[Buddha-l] Gandharan Buddhist Art at NY Asia Society

[Dan Lusthaus]

Lance,

In a couple of instants you point to the exact issue that makes me hesitant 
to air the case of Yogacara influence on Buddhaghosa in a piecemeal fashion 
on an email list, rather than after marshalling and organizing substantial 
evidence. The lacuna that I've mentioned several times provides a wide open 
space for all sorts of imaginings. One can imagine nothing happened for 
centuries. One can imagine all sorts of things no longer available happened 
and these are the ur-texts or Q-s (Quellen = original source) for what one 
finds elsewhere. Since the arguments are literally based on the absence of 
evidence, it never leaves the realm of speculation. Pointing to parallels or 
affinities between Yogacara texts and Buddhaghosa (or Buddhaghosa-related 
texts) immediately raises the question: Did the Yogacaras get this from B? 
or did B get it from them? or are they both drawing on some Q? Each of those 
possibilities would have to be addressed and resolved to the best of our 
abilities in each case brought up for consideration. That is not the sort of 
task for which an email forum is ideal. Failing to apply that rigor would 
result in simply arguing in circles, as we've started to do.

On the other issues:

>You are still using Theravāda in a
> distinct sense.

Probably. I'm less convinced of the sectarian developmental history of 
"Theravada" than you, and thus have less resistance to viewing a continuity 
of sorts between the "Old fuddy-duddies" (Theras) -- against which the 
Majority (Mahasanghikas) and others rebelled early on -- and the 
self-proclaimed Theravadas from Buddhaghosa's day onward.

What I do have a problem with is the iron-clad association of 
Theravada/Sthaviravada and Sri Lanka. That strikes me as a late 
construction, forged and cemented once Theravadins vanquished their rivals, 
which occurred VERY late. Sri Lanka was a wild and wooly place prior to 
that -- one of the Yogacara centers (cf. Lankavatara sutra; albeit a 
distinctive type of Yogacara) and one of the original bases for tantra (the 
transmission of early tantra to China all came directly from, or by way of, 
or in relation to Sri Lankan tantra and texts).


>> One can literally watch sutras grow, watch accretions attach
>> themselves and expand. This type of process has been well documented for
>> many major mahayana texts, but, until recently, much less attention has 
>> been
>> paid to the Agama material, so the same process has not been documented 
>> to
>> the same extent in the secondary literature. That will change soon.
>
> I have seen this kind of argument over a rather long period. See for
> example the work of Konrad Meisig. It is not at all new. I think it
> involves rather naive conceptions of the historical processes involved.

It's not about polemical arguments -- naive or otherwise -- but simply 
taking account of overt, unambiguous evidence, esp. in the case of Mahayana 
sutras, where most scholarly attention has focused during the 20th c. 
(largely because students of the Chinese lit. approached it through Japanese 
prisms, and the Japanese were more interested in the roots of their own 
Mahayana than in Indian Buddhism per se.) There is nothing naive about 
watching entirely new chapters being added to sutras, or watching 
independent sutras being stitched together to form a new "complete" sutra 
under the rubric and name of one or another sutra. It is such a common 
happenstance in that literature that to question its occurrence would be 
naive and willful blindness. The question remains to what extent "Hinayana" 
materials were undergoing comparable processes during the first half of the 
first millennium of the common era. The evidence has hardly been examined 
yet, much less evaluated. What I (and others) are suggesting is that we are 
finding comparable shuffling, redaction, and creation -- albeit on a smaller 
scale -- in the Agama material now that we are finally looking at it. 
Nothing naive about looking. There is something naive about insisting on a 
conclusion prior to examining the evidence.

> Some of the Sutta materials in Chinese represent late development with
> strong Mahāyāna influence.

Probably. And a lot doesn't. One of the tasks still not resolved is 
identifying the affiliations of many of these texts (there are speculations 
and working hypotheses, but often based on less than solid criteria). While, 
based on what literature has survived in Indic and Tibetan versions, today 
our more concrete notions of "hinayana" gravitates toward Sarvastivada (with 
still some questions about how to sort out Vaibhasikas of various stripes 
from Mulasarvastivadas, etc.) and Theravada, there were many other active 
schools, with their own literatures -- Agama and otherwise. The Chinese 
preserves translations of many of these, but they are not adequately labeled 
for us to automatically know which texts belong to which lineage or 
sectarian affiliation. The Chinese themselves early on got the idea that 
only Mahayana was legitimate, so (I contend) numerous non-Mahayana 
translators and texts entered the record labeled as "good mahayanists". That 
leaves us moderns with work to do in order to properly sort the evidence. We 
are still at the starting phase, since Agama literature in Chinese has been 
virtually ignored for many, many decades, and is only recently attracting 
new attention (but, again, with more focus on "early mahayana" than on the 
non-mahayanic agama traditions). However, patterns are starting to emerge.

>
> For the Theravāda the text seems to have been fixed a a rather early
> point by the creation of detailed commentaries.

Since we do not have either the actual mss. of the canonical texts on which 
the commentaries were being written, nor any of the actual commentaries that 
were written -- but only the allusions to them from Buddhaghosa's day (even 
if we presume that his texts have reached us without the slightest 
alterations), this is just another type of "argument from lacuna". What 
seems certain is that a heap of messed up texts were dumped on Buddhaghosa's 
desk, and it was his task to wade through that, make sense of it, and 
produce something coherent "in the spirit" if not always the letter of these 
earlier texts. That the source texts themselves would be emended in the 
process should not be ruled out. That he did not produce cleaned up 
redactions of the earlier commentaries, but a new commentary (that 
incorporated in unspecified ways the earlier works, but went beyond them), 
indicates the degree to which his work was not a mere supplement, but a 
supplanting of the earlier material.

