Wow! That’s incredible!
Thank you, Bhante. I have Olivelle’s book; I’m going to look it up directly!
SA 216: 如狗肚藏，如亂草蘊(It is a mess as the stuff inside a dog’s stomach or messy grass).
T14: 世間如織機躡撰往來(This world is somewhat like a weaving machine. the stepper and shuttle have the string to come and go.)
MA 97: 念彼眾生如織機相鎖，如蘊蔓草 (It comes to me that worldling live like the device of a weaving machine comes and goes, like messy grass. )
T14 and MA 97 did enumerate the simile of weaving machine or shuttle and stepper of it, while DN 15 ‘Etassa, ānanda, dhammassa ananubodhā appaṭivedhā evamayaṃ pajā tantākulakajātā kulagaṇṭhikajātā muñjapabbajabhūtā apāyaṃ duggatiṃ vinipātaṃ saṃsāraṃ nātivattati.’ Its focus is on messy strings instead of shuttle.
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Yeah, it’s a prominent dialogue, it struck me right away.
Right, sometimes it seems the focus of the metaphor drifts, but you can still see that there’s some common “thread” (if I may!)
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We should note, too, that these are Sarvastivada texts, SA 216, MA 97, and T14. The Dharmaguptaka version lacks a parallel metaphor that we find in these and DN 15. The Buddha just says:
阿難！此十二因緣難見難知，諸天、魔、梵、沙門、婆羅門、未見緣者，若欲思量觀察分別其義者，則皆荒迷，無能見者。
Ananda, these twelve steps of dependent origination are difficult to see and know. Gods like Mara and Brahma and ascetics priests have yet to see these conditions. If they want to think on, investigate, and discern their meanings, they would be confused and unable to see it.
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Indeed. The same with T 52, which really followed a creative trajectory. Still, the Dharmaguptaka version is an outlier on many levels: even surpassing T 52, which, to my mind, is counterintuitive because, from what little I know of Buddhist schools from that era, the Dharmaguptaka should be more aligned with the Theravāda doctrinally. (Though I’ve also heard things which imply that they may have actually been more on the Mahāyāna side.)
sure, but you can’t generalize from school doctrine to an individual text. Well you can, but there’s all kinds of complexities—like this.
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Yes, as @sujato rightly points out, it gets really complicated. I removed my reflexive “this must be a later addition” because I recalled how much has been added to DA 15 that isn’t in other texts. Each school went through a long history that changed its texts in unique ways.
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