The salvation of Ajātaśatru - a comparative study

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The following study by Juan Wu is an interesting and detailed comparative study of DN2, drawing from various early-Buddhist and non-early texts as well as the Jaina accounts. I want to place it here to link it to the search function for SuttaCentral. Maybe at some point somebody is interested to go through all the parallels mentioned to see if we have all of them on SuttaCentral. At present not many Jaina parallels are there.

Interesting detail here is that both Buddhist and Jains claimed that Ajatasatu was a follower of their sect.

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Interesting article. Thanks for bringing it up, Ven. @Vimala. I always was intrigued by the fact that so many later Buddhist sources/commentary assumed that Ajatasatu was damned to hell, even though the sutta itself doesn’t actually go that far. It’s interesting to find out that the Buddhist accounts are more charitable than the Jains’.

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I always thought Ajātasattu would be a great subject for a Buddhist novel. Most characters are either all good, great arahants and the like, or all bad, like Devadatta. Ajātasattu is irreconcilably both, which makes him one of the most human characters in early Buddhism.

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The intensity of her scholarship is amazing. Juan WU | Tsinghua University - Academia.edu

The site links to papers other scholars of Buddhism, with a treasure trove of papers. I’ve been busy downloading, to save some of these for lunchtime reading. Most of these papers are well above my cognitive pay grade ( Reexamining Jhana Towards a Critical Reconstruction of Early Buddhist Soteriology ) (huh?), but good stuff nonetheless.

Edit: Diving into the aforementioned cognitive deep end of the pool, and what do I see ?

The issue of early Buddhist meditation has already been researched to a certain extent by several scholars,including: Johannes Bronkhorst, Tilmann Vetter, Lambert Schmithausen, Bhikkhu Sujato, Alexander Wynne, and Tse-fu Kuan. The sad thing about early Buddhist studies, is that some of these seminal works have not received the attention they deserve.
(PDF) Reexamining Jhana Towards a Critical Reconstruction of Early Buddhist Soteriology | Grzegorz Polak - Academia.edu P. 11

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