"Text Levelling"?

Q & A
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Greetings, All:

This is a question about textual criticism terminology.

If I’m not mistaken, when, in the process of transmission of EBTs, formulas were overused or applied inappropriately, it has been termed (by @sujato and others) “levelling.”

I’ll give an example of what I mean: We’re all familiar with the phenomenon where, in the case of, say, the four absorptions, whenever they are mentioned, the entire stereotyped, formulaic presentation of each of the four absorptions are recounted in order (with or without similes). This is standard and serves a purpose.

However, there are times when it is inappropriate, where the intention was clearly just for the absorptions to be mentioned in passing, but, by way of habit, the entire formula appears and detracts from the meaning, the theme, or the flow and rhythm of the passage–probably having coming about as an interpolation at a later stage within the textual formation process.

As I remember, this was called “levelling” by Ajahn Sujato.

However, that is not the standard, technical definition I find of “text levelling,” which is usually something very different. Buddhist texts, because of the formulas, are constructed very differently from other texts: this may be the reason for this somewhat unique usage.

I want to ask the origin of this term in the context of EBTs: who came up with this? where did it come from? and, if it is not a standard term in the greater world of textual criticism, what would be the standard term for this phenomenon?

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I’d be happy to comment, but I’d appreciate some specific examples, else I’m not 100% sure of the distinction you’re making.

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Thank you, Bhante, for your kind response. I’ll strive to be a bit more explicit.

Outside of EBT critical history circles, “levelling” (or “text levelling”), as far as I have been able to find, is a pedagogical term (used specifically in the area of [usually elementary] reading instruction). The common understanding can be seen in the following two examples:

Offhand, the sole instance I’ve been able to find of you personally using levelling occurs in The Authenticity of the Early Buddhist Texts, page 48:

“Schopen suggests that the shared content of the EBTs may be due to later borrowing, levelling, and standardisation.”

The citation refers to the following two statements made by Schopen (both appearing on page 80 of Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks):

“[S]uch common elements result from contamination, mutual borrowing, and a process of leveling, and, therefore, are late.”

“[I]f uniformity is ever achieved, it is achieved over more or less long periods of time through a complex process of mutual influence, borrowing, and sometimes violent leveling that works on originally discrete and competing groups and voices.”

Again, this was all I could find offhand; but it is a term used quite commonly by EBT scholars.

For my understanding of the term as used in the specific context of formulas, we might look at SN 12.65, the Nagara Sutta, where, while the Buddha clearly awakens to a ten-factored, vortical paṭiccasamuppāda chain (i.e., commencing with the mutual conditioning of nāmarūpa and viññāṇa), in the final formula recounting the chain factors in terms of the 4NT (beginning with tamanugacchanto jarāmaraṇaṁ abbhaññāsiṁ; jarāmaraṇasamudayaṁ … jarāmaraṇanirodhaṁ … jarāmaraṇanirodhagāminiṁ paṭipadaṁ abbhaññāsiṁ, etc.), a twelve-factored chain is substituted.

We see something similar again in DĀ 13, where the famous nine-factored chain is featured. Again, while we find the non-standard chain (minus avijjā, saṅkhārā, and saḷāyatana) explained in the vibhaṅga of the main body of the discourse, in the refrains which bookend it, wherein the chain is recounted in toto, the “missing” factors are inexplicably replaced.

A plausible (though, admittedly, not the only) explanation in these two cases is that the bhāṇakas, habituated to chanting these refrains in full, mistakenly chanted the fuller formulas in contexts which were clearly inappropriate, and that was what was then transmitted.

This is my understanding of “levelling” as I have seen it used by scholars of EBTs with respect to formulaic refrains.

Again, I apologize for not being able to come up on short notice with examples which more directly tie scholars’ use of the term to the phenomenon I’m referring to; however, I’ve certainly seen it used in precisely this way on more than one occasion. So (provided, of course, I am not too far off the mark), my question, then, is this: where did Buddhologists come up with this so very context-specific use of the term “levelling,” which seems a bit of a departure from common or standard usage? And, if I’m indeed off the mark, how, then, would you say it should be understood?

Thanking you kindly.

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I was struck, reading Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, how simple the grammar was on the whole. Mostly just strings of apposed nouns / adjectives. It gave me the impression of having been written for an audience who was just starting to learn Sanskrit (… or maybe that is just me projecting? :laughing:)

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Not likely. The Bhāṇakas (of any generation) could have never been chanting prose texts from memory. The verb root ‘bhaṇ’ (from which the noun ‘bhāṇaka’ is derived) means ‘to speak’. So a bhāṇaka was likely a person who spoke (vocalized/read) the written suttas, not a ‘chanter’ of prose texts from memory.

It is plainly evident (for those who read and understand the EBTs in their original language) that most suttas have been progressively (in some cases mechanically) elaborated based on the model/contents of other suttas by monks in probably all EBT sects from a very early period of Buddhism. Most of the EBT material I have seen in the Indic languages/registers and in Chinese evidence this trend. Even the Pali commentators acknowledge variant/elaborated readings of suttas from different manuscripts. Repeating the formulaic phrases would have been part of the mechanical elaborations, they were all invariably made by scribes not by bhaṇakas (in my understanding).

Eh no, the yogasutras are not just strings of nouns and adjectives - not sure what you mean.

