[Buddha-l] Re: Rational or mythological Buddhism and Western Buddhist lay practice

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Tue, 2005-03-22 at 11:42 -0500, Jackhat1 at aol.com wrote:

> It is my understanding from the commentaries to the Satipatthana Sutta
> that it was given at a town in Kuru country where there was no
> monastery. My understanding is that the teaching was given to
> laypeople as well as to monks.

Some years ago I read Buddhaghosa's commentary to this text. He stresses
the point that when the Buddha says "Oh, bhikkhus" that he is really
addressing anyone who is interested in meditation, not just people who
have taken monastic vows. The Abhidharmakosha also has a long discussion
of the benefits of meditative practice for people who have taken various
kinds of vows, all the way from monastic vows to the vows taken by the
laity. That text, of course is not of the Theravada tradition, but it
was written some 1500 years ago in India, long before Gombrich made his
observations about "Protestant" Buddhism.

Speaking of Protestant Buddhism, Gregory Schopen made the observation
about twenty years ago that there is nothing much more Protestant than
the supposition that allegedly early canonical texts (scriptures, if I
may used that term) contain all the truth in a tradition and that later
developments, insofar as they deviate from the scriptural norms, are
therefore decadent innovations. Hs argument, if I recall it correctly,
was that a scholarly preoccupation with the origins of texts, as if
early texts are necessarily better and texts from India carry more
authority than texts from China, betrays a Protestant bias that could
very well stand in the way of a careful empirical investigation of what
Buddhists have in fact said and believed down through the ages. 

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico