Notes on Finding Buddhists in Global History

Jonathan Walters was kind enough to correspond with me and send me a pdf copy of his extended essay in book form: Finding Buddhists in Global History (1998). The book has three chapters

1. Problematizing the Buddhological Construct
2. Historicizing the Buddhological Construct
3. Beyond the Buddhological Construct

Walters is a historian, and thus his work can be bracketed with other historians of Buddhism such as David Drewes, Bernard Faure, Charles Hallisey, Frank Reynolds, Gregory Schopen, and Joseph Walser. All of these historians have been critical of how the history of Buddhism has been handled within Buddhist Studies. Note that the book and its argument are aimed at historians who wish the see Buddhists in their global context. Other approaches to history are available and valid.

What follows are my notes on reading this essay (thus my understanding of Walter's argument). Numbers in parentheses, e.g. (4), are page numbers in Walters 1998. My comments are in [square brackets].

Note that the preface has footnotes but the main text uses endnotes.

Problematizing the Buddhological Construct

The Buddhological Construct is a master narrative of Buddhist history in five key moments:

1. The historical Buddha founded Buddhism
2. Early Buddhism
3. Asoka and general propagation through Asia
4. Medieval decline
5. Early modern revival (19th and 20th Centuries)

Within this framework, various Buddhological arguments have raged over:

1. The dates of the Buddha and the authenticity of the texts
2. The character of early Buddhism
3. The chronology of Buddhist missions
4. The causes of medieval decline
5. The details of the modern revival

This master narrative was a product of nineteenth-century European colonialism (5). It produced massive overviews of Buddhism [such as Etienne Lamotte's History of Indian Buddhism]. Since then Buddhological scholarship has become increasingly specialized, but it has continued to presuppose the master narrative. Walters is critical of this narrative:

"The Buddhological Construct is a crude and misleading interpretation of the evidence, and we now need to move beyond it... the Buddhological Construct obscures [the global significance of Sri Lankan texts and monuments] with pat generalizations that have little or no relationship to the evidence itself." (4)

Rather than being updated due to more specialized studies that undermine it, the Buddhological Construct has remained in force and become a dogma.

Historicizing the Buddhological Construct

Many of the ideas and concepts that seem basic to Buddhist Studies—such as "Buddhism" and "the historical Buddha"—were invented in the period 1820–1840. By the 1840s Europeans had discovered that Buddhism was a religion, though they saw it as "moribund" [i.e. dead] (8). In the 1850s, Buddhists themselves were challenging the idea that Buddhism was moribund.

19th-century scholars were far from systematic in their approach.

Scholars did not begin by deliberating about what should be asked of the primary evidence, which questions should be answered on the basis of which evidence, nor what sort of evidence it was in the first place. Instead, being thinkers of their age, these scholars dived right into the evidence as though its nature and the questions to which it represented answers should be transparent and obvious. (8).

The Buddhological Construct reflects 19th-century preoccupations. Walters suggests that it "was little more than the extrapolation to Buddhist history of 19th-century Protestant historical self-understanding." (9). So the five key moments of Buddhist history are modeled on a Protestant understanding of the history of Christianity, i.e. founder, original church, missions, decline, and revival (9). The history of Buddhism was shoehorned into this model by 19th-century Buddhologists.

Walters suggests that this outline of history was so ingrained in 19th-century European scholars that it was presupposed before they ever opened a Buddhist text. And the "discovery" of this same pattern in Buddhist history was more or less inevitable. This led to subsequent questions about Buddhist history being framed in the same Christian terms. Walters suggests that Buddhologists and Theologians were concerned with more or less the same questions, with only the names being different. (10)

At the same time, Buddhologists insisted that their methods were "strictly historical", though this relied on "that nineteenth-century oxymoron 'scientific history' (also known as empiricism, historicism, or positivism)" (10). This approach "entailed numerous presuppositions about the nature of historical evidence and historical knowledge."

[I think Walters could have expanded on what these presuppositions were because they are not obvious to me. OTOH, it's obvious, for example, that Wynne (2019), Hinuber (2019), and Levman (2019) are all still operating largely in this 19th-century positivist mode when they write about the "historical Buddha"].

The problem with this is that Buddhist texts were not written with history or historicism in mind. The questions that concerned nineteenth-century scholars were, on the whole, completely unrelated to the concerns expressed by the authors of the Buddhist canonical literature.

This question has led an increasing number of Buddhologists today to argue that we are gravely mistaken to read Buddhist texts as though they had been written by nineteenth-century Europeans. (10)

In a note (41 n.4), the only name that Walters cites is Gregory Schopen, particularly his 1991 article "Archaeology and Protestant Presuppositions in the Study of Indian Buddhism".

[Given the "increasing number" I would have expected more citations here, but see also note 3.]

If Buddhist literature is conceived of as a series of answers to questions, then the questions asked in that literature are utterly unrelated to the questions being asked by 19th-century European historians. Moreover, European historical methods have changed significantly in the meantime. As Walters (11) says: "Our questions, presuppositions, historiographies, and sociopolitical realities are drastically different than those early nineteenth-century European men."

The classic example of this is the mining of Buddhist texts for historical details, while at the same time excluding any and all non-historical details as examples of "self-edification", "bias", "superstition", and appeal to "the psychological needs of the masses" (11). The insistence on this approach, Walters argues, "was rooted in one of the most basic Enlightenment European presuppositions: What I call the imperial dogma of universal human nature." (11).

This involves Europeans taking themselves to be exemplars of universal human nature; and assuming that "all people ask the same basic questions because all people experience the same basic reality in the same basic way" (11). And this goes to explain why European historians saw their own history as paradigmatic of world history.

[This view of history is still prevalent in "scientific" works of history such as Yuval Harari's Sapiens. It is directly challenged by David Graeber and David Wengrow in their book The Dawn of Everything (2021), which makes the argument that European culture is very far from being representative.]

Moreover, the picture of Buddhist history that premodern Buddhist texts do present varies wildly (12). Different Buddhist groups had different ideas about questions such as the dates of the Buddha and never arrived at a consensus (unlike modern scholars). [This section of Walters' essay—Philosophical and Political Problems—is more difficult to follow and understand]

Walters again argues that a majority of Buddhologists have left behind these outdated methods, embracing modern approaches to Buddhist literature and art, while leaving the "historicists" to argue about the details of their anachronistic approach.

[And again, I wish he had thought to provide some evidence to support this sweeping generalization because it's not self-evident].

Walters asserts that the "stale and unresolved debates of 19th-century historicists" effectively stymie efforts to place Buddhist history in a global context. (13)

He then returns to consider the epistemological presuppositions of the Buddhological Construct and the "scientific" paradigm in history.

[The latter is important because both Drewes and his recent detractors refer to taking a "scientific" approach to history.]

Walters makes a strong claim: that "Buddhism" did not exist before the nineteenth century. At one level he is talking about the term "Buddhism", coined by English-speaking scholars. On another, he points out that 19th-century accounts of global history did not see Buddhism as significant. He argues that, around the 18th century, there was a sea change in the way European writers refer to Buddhism and how they see it in a global context. Before this time, Buddhism is seen as serving the agency of Asian kings and their subjects. Afterward, Buddhism becomes a "transcendental essence" (13) with its own agency that followers merely enact. Again this reflects the idea of European Christianity as the model for all religions. As a result, Walters says: "I avoid the term Buddhism whenever possible" (13).

For Walters, the term Buddhism represents a hypostatization of a complex social phenomenon. We see this in phrases such as "Buddhism teaches that life is impermanent and without essence" (14). In this view, "Buddhism" is conceived of as a monolithic agent. Walters would rather that Buddhists, in all their diversity be seen as agents, rather than

[The obvious parallel for me is the routine hypostatization of science, in phrases like "Science says that the supernatural doesn't exist" (which is something I might have said). To my mind, this hypostatization is not peculiar to Buddhism but reflects a general pattern in European thinking. Walters (14) notes the same pattern in religious concepts like God, the Church, and the Holy Spirit as the agents of Christianity].

[I think here Walters is presaging Joseph Walser's (2022) idea of "Buddhism without Buddhists". Walser notes that while scholars assert that "Buddhism teaches anātman", if you go to Buddhist countries and ask Buddhists about this, they (A) have not heard of this doctrine, and (B) assert some kind of doctrine that would be considered ātmavāda.]

Next Walters draws attention to the political consequences of "hypostatization of 'Buddhism' as the agent of Buddhist history" (14). This view sees Buddhists as "passive victims of their own beliefs and practices".