Nobody who studied the yogasutras (back in the day) would have needed to learn basic Sanskrit using the yogasutras, as both the students and the teachers were all native-level Sanskrit speakers who normatively spoke in Sanskrit with one another.

Traditionally (even as recently as the 19th century until printed books became popular) Sanskrit texts were taught and studied only by Sanskrit speakers. The number of such speakers has been slowly and steadily decreasing as a % of the total Indian population since Vedic times (a time when all Indo-Aryans spoke it).

Even these days there are people teach the Yogasutras (and other Sanskrit texts) in Sanskrit medium (for other Sanskrit speaking students) - such as in this Youtube video:

But I don’t see what the supposedly easy language of the yogasutras has to do with the topic above.

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Thanks for the examples, that’s clarified it for me.

I admit I’m not familiar with the first sense you mention above, where it seems to mean “fitting a text to the level of the reader”.

As you say, it’s used sometimes in Buddhism to refer to what might better be called “standardization”. Given that “leveling” is cited from Schopen, it is probably intended as a slight, suggesting that the texts have lost information. Of course to me the interesting thing is the opposite—that they have preserved some information.

But as for your question, I have no idea where it originated or how prevalent it is. It may, for all I know, be a Schopenism.

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Could I possibly get you to expound on this a bit? It’s interesting that you would say (if I’m understanding you correctly) that levelling has led to greater preservation rather than loss.

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Well, we can think of it in information terms.

If a passage is standardized, the information is copied in multiple places, and is memorized by many people. Moreover, it takes less energy to memorize texts, as one can simply indicate a passage and expand it.

This is somewhat similar to the use of compression in, say, image formats. A purist might argue that images should be preserved as lossless .tiff files. Great, all data is preserved; but it is also tied to an individual hard drive. Sure it can be copied, but it tends not to be, the file size is too large. A .jpg on the other hand, is less “perfect” as it has lost fidelity due to compression, but on the other hand it can easily be posted on the web and shared, thus ensuring its survival. And for most purposes, that’s good enough.

The problem with skeptical scholars like Schopen is that they want to answer exactly the wrong problem. Loss of information is normal. It happens literally every time you have a conversation. It doesn’t require any special explanation, it’s just impermanence. The real question is, how did so much information from so long ago come to be preserved? That’s interesting and rare, if not unique.

So I would argue that practices like standardization form a critical role in ensuring the accurate and reliable memorization of large quantities of texts. I can still remember and recite long passages of Pali prose that I memorized thirty years ago. It’s always funny to me to see how those who have never actually memorized a text think they’re experts, when the oral tradition is still very much alive, and they never, to my knowledge, think to actually speak to someone who is a part of it. :person_shrugging:

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What you are talking about is not oral transmission.

You are talking about repetitive rehearsing from a written (foreign-language) frozen text that you can check against each time until you memorize the complete text verbatim.

I am talking about an oral transmission tradition (passing a live speech orally and aurally from mind to mind across hundreds or thousands of listeners and reciters in each generation) with no durable copy to check against; where the unrehearsed/impromptu speech does not exist verbatim anywhere after it is spoken for the first time by the Buddha. Even the Buddha himself would not have been able to make the same speech verbatim after he had once spoken it. What’s more, the prose suttas are predominantly third-person narratives, not just the buddha’s speech.

A foreign language frozen text being rehearsed and memorized verbatim isnt processed by the brain in the same way as an impromptu speech that is heard and at-once understood. When the language you need to memorize is the language you normally speak, your mind processes the speech into its meaning and you no longer remember the exact phonemes/words after the speech is finished, you just remember the meaning of what you heard. Trying to transmit prose speech exactly in your mother tongue after having heard it once (with pauses, diversions, interruptions etc that normally happen in daily speech), is not like a few monks performing rare feats of memory after reading a written text aloud in a foreign language verbatim over and over again hundreds of times. So what they do is not an oral-transmission of the tripiṭaka.

As I said earlier, an oral transmission does not exist anywhere and has not existed anywhere in the world for huge prose texts written in one’s own native language. So your belief that there was an oral transmission of the prose tripiṭaka in ancient India from pre-writing times remains just a personal belief. I’m saying this because I know quite well how the Vedic oral transmission works, and the Vedas are nearly entirely verse texts. That method and its techniques would never work for the prose Tripiṭaka.

Make an extempore speech for 30 mins and try to yourself repeat that speech in exactly the same way without changing a word. Now ask someone else to repeat it after listening to your repetition once, then ask a third person to repeat what the 2nd person repeated . If the 3rd person repeats 100% exactly what you first spoke, congrats you’ve achieved the impossible and started an oral transmission tradition for extempore prose.

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I really appreciate this answer, @srkris, because these are just the sorts of subtle distinctions I am concerned with in my research.

I am, however, going to close out this thread because it seems to be going off-topic, and @sujato actually answered (or, rather, didn’t) my initial query when he said,

I agree that “standardization” is a probably somewhat more accurate description of the practice than “levelling.” It’s certainly a helpful clarification, in any case.

I invite you and @sujato to continue your conversation in a new thread, should you so desire.

If I may, I will be contacting you with a DM in order to ask more. (I hope that’s agreeable to you.)

I thank both you and the two Bhantes for all your kind help.

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