[Buddha-l] Lamas and such

[Dan Lusthaus]

Richard,

> In a moment of fastidiousness, I trained myself to refer to Nikāya/
> āgama/abhidharma Buddhism as canonical Buddhism, since those schools
> did seem to have in common a craving to establish a boundary (a
> pāḷi) that separated the authentic from the inauthentic. Of course,
> all Buddhism is in some sense canonical, but my terminology was meant
> to separate (up)tight canons from loose canons.

Interesting proposal. How about Tripitaka Buddhism? While Mahayana pays lip 
service to the Tripitaka, their actual canonical limits wander way beyond.

I'm not sure either of our ideas would work since the actual Buddhist texts 
of the 1st millennium CE speak not only of Tripitaka, but the 8-fold, 
12-fold, etc. canon. And this was embraced by Mahayanist schools (e.g., 
Yogacara) as well as their non-Mahayanic brethren (and sistern).

> "Early" does not carry such a suggestion for me at all.

"Early" as archaic, outdated, and superceded was part of the reason 
Mahayanists called Hinayana "sraavaka-yaana, the "hearer's vehicle". Their 
"sruti was authentic, but a long time ago, and the guys running around today 
pretending to be "sravakas were not there, so they heard nothing.

I would imagine that at minimum, the average person on hearing of an "early" 
Buddhism would imagine it was a form of Buddhism that embraced ideas worked 
out early on in the development of Buddhism, and would not be keeping up 
with innovations, much less be at the cutting edge a thousand years or so 
after Buddha. As the travelogs of Xuanzang and Yijing show -- as well as the 
material they translated -- 7th c CE Indian Buddhism was still teeming with 
active, creative, and institutionally solid "Hinayanas". Calling such 
schools "early" seems to suggest that they were just deviant Theravadins 
still reading the Nikayas and not worrying about pratyaksa or pramanas, or 
whether an aakaara is a mental image or an intrinsic property of an object, 
and that impression would be entirely false.

>> Coming up with a good name isn't as easy as it looks. ;-)
>
> Fortunately, it is not at all necessary. I am not sure there needs to
> be a name for forms of Buddhism other than Mahāyāna,

All that's true to some extent, but we need useful labels to save us the 
trouble of having to recite something comparable to "Three 
Kingdoms-Wei-Jin-Northern and Southern Dynasties" everytime we want to 
discuss non-Mahayana. And it may be true that finding a long list of 
positive defining features that all non-Mahayana schools share in common 
would be a task (but maybe not impossible, e.g. 4 Noble Truths, Arhathood as 
goal, etc.) it is easier to indicate some exclusionary qualities they have 
in common, e.g., rejection of major Mahayana texts (e.g., Lotus Sutra) and 
prominent Mahayana concepts (this would be an interesting exercise to 
enumerate carefully).

Dan