The overwhelming evidence that Buddhist thought and practice were closely tied to political fortunes in separate kingdoms and across the premodern interregnal Buddhist world---Buddhist wars and warriors, Buddhist economies and monopolies, Buddhist courts and diplomacy, royal sponsors of Buddhist activities and Buddhist participants in royal activities---was dismissed as "un-Buddhistic", a mere accretion of what "Buddhism" was essentially supposed to be. (14)

The depoliticization of "Buddhism", or its deliberate dislocation from its socio-political context served the ends of European Christians and politicians. Since where Buddhists were involved in politics, this could be portrayed as a degeneration of the pure religion and contributed to the "decline" narrative.

What Buddhologists did for "empire" (wittingly or unwittingly)—providing its intellectual justification because Buddhist political statements and actions are not really political, or else they are not really Buddhist—they simultaneously did for Christian Mission. Making Buddhist agency into a "religion", showing that Buddhists do not really live up to their own "gospels" and insisting on the decadence and dormancy of contemporary "Buddhism" at that time, all dovetailed quite nicely with missionary goals. (15)

The Buddhological Construct obstructs the historian. It fails to answer historical questions [e.g. What was the relationship of Buddhists to their polity/king?] but it prevents such questions from even being asked by placing them out of bounds.

The invention of Buddhism was thus part and parcel of colonialism, the intellectual counterpart to a military regime that denied the sovereignty of those who were imperialized. (14).

As a historian, Walters is concerned to know how specific Buddhists saw themselves fitting into the world. He's interested in knowing how they saw themselves in relation to competing groups of Buddhists. Was there, in fact, a sense of shared identity amongst Buddhists? And so on. The standard kinds of questions that modern historians ask, but which never seem to have occurred to the scholars who constructed and promoted the Buddhological Construct.

Beyond the Buddhological Construct

For Walters, the way to go beyond the constraints and obstruction of the Buddhological Construct is provided by the British philosopher and archaeologist, R. G. Collingwood. Walters recommends reading An Autobiography and An Essay on Philosophical Methods rather than the better-known The Idea of History (this was published posthumously against Collingwood's wishes and supplemented with one of his student's notes that are "quite out of line with Collingwood's larger systemic writings" (40-41 n. 4)

Walter's essay undergoes a major change in style in this last chapter. The precise criticisms of the formation and application of the Buddhological Construct are replaced by more impressionistic statements about "global history" and "global perspective".

We need to bring a global perspective to bear on each bit of primary evidence we study, rather than to expect to cobble all the bits together into a global perspective. (18)

[This chapter introduces a suite of novel ideas and practices, along with several neologisms for concepts (whether they need them or not). For anyone unfamiliar with Collingwood, which I suspect is the majority of us, the endnotes provide important contextualisation. A lot of these notes could have been included in the body of the text]

Interregnal Buddhism

A term that is important for Walters is interregnal Buddhism (20-23). It is used several times before it is defined (on p. 20), which is confusing for the unfamiliar reader. Interregnal is being used where we might have expected to find international and reflects relations not between modern nation-states but between medieval kingdoms. However, "interregnal" and "global" are somehow not the same thing and the two terms continue to be used.

Walters argues that the societies in which Buddhism thrived, and for which we have primary sources, were kingdoms marked by constantly shifting relations (20). He argues that (unnamed) "orientalists" viewed the changing nature of the political landscape as evidence of disorder. Curiously, here, Walters introduces an emic concept "Buddhists... described change itself as a form of order" (20) and suggests that this is the key to seeing order in ever-changing Asian kingdoms.

At times we are deep in an unfamiliar jargon:

At any particular point in time, this "medieval" Asian world can be understood as a scale of forms being constantly revised across space, within which the entire interregnal Buddhist world... was but one large part. (20)

But what is a "scale of forms"? This is presumably evident to those who know Collingwood. The rest of us have to go back to the Preface and consult footnote 1.

The scale of forms, embodying hierarchical relationships of kind and degree among overlapping classes, is a technical term in R. G. Collingwood's philosophy of history. (xv n.1.)

But there is still more information in the endnotes (44 n 4). Here we find that the term "scale of forms" refers to the way an individual is embedded in overlapping social units:

An individual always acts as a member of a family, a resident of a village or town, a participant in a region or district, a subject-citizen of the king, of the king's circle of allies, and ultimately of the entire world. (44 n.4)

Note that in use, Walters defines "the scale of forms" and in his text "a scale of forms". The former suggests something monistic, the latter something pluralistic. Which is it? It's not clear to me what we gain from using this unfamiliar, rather counter-intuitive, terminology for facts that seem to be self-evident because, for example, I'm familiar with the works of Robin Dunbar, who has attempted to put upper limits on the size of these categories for human societies. Given this, the "scale of forms", which tells us nothing at face value, is a poor choice.

What is the point of this? (Unnamed) "Scholars" who take the view that there is something called "Buddhism" (qua hypostatized transcendental essence with agency) see "Buddhism" as all the claims to be Buddhist. Walters wants to contrast this with his concept of the "interregnal Buddhist world" which is...

a shifting, dynamic context within which Buddhists were the agents of their own history and their essence was contested, to be fully known only on the basis of what particular Buddhists in particular times and places thought and did. (21)

Walters asserts that every individual action reveals its global context (22). For example:

Each particular claim made by whatever particular Buddhist about one of the countless areas of contestation among Buddhists themselves and between Buddhists and non-Buddhists, when taken seriously as an informed action of a self-conscious human mind, reveals its global context wherever and whenever we look for it. (22)

[I think this is similar to my feeling that Buddhist history is written in isolation from world history. For example the periodisation of Buddhism doesn't relate to any periodization of Indian history more generally. Buddhist histories often play down the extent to which Buddhists were still embedded in wider social dynamics. It's almost as though Buddhists existed in a hermetically sealed environment in which external forces play no role. When examining changes in doctrine over time, we see descriptions and generalizations but not explanations: positivists work inductively to produce generalizations; historians work abductively to produce causal explanations.].

On the other hand, Walters notes that most particular Buddhists were not involved in the production of texts and thus we know little or nothing about them (22). This is important because the people who produced texts were an educated elite who could be expected to have a broader interregnal (perhaps even global) perspective of where Buddhists fit into the world.

Shared Paradigms and Opposing Interpretations.

As important as Buddhist interregnal interactions, were intra-Buddhist conflicts in which both sides were "claiming to represent the Buddhist whole". Walters notes that "Buddhist sources greatly disagree on virtually every topic of interest to historians, including the topics that constitute the five key moments of the Buddhological Construct" (23). Note that through this section, Walters works through each of the moments in the Buddhological Construct one by one.

1. The historical Buddha founded Buddhism
2. Early Buddhism
3. Asoka and general propagation through Asia
4. Medieval decline
5. Early modern revival (19th and 20th Centuries)

1 & 2. The Buddha and Early Buddhism.

The 19th-century approach to this pluralism was to attempt to adjudicate between them. In practice, this usually meant championing one of the medieval Buddhist polemics. But no evidence from the historical Buddha or early Buddhism as imagined by Buddhologists survives, so there is no historical basis for adjudicating. "Given that none of the evidence survives from the 'historical Buddha' or 'early Buddhism' as imagined by Buddhologists."(23).

Moreover, rather than trying to eliminate the contested nature of Buddhist history, we should be focused precisely on conflict:

When we ask what this contestation was intended to achieve, what rules made it possible, and how it proceeded in any particular instance, we are well on the way to finding Buddhists in global history (23).

Rather than take Buddhists at face value, and a pluralistic community riven by internal and external conflicts, 19th century historians sifted Buddhist documents for the one true Buddhism. Modern historians should focus on those periods for which we have reliable, dateable primary evidence, since the kinds of questions that historians ask can only be answered by documents of how Buddhists thought. And such documents as we have date from the "medieval" period (24).

3. Asoka.

Similarly, with respect to the variety of Buddhist stories about Asoka, Walters asserts

Rather than ask which version [of many] depicts "the historical Ashoka", we should wonder what it meant to be talking about Ashoka at all many centuries after he and his entire empire had crumbled to dust. The global historian should ask: Why did all Buddhists maintain their own version of the Ashoka Maurya story? (24-25)

[It annoys me that people use the Sanskrit form of the name Asoka Moriya, given that we know the man himself communicated in Prakrit and Buddhists did not use Sanskrit until several centuries after his death. Sanskrit in this context is an anachronism at best.]

