[Buddha-l] Lamas and such

[Richard Hayes]

On Dec 7, 2009, at 12:42 AM, Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> 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.

I think the first part is true, but not the second part. First, it is  
not the case that ideas worked out early necessarily fail to keep up  
with innovations. But that is not your claim anyway. Your claim is  
that "the average person" (whoever the hell THAT is) "would  
imagine" (a well-chosen verb) that what is early fail to keep up with  
innovations. I don't know how to assess whether that is true. Perhaps  
a sociological questionnaire should be devised and some numbers  
crunched. But before that is done, I think we would agree that almost  
everywhere one goes in time and locale, there are human beings who  
almost automatically see change as degeneration, and others who almost  
automatically see lack of change as stagnation. I think we tend to  
label the former, somewhat awkwardly, conservatives and the latter  
progressives.

> 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.

Strangely enough (perhaps because I am not among your average people),  
calling those schools early does not in the least suggest any of the  
things you think it would suggest.

>
>>> 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.

I guess my point is that as a teacher of Buddhism I simply do not find  
any need to discuss non-Mahayana Buddhism qua non-Mahayana Buddhism. I  
find lots of occasion to discuss what is said in nikāyas, āgamas,  
various vinayas, various abhidharma traditions and particular authors  
such as Buddhaghosa and his cousin Aśva. I find it serves me well to  
refer to specific traditions by name or description, and I hardly ever  
find a need to lump all the non-Mahāyāna together into a single  
class, because I tend to see it as an unnatural and useless lump. I  
find no more reason to speak of non-Mahāyāna Buddhists (except as a  
caricature invented by some Mahāyāna polemicists) than I find to  
speak about non-Apache Americans (except on the rare occasions when I  
need to speak about how a particular band of Apaches regarded those  
who did not belong to their band), on non-Jewish human beings (except  
as a kind of fictional motif that runs through some of the books of  
the bible).

> 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).

Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes
rhayes at unm.edu