In Search of the Original Buddhism

Tricycle’s article on the “Truest” Buddhism.

Many of you will have seen this recent article from Tricycle, Whose Buddhism is Truest? If not, I highly recommend it, both for those studying early Buddhism and for all practitioners of Buddhism – both of whom will inevitably run into sectarian superiority hogwash from time to time.

Many a time I’ve seen Tibetan Buddhists claim to have perfectly categorized and analyzed the Buddha’s teaching, including developing and standardizing the “faster way” of tantra. Chinese Buddhists claim a widening and deepening the Dharma by connecting more deeply with the compassion (karuna) missing from the “lesser vehicle” (hinayana). And of course the Theravadins aren’t left out, blithely dismissing the “fabrications” of all non-Pali based traditions. Oh and Zen. Certain Zen folks like to take the haughty stance of being above all the scholarly foolishness, prefering instead to “express their perfect Buddha Nature…” by just sitting (Shikantaza, 只管打坐). Modern Western scholars, of course, escape all of this (j/k). We scholars, insofar as we are human, tend to fall into one or more of these – or other – pitfalls on a regular basis. And these are just a few that I’ve personally observed.

Based on findings from newly unearthed Buddhist scriptures in Gandhara, the above article does a great deal to debunk at least some of these sectarian squabbles, namely claims to primacy or originality.

Here are some of the key points and my thoughts:

It is now clear that none of the existing Buddhist collections of early Indian scriptures—not the Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, nor even the Gandhari—“can be privileged as the most authentic or original words of the Buddha.”

Even at the time of my work on my MA thesis (2005), it was drilled into my head that the Pali canon couldn’t be claimed to be the earliest scriptures, but could still be seen as the most complete original-language (even this is contested) body of the Buddha’s teachings. As Anne Hanson wrote in 2003:

As Steven Collins has persuasively argued, the equation made by earlier scholars between the notion of a preexistent Pali canon and “original” or early Buddhism can hardly be historically supported. Rather, present-day versions of the Pali canon, he suggests, are the product of the Sinhalese Mahaviharin sect’s efforts at self-preservation and legitimation during periodic downturns of  royal patronage for the sect in Sri Lanka. These efforts resulted  in the introduction of the concept of the Tipitaka as a closed and authoritative body of Theravadin scriptures (1990, 75-102). – In “The Image of an Orphan: Cambodian Narrative Sites for Buddhist Ethical Reflection,” The Journal of Asian Studies

And “Pali” is not what the Buddha spoke – the word itself means “text” – but rather it is guessed that he spoke Magadhi or Magadhan, an Indo-Aryan language of the ancient Indian kingdom of Magadha, which spanned present day Indian states of Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bengal.

So what the Buddha spoke, and taught, was stretched in various directions after his death.  And none of that process begins to be recorded for at least 300 years. Therefore to claim to have this or that “original” teaching or thought of Buddhism is a fiction. But a useful fiction – at times.

The parallels with digging through the mess of Christian orthodoxy are telling:

Religious orthodoxy wants to claim that one’s own tradition is the best. To do that, one needs to point to something unique to make it so. Having the sole true version of a singular truth is just such a foothold. And not only for Buddhists. Elaine Pagels, the scholar of religion who brought to light the Gnostic gospels, told Tricycle in 2005:

The Church father Tertullian said, Christ taught one single thing, and that’s what we teach, and that is what is in the creed. But he’s writing this in the year 180 in North Africa, and what he says Christ taught would never fit in the mouth of a rabbi, such as Jesus, in first-century Judea. For a historically-based tradition—like Christianity, and as you say, Buddhism—there’s a huge stake in the claim that what it teaches goes back to a specific revelation, person, or event, and there is a strong tendency to deny the reality of constant innovation, choice, and change. 

The Buddhist canons as they exist today are the products of historical contingencies.

And the parallels are also humbling, as Biblical studies, as a field, is much more mature than Buddhist studies. Richard Gombrich observes, “The exegesis of the Pali canon has not yet advanced much beyond where the exegesis of the Bible stood in the middle of the 19th century…” (from here, pdf.) – We have some work to do! This sentiment is echoed in the article as well:

The meaning of words is their use in context. A set of words stripped of their context is like playing pieces stripped of their board game. What would we have?

Certainly it would be good to know what the Buddha said. To the extent that we share the conventions of 5th-century B.C.E. Indians, we might understand some of what he meant. If we increased the conventions we shared with them (say, by learning early Indian languages or by studying history), obviously we would understand more.

This is a line that Gombrich enthusiastically urges in his book What the Buddha Thought. He, however, stands on one side of a divide amongst scholars about what we can know, ironically, about what the Buddha thought. The Tricycle article’s author, Linda Heuman, seems to place herself on the other side:

But context is vast—an unbounded, interdependent web of connections. And it is dynamic, shifting moment to moment. Context is finished the moment it happens; then it is a new context. We really can’t recreate it. And even if we could, we still wouldn’t know exactly how the Buddha was using his words within that context, so we wouldn’t know exactly what he meant.

Such a view clings to a somewhat slippery slope – somewhere along that slope we begin to question whether the Buddha even existed, vs being a mere literary figure (see What the Buddha Thought, ch 13). Once that is done, the authoritative figure of all schools of Buddhism becomes a mere shadow, and what trust can there be of the claims concerning various practices? Gombrich resists such a downhill postmodern tumble into murkiness (Linda’s use of the qualifier “exactly” twice gives her good room to argue that she’s not in danger of that murkiness) by asserting that it’s patently obvious to any reasonable person who reads the Pali suttas that they were produced by and large by one genius individual. And further, by learning early Indian languages and by studying history, one can get a sense of what that individual was like, indeed, some glimpse at “what the Buddha thought.”

The article should be read for its discussion of the “braided river” theory of early Buddhism advanced by the scholar Paul Harrison, as well as the discussion at the end – which deserves expansion – on what is essentially Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblance, extended to Buddhism.