Walters introduces a spatial metaphor for the five key moments identified as constituting the Buddhological Construct. We should think of these as "sites" (25). He argues "Viewing the five key moments... as key sites in the interregnal Buddhist world is to take seriously the contestation over them." (25). [On 34 Walters confusingly gives a completely different list of "five key sites": see "Conclusion" below]

Rather than focusing on the content of conflicting Buddhist accounts of Buddhism, we should stay with the fact that there were conflicting versions of these stories. Noting that Buddhists have argued amongst themselves about such issues, and trying to explain why, is what should interest the historian. The fact that Buddhists (one-sidedly) recorded intra-Buddhist debates and composed polemics should not be glossed over. 

[No historian would think of taking the approach of adjudicating which of the different Greek myths was the most accurate version of history].

Walters notes that all the various sects tended to claim to be the one true Buddhist path and criticized or even denigrated the others. They vied with each other to be the official representatives of Buddhism. They all claimed that their identity as Buddhists was the only true Buddhist identity. Walters points to a shared paradigm with contested interpretations.

The claim to be Buddhist was always a particular claim about the Buddha; which Buddha claimed was a vital factor in the sociopolitical import of those claims. All others may have lesser or even heretical understandings of the details, but even they share in taking the Buddha as the paradigm of all authentic human existence. (26).

The many contradictory biographies of the Buddha are not "windows into the time of the historical Buddha", which is itself restricted to a brief period in Northern India. Rather, such competing stories reflect medieval Buddhists attempting to define their identity and their place in the world.

As such the Buddhological Construct is not helpful because it projects the global Buddha back in time to "an ultimately irretrievable and decidedly nonglobal situation" (26). The Buddha imagined as a man living during the second urbanization is diminished compared to the medieval Buddha. [Note that this approach is exemplified in Bernard Fuare's (2022) recent book on the life of the Buddha].

In this manner, the Buddhological Construct distracts from one of the most central bodies of evidence we have for reconstructing the roles Buddhists played in global history. (26)

Much the same can be said for the subject of the number and chronology of the Great Buddhist Councils, the contents of the authentic Tripiṭaka. Common standards of ethics and etiquette, common "church" languages, and shared epistemic frameworks (like karma and rebirth) made a broader Buddhist identity possible, and this, in turn, created pan-Asian institutions (like Nālanda), artistic movements, economic exchanges, and the justification for empires (via the idea of the cakravartin). But the study of these well-documented aspects of Buddhist history is minimized by the Buddhological Construct and the focus on "early Buddhism", a non-global history which Walters again refers to as "irretrievable" (27).

Stories about Asoka vary but there is a common core to the story. Asoka presents us with the first global paradigm for a Buddhist ruler. And yet Buddhists contested the details. Walters makes the comparison with different interpretations of the intent of the "founding fathers" of the USA.

...the agreement that there is a (more or less potential) Buddhist imperial claim of which Ashoka is the ordinary paradigm, made championing one's own version of the Ashoka story consequential, generating a potentially imperial prize worth fighting for. (28)

[It's rare to see ancient Buddhists being described in such human terms. It reminds us that they were human beings.]

4. Decline

A similar case can be made for the idea that the Buddhist teachings will one day disappear. Note that this belief seems to have been ubiquitous amongst Buddhists. Again, the details are contested, but the decline narrative is also different from the previous three aspects of the Buddhological Construct. (28)

Ideas like the decline of Buddhism became more prominent when Buddhists felt their world to be in decline, be it a natural disaster, military invasion, or a loss of status for the saṅgha under a non-Buddhist king (and most kings in Indian history were not Buddhist), or simply a perception of declining standards of morality within the saṅgha.

Walters argues that all these kinds of calamities tended to make Buddhists unite (rather the disagree). He notes that a sense of decline in China drove Chinese Buddhists to visit India, where they witnessed the decline of Indian Buddhism. However, he also asserts that Buddhist kingdoms often existed in relative isolation from each other:

The main reason for disagreements in Buddhist accounts of the Dharma's decline may be a lack of much interaction of any kind. Buddhist kingdoms became entities unto themselves, exercising the potential political agency of the claim to be Buddhist, if at all, only in the limited region. (29)

[This is by far the weakest point in the article. Walters begins by arguing that the Buddhological Construct reflects 19th-century preoccupations. But now he tells us, and I agree, that the decline of the Dharma is a pan-Buddhist concern over an extended period of time, and as well as leading to the usual divergent accounts, it also led to a kind of trans-sectarian unity in the face of a common enemy].

5. Revival

The last plank in the Buddhological Construct is the revival of Buddhism beginning in the 19th century. This revival is conceived as coming out of the blue: "it has no premodern precedent" (29). The putative "revival" supposedly takes the same form as revivalist Protestant Christian movements from 19th-century Europe and the USA. In fact, we "are hard-pressed to find any premodern counterpart" (30). In essence

The revival of Buddhism is thus the impossible revival of something ("Buddhism" itself) that did not previously exist. (29)

This reflects Walters' earlier contention that "Buddhism" per se was an invention of the 19th century.

On the other hand, Walters argues that the changes we see in Buddhist doctrine and practice in this period reflect attitudes that are evident in the earliest evidence: Buddhists asserting that they are the Buddhists.

"Revivals" of the premodern sort did not just happen; rather, the powerful complex agents consisting of kings, courtiers, monks, and nuns set out to make them happen, articulating and effecting the particular shared vision of the interregnal Buddhist world, and their own place within it, which proved true at the particular place and time in the interregnal Buddhist world in which they found themselves. (30)

The point seems to be that Buddhists were constantly evaluating their attitudes and practices and changing them in response to changing conditions. Buddhists have pursued "revivals" throughout global history, and these have to be understood in their own context. Walters again emphasizes that change is not random or imposed on Buddhists by "Buddhism" qua "transcendental essence". Agency resides in people, not institutions.

Changes were made not as an inevitable result of creeping "Jesuitism" but as a result of reasoned argument, multireligious debate, political realism, enforced submission, and wished for and realized power. Human agency, Buddhist agency, made such "revivals" happen. (31).

 

Conclusion

Walters' concern throughout is with global history, the broadest view of human history. Buddhists clearly played an important role in this history. But the study of Buddhists in global history is hampered by the insistence on the 19th-century imperialist Buddhological Construct because so much effort goes into shoring it up and the results tell us nothing about global history.

He contrasts the Buddhological Construct with the records left by Chinese pilgrims who visited India.

The Chinese pilgrims cataloged the interregnal Buddhist world as a system of overlapping pictures of the whole—the whole Buddha's corpse and its worship, the whole sangha and its divisions, the whole potential empire and its constituent kingdoms—whose landmarks were the actual stupas, monasteries, and royal courts that the visited and described. (34)

From the pilgrim's accounts, we can say that Buddhist identity is twofold: to the outside world, Buddhists typically present as members of a single unified religion. At the same time, amongst themselves, Buddhists incessantly debate and negotiate what it means to be "Buddhist".

[There is a confusing use of "five key sites" on p 34 that are not the "five key sites" of the Buddhological Construct. But when "the five keys sites are mentioned again on p.35, it seems that the original set is indicated]

To understand the role of Buddhists in global history we have to take this into account. However, the global context is seldom so explicit. And recovering it is not easy. For his part, Walters endorses the view of Collingwood.

We cannot access the past; we can only imagine it, which is an activity of the present that will be as rich or poor as the imaginations of the historians who engage in it. (35)

Walters tries to address a potential criticism by stating that the Buddhological Construct is also a product of the imagination.

[The Buddhological Construct] is an interpretation of the very same evidence that all Buddhologists now know, and from the perspective of global history, it is not a particularly believable or well-thought-out interpretation at that. (35)

For Collingwood, according to Walters, the only hard facts that historians have are artifacts. The rest is a matter of interpretation. Collingwood's approach is not the only one, but it is a lot better than the "dead-end" Buddhological Construct. Moreover, not everyone need be concerned with global history. But for those who are concerned with seeing the place of Buddhists in global history, this approach allows primary sources to suggest answers to our questions. This is in contrast to the Buddhological Construct which aims to limit which questions can be asked and to provide standardised answers to those questions.

Still the global cannot simply be reduced to the particular and vice versa. One has to see the stupa both as a reflection of Buddhist soteriology and as a product of the (usually royal) patronage that paid for it. Building a stupa to worship has global ramifications.

Buddhist philosophy was both a quest for truth and a quest for power, each quest making the other more pressing; religious experiences were not only transcendent human realities but also self-conscious enactment of human agency, even on a global scale. (37)

 

—Notes—

Walters' essay makes a compelling case for rejecting the (19th century) establishment view of Buddhist history which hypostatizes Buddhism, giving it agency over Buddhists. He makes the case that agency resides in human beings; in this case, in Buddhists themselves. And that Buddhists were in constant dialogue with both non-Buddhists and other Buddhists over what it meant to be Buddhists.

