[enrisaabsotte]

Well done, Element! I wish I could type well enough to add more of my own comments, but the splint on my left arm is now a full-blown cast. I'll have to settle for a :golfclap: and a c&p from here. Cheers...

How Buddhism Began [New Edition]
The Conditioned Genesis of the Early Teachings--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

INTRODUCTION TO THE
SECOND EDITION

The main purpose of this book is to present the Buddha’s ideas in their historical context. Since it was first published, others have been pursuing some of the same lines of inquiry, and I believe their results to be at least as important and convincing as my own. My most prominent theme, pursued in chapters II and HI, is the relationship of the Buddha’s ideas to the brahminical ideas of his day. This theme seems to have inspired two particularly impressive contributions. In her article ‘Playing with Fire: The pratityasamutpada from the Perspective of Vedic Thought” Joanna Jurewicz has, to my mind, found a convincing answer to an ancient question. While the general purport of the Buddha’s teaching of dependent origination (pratuya-samutpada) has always been understood, there has been almost infinite disagreement among interpreters both ancient and modem about how to understand the details of the chain, and why the links are in that order. Jurewicz has demonstrated that the teaching is formulated (presumably by the Buddha) as a response to Vedic cosmogony not merely in general but also in detail. As is his wont, the Buddha accepts the tenets of his brahmin predecessors only to reinterpret them — one might say, to ironise them. Here the main irony comes from his denial of the fundamental postulate of the Vedic cosmogony, the existence of the ãtman (self). This denial ‘deprives the Vedic cosmogony of its positive meaning as the successful activity of the Absolute and presents it as a chain of absurd, meaningless changes which could only result in the repeated death of anyone who would reproduce this cosmogonic process in ritual activity and everyday life’.

Secondly, in his recent Oxford D.Phil. thesis Alexander Wynne has shown how fruitful a similar approach can be for our understanding of the origins of the Buddha’s teachings on meditation. These too, it would appear, arose as a conscious development from but also a reaction against brahminical teachings.

Another line of inquiry here followed, partially interwoven with the first, is to trace doctrinal change within the Pali Canon itself. Stratification of the Canon into earlier and later texts has acquired a bad name, because the scholars who attempt such stratification have often made quite arbitrary and hence unconvincing decisions that certain features of form or content are early or late. I do not think I ever do this. I try, by contrast, to show how one thing leads to another. For example, metaphorical expressions may come to be taken literally, or two expressions which originally had the same referent may come to be interpreted as expressing a more profound difference. If the Canon, a vast body of material, was produced over many years — and to suppose otherwise seems to fly in the face of common sense — it is not surprising if misunderstandings or diverse interpretations arose in the process. This line of inquiry has been fruitfully pursued by Hwang Soon-il in his doctoral thesis Metaphor and Literalism: a study of doctrinal development of nirvana in the Pali Nikava and subsequent tradition compared with the Chinese Agama and its traditional interpretation (Oxford, 2002).

It is important to grasp that in most cases I am not claiming to have discovered the chronological sequence of the precise texts, i.e., of the wording which has come down to us; the developments I am tracing concern ideas, the contents of those texts. Nor do I subscribe, as has been alleged, to any kind of conspiracy theory, that changes have been introduced by ‘mischievous’ or ‘meddlesome’ monks.

To some it seems a kind of heresy or lèse-majesté to offer new interpretations of sayings ascribed to the Buddha, or to suggest that the commentarial tradition could be mistaken. Bhikkhu Bodhi wrote in a review: ‘To my mind, the texts of the four Nikayas form a strikingly consist and harmonious edifice, and I am confident that the apparent inconsistencies are not indicative of internal fissuring but of subtle variations of method that would be clear to those of sufficient insight’. Having offered so much evidence of inconsistency in those texts, I do wonder what be means by ‘insight’. My bafflement has deepened since the same learned scholar has published a full length article which claims to rebut my interpretation of a famous sutta (pp. 128—29 below). He writes: ‘For Gombrich Musila represents the view that arahantship can be achieved by intellection’ (p. 51). This is not my view. I simply say that Narada has correctly denied that ‘intellection without a deeper, experiential realization is an adequate method for attaining Enlightenment.’ I nowhere claim that Musila disagrees. Thus, so far as I can see, Bhikkhu Bodhi and I totally agree in our interpretation of the sutta. (Of course, we could still both be wrong.)

