[Buddha-l] Re: Where does authority for "true" Buddhism come from?

[Robert Morrison]

Erik Hoogcarspel:

> Well I think the 12 nidaana's are just pseudo causal, because it's a one 
> way street, a spiral at the best, which is nothing but a curved line. 
> Ignorance causes consciousness etc. and not the other way around.

Stephen Hodge in reply (hello Stephen):

>>
Or possibly the 12 nidanas do not involve causality per se at all -- look 
closely at the standard wording for each of the links: "x arises in 
dependence upon Y".  Dependence is not quite the same thing as causality.
<<

An important point.  A flower needs many diverse conditions to arise: seed,
good soil, moisture, heat, etc. but not one of them is a 'cause'.  Not only
that, but, without prior experience, through examining each condition one
could never predict that some flower would appear.

>>
Also there is a lot of confusion about the standard 12 nidanas, because most

people (past and present) are unaware that it is a rather clumsy conflation 
of two separate processes intended to account for suffering, one perceptual 
and the other what we might term existential.

1.    vijñana -> nama-rupa -> ?a?-ayatana -> sparsa -> vedana [= du?kha]
2.    t???a -> upadana -> bhava -> jati -> jara-mara?a [= du?kha]

These earlier forms of the PS can be found in the Nikayas.  Sometime after 
these two sets got conflated, avidya and sa?skara were stuck on at the 
beginning for reasons that concern a different concept of the path and its 
goal.  It would therefore seem unlikely that the Buddha actually taught the 
12-fold PS -- it is more probable that he primarily taught List 2 and 
sometimes possibly List 1.
<<

This 'standard' 12 seems to be what the tradition mistakenly comes to
identify as 'conditioned-arising'.  There are many other more interesting
lists in the suttas.  And your no. 2 is, as you say, of a different kind
that what usually preceeds it.  It is also what we can get a handle on in
experience.  Frauwallner thinks that the avijjaa bit was stuck on later when
there was a shift from seeing the problem as affective (ta'nhaa) to one of
knowledge (avijjaa). 

What is clearly the earliest attempt to give an account of conditioned
arising can be found in 'Quarrels and Disputes', in the A.t.thakavagga of
the Sutta-nipaata [vvs. 862-893 PTS edition].

Cheers,

Robert Morrison