Buddhists have played an important role in global history, but this role is effectively obscured and the history of Buddhists has been cut off from the global context by the imposition of the Buddhological Construct by 19th century imperialists.

That said, I think Walters (writing in 1999) has missed the extent to which reconstructing "early Buddhism" has become a Buddhist project, with prominent Theravāda bhikkhus and Tibetan Lamas taking leading roles within academia. The infiltration of Buddhist Studies by religious Buddhists since Walters composed this essay has only further entrenched certain biases and fallacies. While not entirely in sympathy with their imperialist predecessors, they nevertheless use the idea in the classic way that Walters describes: that is to say they use the construct of "early Buddhism" to mount a defence of an original "pure" teaching and claim to be representatives and defenders of that original teaching.

Rather than the idealized picture of unified Buddhism that Buddhists themselves present to non-Buddhists, historians should pay attention to what Buddhists were saying about each other in writing. And the most reliable sources we have are "medieval" (or at least post-Asoka).

I noted that Walters can be bracketed with other historians, amongst whom there has been a paradigm shift away from the Buddhological Construct and arguments based on it. Amongst the things these historians insist on is that a "primary source" is a first-hand account, written down by someone who lived through the events in question. There are no such sources for Buddhism before Asoka. Importantly, the idea of "early Buddhism" also known as "primitive Buddhism" is an invention of the non-Buddhist European scholars who first presented Buddhism to a modern European audience. (My next blog post will be a deeper exploration of this issue).

Whether or not Walter's use of Collingwood's ideas and the associated jargon moves us forward is moot. Looking at citations of Walter's essay I don't see any great enthusiasm for Collingwood.

For me, the great value of this long essay is that it speaks in a new voice about a new paradigm for doing Buddhist history that actually takes historical theories and methods into account. In the last few months, it has become apparent to me that this is rare in Buddhist Studies. Many of the combatants in the conflict over the historicity of the Buddha, for example, seem to have no idea that their methods are at odds with the whole field of history (see my critique of Levman 2019, which is representative of the positivist-historicist approach).

Ironically, this whole conflict, while being mainly carried on by people with doctorates in Buddhist Studies or Philology, pivots on approaches to history—primary sources, corroboration, etc—that are taught explicitly in high school, and have become background assumptions even in undergraduate history courses. Countering the Buddhological Construct in terms of (the field of) History is difficult because historians are not interested in publishing high-school level critiques of their professional colleagues in Buddhist Studies, and those professionals in Buddhist Studies are not interested in History because it contradicts their articles of faith (which combine religious and scholarly conceits).

I am already following up on some of the recommended reading and processing the change in paradigm that is demanded by paying attention to historians. What I found during this exercise is that it deflated my belief that we know anything about "early Buddhism". I've come around to seeing arguments over early Buddhism as an imperialist European conceit.

—Bibliography—

Faure, Bernard. (2022) The Thousand and One Lives of the Buddha. University of Hawai'i Press.

Graeber, D. and Wengrow, D. (2021). The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Everything. Allen Lane.

Harari, Yuval Noah. (2011). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Random House.

Schopen, Gregory. (1991). "Archaeology and Protestant Presuppositions in the Study of Indian Buddhism". History of Religions Journal 31(1): 1-23. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1062872

Walser, Joseph. (2022). "Buddhism without Buddhists? Academia & Learning to See Buddhism Like a State". Pacific World. Series 4, Vol. 4: 103-170. https://www.shin-ibs.edu/documents/pwj4/3/4-3-4-Walser.pdf

Walters, Jonathan S. (1998). Finding Buddhists in Global History. American Historical Association.

Prolegomenon on the Interpretation of Buddhist Scripture: Introduction

For the last decade or so, my exploration of Buddhist ideas generally has been overtaken by intensive study of the Heart Sutra. My focus has moved from blogging to publishing articles in academic journals. My project has looked at aspects of the history, philology, and philosophy of the Heart Sutra and Prajñāpāramitā generally. Getting to the point of being able to regularly publish articles has involved more than one steep learning curve. I have no training in history, philology, or philosophy. I learned by reading everything I could get my hands on.

An ongoing frustration that I have is that there are no good textbooks on how to do any of these activities that are specific to Buddhist Studies. Indeed, in reading hundreds of articles and dozens of books I have often been struck by the lack of any clearly articulated methodology or theory. This is peculiar for a field of academic study. Most academic disciplines, most especially in the humanities, have been deeply involved in discussing methods and emphasising the need to examine the theoretical basis for the methods. This is partly a response to the clearly articulated methods of scientific enquiry and the relatively new desire to produce (more) objective approaches to topics like history.

Textbooks for Buddhist Studies mainly describe Buddhist beliefs and to some extent Buddhist practices, but they really don't spend any time at all on methods for studying Buddhism or on critical thinking about such beliefs and practices. Part of the problem is that Buddhist Studies is inherently multi-disciplinary. Any given article will likely employ ideas and practices from a range of disciplines such as history, historiography, historical linguistics, comparative linguistics, translation studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and philosophy.

In general, Buddhist Studies scholars don't acknowledge these distinctions in our writing, but take a "pick and mix" approach, employing whatever suits our purpose. For this reason alone a lot of Buddhist Studies scholarship is tendentious, i.e. intended to promote a particular point of view. When an author does bring in specific ideas from outside of Buddhist Studies, the results are often incomprehensible to non-specialists in that field. At one point it was, for example, very popular to compare Buddhist ideas with Derrida. But for anyone not versed in the distinctive thought of Derrida, and the obscurantism of all the post-modernists, such works are a complete mystery. And I don't think this was always an accident. I think some authors take an obscurantist approach in order to seem more profound than they actually are.

There is also the widespread problem that many academics in Buddhist Studies are card-carrying Buddhists who accept certain (often sectarian) religious ideas as givens. In all of the very learned and technical discussions of Nāgārjuna, for example, I have yet to see any scholar really interrogate the unspoken assumptions of Nāgārjuna that seem glaring to me. The leading writers on Madhyamaka all seem to be convinced that Nāgārjuna speaks only truth and that he makes no assumptions whatever. This might (just) be acceptable in a Buddhist theologian writing for a religious audience, but it reflects a catastrophic failure for an academic historian or philosopher. Examining assumptions is the bread and butter of academic scholarship. So the question becomes why is this activity almost entirely absent from studies of Buddhist history and philosophy?

While I have learned a lot from reading within Buddhist Studies, in order to make progress I have inevitably had to branch out and consult textbooks from other disciplines. This is fine, as far as it goes; I've always read quite widely. However, general texts on historiography or philosophical methods seldom include examples from, or aposite to, Buddhist Studies. One can consult general books on how to write history, for example, but these don't use examples from our discipline. So one is always having to translate concepts into the domain of Buddhist Studies. It's not always easy.

As I began to branch out, I also began to see how impoverished our field really is. We seem to have relied on scholars coming from other backgrounds (where they get appropriate training). The results have been patchy, to say the least. Nowadays, we have a whole generation of scholars who have specialised early in Buddhist Studies and so they don't bring the expertise that comes from specialising in, say, history or philosophy.

I am not an expert. I dabble. I'm a generalist. Though I do think my recent work on the Heart Sutra rises to the level of expertise. Still, a lot of the time I end up writing an essay, not because that is the topic I wanted to write about, but because it was a topic I wanted to read about but could not find anything written already. So, I spend time gleaning information from a wide range of sources and pull it all together into the kind of thing I wanted to read. People who give advice about writing often say that we should imagine a representative reader. For a lot of these essays I'm my own audience; I'm the reader that I'm trying to appeal to.

This work is laborious and ideally done by experts. But most of the experts are busy doing other things. By now there are probably a dozen encyclopedias of Buddhism for example. Vast amounts of time, effort, and money go into these projects. But how many encyclopedias do we really need? Especially when there is no textbook on Buddhist historiography or any other relevant methodologies. There are several works on how Buddhists practice epistemology, but none on how students of Buddhism in 2023 should do so. Sometimes it seems that the perspective is that if we just outline what Buddhists wrote in texts the job of Buddhist Studies is done. There is no need to provide commentary or analysis beyond what is stipulated in Buddhist traditions.

