fasting traces back to a sutra written by a Chinese monk Tanjing (曇靖) during the 5th c. that drew from a number of sources. He was responding to a persecution that took place under an anti-Buddhist emporer.
The sutra depicted a pair of merchants asking the Buddha questions, so it was focused on lay Buddhist practices and merit making, such as observing fasts, making Buddhist images, etc. The sutra was called the Sutra of Trapuṣa and Bhallika (提謂波利經). It was lost and reconstructed by modern scholars based on Duanhuang fragments and quotations found in 法苑珠林.
Yes, I did run across the reference to the practice, attributed to a text by Tangjing, in the 法苑珠林. However, there are two references to it in an earlier text, the 出曜經 (T212, Zhu Fonian, translated late 4th to early 5th CE). There is also a reference to it in an even earlier text, the 普曜經 (T186, Dharmarakṣa, translated 308 CE), but it occurs in a section that is believed to be a later addition. So that isn’t a reliable source. However, even though the believed translation date for T212 has shifted to a slightly later date, it should still pre-date Tanjing’s text. I’m actually going to base my PhD thesis on T212 . So I’ve been reading everything I can find on it. I know that the general consensus is that it’s a Chinese composition, or at least partly so, although I think I have strong evidence to show that it’s mostly comprised of an Indic original. But it’s definitely possible that someone added the two instances of 歲三月六 to the text at a later date. I’ve found other things that I am convinced are later additions.
Anyway, thank you for the information! I did what I thought were pretty exhaustive online searches for 歲三月六, but I don’t remember getting hits related to either Makita Tairyō or Shinden Yu, who both wrote on the 提謂波利經. I just downloaded Shinden Yu’s article, and plan to look through it to see what they have to say about the 歲三月六.
Ah! He probably didn’t invent the practice but incorporated it into his own work. Likely it stems from a northern Buddhist tradition that’s obscure now, only mentioned in a couple extant texts. That would be my educated guess at least.
Likely it stems from a northern Buddhist tradition that’s obscure now, only mentioned in a couple extant texts.
I was wondering if it was some Gandharan or Central Asian practice. I even emailed Dr. Richard Salomon and asked if he knew of a tri-annual fasting practice mentioned in any Gandhari texts. He said he didn’t. I have found Vedic and Chinese customs that would be the most likely candidates as a source, if 歲三 is an example of Buddhism co-opting an existing non-Buddhist custom. However, I’m still missing an explicit connection.
I have found some things in T212 that definitely count as an obscure tradition. There’s a very interesting section that describes a meditation retreat, and how monks would place something like a shell on their head, then tie it to one ear. If they dozed off during meditation, the shell would fall off of their heads (and pull their ear?), waking them up. There was also a “meditation ball” that monks would throw to wake each other up. A “Dharma staff” used to wake up sleeping monks, like the ones made famous in the West by Japanese Zen, is also mentioned. I wonder if this is the first instance of using a Dharma staff in a retreat setting? The idea of 7-day meditation retreats is referred to, as well. After reading that, I got curious about the origin of meditation retreats being based on 7 days. I don’t remember ever reading about that in the Pali suttas, but an familiar with the 禪七. It turns out that the Mahāvibhāṣā mentions 小七大七 (referring to meditation retreats), the Dharma staff, and meditation ball. Interesting!
Could be! The passage in T212 (an Udanavarga with commentary) that talks about meditation retreats specifically mentions a 49-day retreat. It seems obvious that 49 days is used because of the 49 days after the Buddha’s enlightenment. However, I haven’t found anything that explicitly makes that connection. I haven’t done a super deep dive on this yet, though. It’s possible that in Gandharan/Central Asian Sarvastivadin Buddhism, it was just assumed everyone would know of the connection, and so it didn’t need to be pointed out. The significance of the number 7 in Vedic culture might be the real source, though. Zoroastrianism in Central Asia might have also had an influence on the Sarvastivadins, as it seems it had a seven-day week.
Thanks! T212 is quite a fascinating text, but there has been no substantial English-language scholarship dedicated to it. Asian Buddhist scholarship is a bit ahead in this regard. Japan has a lot of talented researchers producing amazing work, including work on this text, but it remains locked in Japanese. I think Western academia is only just beginning to appreciate this fact. The only person I’ve been able to find who really spent a lot of time on T212 in the 21st century is a Taiwanese independent researcher. His Chinese name is 蘇錦坤. He uses a few different English names, like Ken Su or Ken Yifertw. This is his Academia.edu page: https://independent.academia.edu/KenYifertw. He has contributed to the Agama Research Group, and mostly works on EBTs. He has a paper on T212, and a whole blog where, among other things, he attempts a reconstruction of the text (there’s been some corruption).