>> H. Guenther, on the other hand, in his Philosophy & Psychology in the
>> Abhidharma, states (p. 133): "The author of the Atthasalini, who is,
>> as many passages in his work reveal, much indebted to the intellectual
>> and spiritual acumen of the Vijnanavadins..."
>
> I am not convinced.

Nor should you be by that alone.

> The author of the Aṭṭhasālinī was asked to write his work by the bhikkhu
> Buddhaghosa and so is almost certainly a senior contemporary of 
> Buddhaghosa.

In fact, it is murky who was involved in specific with the commentarial 
writing. Buddhaghosa, apparently still relatively young at the time, was 
chosen as the head of committees, largely due to his command not just of 
commentarial lit. but of the grammatical tradition, which, at that time, 
would include the Sanskrit as well as Pali grammatical traditions. Ergo, he 
was reading Sanskrit texts, and knew what was in them. What degree of 
authorial control or involvement he had in each of the commentaries - or 
even the Visuddhimagga - could be argued, I suppose. Who put pen to paper is 
irrelevant to our discussion, which is rather whether the commentaries --  
which at Buddhaghosa's time I would agree pretty much fix the canon once and 
for all -- show any influence from Yogacara, as Guenther and I contend.

>> So at least we might agree that Theravada borrowing from Asanga is
>> attested for Dhammapala? That would be a first step.
>
> From the Bodhisattvabhūmi, possibly. But we don't know the sources of
> that work which seems rather eclectic.

Hence what I wrote at the beginning of this message. Let's call this jumping 
to the lacuna grabbag.

> You did not pay attention. I said only that no figures later than the
> first century A.D. are mentioned in his commentaries. That suggests to
> me that the sources he is using date from after the first century. They
> themselves probably had earlier sources.

Thanks for the clarification. Not how I understood your initial claim. But 
this then would indicate that there was active interpretive work going on 
continuously up to Buddhaghosa's time. This activity MAY have spilled over 
into "correcting" the texts, and most likely did -- let's note that one of 
the tasks assigned Buddhaghosa and his committee[s] was redacting texts that 
were recognizably corrupt at his time; that is usually understood as 
referring to the commentaries, not the canonical texts themselves, but the 
dire circumstances under which Buddhaghosa and his committees were assembled 
suggests the corruption had snuck into the canonical materials as well, 
which also therefore required final redactions.

>> Please see my discussion of Visuddhimagga in [...]
>> http://tinyurl.com/3nhdemh ) I don't make any historical claims of 
>> borrowing
>> there, but that would be a starting place to notice (initially) strong
>> affinities, and then parallels, and, once enough of these sorts of 
>> sections
>> of texts are compiled, to determine direction of influence. Since Asanga 
>> and
>> Vasubandhu predate Buddhaghosa, they were not borrowing from him.
>
> Thanks for the URL and the interesting paper.
>
> I don't see any evidence here for borrowing from Asaṅga, however. The
> verses you cite from the /Visuddhimagga/ are also found in the
> /Abhidhammāvatāra/ of Buddhadatta. In both places they are specifically
> attributed to the Ancients (Porāṇā). That (here and elsewhere) suggests
> a source in the earlier commentaries.

And again we have the Q question. Note I did not offer this -- either in the 
essay nor in our discussion -- as a proof text of such influence, but rather 
as an example of the types of texts which would need to be examined. In this 
particular case I would fully agree with you that this is a "purana" 
template -- and that is precisely why Asanga is trying to show his readers 
how to revitalize their reading of texts that have become so routinized and 
overly familiar that they tend to anesthetize rather than stimulate. 
Buddhaghosa and Asanga are, in this case, I agree, drawing from the same or 
similar well. That is pretty much how I characterize the relation in the 
article.

There are many other instances which are not so easily thrown into the 
lacuna grabbag, or resolvable by an appeal to Q. Compiling and analyzing a 
sufficient quantity of them in the Yogacara and Pali commentarial literature 
is not a task I have time for at the moment. My contention, however, is 
based on the impressions gained from years of reading this material. Had I 
been more conscientious, I should have kept a record of all such 
instances -- unfortunately I made only mental notes, not an actual 
compendium. It seemed too commonplace to require minute documentation.

But, for the record, let's at least be clear what we seem to agree has been 
acknowledged so far:

(1) There are affinities between Buddhaghosa and Yogacara texts.

(2) Dhammapala, Buddhaghosa's main subcommentator, is seen to be drawing 
directly from the Bodhisattvabhumi. He obviously saw no conflict in doing 
so.

(3) Others, besides Lusthaus, such as Guenther, have noticed Yogacara 
influence on the Pali commentaries (or claim to have noticed such).

That's a start.

> Oskar von Hinüber writes (Handbook p.103: "... the brackets for
> Buddhaghosa's dates are about AD 370 to 450", but the earlier limit is
> provided by the dates for Mahāsena, taken as d. 362 rather than as d.
> 302. I prefer the earlier chronology. The usual dating to the reign of
> Mahānāma in the fifth century is based on very late evidence which
> should be ignored. In general, a mid-fourth century dating seems 
> preferable.

Understandable why you would be attracted to von Hinüber's suggested dating. 
Dating Indian figures is a ridiculously imprecise pasttime, and there is not 
a major figure I am familiar with for whom the secondary literature doesn't 
provide a swing between several centuries. I can see motives for desiring an 
earlier date for Buddhaghosa, but not any compelling evidence in his 
writings themselves for doing so.

Dan