[Buddha-l] A question for Jewish Buddhists

[L.S. Cousins]

Dan Lusthaus wrote:
> 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.

And meant to be.

>  I suspect that -- Mahayana aside -- all the
> schools "largely" shared similar tripitakas, especially the Nikaya/Agama
> portion. 

I have carefully avoided talking about Canons or Tripiṭakas or even Vinaya.

> In the Katthavatthu there are very few proof texts cited by the
> variety of opponents that the Theravadins reject as authentic. 

It may be that collections of the four Āgamas differed mainly in their 
arrangement, not in their content.

> 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.
>   

Agreed.

> 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
>   
All of this is true, but doesn't affect what I had to say about the 
Dīrghāgama and Madhyamāgama collections.

Lance