Recently, I have become particularly interested in the subject of how we read and interpret Buddhist scripture. This is a very popular activity amongst rank and file Buddhists these days. Moreover, writing commentary on scripture is one of the major ways that Buddhists communicate about Buddhism. And yet this is all done on an ad hoc basis. I might not even have noticed this had I not become an expert on the Heart Sutra. I'm now in a position to evaluate in detail the things that are said about the text. And my evaluation is that writing on the Heart Sutra is almost universally poor, tendentious, and religious rather than scholarly in character. Most writing on the Heart Sutra asserts a strange worldview in which truth is communicated in the form of express contradictions and paradoxes. No one ever seems to mention that such forms of communication are completely absent from general Buddhist thought (even Nāgārjuna uses logic and avoids contradiction), expressly repudiated in early Buddhist texts, and on further investigation can be seen to be based on traditional misunderstandings of Prajñāpāramitā and tendentious modern scholarship.

The absence of any methodological critique leaves the field open to abuse by fraudsters and hoaxes. I believe, for example, that the bulk of what Edward Conze contributed is fraudulent and misleading. While, privately, many scholars say they agree with me, this has not changed the blind acceptance and excessive praise of Conze in Buddhist Studies generally. The fact that Conze was a racist, misogynist, elitist asshole with messianic delusions is incidental, but also true. However, we generally expect academics to weed out such assholery over time. In Buddhist Studies this asshole is still widely revered. And publically many scholars continue to treat Conze as a neutral contributor and argue that he was a pioneer and thus allowed considerable licence. When I think of pioneer Buddhist Studies scholars I think of people like Etienne Lamotte or Thomas Rhys Davids. I would call Max Muller a "pioneer" in that he sincerely made attempts to further knowledge of Sanskrit literature in Europe and at the same time had many of the flaws of his generation. In my view, Conze was entirely disingenuous, where he was not simply wrong.

While the interpretation of scripture is a popular activity, the standards of commentary available vary wildly and there are no agreed criteria on which to assess any particular claim. While Christian theologians have long explored the problems associated with reading and interpreting scripture, there are, to my knowledge, no such resources for Buddhists.

The hermeneutics or interpretation of the Bible have been the subject of intense study over the centuries and have produced innumerable works of both general and sectarian scholarship. While theologians take many aspects of Christian doctrine for granted, they have still produced scholarly works such as John Meier's four volume, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (see Meier's Historicity Criteria). Such works have considerable merit since they are pluralistic and encourage critical thinking (albeit within religious limits). The methods they discuss were developed for theologians. Nowadays, partly through the influence of Protestantism, lay Christians are also encouraged to read and interpret scripture.

The situation for Buddhists is quite different. There are no general or scholarly works on how different ways to read and interpret Buddhist scripture. Some Buddhist theologians have published works which offer a particular interpretation of scripture (i.e. apologetics), though these are all designed to lead readers to specific sectarian conclusions rather than offering them tools that might enable them to come to their own conclusions. And this despite noticeable influence of Protestantism on Buddhism.

Of course, there are some studies of how Buddhists themselves have interpreted scripture in the past. But these are descriptions of pre-modern reading practices and they seldom involve any critical appraisal of the approaches, and are usually so arcane as to offer very little guidance to the modern reader. In most cases, such approaches to reading scripture have little value in the modern context since we don't accept some of the givens the ancients took for granted. The point of this project would be to produce a guide to reading and interpreting Buddhist scripture for twenty-first century readers, scholars, and theologians.

One of the problems that we have in Buddhism is that many academics are apologists for a sectarian approach to Buddhism. For example, almost all of the works that interpret Nāgārjuna are written by people who openly and explicitly accept a Nāgārjunian worldview. Indeed, the leading interpreters of Nāgārjuna's writing are card carrying Mādhyamikas (which is what people who accept Madhyamaka metaphysics call themselves). Where there is any difference of opinion amongst them, and there are a number of points of disagreement amongst them, it is based firmly within a Nāgārjunian worldview. To my knowledge, no scholar has investigated and evaluated the axioms that underpin Madhyamaka. So all readings of Nāgārjuna that we commonly encounter are naive readings.

For Buddhists, there is no body of work that outlines general principles of scriptural interpretation. There are no parallels to magisterial works such as Meier's A Marginal Jew. This means that there is no rational counterweight to the proliferation of conflicting religious apologetics. It increasingly seems to me that the capable scholars of Buddhism are few in number and for the most part they are absorbed in their own sub-field. Many of the Buddhist Studies scholars I've met recently have echoed my own complaint that I publish, but no one ever seems to critically engage with my work. There are simply not enough capable scholars in the field and at the same time far too many who are following (consciously or not) a religious agenda. On the other hand, if there were enough capable scholars, I'd never have had the opportunity to publish my articles on the Heart Sutra.

The aim of this project, then, will be to produce an introduction to the issues, sources, and methods of reading and interpreting buddhist scriptures and to highlight resources that contribute to understanding the topic. The idea is to ground the reading of Buddhist texts in some generally applicable principles that disparate readers can use as the basis of cross-sectarian discussions. These principles may be used by both academic and religious students to make their interpretation of scripture more nuanced (and perhaps even more persuasive).

I do have preferred interpretations of the texts I read. However, the aim here would not be to defend or promote my particular view. Rather, I wish to create a resource for those who read and think about Buddhist scripture. I'm trying to pitch this a the level of educated Buddhist readers and university undergraduates studying Buddhism or comparative religion. I hope it will be generally useful to anyone who wants to go beyond passively consuming Buddhist ideology when they read Buddhist scripture.

In the first place, this project involves identifying the intellectual tools that I have picked up piecemeal in my scholarship. I will supplement this with reference to the literature on Christian hermeneutics, with Meier as a reference point. I will try to use real world examples to illustrate points.

At present we see many of these principles being applied in an ad hoc fashion and without any reference to the broader literature on scriptural interpretation. As such, Buddhist Studies has not benefited from the depth and breadth of research on hermeneutics in Christian Studies. The only relevant exposition I'm aware of in the field of Buddhist Studies is the brief and unreferenced passage in Nattier (2003: 63-70). As a preliminary, I'm planning an academic paper which compares three approaches to the biography of Xuanzang. I will show that authors on this topic employ hermeneutic principles in an ad hoc and seemingly unconscious fashion. Most authors seem to comprehend, for example, that a corroborated fact is more reliable than an uncorroborated fact. But this has never been stated as a general principle that can be invoked by way of explanation.

At present I am conceptually dividing the project into four broad topics, which in addition to this introduction will become four blog essays: (1) Issues, (2) Sources, (3) Methods, and (4) Resources. My usual approach is to sketch out the broad outlines and then fill in the details. These blog posts will be my coarse-grained notes on what I think is important from the outset. I can already see that this is a huge topic and one that might take several years to reach fruition. Ideally, I'd like to publish a textbook on interpreting Buddhist scripture.

~~oOo~~

Meier, John P. (1991). A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. 4 Vol. New York: Doubleday.

Nattier, J. (2003) A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva Path According to the Inquiry of Ugra (Ugraparipṛcchā). University of Hawai'i Press.

Why Did Buddhists Abandon Buddhavana?

I doubt there is a Buddhist alive today who does not revere the words of the Buddha (buddhavacana), at least in some form. The extent to which Buddhist doctrines are considered authentic is the extent to which they are considered to have been enunciated by the Buddha, whether we think this means an historical person or some form of deity.

While academic historians argue against the historicity the Buddha (e.g. Drewes 2017), Buddhist theologians produce apologetics for the authenticity of the Pali suttas as buddhavacana (e.g. Sujato and Bramali 2014). Indeed, the idea that the Pāli suttas are the word of the Buddha is still current in many Buddhist sects. There is a kind of consensus that if early Buddhist texts don't contain all the words of the Buddha, they at least preserve some of them. This is accompanied by varied speculations about which words those are. Accompanying this are various arguments about what the Buddha's "original teachings" were, including some that seek to exclude well-known Buddhist doctrines about karma, rebirth, and ātman.

Despite the different opinions about how it is constituted, everyone seems agreed that the highest value can be assigned to buddhavacana and that the fact of being spoken by the Buddha is still the most important measure of authenticity. I don't think there is anything controversial about this statement, but it does raise some interesting questions.

That said, readers may be puzzled by my title today. Did Buddhists really abandon buddhvacana?

Evolution of Doctrine

Despite the forgoing argument, it is a notable fact of Buddhism that Buddhist doctrines evolved both gradually and, at times, suddenly. By the beginning of the Common Era we see multiple competing versions of the major genres of Buddhist text: Sutra, Vinaya, Abhidharma, and śāstra. While there is some inter-sect commonality in the Sutra genre, the seven extant Vinaya texts show considerable differences, while the extant Abhidharma texts have very little in common except for the general idea of cataloguing dharmas.

At the level of sect we see the emergence of competing heterodox interpretations of doctrine such as sarvāstivāda and pudgalavāda. Both of these are now routinely represented as being Buddhist heresies but, in their own time, were entirely mainstream and respectable. And this is only with respect to texts produced by India. Outside of India far more radical changes occurred as Buddhism was syncretised with local worldviews and beliefs.

