My preliminary observation is that we should most likely take the verses of the type above, strewn throughout the EBT, as forming a fairly uniformly “early” strata of the text.
That is the approx 70 Tuṭṭhubha, Jagati, Vetālīya and Opacchandasaka verses from the Dhp.
The bulk of actual Udanas in the Udana. (approx 80)
The bulk of the simple refrains in the Iti. (120?)
The bulk of the simple verses in Snp
The bulk of the simple verses in SN (for eg see esp SN3.)
And so on.
A few preliminary observations;
First, they are absolutely unbashful in talking about attā 's. There is no self consciousness, no hand wringing, the above poem, repeated in the canon at least 4 times, paralleled in Chinese, Gandhari, Sanskrit, etc appears undoubtedly early, and reflects a less doctrinally strict period than the bulk of the suttas.
Second, they reflect a culture of Brahminism. There are explicit refrences to rg Veda, to the 3 Vedas, to mystic syllables, to dreadlocks and deer hides, the the nature of sacrifice, etc etc.
Third they are much less fixed in meditation praxis, with a huge range of meditations given interchangeably with no discernable notion of hierarchy or technicality.
So appaduṭṭhassa narassa dussati,
One offends against the inoffensive one,
suddhassa posassa anaṅgaṇassa,
a purified and passionless person,
tam-eva bālaṁ pacceti pāpaṁ,
that wicked deed (then) returns to the fool,
sukhumo rajo paṭivātaṁ va khitto.
like fine dust that is thrown against the wind.
Dhp116 SN1.22 SN7.4 Snp3.10 Ja367
Jīranti ve rājarathā sucittā,
Decorated royal chariots decay,
atho sarīram-pi jaraṁ upeti,
and the body also decays,
satañ-ca Dhammo na jaraṁ upeti,
but the good Dhamma does not decay,
santo have sabbhi pavedayanti.
the good surely pass it on to the good.
SN3.3 Dhp146 Ja537
Iti is a curious bag. On one hand, it has some farily straightforward moral poetry that could fit in with any Dhamma movement. On another, it has some explicitly buddhist doctrinal elements, such as references to Schism in Sangha (Iti 18), Buddhas (Iti 41), Nibbāna (Iti 44), Māra (Iti 59), Devadatta (Iti 89), Four Noble Truths (Iti 103). And they do make a coherent whole together somehow. It’s a very interesting book.
I think Iti represents a strata of poetry well established in a settled, monastic life, as opposed to the “Wandering Muni” of some of the earlier stuff.
V. Anandajoti is such a treasure. His contribution to poetic analysis is outstanding.
Yassindriyāni samathaṁ gatāni,
For the one whose senses are stilled,
assā yathā sārathinā sudantā,
like horses well-trained by their charioteer,
pahīnamānassa anāsavassa –
who has abandoned conceit, who is without pollutants –
devā pi tassa pihayanti tādino.
even the gods envy such a one.
I think i would like to put together a bit of an index for the Tuṭṭhubha, Jagati, Vetālīya and Opacchandasa verses in Dhp that have parallels and recurances in the EBT.
Ānandajoti Bhikkhu’s texts make these verses really clear and identifiable.
My laptop is on the fritz at the moment but maybe i will get some opportunity soon.
“Sabbā disā anuparigamma cetasā,
“Having explored every quarter with the mind, Nevajjhagā piyataramattanā kvaci;
one finds no-one dearer than oneself. Evaṁ piyo puthu attā paresaṁ,
Likewise for others, each holds themselves dear; Tasmā na hiṁse paramattakāmo”ti.
so one who cares for their own welfare would harm no other.”
SN3.8 Ud5.1
“Attānañce piyaṁ jaññā,
“If you knew your self as beloved, na naṁ pāpena saṁyuje;
you’d not yoke yourself to wickedness. Na hi taṁ sulabhaṁ hoti,
For happiness is not easy to find sukhaṁ dukkaṭakārinā.
by someone who does bad deeds.
Dhp157 SN3.4
In modern Theravādin Buddhism, say of Sri Lanka, it seems the Dhammapada is extremely popular for sermons, both to children and adults. This includes ethical verses and ones about the self.
And yet Theravāda Buddhism also has a very clear ultimate no-self stance. These two views live together, with monks who preach both.
There’s a clear distinction between conventional, ethical speech to a local king or townsperson or even monks, and more philosophically refined discussions of metaphysics. To see these as necessarily being opposed at some point in the past would be an error, I’d say.
