[Buddha-l] A question for Jewish Buddhists

[Dan Lusthaus]

Lance,

As for

> The only alternative I can see is to suppose that by some time around
> the middle of the first millennium A.D. (or earlier) a Sanskrit
> canonical recension of the four Āgamas had been produced which was
> largely shared by the major schools of northern India.

"Largely" is a vague term. I suspect that -- Mahayana aside -- all the
schools "largely" shared similar tripitakas, especially the Nikaya/Agama
portion. In the Katthavatthu there are very few proof texts cited by the
variety of opponents that the Theravadins reject as authentic. As a study of
the pudgalavada texts (the few we have in Chinese) also demonstrates, their
proof texts are all things also found in the Pali. Without complete sets of
all the different tripitakas, it would be hard to be anything more than
tentative about the extent of variants or outright diversions, much less pin
down all the sectarian digressions. We know, for instance, that the
Sammitiyas had a nine-work vinaya that differed from all the other schools,
but we don't know with any great specificity at all what those nine works
were, or in what ways they differed from other vinayas. We have a few clues
in Paramartha's writings and in a handful of mentions of Sammitiya practices
mentioned by Yijing (I-Ching) in his travelog, but we don't know how rooted
those alternatives were in the actual text of the Sammitiya vinaya.

Nor, for that matter, do we know how faithfully the translators rendered
whatever tripitaka texts they had at hand from Indic into Chinese (quite a
few were probably closer in language to the Gandhari prakrit than to correct
Sanskrit, detectable in things such transcriptions of names, and certain odd
syntactic features). The evidence presently suggests that many liberties of
various sorts were taken when producing these translations, or at least with
many of them. These texts have not yet been examined very carefully
(interest in them is on the rise, so hopefully someday soon, but not yet),
so drawing firm conclusions at this stage would be premature and not
prudent. There are what have become the standard doxographical
classifications (which get repeated uncritically in all the modern
literature), inherited from catalogues prepared in China many centuries
after the translations themselves, but when such claims are examined
carefully, much turns out to be bogus, and will need to be reexamined and
corrected.

Dan