As far as I can see, all Buddhist sects gradually moved away from buddhavacana and adopted novel doctrines over time. Even the venerable Theravāda tradition—whose own mythology includes the claim to have preserved the entire oeuvre of the Buddha in the very language that he spoke—moved substantially away from those texts. Modern Theravāda is actually based on the writings of Buddhaghosa, a fifth century commentator, and on medieval sub-commentaries on Abhidhamma, such as the Abhidhammattha Saṅgaha. The practice of meditation died out in Theravāda sects and had to be reinvented in the eighteenth century. Indeed, some Theravādins have argued that liberation from rebirth is impossible in the absence of a living Buddha.

We also see radical departures from early doctrines, such as the Madhyamaka metaphysics of Nāgārjuna. Basic Buddhist ideas such as the distinction between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa (roughly the distinction between continuing to be reborn and not being reborn) are replaced by slogans like "saṃsāra and nirvāṇa are the same thing". To be very clear, this makes no sense in general Buddhist terms. The whole idea of Buddhist soteriology turns on the difference between being reborn and not being reborn. If we repudiate this, then we repudiate Buddhism. And those who study Nāgārjuna's gnomic utterances seem to revel in this repudiation and take this to be a higher form of truth which they grandiloquently name paramārtha-satya "the truth of ultimate meaning".

Note that although Prajñāpāramitā is routinely presented as a radical break in the Buddhist tradition along with Madhyamaka, recently several scholars (esp Huifeng and I) have begun to see considerably more continuity than the historically dominant explanations allow. The idea of withdrawing attention from sensory experience so that it ceases, leaving the practitioner in a state of contentless alertness, is central to Aṣṭa. And we can find ample parallels to this in Pāli. Many of us have now commented on the parallels with the Cūḷasuññata Sutta (MN 121), for example. It now seems wrong to me to think of Prajñāpāramitā as culminating in Madhyamaka. Note that, as far as anyone can tell, Nāgārjuna does not cite any Prajñāpāramitā texts. Nor do they appear to have the same message.

Thus, while Buddhists certainly do valorise buddhavacana, at least some of them strenuously repudiate it and claim we should replace it with Nāgārjuna-vacana; at the same time trying to convince us, despite the obvious contradiction, that buddhavacana and Nāgārjuna-vacana are one and the same thing despite apparently making contradictory claims. Either saṃsāra and nirvāṇa are the same or they are not, and Buddhist soteriology (that is to say the possibility of escaping from saṃsāra by not being reborn) is dependent on them not being the same.

Whither Buddhavacana?

It is a brute fact of Buddhist history that, for all the high-toned talk about buddhavacana, no Buddhist sect in history was ever satisfied with it. Whether they drifted away or were propelled at speed, all Buddhist sects gradually replaced buddhavacana with their own doctrines.

We partly know this because the sects all moved in different directions and some of the vehement polemics that they composed denouncing each other have survived. The Pāḷi Kathavatthu, for example, records Theravāda complaints against other Buddhists and was probably composed at a time when they themselves were decisively moving away from buddhavacana and developing their unique and distinctive Abhidhamma tradition.

After many years of consuming Buddhist studies literature, including hundreds of articles and dozens of books, I cannot recall a single account of Buddhist history that did more than note the evolution of the doctrine in various directions. The well-documented, centuries-long, intra-Buddhist conflicts over doctrine are played down, if they are discussed at all. And no explanation for the changes ever seem to be offered. Scholars seem to say "things changed" and then have nothing to say about why things changed.

I would be very surprised indeed if changes in Buddhist doctrine could not be related to causes. This is what historians do, after all. Just listing a series of changes is not very interesting if we cannot say anything about what led to the change and how the change was reflected in other aspects of the attendant culture.

Why are modern Theravādin bhikkhus like Sujato and Brahmali so anxious about the issue of authenticity that they go to the trouble of publishing a lengthy quasi-scholarly defence of the authenticity of the Pāli suttas? Is there some real possibility of inauthentic Buddhist teachings? Well, yes there is from a Theravāda point of view; almost every other sect of Buddhism could be seen as inauthentic if they believe (as the bhikkhus seem to) that the Pāli represents buddhavacana and other Buddhist texts do not.

The issue is addressed head on in the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā (Aṣṭa). The first thing that happens is that the Buddha asks Elder Subhūti to deliver a sermon on Perfect Insight to the bodhisatvas (which here seems to mean the monks assembled in the audience since no other people are present). Elder Śāriputra wonders whether Subhūṭi will speak from his own insight, or whether he will rely on the anubhāva of the Buddha. Elder Subhūti replies that everything a disciple of the Buddha says is a product of the Buddha's anubhābva

The word anubhāva is difficult to translate since the etymology is unhelpful (it means something like "after-being". However, the word is clearly used in a sense that suggests that the Buddha has a kind of puissance or power by which words spoken by his disciples are, in effect, buddhavacana. Every word that Elder Subhūti speaks, in this view, is something the Buddha might have said.

So the open question is this: If early Buddhists genuinely believed themselves to be in possession of authentic buddhavacana, and they thought this included (by implication) a complete and nuanced description of the Buddhist path, why do we now have a massive plurality of versions of the the Buddha path?

Or, more simply, why did Buddhists come to feel unsatisfied with buddhavacana and replace it with the ideas of lesser figures who came later. How did some Buddhists come to substantially repudiate buddhavacana. Why did Buddhists abandon buddhavacana?

I don't know the answer and I'm not aware of any salient discussions.

A Suggestion

Some time ago, I tried to publish an article which gave a unified explanation for why doctrines that sought to explain karma proliferated. This was knocked back by a stout Theravādin defence from the editor and reviewers and I felt so disheartened that I let it drop. I don't think I was wrong, I think that causal explanations are not seen as valid in Buddhist Studies, so it seemed pointless to continue trying to offer one.

I think Buddhists noticed certain problems in early Buddhist doctrine and responded. In particular I noted that there was a problem I called "action at a temporal distance". Let's say that I make a great donation to a Buddhist monastery and earn a vast amount of merit (puṇya, aka "good karma") in the process. Some Buddhist texts say "I am the heir of my actions", i.e. the person who experiences the consequences is the same as the one who acts. And this can stretch across lifetimes. This is the main theme of the Jātaka and Avadāna literature and one of the main ways that Buddhists talk about morality.

At the same time, however, most readings of the doctrine of dependent arising say that I am not the same person from moment to moment, let alone from lifetime to lifetime. So the one who experiences the consequences is not the same as the one who acts, but only arises in dependence on their actions.

If the action of giving is a discrete event which lasts for a few seconds (maybe) and then ceases, how can that be the condition for some effect in the future given dependent arising? The standard formula is

This being, that becomes. When this arises, that arises.
This not being, that does not become. When that ceases, this ceases.

I argued that this means that the condition has to be present for the effect to arise, and if it is absent the effect ceases or never arises in the first place. The Theravādins in academia disagreed with this extremely enough to reject my article outright, but it is undoubtedly how proponents of sarvāstivāda understood it.

Thus Buddhist morality tales and Buddhist metaphysical texts tell a very different story about continuity over time. Standard modern interpretations of karma don't acknowledge this dichotomy and thus do not explain it. When I looked at historical accounts of karma I did not find a good explanation, but I did perceive a pattern.

In my rejected article I tried to show how various historical Buddhist sects responded to this problem. For example, the Sarvāstivādins took a fundamentalist view of dependent arising.

In this view, if something is able to act as a cause, it must be present. That is to say, if my past actions are causing me to experience something (or anything) now, then they must still be present in some form (the nature of this presence is not discussed). Interpreted metaphysically, which is not obligatory, this means that a past condition must still exist (asti) if it is functioning as a condition. And if something I do now is to have future consequences, then it must continue to be present. Again, this is just a literal reading of the dependent arising formula, albeit it in an optional metaphysical framework. Hence the doctrine (vāda) of always existent (sarva-asti) phenomena (dharma).

Nowadays, I would separate out "presence" and "existence" because I think the discussion was probably intended to refer to the presence or absence of sensory experience, which is only loosely connected to the existence of objects.

In the article, I made similar arguments for pudgalavāda, kṣanavāda (doctrine of moments), and śūnyavāda (doctrine of absence). And I argued that they were all solutions to the same problem: how karma can operate at a temporal distance (how can consequences manifest if the condition has ceased).