Just because certain Dhammapada verses talk about the self, doesn’t mean those verses are earlier than passages about very strict no-self. It may be interesting, even, to look at later sectarian literature and examine if they taught new verses about the self for ethics while also developing their metaphysics of no-self tangentially.
In Zen, there’s often the concept of True-Self. This true self, depending on the teacher, can be both (Buddha-)Mind, Sunyata, Anatta and so on. It gets kind of Brahmanical in understanding, a self beyond limits and definitions and/or the very essence of emptiness. It can get pretty weird.
I hear this quite a bit but i dont see it in the texts.
The anatta stuff changes from DN to SN as the new aggregates doctrine is introduced.
The aggregates doctrine is not metaphysically sophisticated compared to the esrlier presentation, it is simpler.
It also, read as metaphysics, does contradict abyakata.
I am completely unconvinced by these arguments.
The thubbuta verse is esrlier than the nirodhaagamani patipada which is earlier than the prose suttas that contain it which are earlier than the prose suttas of SN.
I am not yet well versed in the “history” (have you seen how much a cooy of Lamotte costs?) But if i had to guess i would guess a minimum of 100 years and probably more seperates the early verse from the aggregates material.
The conventional truth/ultimate truth distinction is simply not made in the EBT, its all conventional, selves, not selves, youbname it, pardon the pun.
““When a mendicant is perfected, proficient, with defilements ended, bearing the final body: is such a mendicant drawing close to conceit if they’d say, ‘I speak’, or even ‘they speak to me’?”
“Someone who has given up conceit has no ties, the ties of conceit are all dissipated. Though that intelligent person has transcended conceiving, they’d still say, ‘I speak’,
and also ‘they speak to me’. Skillful, understanding the world’s labels, they’d use these terms as no more than expressions.””
SN 1.25
From the first chapter of DN:
“In the same way, while in any one of the three acquisitions of a self, it’s not referred to as the other two, only under its own name. These are the world’s common usages, terms, means of communication, and descriptions, which the Realized One uses to communicate without getting stuck on them.”
DN 9
For example. But I also didn’t specifically mention the aggregates. There are metaphysical discussions at e.g. DN 1, and there too, talking about a substantial “self” would be out of bounds. You can say the same applies to “no self,” but that doesn’t change the fact that a substantial, true self is still not acceptable by the standards of DN 1. And therefore the verses in the Dhammapada would still need to be read in a particular interpretive light that sets aside more refined metaphysical details, even without any aggregate doctrine.
We don’t need to turn to the formal ‘ultimate/conventional’ distinction of later literature to understand that the context of a Buddha teaching a local king about ethics is different than a refined metaphysical discussion about the self and world. We would expect subtleties.
But if we were to turn to commentarial literature, then still we see that they do cherish the texts discussing a ‘self.’ In fact the verses you cite are available to you because they passed them down and preserved them. And they are taught to this day by Theravādins in a tradition with a very stark ultimate/conventional divide. So the fact that the ethical verses discuss a ‘self,’ as does DN 9, doesn’t mean that those verses would be at odds with what a strong no-self tradition teaches, even if the way that tradition understands self/no-self is different than certain interpretations of the suttas.
You rather seem to be forming a kind of strawman by projecting commentarial Theravādin arguments back against them on suttas earlier than that tradition, with the help of ethical teachings in a popular collection of verses that said commentarial tradition itself passed down.
As to what is acceptable to the picture at DN1 it is clear to me at least that both a substance and a not-substance would equally have an appearing, a dissapearing, an attraction, a drawback and a transcendence, since either concept is infered from repeated sense experience. This is after all the entire point of the sutta.
As to what this implies about how we are to read atta in the, as I say, clearly earlier and prior verses, it is not at all clear.
The inference that they are conceptually consistent because a later tradition took them to be so is precisely the fallacy you accuse me of, taking a subsequent sectrarian traditions position and projecting it back onto the earliest material. I do no such thing.
There are many possibilities:
One may be that the verses are pre-buddhist, “the wise master themselves” could as easily be greek as indian, in fact could easily be egyptian and predate india and greece by a thousand years.
How the atta in “the wise master themselves” is reconciled with the (an)atta in SN is an open question historio-text-critically but we needn’t answer such a question at all to recognise the periodisation implied by the material.
Another possibility is that buddhists, explicitly thinking of themselves as followers of gotoma composed these verses at a time when aggregates and anatta where simply not yet invented, and therefore there was no tension.
