[Buddha-l] Re: G-d, the D-vil and other imaginary friends

[Dan Lusthaus]

Stephen, nice to see you at it again. It's good to hear that you are hard at
work on MPNS, and hopefully your work will shed some new light on the thing.

You are, however, being overly critical of what is not a detailed piece of
writing for specialists, but an encyclopedia article aimed at
nonspecialists, with a tight word limit. Anyone who has written an
encyclopedia article on as broad a topic as "Chinese Buddhist Philosophy"
with a word limit half the size of a normal journal article will know that
balancing comprehensiveness with terseness forces one to skim a few corners
here and there. In the luxurious space of a monograph everything can be
quibbled and qualified in triplicate, and further developed in endnotes,
etc.

So

> > ".....Second, in 418 Faxian (the first Chinese monk successfully to
> > return to China with scriptures from pilgrimage to India) and
> > Buddhabhadra produced a partial translation of the Mahāyāna
> > Nirvā�a Sutra.
> Partial from whose point of view.

The subsequent Chinese tradition, of course. That is how they have
characterized it for over 1500 years. I agree, however, that the later
chapters were likely accretions, just as we can document with other texts
that received multiple Chinese translations over the centuries, like the
Lankavatara, Sandhinirmocana, Avatamskaka, and Vimalakirti sutras, etc. You
might also have pointed out that there are not only very different
recensions of the NS in terms of the so-called Southern and Northern
recensions, but lots of "partial" translations collected in the Taisho of
sections which obviously circulated independently of the main text.


>The Faxian version and the parallel
> Tibetan one are complete in their own terms.  Their source text was the
one
> compiled and used in India.

Maybe. The Skt text for the Faxian version probably was also acquired in
Central Asia. Since we no longer have an extant NS in Sanskrit, what might
have circulated at various times in India is a judgement call, not a clear
fact. Texts produced in Central Asia did travel back to India and circulate,
and some took root.

> There is no evidence that the extended version
> translated by Dharmaksema was even know in India

And no evidence that it was not. We don't know.

> -- to my mind, the extra
> material in Dharmaksema represents a bowdlerizing attempt to back-track on
> the doctrines of the Indic MPNS.

That's one hypothesis, one I have some sympathy with. I don't think it is
that cut and dry, however.

>A detailed examination of the two
> versions strongly suggests, as one might expect, that the people
responsible
> for the new material in Dharmaksema had not ideological or doctrinal
> connection with the originators of the Indic version.

That's another judgement call. Hopefully your work on the NS will document
this.

> > However, it should be noted that there is no clear precedent or term in
> > Indian Buddhism for "Buddha-nature"; the notion probably
> > either arose in China through a certain degree of license taken by
> > translators when rendering terms like buddhatva ("Buddhahood").
>
> Unless this is a quibble about the English term "Buddha-nature", this
> statement suggests a lack of familiarity with the relevent Indic texts -- 
> Chinese "fo-xing", normally translated as "Buddha-nature" is the Chinese
> equivalent of "Buddha-dhaatu".  This is very well attested in many texts
> such as the MPNS.  Only occasionally does "fo-xing" translate "buddhatva"
as
> in some versions of the LAS.

"A detailed examination of" what I wrote suggests the use of the word "like"
in the phrase "terms like buddhatva" is an indication that there are more
words, besides buddhatva, that were possible sources of the Chinese foxing
(Buddha-nature) [pronounced fo shing, not foxhunt]. Were the encyclopedia
entry on "Buddha-nature" these other terms would have been discussed in
detail. Buddha-dhatu is just another of many terms. The most interesting
one, at least in terms of an unexamined Chinese development, is buddha-gotra
(another term closely tied at times with Tathagatagarbha thought). Gotra,
which means a family group, was sometimes rendered with xing/family name, a
homonym for xing/nature. The two xings are written similarly, the only
difference being that xing/family has a woman radical on the left and
xing/nature has the heart radical in that position. Many Chinese
translations and Chinese original compositions discussed
fo-xing/buddha-family, as in when one has taken refuge one is a member of
the family of buddhas. At some point in Chinese redaction history, some one
or committee, or perhaps it was an ongoing "corrective" project, went
through a vast amount of Chinese Buddhist literature and replaced the
fo-xing/Buddha-family with fo-xing/Buddha-nature. I first became aware of
this years ago when working on the Cheng weishilun, where the context
clearly indicated gotra, but most of the printed versions have xing=nature
(not all of them, which was the clue). An example of this that most readers
of buddha-l are likely to have on their bookshelf is the Yampolsky
translation of the Platform Sutra. In the back he has the Chinese from the
Dunhuang ms he translated. Where ever that text has xing/family, Yampolsky
(following the scholarly convention of that day and our own) replaced the
term with xing/nature in parenthesis, "correcting" the text, bringing into
line with the later popular redaction, and, of course, translating his
corrected version. That gotra would strike some odd in some of those
contexts today shows how successful the revision project was. This happened
to many texts, and in some (like CWSL) the fact that gotra xing/family was
originally intended and written is unquestionable.

Borrowing a page from Richard's book, one might say that whenever
Tathagatagarbha appears, Buddhist minds turn to mush, get sloppy, say and do
stupid things, and Buddha-nature is the spawn of that disease. Dogen tried
to correct that by reminding us that no one has Buddha-nature, buddha-nature
is a euphemism for everything being impermanent, in other word, just a
reified word totally misunderstood and abused by Buddhists. Linji was more
radical and said there is no Buddha. That Tibetans adopted the idea of
Buddha-nature with its attendant mushiness is one of the most powerful
refutations of the Tibetan myth that their Buddhist transmission came
directly, in pure form, from India without Chinese corruptions.
Buddha-nature is not an Indian idea, but a Chinese one, so that every
Tibetan who has tried to account for it, in any way, is wrestling with
Chinese demons and ghosts.

As the discussion that spawned these messages illustrates, those ghosts now
have a new home in the heads of Western Buddhists, who, like people who have
just heard that a sale is going on in a nearby store, want to know where/how
they can get their very own Buddha-nature (in the name of having no-self or
own-nature), while comforting themselves they already have one.

Just this week I heard  two Zen teachers, from two different Zen schools,
talk about Buddha spending six years under the Bodhi Tree. We might be
inclined to excuse that as a hyperbolic metonymy for his six years in the
forest (only 40 days and nights of which were, according to most texts,
spent under the Bodhi tree). It could be shorthand for his six years of
practice in the forest. But once the idea is introduced, it becomes a way of
saying that Buddha was sitting in zen for six years (he didn't); Bodhidharma
sat for nine years. And you should sit for... It's a shorthand metaphor that
has taken on cosmological ramifications. Buddha-nature, similarly, is a
quick shorthand metaphor that has gotten away, grown out of control, and
spread far beyond the point of being useful. It's become a hindrance, a pure
case of what Buddhists call prapa~nca. Whichever genius thought that whopper
up should have been pummeled into silence until nothing but his lumpy
buddha-nature remained in a silent puddle. That someone failed to do that
quickly enough has helped usher in the age of mappo.

Dan Lusthaus