When I was in college at Cal State University at Long Beach working on my BA in History I walked over to the Woman’s Studies department That was famous for their ‘Rosie The Riveter’ research, and talked to the ladies at the front desk Of the Oral History Department. They told me to my dismay that oral history had likely factual content for about three generations, the oral tradition in a family being like driving a new car off the lot losing 70% of its value right away.
The Question:
Now does this mean that if a historically recorded King, in a stone or written Edict, within 3 Generations subsequent to 400 plus or minus 20 years BCE, * mentioned the word ‘Buddha’ as a spiritual teacher that this would be enough to begin a conversation about a “Historical Buddha?”
Here is what Emperor Aśoka had inscribed at the birth village of the Buddha (Lumbini) in 249 BCE:
“Twenty years after his coronation, Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi (i.e. Asoka), visited this place and worshipped because here the Buddha, the sage of the Sakyans, was born. He had a stone figure and a pillar erected and because the Lord was born here, the village of Lumbini was exempted from tax and required to pay only one eighth of the produce.”
To me, this proves beyond any doubt that Emperor Aśoka thought that the Buddha was a “historical person”, not mythological or else. For the authors of EBTs the Buddha is surely a historical person, teacher, man.
So, yes, I think we can surely have such a conversation. We do not have access to his words in their exact form, but his teaching is largely extant.
The papers by D. Drewes are laughable. I don’t know why they let him publish such things (well, I know: his other research was and is good and up to a high standard). He simply doesn’t know (and doesn’t like, evidently) the early Buddhist stuff.
Because it was the original Buddha who reached Enlightenment (if he did). Therefore, his teaching is important in that it is supposed to lead to Enlightenment.
Things are either true or untrue. I feel that a thorough study of tradition and the canon along with personal logical and philosophical reflection is more likely to lead to a good result than historical-critical speculation. I feel that most of it is very vague.
I’d love to provide some of these textual critics with an article of today’s newspaper and see with what tales they come up with.
The lumbini pillar edict is a controversial record.
It was excavated in suspicious circumstances, by a single person who was known for such frauds, at a place that was not known as lumbini prior to its discovery, the inscription appears as if it was freshly inscribed just a century ago, and the inscription calls the buddha sakyamuni, when other ashokan edicts call him sakamuni.
Besides exemption from tax would normally mean no produce needed to be paid in to the treasury as tax was paid in kind in the Ashokan era. Paying 1/8ths of the produce is not an exemption from tax.
Besides, it would be really odd for Ashoka to offer a tax exemption to a single village, when it is not described as a village but as a forest or woodland (vana) in the EBTs. The village did not exist when the Buddha took birth. Why was he trying to offer an exemption that was no exemption, to a village that was no village, that had a name which the location was not known as prior to the discovery of that pillar?
It appears Prof. Rhys Davids was known to the lone excavator of this pillar and he may have supplied the text in question that had to be put up on the “Ashokan edict at Lumbini” that was going to be found in future.
Particularly in this case, Drewes papers, denying that the Buddha existed at all (hence, there is no way to Enlightenment, because there was not such a thing as Enlightenment) were mostly vague speculations. The people who responded to him, Hinüber, Levman and Wynne were very precise and pointed out many personal features and idiosyncrasies of the Buddha, even his ways of personal hygiene, which they had learnt from their careful studies of the EBTs.
I don’t have anything against “thorough study of tradition and the canon along with personal logical and philosophical reflection”, and I’d venture to say that the mentioned scholars do not as well.
But to answer your initial question (again): we should care about the (original) Buddha’s teaching, because it was the Buddha who reached Enlightenment and showed they way to it.
Well, no one among serious scholars of Aśoka (Thapar, Falk, Olivelle, Tieken, etc.) doubts its reality. They also explain why it was 1/8th of produce and so forth.
In the other thread you said that Nibbāna is not mentioned among dhammas, that, in reality, Kapila is the name of the Buddha, that his real teaching is Sāṃkhya, etc.
You can surely have such eccentric opinions, but you should realize that they are very far from the historical facts.
History has to be verifiable. The Buddha’s enlightenment was not verifiable to anyone else even in his own time.
How could anyone know or verify that rebirth had ended for the Buddha? How did he himself know his future state unless he was controlling time?
So without his rebirth ending being verifiable, how did anyone know he had attained nibbāna? How can an unverifiable nibbāna be considered a historical event? Without verifying the authenticity of his nibbana how does Gautama the contemplative call himself, or get others to call him a fully enlightened Buddha?
I have no problem accepting the historical existence of Gautama the contemplative, and his efforts in founding Buddhism - but all the unverifiable stuff that the EBTs claim were his achievements seem greatly exaggerated and ahistoric.
The historical existence of Gautama the contemplative who founded Buddhism - is not the same as the historical existence of Gautama, the Buddha - they are 2 very different things.
This statement seems nonsensical. Whether the historical Buddha existed or not is irrelevant to the question of whether human beings can reach an enlightened state.
So, does that mean Dr. Rhys Davids had no way to communicate from the UK with a colonial excavator working in British India (or for the excavator to take the help of British scholars like Rhys Davids who were pioneers of Early Buddhist translations, to forge an inscription like this and call it an Ashokan pillar?
Dr. Rhys Davids served in the colony of Sri Lanka, which was known as British Ceylon back then. There was no way he could have set foot in Ceylon avoiding India totally.
The most that they (the so-called arahants) could have done was to verify their own Nibbāna when they attained it, not that of the Buddha. Even those arahants who claimed to have attained nibbāna (and thus wouldnt ostensibly have a rebirth) would need to control time to see what their-own post-death status would be.
It is not credible that any human can control time or visit their own post-death state to verify if they really were not reborn. So making such post-death status claims prior to their death would not have convinced any brahmin of Gautama-the-contemplative’s lifetime (except those who personally chose to place blind faith in whatever he said).