The lack of aggregates in DN, the place of anatta in the annica dhukka trope in DN (i.e anatta as “perceptual stratagy”), the presence of individual “vedanas” “sannas” etc, the criticism of and aversion towards the validity of sabbe-inferences we see in DN that is broken by the end of MN and SN, all point to a metaphysical position at direct odds with an “ultimate truth” interpretation of “sabbe dhamma anatta”.
A third possibility is the esoteric-exoteric convention-metaphysics distinction ypu point out on which the later therevada rely.
I think this is the least likely and least natrualistic picture of the evolution of the literature with fairly obvious and prosaic religious motivations to see the holy scriptures as wholly self-consistent (pardon the pun again).
That said i am not as yet really taking a position on how we should or shouldnt read atta in the early verse, I need to do a LOT more research here before i am even able to confidently asses how ignorant i am
I am simply pointing out that a LOT of this material (proportionally) takes attas as unproblematic and asserts brahmanas as the pardigmatic case of the spiritual seeker, and that these features, by SN6 for eg, are becomming clearly “on the nose” to the buddhists who, to speculate, where by this time beginning to consciously distinguish themselves from Atman=Brahman style Brahmins (Brahmins incidentally of whom there is little evidence in the early Upanishads we might take to be earlier or coeval with the first generation of Buddhists).
DN9 is a good example of a time when attas where still being used uncritically, the passage you refer to is about temporal metaphysics not substance metaphysics and frankly I dont think it supports your point it being (the 3 times) notoriously a question that has evolved into a.myriad of sectarian positions.
As I said, even if you think no-self falls into DN 1, self still would as well. So the case still holds that we have to shift our perspective. When a verse says “the wise shape themselves,” we shouldn’t read this as referring to a self enduring across time as at e.g. DN 1 or argued against in DN 9. Even without the officially formulated aggregates teaching, there are contexts where certain kinds of language have to be read in a different light than other contexts.
This would include them being earlier than the Pārāyanavagga verses as well of course, which discuss non-self.
A single verse in the Dhammapada as a candidate for the earliest Buddhism, everything else being a later conspiratorial invention — doesn’t seem to hold much water, but with how Buddhist studies tends to go these days, I wouldn’t be too surprised. Not that you are proposing this is the case.
Which is, again, a commentarial Theravāda view, not one I’ve defended here as how we should read all the suttas, nor is it how the aggregates teaching need be interpreted.
Which is also pointed out in the poetry of SN 1, for example. Here’s another example:
“Sentient beings who perceive the communicable, become established in the communicable. Not understanding the communicable, they fall under the yoke of Death.
But having fully understood the communicable, they don’t conceive a communicator, for they have nothing by which they might be described.”
SN 1.20
Excuse any laxity in philosophical precision. By ‘substantial’ I include also the idea of underlying entity enduring across time, or latent in earlier processes (i.e. ghee being pre-existent in butter, etc.). Something which the DN 9 passage argues against, instead arguing for a kind of conditionality based conventionalism. So the idea that an enduring self can be shaped and change across time while remaining identical to the prior entity would not square with DN 9.
Another research project could be to check how many times the commentarial literature refers to “persons” or uses personal pronouns such as “he/I,” and compare that to how often such words occur in the earlier literature. That might give us a sense at how possible it is for a tradition to both criticize the notion of substantial entities or identity across time, and also compose passages with language that imply such a thing. Unless all the commentarial compositions that refer to ‘beings’ and ‘persons’ represent an earlier layer, the rest being invented by other later commentators and subsequently compiled together and presented as one thing?
yes. the analysis holds for self and no-self, being and not-being (or no-being), both selfs and not-selfs (and both beings and not-beings) and … but whatever holds or not for DN1 is putting carts before horses again.
Say gotoma flourished circa 60 years from 500bce and died circa 440bce.
Say the phrase “sabbe dhamma anatta” appears around 120 years after that at 320bce.
Say at that time “sutta” meant the 4 line poems of the type ala;
Kāmesvādīnavaṁ disvā,
Seeing the danger in sensual pleasures,
Nekkhammaṁ daṭṭhu khemato;
seeing renunciation as sanctuary,
Padhānāya gamissāmi,
I shall go on to strive;
Ettha me rañjatī mano”ti.
that is where my mind delights.’”
Snp3.1
Say the “4 nikayas” literature starts to be memorised as such over the next 200 years to circa 120bce. (so for 8 generations of a society communicating across multiple languages while still composing/redacting/whatever you want to call it, those texts.
Then suppose the presumably already emerging traditions of both “abhidhamma” and “mahayana” literatures, (the distinction seems to me mostly artificial), from around then for the next approx 600 years.
