[Buddha-l] Personalists. Was: Are we sick of dogma yet?

[L.S. Cousins]

Dan,

>  > Lamotte is misleading here [re: the tabulations]. He has omitted the
>figures for pure
>>  Mahaayaanists which he gives elsewhere.
>
>In a sense, yes. Priestley "retabulates", reducing the Sammitiyas to a
>"quarter" of all Indian Buddhists, rather than half (still a substantial
>portion).

Priestley is right. You  cited Lamotte as your authority. So let's 
stick to that.

In Lamotte's history:
134,800 'Hiinayaana' monks in total
66,500 Sam.matiiyas (more correctly Saam.mitiiya from samiti)

In his article (Sur la formation du Mahaayaana, p. 395) he gives:
119,430 Mahaayaanist monks

So Lamotte's total figure is 254,230.

This means that you cannot cite him as an authority for a 'half'.

Unfortunately, the Chinese pilgrim does not give the Vinaya 
ordination of the Mahaayaanists, but since Mahaayaana Sthavira is 
listed separately under Hiinayaana, we should probably assume that 
they are all ordained in the Sarvaastivaadin and Mahaasanghika 
lineages. I know of no evidence that there were any Mahaayanists 
ordained in the Saam.mitiiya group of schools. Do you ?

>At one point I did my own tabulation of Xuanzang's Xiyuji, and
>came up with figures different from both (somewhere in the middle), but I
>don't have my notes on that at hand at the moment (nor the time at the
>moment to retabulate, since these demographic references are scattered
>throughout the work).

I have my own too - based on the two volumes  translated in the Numata series.

>So let's say, for the moment, that somewhere between a
>third to half of Indian Buddhist clerics (which suggests the size of the
>support community as well) were Sammitiyas at that time. That is still
>substantially more than the competition.

A quarter to a third - in the reign of Hars.a.

Undoubtedly most Indian lay supporters would donate to whatever monk 
came along. Indeed most were probably not strongly ideologically 
committed at all.

>  Incidentally, when one tabulates
>the Mahayana figures, they are *not* as large as Priestley imagines, and
>they have a vaguer reference, since they include, among other things
>(largely unspecified), Mahayana-Sthaviras -- whatever that means.

Hsüan-tsang did not visit Ceylon; so his source must be the 
Mahaayaanist monks from Ceylon whom he encountered in South India. 
There can be hardly any doubt that the term Mahaayaana Sthavira is a 
collective designation for the Abhayagiri and Jetavana branches of 
the Theriya/Theravaada school. Of the 36,800 listed by the pilgrim, 
20, 000 are listed as being in Ceylon. (No non-Mahaayaanists !) 
Another 1,000 are listed for Bodhgayaa where we know from an 
inscription that the Sinhalese king had constructed a monastery. The 
remainder are in coastal areas which would be in a trading connexion 
with Ceylon.

>  > >5. They didn't call themselves "Pudgalavadins" -- that was a label
>applied to them by others.
>  >
>>  We don't know that.
>
>It's not a term that appears in any of their extant texts.

That is hardly evidence, since there are only very few extant texts. 
Most Sarvaastivaadin texts don't mention the word Sarvaastivaadin nor 
even the doctrine of sarvam asti. That's not at all surprising.

>and "Suunyataa-vaadins as a label for
>Madhyamakas is ambiguous at best since that label was also applied to a
>variety of different schools, and so on).

I don't agree.

>So I'd rather stick with an
>attested name, rather than accept an opponent's labelling.
>
>Consider the following from Priestley (p. 37):
>
>"Finally, we need to note that certain other schools have occasionally been
>identified as pudgalavadin, affirming the reality of the person. Vasumitra
>says in his account of the development and doctrines of the schools... that
>the Sautrantikas taught the existence of an 'ultimately real person'
>(paramaarthapudgala).

But Vasumitra's treatise doesn't mention Sautraantikas except in 
Hsüan-tsang's translation. Neither of the other two translations nor 
the Tibetan include them in the 18 schools. (They were a 
philosophical school not a Vinaya lineage.) This is clearly a simple 
error on Hsüan-tsang's part when dealing with an ancient and no 
longer extant school with a similar name.

>  In his commentary on Vasumitra's account, Kuiji
>distinguishes this doctrine from that of the Pudgalavadins:
>
>'They hold that there is the paramaarthapudgala, but it is subtle and
>difficult to conceive; it is the real self. It is not the same as [the
>pudgala of] the Sammitiyas and so on, which is neither identical with the
>aggregates nor separate from them.' "

Rather obviously made up by Kuiji, lacking other information.