Gautama the contemplative was not the only one making such unverifiable claims, there were a lot of his contemporaries like him who made similar outlandish claims. It didnt convince any king like Bimbisāra or Ajātasattu or even the other kings like Aśoka (to believe entirely in what Gautama-the-contemplative was claiming), so they remained lay followers (upāsakas) and didnt choose to give up their lay life to seek an unverifiable nibbāna. Buddhism therefore remained a relatively tiny minority religion until Emperor Ashoka took it upon himself to promote early-Buddhism in a big way (and perhaps sponsor the creation/redaction and widespread geographical dissemination of what we now call the EBTs). Even in his own lifetime, the EBTs say who he was, his doctrine (or his claim to fame) weren’t known to most Brahmins or Kings in most destinations that he visited, and he needed to be introduced to the locals as a fully enlightened Buddha everytime he visited a place. This sounds like he wasnt all that popular or well known in his lifetime as the EBTs make him out to be.
Similarly even in mundane matters, things that the EBTs claim don’t appear fully credible.
It is said in some suttas that he was travelling great distances with a veritable army of bhikkhus following him (say 500 Bhikkhus, 1250 bhikkhus, several thousand bhikkhus etc).
Where did they all get their food along the way during their journey of many days/weeks/months outside inhabited areas,
did they walk through forested paths, did they ride on horses or use chariots,
did they frequently come across tropical wildlife such as lions, tigers, leopards, wild-elephants, pythons and snakes, bisons, etc
did they get bitten by leeches etc (which were all abundant as most areas were forested back then),
did any of the bhikkhus in the large retinue get attacked by wild animals commonly as a result during their travels, or did they manage to run away from the animals and survive,
did no one get bitten by insects or get communicable diseases when they were walking across forests, with no trained physicians or medical supplies around to treat them,
were there no old people in the retinue who wouldnt have been able to walk as fast or as long
are a few of many questions that arise, and the EBTs are usually silent on such details. So the numbers of bhikkhus following Gautama the contemplative seems greatly exaggerated in the EBTs, presumably to impress Gautama’s opponents of his own times and those of later times.
Nibbāna is not only or even mostly about ending the rebirth, but about the extinguishment of dukkhain this very life (and any competent Buddhist teacher would also say that nowadays). There were a great deal of people who didn’t believe in rebirth in the Buddha’s time, and to them this aspect of the Buddha’s teaching (i.e., the “palpable” ending of dukkha) was most attractive.
Buddhists dont’ have to take the teachings on rebirth on blind faith; there is a sufficient scope for being agnostic on that matter.
Regarding ‘the control of time’: the Buddha’s insight was that it is the taṇhā, the fundamental existential craving or hunger, that keeps one circling in the wheel of rebirths. So if you extinguish this taṇhā, you are no longer subject to rebirth. It makes sense, doesn’t it?
The other things that you say are mostly reasonable. Indeed, when in the Pāli suttas you have 100 or 500 bhikkhus following the Buddha, in the Chinese versions there are already many thousands. The exaggeration was one of the features of the growth of that literature, and therefore the instances of EBTs where the Buddha teaches or converses with just a few fellow monks likely have more credibility.
Have you read Vens. Sujato’s and Brahmāli’s The Authenticity of the Early Buddhist Texts (2015)?
They give a very reasonable account of that ‘EBT’ literature, which doesn’t contradict anything that you say.
Can you provide some citations of where each of them has confirmed that they take the Lumbini edict as being as authentic as Asoka’s other pillar edicts? I am not aware of such confirmations - as I don’t read Thapar at all, and haven’t seen Falk and Olivelle discuss the Lumbini pillar edict’s authenticity yet. I havent read anything from Tieken as far as I can recollect.
Yes I still hold my stated ideas about Kapila and early-Sāṅkhya (not that his real teaching is Sāṅkhya - but that his teachings were called Sāṅkhya by the Hindu philosophical traditions, well before the Kārikās of Īśvarakṛṣṇa adopted the name Sāṅkhya to describe his own philosophy) and the relative historical convergence of early-Sāṅkhya to the EBTs and Early-Buddhism in general - and to me they are not eccentric opinions, but personal inferences relying on positive knowledge of EBTs and co-eval non-Buddhist texts.
Regarding Nibbāna not being described as a dhamma in the EBTs (to which i added the phrase “to my knowledge”), when you cited AN 4.34 to prove that it was considered a dhamma, I thanked you for the reference, adding “I stand corrected about Nibbāna being described as a dhamma. But nibbāna is still not anattā.”
Not sure what is eccentric about offering a tentative opinion, and when being proved wrong, accepting that you didnt know something and thanking someone for pointing it out with an appropriate citation?
That does not however in any way make his claims verifiable.
You dont want to answer the verifiability of rebirth - OK let’s talk about just a permanent end to dukkha here. How can you know if someone else’s dukkha has ended permanently unless you spent all your life with them and felt what they felt all the time? How do you verify if dukkha has ended once for all, or is merely temporary?
Since Dukkha has been associated with anicca, how does the ending of dukkha become a nicca (a permanent/final end)?
I’ll try to go through it in detail, I only cursorily went through it some years ago, and I was not impressed with much of what the OCBS publishes. But I shouldnt dismiss it without fully reading it, I will attempt to offer my thoughts on it in a different thread dedicated to it (maybe such a thread already exists here).
It appears Alois Anton Führer took the whole credit for the ostensible discovery of the inscription. Anyways his forgeries, including the so-called Lumbini pillar edict, are explicitly discussed in his wikipedia page that you’ve linked to. Please read through them all unless you’ve already done so - as they explain a lot about his methods.