All this still leaves the question of what the poets of the 4 line suttas like above would have made of ANY of DN1, DN2, SN56.11, SN22.59 etc.
the question of what dat the 4 line suttas eminate from seems to me to boil down to 3 options:
they are from pre 500bce
they are from approx 500bce to approx 400bce
they are from approx 400bce to approx 300bce
(acknowledging the obvious proviso that any given singular instnce of a “4 line sutta” may be a sectarian interpolation, a later forgery, a conscious exercise of “archaism” by a later generation, etc etc)
I think that overall they appear to be from 1 and 2 imho.
This for me is exciting.
For example it makes me think that it’s entirely plausible that:
“Nikkhantaṁ vata maṁ santaṁ,
“Now that I’ve renounced
agārasmānagāriyaṁ;
the home life for homelessness
Vitakkā upadhāvanti,
I’m overrun
pagabbhā kaṇhato ime.
by the rude thoughts of the Dark One.
Uggaputtā mahissāsā,
Even if a thousand mighty princes and great archers,
sikkhitā daḷhadhammino;
well trained, with strong bows,
Samantā parikireyyuṁ,
were to completely surround me;
sahassaṁ apalāyinaṁ.
I would never flee.
Sacepi etato bhiyyo,
And even if women come,
āgamissanti itthiyo;
many more than that,
Neva maṁ byādhayissanti,
they won’t scare me,
dhamme samhi patiṭṭhitaṁ.
for I stand firm in the teaching.
Sakkhī hi me sutaṁ etaṁ,
I heard this with my own ears
buddhassādiccabandhuno;
from the Buddha, kinsman of the Sun,
Nibbānagamanaṁ maggaṁ,
about the path going to extinguishment;
tattha me nirato mano.
that’s what delights my mind.
Evañce maṁ viharantaṁ,
Wicked One, if you come near me
pāpima upagacchasi;
as I meditate like this,
Tathā maccu karissāmi,
I’ll make sure that you, Death,
na me maggampi dakkhasī”ti.
won’t even see the path I take.”
Might really be by someone named vaṅgīso who really did Sakkhī hi me sutaṁ etaṁ buddhassādiccabandhuno.
If they where are likely to have been written by people to whom the phrase “sabbe dhamma anatta” would have just sounded like lokāyata talk then they are not far off being in the lifetime of the buddha on modern dating (as above) ((although I am also open to the concept that the gotama was circa 560bce to circa 500 or 480bce, that would shift the picture a bit.))
For me the current research project is to read and re-read as much of the 4 line sutta form in Dhp, Snp, SN, Thera, Theri, Ud, Iti, etc etc while learning as much as I can from Ānandajoti Bhikkhu’s excellent site.
I don’t know what you are referring to here, perhaps a suttacentral link?
I am certainly not.
I am certainly not saying you entertain this view, my point is more that an incorrect interpretation of sabbe dhamma anatta is possible and it is not a claim I see made in the 4 line suttas.
“Akkheyyasaññino sattā,
“beings (believing they are) perceiving what can be said,
akkheyyasmiṁ patiṭṭhitā;
(become) firmly set in what can be said. (become defined by the said)
Akkheyyaṁ apariññāya,
(and are therefore) not fully understanding what can be said,
yogamāyanti maccuno.
they fall under the yoke of death.
Akkheyyañca pariññāya,
But having fully understood what can be said,
Akkhātāraṁ na maññati;
they don’t/aren’t determine(d by) what can be said,
Tañhi tassa na hotīti,
for there is nothing
Yena naṁ vajjā na tassa atthi;
by which they might be “said”.
My free modification of @sujato 's translation is not intended to deny the presense of the “does not concieve of a communicator”, I merely protest that we needn’t make the inference to “there is no such thing as a communicator” to understand what is being said. We can take the poem as being about the limits of language for the atta/being in the line akkheyyasaññino sattā.
They are trapped and defined by their language only in as much as they are unaware of how to escape from it, no metaphysics of persons needs be implied for this to be a perfectly legitimate argument in the philosophy of language.
There is a lot to unpack here.
first that things endure through time seems not in dispute in any of the early 4 line suttas. There is no sense that “time is an illusion” or i don’t know, whatever. DN9 also does not seem to me, when read in parallel to the chinese, really try to make a definitive point about the termporal nature of things, rather it addresses one specific thing, meditation, for want of a better word, and makes an argument to the effect that in the state of formless mediation in some sense one is in a present state in which your physical body has ceased to exist, that is there is a path of practice of training ones perceptions such that one can attain an experience of not having a body and at that time you really don’t have a body, any more than the ghee has a milk.
