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

[Dan Lusthaus]

Tim Cahill asks,

> How is the nonspecialist audience supposed to know this?  And further, has
> the writer been asked by the publishers to produce a tightly limited piece
> from a traditional Chinese perspective?  If chapters were likely
> added later then doesn't Faxian deserve credit for translating the
> *entire* text as it (likely) existed in his time?

All fair observations. Note however the wordcount of "partial" as opposed
to:

"the subsequent translation had additional chapters, probably not part of
some imagined ur-form of a Mahayanic Nirvana Sutra, which, incidentally, is
radically different from the Nibbana sutta found in the Theravada canon [how
would a nonspecialist know that either?], and perhaps reflected some new or
at minimum different thinking about the whole thing, so that now realization
of Buddha-nature was even conferred on icchantikas, modifying the history of
the theory of icchantikas from..."

an entry on "Chinese Buddhist Philosophy" should present the ideas that are
and have been foundational to Chinese Buddhists. If one goes back to the
full encyc. entry and sees this discussion in the context in which it was
written instead of yanked out of context as it was when posted here (which
never prevents anyone from shooting from the hip before prior
investigation), one will notice that the article does discuss *briefly* that
this whole mess is probably of Central Asian, not Indian origin, and that
this little incident was a major turning point in the development of Chinese
Buddhism (as opposed to merely reiterating or trying to reiterate Indian
ideas in Chinese). Thus the Chinese interpretation is part and parcel of the
incident, a pivotal decision from which no East Asian Buddhist has been
allowed to deviate without becoming an object of scorn and derision. The
amended translation followed very quickly after Faxian's version -- there
was no large gap in time -- so the assumption the Chinese immediately
reached was that they had been mistaken about icchantikas because the Faxian
 text had neglected to provide the necessary information which was missing
from their version, especially because of the apparent prescience of one in
their midst who insisted before even seeing the new/amended/whatever
version, what it *ought to say*. Since he knew it ought to be there, it must
have been there already, and the new translation -- which, after all,
contains the words of the Buddha and thus could never be an amended text but
must have been complete from the beginning, so that any additions must have
always already been there....

Now count those words, compare that total with "partial", and then read the
whole entry in context.

Dan ("I didn't know there would be any math on this test") Lusthaus