>So, as Priestley and Thich show, the label "pudgalavada" was applied to a
>variety of schools that we, now, would have some doubts about calling such.
>It is a generic derogatory term, not what these schools called themselves.

Again, I repeat, you don't know this. It is only speculation to 
suggest that they would have found the term derogatory.

>  > >  The earliest version of Pudgalavada called themselves 
>Vaatsiiputriiyas -- being named after their founder, Vaatsiiputra 
>("son of a heifer").
>  >
>>  'son of a woman of the Vatsa clan'
>
>That's another possibility considered in the literature. Thich provides a
>discussion of the options. Priestley even suggests that it may be a
>Sanskritization of Vacchagotta (!), well known from some important MN
>suttas. The heifer option, to which I have no particular attachment, comes
>with an explanatory mythology, so it would appear the Buddhists themselves
>were unsure of exactly what the name referred to.

Not really. There is only the one serious possibility. The 'heifer' 
suggestion (and story) is an obvious late invention based on the 
name. As you know, Skt vatsa = Pali vaccha or vatsa or vam.sa. 
Metronymics are not so familiar among later Buddhists. So the name 
was misunderstood. But given their frequency of use in earlier 
sources e.g. 2nd century B.C. inscriptions, we can be sure that this 
is what is meant.

>  > >6. Their influence (and numbers) continued to grow, replacing other sects
>in
>>  >many places, and this continued until Buddhism disappeared from India.
>>
>>  Evidence for this ?
>
>Which? Point 5 or point 6, or both?

Point 6

>As for 5, we have descriptions of their literature and its purported size in
>various sources (noted in both Priestley and Thich). The names of the
>different Vatsiputriya offshoot schools are attested in a variety of
>sources, such as ch. 10 of Vasumitra's Samaya-bhedoparacana-cakra,
>T.49.2031) which says they divided over alternate interpretations of a
>single agama passage. Since this text is probably from the 2nd c CE, the
>schism was apparently fairly early on.

Yes.

>The Sammitiyas appear to have become
>the dominant sect, and the fate of the others is uncertain.

Not really. Later sources use the term Saam.mitiiya as a collective 
designation for all the Personalist schools - whether three or four 
or five is uncertain.

>The Sariputra to
>Rahula to Vatsiputra lineage is reported by Kiuji, who, as I mentioned,
>seems to get most other details about them correct.

I distrust nearly everything in Chinese sources about 'lineages'. 
Note that both Saariputta and Raahula predecease the Buddha. So this 
makes Vaatsiiputra a contemporary of the Buddha. We cannot take this 
seriously !

>  There are alternate
>"origin" stories in the literature, some putting the creation of the
>Vatsiputriya school two hundred years after Buddha's parinirvana, and others
>with alternate dates. Vatsiputra is mentioned twice in the Maha-parinirvana
>sutra, lending ideological (if not historical) credence to considering him a
>contemporary of the Buddha.

Not in the Pali one, he isn't.

>As for point 6:
>
>>My understanding is that they had the support of
>>  Hars.a and his family. So their exceptional numbers at the time of
>>  the visit of Hsüan-tsang is due to the support of his short-lived
>>  dynasty. I see no reason to suppose that they were such a large
>>  proportion of the Sangha before or after.
>
>Harsha may have been a contributing factor at a certain point, but one of
>the striking facts of Xuanzang's Xiyuji is that he reports on monasteries
>and their demographics as he enters each area and town of India, and the
>Sammitiyas are established in sizeable communities virtually wherever he
>goes -- north, south, east, and west. I doubt we can attribute that wide
>distribution to Harsha alone.

That's just wrong. He doesn't mention any in the Deccan or south of 
there. That's half of India to start with ! Moreover, the 
distribution is not at all even. Using Lamotte's figures, of the 
66,500 plus monks of the Saam.mitiiya schools, we find:
20, 000 in Sindh and the lower Indus area,
20,000 in Maalava (Hars.a's capital)
6, 000 in Valabhii (the great monastic university in western India)
There were some in the NW and in Central India too.

Lamotte's information on the East is suspect. For one thing, the 
Record and the Life in a number of places differ as to whether a 
place had Saam.mitiiya monks or Sarvaastivaadin. In particular, we 
should expect that the major pilgrimage centres in Maagadha will have 
had monks of all schools. We cannot conclude from that anything about 
their general distribution in Eastern India before the Pala period. 
(After the Muslim invasions of the West and North-west, we may expect 
both refugee monks setting up centres in the East and Buddhists from 
areas under Muslim rule going to the Pala territories for ordination.)

