[Buddha-l] Anomalous doctrines [III]

[Dan Lusthaus]

Dear Stephan,

> Judging by your later comment reproduced below, I wonder if you have
muddled
> up his proposal and my own musings.

I don't think so; I was trying to respond to them together, but perhaps my
response became muddled.

>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.

I'm curious to know what happend five minutes before the big bang, but I
don't have much evidence to go on for that either.

> 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 ?

This introduces a set of methodological issues. Attention to inconsistencies
in the Gospel accounts is what fueled late 18th and 19th c Biblical
philology. Exegetes had found other ways over the centuries to smooth over
the differences (though modern exegetes prefer to ignore Luke 14 rather than
smooth it over; Jesus' brothers are explained away as not really brothers,
etc. -- though these are discrepancies with current Christian doctrine, not
internal conflicts between the Gospels themselves). As anyone who has
methodically gone through a Parallel Gospels realizes, there are major,
irreconciliable discrepancies -- primarily of a narrative, not necessarily
doctrinal nature -- throughout. Once the Protestant Reformation gave the
populace access and even encouragement to read the scriptures themselves,
the clergy could no longer hide the glaring inconsistencies. The hope of
19th c. philology and hermeneutics was to solve those problems, and its
zeitgeist was historical consciousness (the century of Hegel, Darwin, etc.).
Determine which version of the story was earliest (i.e., which Gospel was
written first), and the "deviations" could be safely put aside. Applying
ostensibly "scientific" methods, the true historical Jesus was supposed to
emerge. Instead, multiple and repeated shocks struck. John was not the first
and primordial Gospel -- as many initially believed -- but Mark (which even
lacks a nativity narrative). And even Mark was preceded by Q (the elusive
Quelle). Correlating Gospel accounts with alternate records of the time
(Jewish, Roman, Egyptian, etc.) undermined the historical veracity -- or
even possibility of many of the events depicted. E.g., there was no census
taken anytime near when Jesus was supposedly born. By the end of the 19th c,
some had come to the conclusion that the Gospels were so incommensurate with
the verifiable historical record, that Jesus never lived. Others went to
work trying to determine what if anything could be said about the historical
Jesus. Bultmann's position is classic: as a historian/philologist he
acknowledges that a very different Jesus and early Christianity appears, but
as a Christian, he adheres to the Jesus of faith, despite severe
incommensurabilities.

The consequence of this for Buddhist studies (or Daoist studies, Confucian
studies, etc.) is that the zeitgeist has shifted somewhat. On the one hand,
still stuck in the optimism of early 19th c philology, the tools and methods
are applied to other traditions and canons, looking for origins, murky
suppressed groups, etc.; On the other hand, the expectation now, however,
becomes: since we couldn't really find Jesus, Buddhists won't have a Buddha,
Daoists can't have a Laozi (and Zhuangzi didn't write most of Zhuangzi),
Confucius was invented by Jesuit missionaries after the 15th c. (cf. Lionel
Jensen, _Manufacturing Confucius_); etc. It has become, in other words, not
an endeavor of recovery, but rather a kind of search and destroy mission. No
religion is now allowed to have a solid foundational figure who actually
said what the tradition recorded he said. We call this attitude enlightened
and scientific, and heap scorn on whoever refuses to get with the program,
or at least consider them naive and unrealistic.

Methodologically, where discrepancies, fissures, tend to be clearly evident
and stark, is in narrative contexts. Did good Friday happen on a Friday or a
Thursday? Depends which Gospel you read. That's an incommensurability that
can't be ignored. Since the events are supposed to link up with the Jewish
Passover being celebrated, the calendrical calculations are important to
maintaining the myth (Jesus as the new Pascal lamb, etc.). The dating of
events were adjusted to accomodate that, but the redactors used different
calculations. So "history" saves the day (literally). But for non-narrative
things historical philology is a much more uncertain tool, and has, at best,
a very mixed track record. One actual historical artifact trumps a century
of philological speculation (as the Mawangdui and Guodian Laozis finds did
to 20th century philology on the Daodejing). We sometimes think that
language -- because it changes over time, and the types of changes it
undergoes can be classified -- can reliably date strata of a text.
Unfortunately, that's only true sometimes, and really only when one has
actual datable manuscripts. A text that has been redacted or transmitted
could have had all its language, grammatical particles, archaisms "updated"
for newer audiences (as has been demonstrated with the Daodejing), so that
speculations based on the received text on the basis of its language are
suspect. For a literature that was not redacted into a written form until
several centuries had passed, and into a language that differed from, or
maybe had evolved from the original language (though, in the case of
Buddhism, I suspect that the itinerant teachers, even during Buddha's life,
spoke and preached in a variety of languages/dialects, adjusted to their
differing audiences -- the lack of alternate early agamas/nikayas leaves
this in the realm of speculation, however), speculation based on language,
etc., is also methodologically questionable.

Doctrinal disparities are a different thing. These, once again, become case
by case occasions for analysis. The Analects say that Confucius "never"
spoke about ren (humankind-ness). The rest of the Analects have him say
quite a bit about ren. There is the sort of "inconsistency" you mention. How
to resolve it? Might it be nothing more than someone (copyist, redactor?) at
some point inadvertently added a negative ("never") where there should not
have been one, and, since this was Writ, no one has had the courage to
change it since? There has been plenty of speculation about it over the
centuries, but in the end, given what else we know about Confucius and the
importance of ren in the Confucian value system, no one -- except certain
types of scholars -- display any concern over that negative.

Let me propose a different sort of axiom, a more Buddhistic one, I think.
Our asavas, anusayas, kilesas, etc., are such that we have a hard time
admitting impermanence (my students sure do). We want permanence,
self-continuity, permanent sukha. Buddha's teaching focused on that
aspiration; since that aspiration pursues an impossibity (there is no
permanence, no self, etc.), and the more we are forced to admit that, the
more desperate we become to deny and efface it, driving ever deeper into
dukkha. Buddha attempted to systematically gets us to face the absurdity of
that aspiration, and to recognize that extirpating it also eliminated
dukkha. But human nature being what it is, that aspiration keeps reasserting
itself. Buddhists keep trying to smuggle it back into Buddhism, and in some
schools have done so successfully (e.g., tathagatagarbha thought, the Lotus
Sutra's transcendental, eternal Buddha, etc.). Other Buddhists (Nagarjuna,
Dogen, etc.) have tried to clean house, and remove those asavas from
Buddhists, as Buddha instructed. So the axiom would be: any form of Buddhism
(whether early or late) that takes the four noble actualities seriously
enough to accept impermanence, is authentic Buddhism. Any purported Buddhism
that tries to smuggle permanence (svabhava, nitya, etc.) back in, is a
deviation. Once we realize we are no longer living in the 19th c., and are
thus not under any obligation to think exclusively in the terms of an
obsolete and imperfect methodological zeitgeist, this axiom is as viable a
standard for determining what is close to the "origin" of Buddhism, and the
thoughts of the originator, as anything else.

Dan Lusthaus