What my critics have generally failed to address is that when I propose a new interpretation I also offer an explanation of how it has come about that this interpretation has escaped the ancient commentators. The most general such explanation is their ignorance of the brahminism of the Buddha’s day; but I also show how commentators are trying to smooth out inconsistencies in the text they have inherited. On occasion I suggest that we need to emend the text. As when I offer a new interpretation, I make such a suggestion only because I feel that what has come down to us makes poor sense. I show in chapter V that the legend of Angulimala, the brigand with the garland of human fingers, is incoherent in its traditional form. Very small changes in the text transform Angulimala into a worshipper of Siva and thus make sense of his behaviour. The commentators probably knew as little of Saivism several centuries before their time as they did of brahminism.

There has been notable progress in following yet another line of inquiry suggested in this book. Chapter III ends with my discussion of a passage which, I say, seems to leave it ambiguous whether the Buddha was a realist or an idealist. Building on her earlier work (which I mention on p. 4 below) Dr. Sue Hamilton has taken this a crucial stage further. In her book Earl Buddhism: a new approach she argues that the Buddha is not talking, as most interpreters have assumed, about what exists, or whether there is really a world out there or not, but deliberately restricting himself to lived experience and how it works. Thus it is normal experience that is unsatisfactory — the first Noble Truth — and requires radical amelioration; nirvana is the experience which must be our goal if we see the world aright: and the self is denied not in the sense of claiming that it is a non-existent entity, but in the sense that whether or not it exists cannot be known and is therefore irrelevant to what matters, our salvation. I think that Dr. Hamilton has made a powerful case for her interpretation, and that it not only makes excellent sense of the Buddha’s teaching but also helps to explain how its diverse interpretations came about. The fruitfulness of her approach has already been shown by Noa Gal in her book A Metaphysics of Experience: from the Buddha ‘s teaching to the Abhidhamma. which takes the story further by tracing how the Buddha’s metaphysics lead to a quite different metaphysical stance in the Abhidhamma.

In chapter IV I discuss the problem of monks who are said to be ‘released by insight’ (paññã-vimutto) and yet to lack the supernormal powers which result from accomplishment in meditation, specifically in the four jhana; this then calls into question whether one can become Enlightened without practising those jhãna (see especially p. 126, footnote 21). I have since found relevant material in a narrative context.

This is in the story of Puma in the Divvavadãna, a Buddhist Sanskrit text generally dated to about the third century A.D.. The Buddha and his monks are invited to a meal the next day in a distant city. A certain monk indicates that he wants to go. However, ‘He had been released by insight, so he had not developed supernormal powers (rddhi)’. In this context, that means he cannot fly. But since he badly wants to go, he exerts himself, and acquires the necessary ability, which — as he points out himself— is based on meditative powers (dhvana-bala); so he takes a meal-ticket. The text makes it clear that he does this within a matter of seconds. If the story has any coherence. this can only mean that he had previously practised the jhãna but never bothered to exploit their potential either for special powers or for attaining Enlightenment by their means.

A little later in the same text, the Buddha’s great disciple MaudgalyAyana tells the Buddha that he regrets that he did not aspire to become a Buddha himself. Now he is an arahant and it is too late: ‘I have burnt up my fuel.’ This is the sentiment of a Mahayanist. Some scholars have called the Divvãvadäna a SarvastivAdin text, i.e., non-Mahayanist. But these episodes suggest to me that sectarian orthodoxy was not so cut and dried, and soteriology could be adapted to make a good story. This in turn reinforces my hunch that the Susima Sutta may have been ‘a kind of narrative accident’.

The text below has been reprinted with only two changes. I have corrected a wrong statement about a metrical matter (not affecting my argument) on p. 144. More importantly, I have changed my translation of the word nibbãna from ‘blowing out to ‘going out’, to make it clear that the term is intransitive: the fires (of passion, hate and delusion) must go out but the term does not imply an agent who extinguishes them.