[Buddha-l] textual linearity vs fluidity in dialogue

[L.S. Cousins]

Joanna,

you wrote:
>  so I take the liberty of reposting a comment from another list 
>(that some of you are on as well) which not only answers my query 
>indirectly, but also makes a sage point that seems applicable to the 
>discussion about pudgalavada texts as well:

and quote Matthew Kapstein:
>"In a similar vein, I note that my article on the
>Chaandyoga-U., "Indra's search for the self" (reprinted in
>my  book _Reason's Traces_) suggests -- though I did not
>state this as robustly as I now think I should have -- that
>the final redaction of that "early" Upani.sad was also
>post-Buddha. It seems to me that the 19th cent. model -- one
>text or tradition coming after another in a linear series --
>has to be definitively abandoned in favor of a more
>fluid conception in which texts and traditions evolved in
>dialogue with one another and arrived at their "finished"
>forms in processes spanning centuries. Certainly, works like
>the BAU and the ChU seem better understood in this way.

Well, I also think that much literature during the oral period (and 
some after) may have operated like this, but I would be wary of 
assuming that this is true in all cases.

Of course, in this particular case it does not take two to tango. 
Even if one believes that some of the discourses of the Majjhima had 
a relatively fixed form because of their association with the 
founder, if the early Upani.sads did not, then the alternatives I 
presented will have to take a more nuanced form. We could only say 
that Majjhima references are to particular passages in Upani.sads. 
And this does not take into account that there may have been older 
Upani.sads or proto-Upani.sads which have not survived.

Lance