[Buddha-l] Re: Chronology of Pali texts

[Stefan Detrez]

Dear Andrew,

thank you very much for you help. This is very interesting information for
me. I wonder why so few scholars deal with the issue of
chronology/stratigraphy of the suttas, as the establishment thereof would
have tremendous implications for the reconstruction of the 'evolution' of
doctrinal history within the suttas. As for now, I'm inclined to think that
a synchronical approach (where all texts are regarded as having emerged
simultaneously, and should therefore be seen as coherent) is fallacious. A
diachronical approach, based on stratigraphy, would help to clarify a lot of
'contradictions' within the suttas (not to mention 'upaya' being an
erroneous explanation for inconsistencies between suttas).

Thank you again,

Stefan

2006/2/4, Andrew Skilton <skiltonat at cardiff.ac.uk>:
>
> On Fri, 3 Feb 2006 Stefan Detrez enquired:
>
> >Does anyone know of (recent) works attempting to establish a chronology
> of
> the suttas based on paleography/dialectology? The only works I'm familiar
> with dealing with this issue is Vishvanath Prasad Varma's 'Early Buddhism
> and its Origins', MLBD, 1973 and, in an implicit way, Oskar Von Hinüber's
> 'Handbook of Pali Literature'. There is also some discussion of Pali
> dialectology in 'Middle Indo-Aryan and Jaina Studies / Sanskrit Outside
> India' in the 'Panels of the VIIth World Sanskrit Conference-series',
> Brill,
> 1991. But's that all.
> Any works I'm not yet familiar with?
>
> Stefan, This does not address your question from the angle you ask, but I
> was interested to find on the web recently: Paul Kingsbury,  'Inducing a
> Chronology of the Pali Canon'. You'll find it at
> http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kingsbur/inducing.pdf. It employs stats,
> computers, big Pali corpus and development of Pali grammar to build a
> chronology. I think it is the result of fairly recent PhD work in the
> US.  You probably know it anyway.
>
> Andrew Skilton
>
>
>
>
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> Andrew Skilton
>
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- Laurie Anderson
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