The question comparing the Chinese and Indian Buddhist writings reminded me of something that I run into every so often that mystifies me. The only one I really remember is that someone will say that the Middle Way teachings are earlier than the teachings on Dependent Origination or the Four Noble Truths.
It seems like all of these kinds of orderings of basic tenets have to be pure vaporware because you can’t look back farther than Ashoka really. Or can you?
Buddha adopted the Middle-Way after abandoning the path of severe asceticism. Then He came to the Realizations of the Four Noble Truths, and the Noble Eightfold Path under the Bodhi Tree during His Meditation on Enlightenment. Correct?
The core teachings are now completely and essentially found in the five major sections (varga) on aggregates, sense spheres, causal condition (including nutriments, truths and the elements) and path of the extant Saṃyukta-āgama/Saṃyutta-nikāya .
I would love to have historians look at a random snippet from today’s newspaper and see what they come up with. They will probably theorize that the journalist’s mother’s name was Barbara.
Then we could go the editor and find out that the whole thing was written by AI.
Seriously, I believe that the idea of the “middle way” is very original in ancient dualist (“gnostic”) thought. My personal suspicion is that the original Buddha’s teaching might have been very similar to SN 1.1 (of all).
If later doctrine could all be shown to represent philosphical elaboration of this little mythical simile and traced back to questions it leaves undeclared, I believe I could have a real hypothesis here
That Sutta, SN 1.1, seems to have powerful tenants of the Middle Way as well…
“After a long time I see
a brahmin fully quenched.
Neither standing nor swimming,
he’s crossed over clinging to the world.”
I guess the only way to get to the other side is to accept the world’s currents, to accept it’s purpose, and do the best with them, it’s like choosing a Path of least resistance to you, while all the while knowing it will be dangerous, and full of much difficulty.
Details of mythical stories can not be chiseled in Stone, rather one needs to look at the full story/simile and the general picture that it wants to conveigh. It is the interpeter’s choice to weigh a detail of the story. I believe this is exactly where doctrinal elaboration took off from.
MN25 may be a very powerful companion to SN1.1, much like a sister Sutta.
I believe that the middle way teaches us that by asceticism and self-mortification we only add to the grim conditions of our suffering, and that the true path of escape is trough the Jhanas/Nibbana.
To take it a little further, I believe that Mara in MN25 is a personification of the laws of nature (and/or the human condition).