[Buddha-l] Theravada

[Dan Lusthaus]

Bruce,

Lance Cousins can probably provide more details on the Theravada take on
this. I'm unclear what you mean by "lineage"? Do you mean ordination into
one or another sectarian Buddhist school? I believe Lance is of the opinion
that ordination, even for Mahayanists, was largely the same for all
Buddhists in India, and that the discrepencies between the various vinaya
prescriptions for ordination were minor or insignificant.

If, on the other hand, you are asking whether there were different
ideological lineages within Theravada, then, at least for the early period,
the answer, as reflected in Buddhist sources, would be yes. Different
disciples of Buddha had their own disciples, and schisms between them
already during the time of the Buddha are recorded. After Buddha, some
followed Ananda, some followed one or another of the other disciples (the
names and stories vary across the literature, some of it relatively late).
One or another of these schismed lineages eventually died out -- there are
several texts that bemoan the loss of a tremendous amount of original
Buddhavacana when the Ananda lineage (or Ananda himself) died. To what
extent, if any, any of this involved differences in ordination procedures is
unclear. Lamotte's _History of Indian Buddhism_  provides some discussion of
this, but I haven't time now to hunt that down (be warned -- the index to
the English edition is utterly useless and out of sync with the main text.
Has anyone compiled a working index to this edition?)

If, on a still further hand (in the imaginary world, we can have as many
hands as we wish), you don't mean these distinct lineages as internal
Theravada matters, but a Theravadin take on rival Buddhist sects, then
again, Lance could give you a better account of that than I. If, on a still
further hand (maybe that's why Indian deities have so many arms?), you are
wondering whether the different sects each had their own ordination
procedures, then the answer would be a qualified yes. The picture is
somewhat murky, and something debated these days among some scholars, but my
sense is that there was a generic set of ordinations that made one a monk or
nun (of various degrees of initiation), with auxilliary ordinations for
specific sects. So, for instance, those subsets of clerics who took
vegetarianism as a rule, may have had an additional set of ordinations
specifying those rules, administered by the "lineage" of that subset. We
have good archeological evidence that Mahayanists and non-Mahayanists, e.g.,
lived together in the same monastic institutions (as well as literary
evidence that certain monasteries were predominantly or even exclusively of
one or another sect), but these institutions may have allowed for
differentiations nonetheless, such as Mahayanists sleeping in different
dorms/caves. At Nagarjunakonda, a partially preserved vihara has an entrance
foyer with two chambers, one to the left and one to right, that one must
pass to get to the main hall (in which the monks ate and probably studied).
The one on the left contains a dharmacakra, i.e., a statue of the
dharma-wheel; the one on the right has a statue of a Bodhisattva (I don't
remember offhand which -- possibly Maitreya or Avalokitesvara). Obviously
non-Mahayanists made obeisances upon entering in the left chamber, while
Mahayanists availed themselves of the one on the right.

Dan Lusthaus