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

[Dan Lusthaus]

Lance,

I'm not sure how to respond to the various details in your message, since
there are a number of underlying epistemological and methodological issues
that would have to come into question, and I'm not sure we will be able to
resolve these via email.

In short, you seem eager to delimit Sammitiyas in geographical range,
numbers, and historical stretch at any imagined opportunity, as if absence
of *explicit* countervaling evidence were decisive, which is certainly is
not. More problematically, you are quick to label information from Chinese
sources (Xuanzang, Kuiji, etc.) as in error or mistaken, while, at the same
time, fashioning an untenable theory that Sammitiyas only had a momentary
dominance due to Harsha -- and our main information about the demographic
distribution of Buddhists in India at that time is precisely the reports by
Xuanzang and Yijing (in conjunction with Faxian's accounts of a couple
centuries earlier -- which incidentally also found Sammitiyas dispersed
throughout India, including the south). If not for Xuanzang's account, you
would probably be inclined to argue that Sammitiyas were negligible even in
the 7th c. If not for the Chinese ethnographies, we would all probably
imagine that by the first c. CE, only four schools -- the Tibetan
nomenclature of Sautrantika, Sarvastivadin, Yogacara and Madhyamaka, with
some murky Theravadins hanging out somewhere -- survived in India -- which
we can agree is absurd. Inscriptional evidence is, by nature, sporadic and
has its own unreliabilities, and our awareness of the existence of
inscriptions is serendipity at best (think of all the Indian regions
currently under water, victims of all the damn dam projects that India is
scamming the world to fund).

That you are willing to accept that Sammitiya is a blanket label for
additional schools, but resist the well attested fact that "sunyataa-vaada
also a blanket term used for a variety of non-Madhyamaka schools (including
in Pali sources) is surprising. So where the evidence is impossible to
ignore (Xuanzang had no motive for exaggerating Sammitiya presence -- on the
contrary), you grudgingly accept it, while delimiting it to the least
impact, and wherever the record is spotty you fill in the gap with denials.
You accuse everyone of exaggerating (Priestley's claims about the time of
the demise of the Sammitiyas, etc.) or simply being mistaken, but seem to
exaggerate the inverse at every turn. That epigraphic evidence shows that
centuries before Xuanzang or Harsha the Sammitiyas were displacing
Sarvastivadins as far east as Sarnath is compelling evidence. That they were
still around at the time of Harsha -- given that the conservative estimate
of their origins puts them within a couple of centuries of Buddha -- shows
that, unlike most of the other early "schools" that had already faded into
oblivion, the Sammitiyas had hit on formulas for longevity and stability,
and were spreading, is also compelling. That one of their centers was at
Valabhi -- which was decimated by the Muslims in the 780s, all monastics
killed, the extensive libraries burned, etc., and yet the Sammitiyas
continued to thrive, indicates that even a century after Harsha they were
still doing well.

So rather than pursue this further, let's agree to disagree on the extent of
Sammitiya prominence in India. Rather, being more interested in their
philosophical contributions, as is Richard, and following the suggestion in
your recent message to him that we should examine their own texts rather
than speculate from a distance with alien categories and concerns, I have
attempted to translate a bit of two of the surviving Pudgalavada texts from
the Chinese, in part to illustrate why I consider some of the current
speculations about their views, including Priestley's, to be in need of some
re-examination.

So as to avoid going over the word limit for postings, I will break things
up into a number of separate posts.

Dan Lusthaus