We have to throw around a bunch of useless questions before we stumble on to anything meaningful.
If you have the chance, a summary would be interesting.
You can usually email the author for these things. It’s a hassle not having institutional membership, but academic scholars are usually thrilled to find that someone—anyone!—is actually interested in their work.
But more than, we need a robust means of excluding historical development. If our default hypothesis is that “difference implies evolution” then we’ll just end up reading it in to everything. There are plenty of differences that have nothing to do with time. The poetry of Vangisa, just to pick an example off the top of my head, is full of sophisticated poetic techniques that could be regarded as “late”. But we know he was a poet: it’s just an expression of who he was as a person. Otherwise it’s topic, or audience, or geography, or whatever. So we need to do more than just pick up patterns, we need to test them against falsifying hypotheses. This is, of course, why the method of using multiple, independent criteria is so important.
It could easily be explained as a different style for a different purpose for a different audience; namely, converting brahmins (who were used to sophisticated literary tracts).
Or else, yes, I have no idea how this works out statistically. I guess we’d have to frame a set of hypotheses and test them. How well, for example, do they match unrelated information, such as geography, etc.?
There’s a huge problem currently in climate science, where the latest models (CMIP 6) are vastly more sophisticated than previous ones, yet they map less well on to historical data. No-one knows why. So sometimes it isn’t the case that more data and better modelling leads to better outcomes.
I’m not sure. But in the case of Buddhism, no. I think we’re still in the phase of poking the data and going, “ooh”.
This, and all the differences you point to, are relevant data points. What we should do, I believe, is enrich the text data with a detailed markup to identify these different styles. We already have this to some extent, for example, verses are marked. And in the Vinaya, there is quite extensive semantic markup.
Once this has been done, we could isolate, say:
- narrative
- doctrinal formulas
- verse
- analytical exposition (vyakarana)
- conversation
- other
The markup can’t be over-detailed, lest you lose any statistical significance.
Then all these kinds of texts can be run orthogonally. Compare DN with MN. Then compare narrative in DN and MN with doctrinal passages in DN and MN. That would allow a far greater degree of precision.
It’s easy to do this in SC with our bilara system, someone just needs to get their head down and do the work.
I am one of those wierdos who gets excited when there is an actual argument given, even against my own positions, because it stimulates my thinking!
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