It is precisely this kind of explanation that is absent from Buddhism and from academic Buddhist Studies. And the response I got from academia suggested that my attempt to give such a causal explanation of doctrinal evolution was unwelcome. I dropped the article and didn't even bother to put it on academia.edu along with my other failures, though several blog posts leading up to the article are still here.

Assuming that there is any merit in this suggestion (and I remained convinced that there is), we can say, in some cases and to some extent, why early Buddhists abandoned buddhavacana (as they all did). In this case it was because there was a conflict between Buddhist morality and Buddhist metaphysics.

If I am right about this conflict (which no one else seems to have noticed), then the idea of a big bang origin to Buddhism from the insights and utterances of one man is undermined. There is an expectation of great religious figures that they present a coherent set of ideas, attitudes, and practices. Whether this is expectation is reasonable is debatable, but here we see problematic incoherency in what passes for  buddhavacana.

It is simply a mistake to think of ideas like karma and rebirth as emerging from the mouth of the Buddha fully formed without any interactions with other religions. We know that Buddhists absorbed and adapted ideas from Jainism and Brahmanism, for example. It seems to me more likely that Buddhists operated in a milieu in which karma and rebirth were givens, and proposed new explanations of these phenomena that were not initially coherent. After a centuries long process of winnowing (assisted presumably by the decline and disappearance of heterodox sects), Buddhists settled on the best explanation available and retrospectively called that buddhavacana.

As a result I would say that we have to acknowledge that buddhavacana os a contested term, in the sense that Buddhists fought over what counted as buddhavacana. There is no general agreement, whether historically or presently, on what constitutes buddhavacana. The concept is also contested in the sense that Buddhists found the buddhavacana they inherited unconvincing or otherwise unsatisfactory and replaced it with other words that they labelled buddhavacana, a practice that is arguably still current. 

And if there is this level of ambiguity and conflict about buddhavacana, where does that leave arguments about the historicity of the Buddha which is so closely tied to it? I submit that, for historians at least, David Drewes' contention that we should stop talking about "the historical Buddha" because the idea is incoherent, is on the right track. And I add that the concept of buddhavacana is also incoherent in practice.

~~oOo~~

P.S. It occurred to me after I wrote this yesterday to spell out that any example of so-called buddhavacana could well have attained that label post hoc (after the fact): the text was composed, by whoever, and then attributed to the Buddha. 

This also led me to consider the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, i.e. since Y follows X in sequence, X is the cause of Y (also stated amongst scientists as "correlation is not causation"). It made me think about the proposition: a text is called buddhavacana by Buddhists, therefore it must be "words spoken by the Buddha" (the caveat being... except when we have reason to think it isn't). In other words, we know it's not true that every text labelled buddhavacana by Buddhists could possibly be buddhavacana. We know, for example, that Buddhists continued to apply the label long after the time we guess that the Buddha might have lived. And to find justifications for doing so, including inventing new Buddhas, making the Buddha an eternal deity, and so on. We have no idea when the label was first used. 

P.P.S. Thanks for reading. I'm not blogging much these days because I'm mainly focussed on publishing peer-reviewed articles on the Heart Sutra at present. I do post more often on my Facebook Heart Sutra group. Any day now, I'm expecting galley proofs for two companion articles, one of which presents revised editions and translations; the other compares the Sanskrit and Chinese texts in unprecedented detail and tries to explain why they are different. Next up is a major article on the dates of the Heart Sutra (hopefully in 2024) and then I think I'm done. I'd like to put it all in a book, but not sure about who the audience would be anymore since I no longer have any sense of who would be interested in an accurate history, reliable editions, and a coherent interpretation of this weird little text that has come to dominate my life. 

Bibliography

Drewes, David. (2017). "The Idea of the Historical Buddha". JIABS 40: 1-25.DOI: 10.2143/JIABS.40.0.3269003

Sujato and Brahmali (2014). The Authenticity of the Early Buddhist Texts. Self-published via Lulu.com

On the Historicity of the Buddha in the Absence of Historical Evidence

I recently posted an appreciation of David Drewes' recent IABS conference presentation on the historicity of the Buddha to a Triratna Buddhist Order forum and got bushwhacked by a couple of traditionalists who both have PhDs. Let me tell you that PhD-level trolling is something else entirely and it did my head in for a while. Worse, Drewes (whom I admire greatly) was targeted by these doctors for ad hominem slurs based on strawman arguments, and I was tarred with the same brush. The insult du jour is "positivist": which is what they call anyone who asks for evidence for an assertion that we all know is not supported by any evidence. It was one of the most spectacular examples of patriarchal white male gatekeeping I've seen in a while.

One of the things I noted was that arguments for the historicity of the Buddha take much the same form as arguments for the existence of God. I could see that one of the good doctors was in favour of the ontological argument, for example. I thought it might be interesting to see how these arguments work. But let me begin by stating the problem.

The figure of the Buddha is ubiquitous in the Pāli suttas. We may glean all kinds of information about him from reading the Pāli suttas and their counterparts in Gāndhārī and translations into Sanskrit and Chinese. What we cannot do is definitely link the Buddha with any historical event or fact. There is no archaeology of the Buddha, for example. There are no contemporary coins or artworks that feature his image or symbol. There are no inscriptions or texts. There are no mentions of the Buddha or even early Buddhism in the texts of other (non-Buddhist) communities. Moreover, it turns out that no figure from the Pāli suttas, including the kings, can be linked to any historical evidence. The kings named in Pāli do not appear, for example, in the old Purānic lists of kings that do include Asoka. Worse, there are two different biographies of the Buddha in the Pāli suttas that disagree about substantive details. 

And this is a problem for academic historians. That is, it is a problem for those whose job is to produce and teach objective accounts of history if there is no objective evidence to draw on. If there is no evidence from which to construct an objective narrative, academic historians are bound to say nothing or to mark anything they do say as speculation. Academic historians are not barred from speculation, but they cannot treat speculation as a form of knowledge. When we speculate that the Buddha was a real person this does not imply that we know this. Rather, if speculation is all we have, then we don't know. And if someone makes a claim to knowledge, this begs the question: How does that person know?

So at present, academic historians in Buddhist Studies have a problem in that they are tacitly taking speculation as knowledge. This is not necessarily a problem for anyone else. Religieux tell stories about the Buddha for reasons other than composing and teaching objective history. We tell stories to inspire, edify, affirm, and indoctrinate the audience with the views of our religion. The historicity of the Buddha is not generally speaking a problem for religious believers, because they simply believe without objective evidence. Like every other religious person on the planet believes what they believe.

The best we can do with objective history of the beginnings of Buddhism is locate the stories in cities that we do know existed. I have wandered through the ruins of Sāvatthī and Rājagaha, for example. They were real cities. And archaeology tells us that these city states began to emerge around seventh century BCE. We know what kind of pottery they made and we can contrast it with the contemporary pottery of the Brahmins living in Punjab. This tells us something about the cultures involved but not about any individual in those cultures.

That is to say, it is not that we lack any contemporary archaeological evidence. In fact, we have a good deal of evidence, it's just that it does not mention or even indirectly refer to the Buddha in any way. It is as though the cities are real but the people in the stories are not. It's easy to imagine why a storyteller might adopt this device of setting mythic stories in real places. In a feudal age where kings had absolute authority, it would not do to portray them in a poor light because they might just kill you (entirely legally). Moreover, by the time of Asoka, because of the rising power of monarchs, the Buddhist community had become dependent on royal patronage in addition to the support of wealthy merchants.

The first historical person in Indian history is Asoka. We can link Asoka to any number of historical facts and figures: inscriptions, art, architecture, mentions in foreign literature, and links with kings of bactria who dates are well attested. Either of Charles Allen's (popular history) books The Buddha and the Sahibs or Ashoka contain good outlines of this evidence and how it was discovered (the two books overlap substantially in content).

By contrast the stories about the Buddha all have a strongly religious character. They almost always include some supernatural element, a feature that intensifies in texts from later periods. A figure whose main features include supernatural powers is difficult to locate in an objective historical narrative, since objectively there are no supernatural powers. Objectivity is not neutral. No objective history includes accounts of supernatural powers because such powers are a product of the religious imagination.

Though most people believe that the Buddha existed, Drewes argues that academic historians are bound to use a higher evidential bar, and all things considered the Buddha does not meet that bar. As a result Drewes argues that academic historians should not continue to speak of the Buddha as an historical person. He is a figure of myth and legend.

Drewes is specific about who his target audience is: it is academic historians. It is not Buddhists per se, except where they are also academic historians, which is quite often in Buddhist Studies. So having established this, let's look at how Buddhists argue for the historicity of the Buddha, using a framework I've cribbed from a popular philosophy book (i.e. 50 Philosophy Ideas You Really Need to Know by Ben Dupré).

