[Buddha-l] Re: Chronology of Pali texts

[L.S. Cousins]

This is certainly interesting, but doesn't give quite enough 
information in the .pdf to evaluate it properly.

>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>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

 From a smart-Alec point of view the obvious weakness is that it is 
far from clear that the kind of differences it is utilizing 
(different forms of particular tenses and so on) are actually 
products of some early period. We may rather be dealing with the 
idiosyncrasies of different scribes during the period in which the 
texts were put into writing.

The issue for me isn't one concerning stratification as such. It is 
rather a question of whether we should think of development from a 
complex origin or from a simple one. This is not a new problem. 
Similar issues arise with the origins of Christianity or the origins 
of the Mahaayaana. It is clear that people are very attracted to the 
idea of some simple starting point. In fact, however, it may well be 
that we should think rather of movement from one complex situation to 
another complex situation.

So the early Mahaayaana arises at a time when Buddhism had already 
developed considerable variety, looking only at what we know about. 
And it is highly probable that we know only a small fraction of the 
variations existing in pre-Mahaayaana Buddhism. So I would assume 
that there were many different groups developing various different 
devotional practices, meditational methods and understandings of 
Buddhist wisdom. Much of this will have come from preexisting 
Buddhist forms. Some will have been innovatory. I see no likelihood 
of some kind of core group at the beginning. I would think rather in 
terms of the coalescing of a number of different strands to form a 
new synthesis or syntheses which then become the starting-point for 
new developments.

We know much more about the origins of Christianity, but the issues 
are still very disputed. The earliest surviving Christian writings 
are the letters of St Paul (with portions of the Book of Acts and 
perhaps one or two other letters). These show very clearly that there 
was already an extremely complex development with influences directly 
from Hellenistic thought and religion, as well as from existing 
Jewish religion, itself already the product of influences from 
Hellenistic  religion and philosophy as well as of all sorts of 
influences from various parts of the Fertile Crescent and probably 
elsewhere. Note that the length of time from when Jesus started 
preaching to the writing of Paul is probably less than the period 
from the Buddha starting his teaching career to the end of his 
lifetime.

So I see no problem in supposing that Buddhism within the lifetime of 
the Buddha had already become quite complex, incorporating ideas and 
material from an Indian religious and 'philosophical' tradition that 
was already rather varied. Any attempt at stratification which does 
not take such a possibility into account seems question-begging to me.

Lance Cousins
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