What even the authors of DN9 would have to say about anatta I have no idea, as I say, I suspect they would have interpreted it as a lokāyata position and declarted it misspoken or abyākata.
“Samo visesī uda vā nihīno,
“If you think that ‘I’m equal,
Yo maññatī so vivadetha tena;
special, or worse’, you’ll get into arguments.
Tīsu vidhāsu avikampamāno,
Unwavering in the face of the three discriminations,
Samo visesīti na tassa hoti;
you’ll have no thought ‘I’m equal or special’.
Than this:
“Pahāsi saṅkhaṁ na vimānamajjhagā,
“Assessment was given up, conceit rejected;
Acchecchi taṇhaṁ idha nāmarūpe;
craving for name and form was cut off right here.
Taṁ chinnaganthaṁ anighaṁ nirāsaṁ,
They cut the ties, untroubled, with no need for hope.
Pariyesamānā nājjhagamuṁ;
Though gods and humans search for them
Devā manussā idha vā huraṁ vā,
in this world and the world beyond, they never find them,
Saggesu vā sabbanivesanesu.
not in heaven nor in any abode.
Both from SN1.20
Mostly because of “4 lines good 6 lines bad!” (Animal Farm joke) and taṇhaṁ idha nāmarūpe.
And I think taṇhaṁ idha nāmarūpe is earlier than
‘Viññāṇapaccayā nāmarūpan’ti iti kho panetaṁ vuttaṁ, tadānanda, imināpetaṁ pariyāyena veditabbaṁ, yathā viññāṇapaccayā nāmarūpaṁ.
‘Consciousness is a condition for name and form’—that’s what I said. And this is a way to understand how this is so. Viññāṇañca hi, ānanda, mātukucchismiṁ na okkamissatha, api nu kho nāmarūpaṁ mātukucchismiṁ samuccissathā”ti?
If consciousness were not conceived in the mother’s womb, would name and form coagulate there?”
“No hetaṁ, bhante”.
“No, sir.”
DN15
Which I think is earlier than
“Tasmātiha, bhikkhave, yaṁ kiñci rūpaṁ atītānāgatapaccuppannaṁ ajjhattaṁ vā bahiddhā vā oḷārikaṁ vā sukhumaṁ vā hīnaṁ vā paṇītaṁ vā yaṁ dūre santike vā, sabbaṁ rūpaṁ: ‘netaṁ mama, nesohamasmi, na meso attā’ti evametaṁ yathābhūtaṁ sammappaññāya daṭṭhabbaṁ.
“So you should truly see any kind of form at all—past, future, or present; internal or external; solid or subtle; inferior or superior; far or near: all form—with right understanding: ‘This is not mine, I am not this, this is not my self.’
SN22.59
K R Norman thinks they are authentic, composed by monks and nuns spanning from the Buddha’s time to, if I recall, about 50-100 years after his death.
“The teacher willed that this world appear to me as impermanent, unstable, insubstantial. Mind, let me leap into the victor’s teaching, carry me over the great flood, so hard to pass.”
Tālapuṭattheragāthā
What is this but a phrasing of anicca, dukkha & anatta?
I don’t. Momentariness implies discrete entities or identities, which are either infinitesimally small, thus not being able to add up to any real sum, or extended in time, in which case they can be broken up and therefore still imply identity over time.
I don’t think temporal identity or momentariness are fully coherent.
I am not arguing that the 4 line form is uniformly pre-aggregates or pre-anything.
I am not even saying that the the buddha didn’t use terms like aggregates, sense fields, and “elements” (at least some of them), although I do think on balance that he probably didn’t, and if he did they where probably not the “doctrinally complete and consistent” sorts that we are familiar with from the prose.
What I am saying is that it looks overall, as for example Tominaga observed as far back as the mid 1700’s, that the “suttas” are most probably the 4 line poems, and the prose is basically commentary, most of which is most likely composed after the death of the founder.
These “suttas” are probably from a period from “time immemorial” i.e before gotoma was even born, and probably continued to be composed after his death.
There is arcane lore that allows one to guess at these things by appeal to vedic vs classical metres and forms, but it is currently beyond the mere likes of me.
I place vaṅgīso as a little later than say “the wise mater themselves”, but it’s mostly on the grounds of austerity and simplicity vs prolix florid gracefulness
what that means in terms of “when in relatino to gotoma?” is anyones guess.