>Again, Priestley (p. 31):
>
>"At least two of the Pudgalavadin schools, the Vatsiputriyas and the
>Kaurukulaka branch of the Sammitiyas, survived into the tenth century CE...
>The Pudgalavada lasted, then, from about two centuries after the death of
>the Buddha until the time when Buddhism finally disappeared from India, a
>period of well over a millennium.... [T]he extinction of Buddhism in India
>also marked the end of the Pudgalavada."

This is silly. We have no idea whether or not Pudgalavaadin 
monasteries continued to the end of Buddhism in 'India' at this time. 
Buddhism certainly continued down to the fourteenth century in 
various places - possibly everywhere on a small scale.

>This is the conservative estimate (e.g., it starts two centuries after
>Buddha, rather than contemporaneously, etc.).

The two possibilities are not equal. And it is misleading on your 
part to suggest that they are. You surely know better.

>Let's keep in mind that their opponents had no motive for accurately
>recording their success or popularity. As evidence that the Sammitiyas were
>already making their mark before Harsha, consider this from Thich (pp.
>12-13):
>
>"The presence of the school is proved by two inscriptions: one in Mathuraa,
>from the Ku.saana period (second century CE), the other at Saarnath, from
>the Gupta period (fourth century CE)...
>"It was around the third or fourth century CE that the Sammitiyas became so
>influential and popular that they replaced the Sarvastivadins in Sarnath."

They replaced them certainly. But we have no information as to the 
reason or reasons for that.

Everything we know suggests that just as the Theravaada is a school 
originally spreading from the South and the Sarvaastivaada is a 
school spreading from Kashmir and the Mathuraa region, so the 
Pudgalavaada is  a school spreading from the West. My underlying 
assumption here is that the early differences between schools were 
geographically based rather than sectarian. (I prefer to use the term 
Pudgalavaadin so as not to confuse the difference between 
Saam.mitiiya as the name for the most influential of the 
Pudgalavaadin schools and Saam.mitiiya as the later generic term for 
all of those schools.)

We can agree that they were more numerous than before in the time of 
Hars.a and his predecessors.

>That's pre-Harsha. There is also inscriptional evidence that they continued
>to spread a dominant influence north and south subsequently, displacing both
>Theravadins (Sthaviras) and Sarvastivadins from previous strongholds
>southward and northward, respectively.

I have not seen convincing evidence that they spread southward.

>  > This is based on the material in Chinese. As I have mentioned in my
>>  article on Pudgalavaada, it is more likely that these texts are later
>>  and influenced by Naagaarjuna.
>
>Not necessarily. The problematizing of "same as vs. different from" was a
>centerpiece of their approach, but only part of Nagarjuna's arsenal, the
>part sometimes considered most sophistrical -- and thus least
>sophisticated -- of his argumentative methods.

They may well not have accepted other ideas of Nagaarjuna. Note that 
similar ideas also spread among Jains in the early centuries A.D.

>  Their notion of
>"inexpressible" (as everyone seems to prefer to translate avaacya,
>avaktavya, bukeshou, etc.) was at the core of their account of the pudgala
>(cf. Priestley, p. 54, n.1 and passim), and, it would seem, the crux of how
>one was to understand their insistence that the pudgala was a prajnapti.

Clearly.

>Also cf. the quote from Kuiji above.
>
>>  I see no reason to believe that Sammatiyas were particularly dominant
>>  in the early period. Inscriptions don't suggest that. They may well
>>  have been initially dominant in parts of western India.
>
>Xuanzang's 7th c. tabulation does give them a higher concentration in the
>west, but I wouldn't consider either Sarnath or Mathura "west".

One inscription of the second or third century A.D. at Mathuraa 
(perhaps a Kushan capital around this time ?) and one in 'early 
Gupta' letters from Sarnath (a major pilgrim centre). As against 
this, half a dozen from Nasik and Kanheri. Sarnath proves nothing 
about the geographical roots. Mathura is just right for a location to 
which they are expanding from their original area.

>As for the idea that they influenced the thinking and development of the
>other schools, Priestley, e.g., suggests: "...the Pudgalavada might in this
>respect have been an anticipation of the Mahayana doctrine of the
>dharmakaya, and perhaps even a precedent for it." (p. 89) One can find many
>additional similar suggestions, though anxiety of influence prevented others
>from acknowledging such debts.

There is no evidence which would lead us to date the texts preserved 
in Chinese before the time of Naagaarjuna. So at present the default 
hypothesis is that they are later.

Lance Cousins