Anyway, at the moment, T212 is usually only mentioned in passing when scholars discuss the other Dhammapada/Dharmapada texts preserved in Chinese. But it is the sole Chinese text of the Dhammapada/Udānavarga family with a complete commentary attached. I believe there have been some late additions to it, including some Mahayana-sounding terminology, but when you spend time reading the whole commentary, those really stand out as incongruous with the rest of the text. Overall, it reads as very “Theravadin.” Practice is exclusively discussed in terms of renunciation, asubha, samatha-vipassana, and anapanasati. Almost every time it discusses the stages of enlightenment, it’s framed in terms of Stream-Enterer, Once-Returner, Non-Returner, and Arhat. There’s no discussion of the bodhisattva path, unless it’s referring to the Buddha or a Buddha of the past on their journey to Buddhahood. The term “emptiness” does pop up a few times, but it’s the Sarvastivadin usage of the term, where they talk about how impermanence, suffering, emptiness, and selflessness are the characteristics of phenomena, not the later Mahayana version that supplants selflessness with emptiness.
I think this is an underappreciated part of reading these early Northern texts. Contemporary scholars tend to approach them from the reverse side of history, whereas these authors themselves were swimming in the Early Buddhist mythos and didn’t need to make every allusion explicit.
Sure. 7 is often a stand-in number… just giving the specific resonance I hear as a reader of the Pāli Suttas
oo Any fun stories or details about the early disciples?
There are stories about various early disciples, like Ananda, Rahula, Mahakasyapa, and Maudgalyayana, that don’t have 100% parallels in the Pali Nikayas or even the Agamas. One is about Maudgalyayana’s wealthy brother who stops performing dana. Maudgalyayana takes him to a heaven realm, and shows him a mansion with a beautiful female deva. Maudgalyayana tells his brother, “This is waiting for you if you keep practicing dana.” His brother quickly mends his ways. The uniqueness of the stories has caused some to believe that they are Chinese inventions. I have a different take. I believe that taking liberties with stories like these was just part and parcel of the commentarial tradition, and/or is just something happened naturally over time (even within India or Central Asia). Anyway, one big part of my thesis will be proving that.
Why not just take them literally? As stories which some schools deem worthy to be written down, but it did happened, and passed on orally. And other schools didn’t deem this worthy to be written down?
Well, it’s academia. So there are things you have to prove and questions you have to answer in a manner conforming to academic rules. A very well-respected Japanese scholar asked, in regard to the stories in this text, “Why would story X not follow the usual Sarvastivadin version found in text Y? If it was known or available, why would an alternate version be used? A likely explanation is that it was created in China by Chinese lacking the background knowledge of the Indian or Central Asian monks.” So you have to provide a convincing argument as to why he was wrong or why his point should be disregarded.
Keep in mind this is a text from ~400 CE. The Chinese didn’t yet have a complete set of the Agamas, a whole Vinaya, or all of the Sarvastivadin Abhidharma texts. The text I’m talking about was translated just as Kumarajiva was getting started, and was before Xuanzang. So this text was translated during the “Wild West” of Chinese Buddhist translations. The translation of Buddhist texts into Chinese at that time followed a rather tortuous process where a monk recited the text in a Prakrit, another monk did an oral translation into Chinese (a monk who might not have had a mastery of Chinese), and yet another person wrote that Chinese down. The text was then edited, probably several times. Then the text was copied by hand for a few hundred years, then caved into wood blocks for a few hundred years, and finally reached us. The monk who did the Prakrit to Chinese oral translation for this text was Zhu Fonian. He worked on many texts, and was one of the better translators of the pre-Kumarajiva/Xuanzang era. He died before the final editing of this particular translation was completed, too. So, you can’t dismiss the possibility of a bad Prakrit to Chinese translation, ignorance of the “mainstream” version of the stories, accidental textual corruption by copyists, or intentional changes made by some monk hundreds of years after the text was translated as being responsible for discrepancies in the stories. Anyway, with many texts from this era, the picture is very complex. If you want your brain to truly melt, read about the history of the Ekottara Agama (Anguttara Nikaya). That text has one of the most horribly convoluted histories of any Chinese Buddhist text.
Is there an implicit assumption in academia that the conclusion must avoid the conclusion that the stories are literal? And that the translators are incompetent and cannot be 100% competent?
Add-on side question: is there a culture of secularism in Buddhist academia to not regard gods, supernormal powers, etc. as literal?
To be clear, I’m prepping for entering a Master’s program. I’m not technically part of academia yet. However, I’ve been reading research papers nonstop, and have also been corresponding with a few professors. So I’ve started to get an idea of what’s acceptable by academic standards.
