Following up on:
Let’s look briefly at the two main lists (from Wikipedia):
- Dāna pāramī: generosity, giving of oneself
- Sīla pāramī: virtue, morality, proper conduct
- Nekkhamma pāramī: renunciation
- Paññā pāramī: wisdom, discernment
- Viriya pāramī: energy, diligence, vigour, effort
- Khanti pāramī: patience, tolerance, forbearance, acceptance, endurance
- Sacca pāramī: truthfulness, honesty
- Adhiṭṭhāna pāramī: determination, resolution
- Mettā pāramī: goodwill, friendliness, loving-kindness
- Upekkhā pāramī: equanimity, serenity
Prajnaparamita/Mahayana
- Dāna pāramitā: generosity, giving of oneself
- Śīla pāramitā: virtue, morality, discipline, proper conduct
- Kṣānti pāramitā: patience, tolerance, forbearance, acceptance, endurance
- Vīrya pāramitā: energy, diligence, vigour, effort
- Dhyāna pāramitā: one-pointed concentration, contemplation
- Prajñā pāramitā: wisdom, insight
I’m sure there is more serious scholarship on this, but just my rough thoughts.
The two lists have a lot in common, but I don’t think they are historically related. Similarities in later traditions can be explained in two ways: either they borrowed from each other, or they both drew from similar older sources. In this case, most of these items are found throughout the EBTs, so there’s no real need for them to borrow from each other.
The only really new idea is adhiṭṭhāna, which is not really found as a virtue in the EBTs, and certainly not as a major doctrinal item. But it’s required by the Bodhisattva theory: the determination to enter a path that will take many lifetimes.
The other interesting addition, found in both lists, is khanti (“patience”, “acceptance”). This is found in the EBTs, but not in any major doctrinal groups. This might make it a candidate for an idea shared between the two.
In this case, however, I think it is directly lifted from DN 14 Mahāpadāna. This is a prime source work for the idea of many Buddhas, and hence the idea of the pāramīs. And the doctrinal core, the “teaching of the Buddhas” (plural) begins with:
Khantī paramaṁ tapo titikkhā,
Patient acceptance is the ultimate austerity.
This doesn’t just elevate the somewhat marginal status of khanti as a virtue, it connects it directly with tapas, the (pre-Buddhist) practice of self-mortification. In the EBTs, khanti means things like being able to put up with the discomforts of insects and weather while meditating. In the Jatakas, the famous Khantivadajātaka depicts the Bodhisatta patiently enduring as his limbs are chopped off.
Remember, while the Jatakas as texts are late, in theory, and often in actuality, they depict an earlier, pre-Buddhist stage of Indian spirituality. Here we see the gradual seeping of self-mortification practices into mid-period Buddhism under the idea of khanti. From here it is no great leap to practices like suicide by fire that became common in later days.
So even though khanti is not derived from a standard list of teachings on the path, I think it it is likely that both traditions derived it from the Mahāpadānasutta. So it does not establish that the lists borrowed from each other.
Thus I would disagree with Bodhi as quoted in Wikipedia, that there was a shared core of the pāramīs before the split in schools. Maybe there was, but I don’t think the lists as such establish this. (FWIW this view of Bodhi is cited from his work in the 1970s and I don’t know what his current views on this are.)
It seems likely to me that the ideas of the bodhisattva, the Jātakas, the evolution of the Buddhas, and then the systematic practice of the pāramīs were all common features that evolved in post-Ashokan Buddhism. I don’t think we know enough to be able to say that they were found in all the “eighteen” early schools, but they were found in many at least. Of course there were differences: the Dīpavaṁsa says that the Mahāsaṅghikas rejected “some of the Jātakas”.
This being so, I think there would have been a gradual evolution from “the Bodhisattva gradually perfected his virtues over many lives” to “this is the list of the virtues the Bodhisattva perfected over many lives”. The former is common Buddhism, the latter lists are sectarian (although of course they may be shared among several schools too). The “general idea” of the perfections would have been coming to emphasize notions such as patience and determination, but the formalism is not established.
Now, clearly the 6 pāramitas are Mahayanist as they are found in the Prajñapāramita. But did they invent them, or did they draw from early schools such as Mahāsaṅghika and Sarvāstivāda? I’m not clear on this point.
If we accept that the two lists developed independently, then the question arises as to their historical sequence. If they are directly related, then it would be natural to think that the ten of the Theravada is expanded from the six of the Mahayana, and hence would be dated late, probably post 3rd century CE. However, if as I contend this is not the case, then we have no particular date apart from “post-Ashokan”.
The fact that the ten has more items than the six does not mean that it is later: it’s just a list. It’s easy to add items, and this doesn’t require a long period of development. Indeed, sometimes more haphazard early lists are rationalized into shorter later lists (think, say, the five aggregates of the EBTs vs. rūpa, citta, cetasika of the late Pali Abhidhamma).
Now, the list of ten pāramīs occurs in a few places in the Pali.
- Cariyapiṭaka: lists the ten, and illustrates seven of them with summaries of Jataka stories. The list of ten occurs in verse form in the concluding summary of the entire text. The items are a little non-standard (it doesn’t use the actual words for paññā and upekkha but rather describes them), but this could just be because it is verse.
- Buddhavamsa: in its introduction, it lists all ten under their usual forms. In the next chapter it gives them numbers, showing that we definitely have a formal “canonical” list. It also introduces the ideas of upapāramī and paramatthapāramī (“extra perfection” and “ultimate perfection”) thus creating the so-called “thirty perfections”.
- Apadāna: the first chapter of the Thera Apadāna refers to the “thirty perfections”. It also has the same verses on the ten as found in the Cariyapiṭaka, with a few minor variations in reading. The verses that follow are also shared.
Other late Pali canonical texts don’t seem to use pāramī in this technical sense (Milinda, Netti, Peṭakopadesa, Niddesa, even the Jātakas). Rather they use it as in the EBTs, as a descriptor of “perfection” in various aspects of meditation, etc. This also seems to be the case with the internal references in the Apadānas, i.e. the Apadānas themselves rather than the introduction. This suggests that the formal doctrine of the ten pāramīs was not necessarily a major feature of all aspects of this period of Buddhism, but rather was introduced via these specified texts.
The Cariyapiṭaka is the only one of the canonical texts that mentions the ten without the thirty. It is also marked by a rough and unsystematic approach, summarizing some Jātaka stories, without any real attempt at explaining or synthesizing a coherent theory of the pāramīs. Both the Buddhavamsa and the Apadāna mention the thirty, and they seem to take the idea for granted.
On this admittedly slim evidence, it seems to me that the Cariyapiṭaka is the earliest of these three. It introduced the idea of the pāramīs by drawing on the preexisting and already well-known Jātaka tradition. We know that the Jātakas were already popular in the post-Ashokan period, as some of them are illustrated at Sanchi and Bharhut (1st or 2nd century BCE). In those texts that discuss the bodhisattva this rapidly expanded to the “thirty”. But the notion didn’t permeate widely through early Buddhist thought, being restricted mostly to discussions about bodhisattvas. The essence of the Mahayana, it seems to me, is not to invent these ideas, but to take them as the core theory and practice.
This doesn’t give us a date for these texts, but it does suggest that there is no real reason to conclude on a very late date (3rd century CE). In my opinion the Pali Tipitaka was mostly finalized by about 4 centuries after the Buddha, and I don’t see any reason to change that view here.
Sādhu!