[Buddha-l] Age of the Sutta Nipata

[Richard Hayes]

On Saturday 12 May 2007 19:31, Franz Metcalf wrote:

> I vaguely recall reading that the Sutta Nipata was likely to be from
> the earliest stratum of the Pali canon. Or am I making that up?

Many aeons ago, I studied Pali with A.K. Warder. His claim was that the Sutta 
Nipata should be considered very early because it is relatively free of 
formulaic dogmas such as the 4 noble truths, the 8-fold path and the various 
formulae for precepts and types of meditation practice. Warder also had a lot 
of assumptions about the age of texts on the basis of verse forms. I was 
never able to follow the reasoning on these metric matters; what I could 
follow seemed to be based largely on highly questionable assumptions.

I am more sympathetic to the assumption that the less Buddhist dogma a 
Buddhist text has, the more likely it is to be early. But that may reveal 
more about my anti-dogmatic Unitarian childhood than it reveals about 
anything else.

As I said (I hope not too impolitely) to Erik, the age of a text tells me 
nothing about its value. Even if one could know for sure that a text was the 
very words of the Buddha, it could be total nonsense. And if one could know 
for sure that a text was written 1000 years after the Buddha died by a gang 
of carousing drunken yak merchants, it might still make a great deal of 
sense. In short, we must always be wary of the genetic fallacy, that is, the 
fallacious view that one can know whether a statement is true if one can 
figure out who said it.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico