[Buddha-l] Anomalous doctrines [III]

[Stephen Hodge]

Dear Dan,

You wrote:

> Third, I find Schayer's proposal thoroughly unconvincing, for a number of
> reasons -- methodological, historical, and otherwise, but will only 
> mention
> one tangential rejoinder.
It depends on whether you have understood what Schayer was proposing. 
Judging by your later comment reproduced below, I wonder if you have muddled 
up his proposal and my own musings.  However, you also say that "Schayer's 
aim was laudible", so I assume that you accept that there was such a thing 
as "pre-canonical Buddhism" and that it might be worthwhile trying to 
establish what it comprised, to satisfy intellectual curiosity if nothing 
else.

However, you have not expressed your views on the dating of the Nikayas as a 
corpus nor the process by which you think they were compiled.alhough you 
helpfully state in your other msg of 24/03 "on the question of how his 
teachings were consolidated and perpetuated -- that's a large problem", so 
we have not reached any agreement about the time span involved from the time 
of the Buddha's death to the time the texts comprising the Nikayas were 
gradually shaping up into a canon.  However, let's assume that it was a 
process that took a number of generations, perhaps extending over 150 if not 
more years.  That it was a gradual process seems widely accepted, due to the 
textual stratification that can be observed even though opinions vary 
regarding the methological details of analyzing the layers.

Having said that, would you accept that although the Nikayas exhibit a broad 
homogeneity of content, especially in terms of the core doctrines, there are 
also recognizable variants, doctrinal shifts and inconsistencies in details 
?  If your answer is affirmative, then how do you account for the presence 
of these inconsistencies etc ?   Without accepting our accepting his 
specific conclusions, Schayer's view was that these had got locked into the 
oral transmissional process at an early stage and, for a number of reasons, 
there was difficulty in or reluctance to expunge them from the corpus, even 
if they might later have come to be seen as deviant or problematic.  To take 
a concrete example, one might consider the kataphatic definitions or 
descriptions of Nirvana -- as a dhaatu, aayatana, pada etc etc or else the 
passages that refer to or allude to vij~naana as that which attains and 
persists in/as Nirvana, or else the differing accounts of nirodha -- what 
exactly is subject to nirodha.  There are plenty of passages elsewhere in 
the Nikayas that seem to deny the implications or contents of these 
statements.  In other words, if one has a corpus of oral texts that preserve 
A in one place but has a contradictory Z elsewhere which later generations 
consider to be normative, what, if any, deductions or conclusions can be 
made about the nature of A ?

[snip]
I have not commented on your long digression concerning the Pudgalavadins as 
it seems irrelevent.

> In short (in case the point is being missed), one can connect all sorts
> of dots from later developments through circuitous routes back to
> something in the origin.
Despite your lengthy tale of the Pudgalavadins, this conclusion is no more 
than a truism.  All things being equal, there may be cases when the dots do 
connect, when they may connect, when with considerable dexterity they can be 
made to connect and so forth.  I would not rule out any reasonable 
possibility without first examing the feasibility of such connections. 
Thus, in the case of certain doctrines or beliefs in the MPNS, for example, 
I don't think one has to follow an especially circuitous route to consider 
the feasibility of that some connection between those beliefs and others 
that were apparently in existence at an earlier stage.  In the case of the 
MPNS, we are talking about a temporal gap of about 300-400 years which is 
not an overly excessive period for a set of ideas or beliefs to have 
survived or have been transmitted, especially if writing were involved for 
over half that period.

> Speculation is easy; verification is another story.
Indeed, but without speculation in the first instance working from a prior 
intuition or a hunch, there would be little verification to do. One can also 
verify to one's own satisfaction, but not to that of many others -- witness 
your own failure to convince quite a number of scholars that your 
phenomenological model of Yogacara is valid.  You must feel quite frustrated 
or irritated at their inability to see what is presumably so obvious to you.

Best wishes,
Stephen Hodge