In general, anything supernatural is viewed skeptically. I’m honestly not sure how many academics researching Buddhism are actually Buddhist. If any are, they keep their beliefs separate from their research. Any claims made in a peer-reviewed and published paper have to be backed up by something other than belief. It can probably be argued that something supernatural is worth evaluating at face value because of the importance it holds to the believers themselves. That’s a very specific argument that can only be used in a few situations, though. For example, Bhikkhu Analayo used a similar argument when discussing the canonical explanation of the Buddha ascending and descending the different meditative states right before his death. A researcher would naturally ask, “How can the narrator (presumably Ananda) know what was happening inside the Buddha’s mind at that time?” Bhikkhu Analayao said that since the possession of psychic powers is accepted within the sutras, someone who was present at the death of the Buddha could have known what the Buddha was doing. Analayo wasn’t stating that the Buddha did in fact ascend and descend those different meditative states, but that it is an example of the sutras being internally consistent. So at the very least, we can’t discard that part of the lore based on inconsistency (something he does argue for in many other cases).
I don’t know if you’ve read much of Bhikkhu Analayao’s research, but there are many examples of him casting doubt on a number widely accepted things within the Pali suttas. For example, he thinks Mettaya is a later addition, and the Buddha didn’t speak of him. Bhikkhu Analayo also questions the validity of the knowledge of past lives that comes just before enlightenment. His argument is rather compelling, actually. There are a number of problems if you accept the Jataka tales and the tales of the past Buddhas, including Shakyamuni’s prophecy of Buddhahood, as literal, but also accept that the Buddha gained knowledge of his past lives before enlightenment. If he gained all of that knowledge, then he should have known exactly what to do right away because he remembered a past Buddha and his teachings. That also means he wasn’t actually discovering something by himself, but was remembering it. Anyway, that’s part of the argument, and poorly repeated, at that. Bhikkhu Analayo’s research is fascinating, and it’s almost all available for free online.
It depends on the programme I think. If you are doing an MDiv/DDiv it’s probably different than if you are doing general graduate work in, say, a history department. But there are very few English language Buddhist seminaries etc.
There is this myth of objectivity in academia that cuts hard in the Buddhist realm. No one would blink an eye at a Christian academic being open about their beliefs. And it’s much easier to publish papers that do a critical take on things. And of course people there salivate over controversial theories.
Yeah, it depends on where you’re studying and what the goal is. Outside of something like the monastic schools in Sri Lanka or Myanmar, you’ll be expected to present research in an objective way. Secular universities in Europe or Asia will not accept faith-based reasoning as research. I’ve read a lot of research by monastics, Eastern and Western, that follows secular academic standards. That research is often philological and historical in nature, comparing and discussing a Buddhist text’s different recensions, for example, or tracking the development of the bodhisattva ideal in the EBTs. Faith doesn’t really play any role in that kind of research. But that’s academia, not the practicing Buddhist community. There’s a whole market for faith-based writings and musings. It’s a totally different thing. If that’s what someone is interested in, then academia would be the wrong approach.
The Practice of Fasting after Midday in Contemporary Chinese
Nunneries by Tzu-Lung Chiu
https:// dlbs.liberal.ntu.edu.tw /FULLTEXT/JR-MAG/mag550532.pdf
Beyond Religions: The Serenity of Fasting in Buddhism and its Impact on Mental Well-being
https:// www.researchgate .net/publication/372053020_Beyond_Religions_The_Serenity_of_Fasting_in_Buddhism_and_its_Impact_on_Mental_Well-being
A week of Danjiki (Buddhist fasting ritual) on cardiometabolic health: a case report
https:// pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih .gov/articles/PMC10717696/
Well, certainly some parapsychology department somewhere has already investigated psychic powers. I saw videos of kids blindfolded able to act as if they can see, basically divine eye: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhU-_ekGiP4
And Venerable Analayo has the Rebirth Evidence book, which features another power, of recollection of past lives.
Anyway, I have a plan to write a Physics and Buddhism book, and it assumes that both are true, but not materialism, and I likely will include a section on how supernormal powers are viewed through a physics lens.
Could be that he skipped the contents of the teachings of the past Buddhas when he got there, or he didn’t reach that far back before his enlightenment. Just enough to see that rebirth is true and kamma works.
The uniqueness of the stories has caused some to believe that they are Chinese inventions. I have a different take. I believe that taking liberties with stories like these was just part and parcel of the commentarial tradition, and/or is just something happened naturally over time (even within India or Central Asia). Anyway, one big part of my thesis will be proving that.