The Teleological Argument (or Argument from Design)

In this approach, the theologian argues that the "beauty, order, complexity, and apparent purpose" observed in the world cannot have come about by chance. Some mind or intelligent force had to shape things to make them so perfect. And in our case that intelligent force was the Buddha.

In 1802, the theologian William Paley used the phrase "the divine watchmaker" to reflect a mechanistic view of this argument. It was this that gave Richard Dawkins the idea of referring to evolution by natural selection as "the blind watchmaker". But any view of evolution with a "watchmaker" in it is teleological. There is no watchmaker. The "watch" makes and remakes itself in this case, by evolving according to patterns that seem to be properties of the universe.

Applied to the Pāli suttas we see this argument at various levels of sophistication. The most brute form of this is "The Pāli suttas exist, therefore the Buddha exists". A more sophisticated version says that the stories are too complex, too connected by an "underlying unity", too realistic, for the Buddha not to have been an historical person.

As one of my doctorate-holding detractors said, "Why go to all that trouble if the Buddha wasn't real?" This simply begs the question, "Why do religions create and transmit religious stories at all?" This is not a hard question to answer.

We use stories, images, and symbols because people relate more strongly to stories with people in them. They also relate strongly to what Justin L Barrett (2004) calls minimally counterintuitive elements, like animals playing the parts of people or supernatural powers. Indeed, research cited by Barrett seems to show that embedding one's message in a story with minimally counterintuitive elements makes it more memorable. So a Buddha with supernatural powers occupies our minds more strongly that a Buddha without them. Just as a talking wolf is what makes the story of Little Red Riding-Hood so memorable and so useful as a warning against naïveté.

We tell stories, including religious stories, to communicate values, attitudes, and ideas. And we use storytelling devices to reinforce the message. We think of the narrative arc or structure, characterisation, world-building, and so on. The best stories combine the best of each element. There is no doubt, for example, that the Buddha we meet in Pāli is a compelling character, even if the prose is generally turgid and repetitive. The settings of the stories do a good job of world building. And so on.

The problem is that no evidence exists outside of the stories that supports the idea of an historical Buddha. Which may be fine for believers, but we are considering the position of the academic historian.

We might ask, for example, if can we imagine this body of literature emerging and taking the form that it does, in the absence of a human founder of Buddhism. And I have no problem at all imagining this. However, I cannot conclude from this that I know that the Buddha did not exist. On the contrary, I am admitting my ignorance: I don't know if the Buddha was an actual person or not. And this is my official position on the matter unless and until more evidence emerges. 

Still, if I don't know then, unless you have better evidence than I have access to, then you don't know either. And if you have new evidence then, as an academic historian you are bound to publish it in order to be taken seriously. As of today (9 Sept 2022) no such evidence has been published. Academic historians do not know if the Buddha was a real person. No one knows. 

A body of literature was surely shaped by some human mind or minds. But it need not have been the Buddha. Humans have been telling mythic stories for as long as we have had language, which is likely in the order of 200,000 years (On the antiquity of human mythology see Witzel 2012). But the early Buddhist texts are very pluralistic and are clearly shaped by more than one mind. Below I will discuss the hidden (in plain sight) pluralism of dependent arising. Now let us looks at some of the main arguments that theologians have tried for the existence of God and how Buddhists use similar arguments. 

The Cosmological Argument

The cosmological argument in its simplest form is that "Nothing can come from nothing". Everything is caused by something other than itself (autopoiesis is just as forbidden for European intellectuals as it was for Nāgārjuna).

This is a form of argument that we see a lot in Buddhism because of our emphasis on phenomena having necessary conditions. The logic follows from the Buddhist axiom that "things arise in dependence on conditions". The trick is what we mean by "things". There is no doubt that the majority of contemporary Buddhists mean "everything" by this, indeed "every possible thing". For modern Buddhists, dependent arising is their theory of everything. As Evitar Shulman has said, there is no reason to believe that early Buddhists intended this explanation to go further than mental activity or that they saw it as a theory of everything. Many historians of Buddhist ideas now believe that the received interpretation came along substantially later. What we see in the early texts is not this metaphysical speculation, but a rather smaller epistemic claim: all mental phenomena arise in dependence on conditions. And the main condition is attention. Withdraw attention and sensory experience ceases. And then life starts to get interesting.

One form of this argument—everything happens for a reason—is known as the teleological fallacy.

Reasons are ideas or propositions evinced by humans to explain their actions in terms of internal states such as motivations, desires, etc or external circumstances such as peer pressure, coercion, etc. As Mercier and Sperber (2016) have argued, reasons qua explanations of actions, are entirely post-hoc. Careful study of reasons and reasoning shows that our decisions are mainly driven by unconscious inferences, and then consciously justified only in retrospect. And reasons are subject to all the usual biases and fallacies. For example, we tend to settle on the first plausible reason that comes into our mind (anchoring bias). We tend seek confirmation of our stated reason, rejecting any counterfactual information (confirmation bias). And so on.

Outside of human and animal behaviour it is not even true to say that everything that happens can be traced to a cause. Causation is tricky, especially after David Hume (1711–1776), who pointed out that we never observe causation per se, we only ever observe sequences of events. "Causation" seems to be a structure that we impose on experience to make sense of it rather than a feature of reality. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) developed this idea by showing that metaphysics generally are imposed on experience by us, rather than emerging from within experience.

Against this is our everyday experience of causing things to happen by desiring them to happen. As John Searle (1932– ) is fond of saying "I think about my arm going up, and the damn thing goes up" (always accompanied by the appropriate action). That is the archetype of causation for human beings. Although philosophers often prefer to discuss causation in the abstract, I think this is both a red herring and an intellectual cul de sac. That said, our experience of causing things doesn't generalise to a theory of causation. Physical processes don't involve an agent having a desire. A rock rolling down a hill follows the applicable physical laws, but it has no agency. It cannot chose not to roll down hill, for example. A rock rolling down a hill is simply following inherent patterns of the evolution of matter and energy over time. There is, at the very least, an epistemic distinction between agent driven change and non-agentive change. They follow different patterns that we are pretty good at distinguishing. 

Moreover where we have been able to identify non-agentive patterns of change, which were known as Laws by nineteenth century natural philosophers, they don't include the concept of causation. When we examine classical laws of motion or laws of thermodynamics, for example, there is no term that indicates "causation". When we see a classical law like F=ma we assume or intuit that the force causes the acceleration, but this is not the case. Rather it tells us how to calculate the magnitude and direction of the force having observed an accelerating mass. It does not tell us anything about causation. Forces do affect how matter behaves, but the idea of causation is just that, an idea. An idea we project onto the situation, when it fact it only exists in our minds. 

The cosmological argument for the Buddha goes like this. The Pāli suttas exist, therefore they must have had a cause. For Buddhists that cause is assumed to be the Buddha. Since the Pāli suttas exist, the Buddha must have caused them existed. According to this view, if Buddhism is not the product of the Buddha, then it is incoherent. One has to be careful here, because there is much about the Pāli literature than is incoherent. One will not find a coherent theory of karma and rebirth, for example. One will find numerous contradictions in the stories. And so on. 

There is a further fallacy about the Pāli suttas that contributes to this and other arguments for the Buddha, which is often phrased in terms of "underlying unity". In this view, observers claim to see a uniformity of expression and thought that the suttas must have been conceived by a single mind. That mind was the Buddha's mind, even if the Buddha is not accurately portrayed in the stories. Without the idea of the Buddha, many people apparently struggle to make sense of Buddhism (the many beloved characters of fictional literature notwithstanding). 

The absence of evidence often forces those who try the cosmological argument to retreat into a god-of-the-gaps approach. Since the Buddha cannot be found in the evidence, he must exist in the absence of evidence. This stymies any discussion since insisting on the absence of evidence does not refute a god-of-the-gaps argument, because it relies on the absence of evidence. And it becomes rather like trying to have a discussion about anything with a Mādhyamika: pointless.

Aesthetic Arguments

Some Buddhists argue that they don't give a focaccia about history, it just feels right to believe in the Buddha. Or it just "makes sense", i.e. they find it intuitive. This is often followed by a denunciation of reason, reasoning, intellect, or anything other than aesthetic judgement when considering the historicity of the Buddha. The obvious intellectual influence here is Romanticism, i.e. sensibility over sense. Although the English Romantic movement itself was short-lived, the impact on English intellectuals is still profound. In Triratna, for example, Romanticism is sometimes equated with Buddhism without qualification. For those who take this approach, the poems of English Romantic poems appear to have the same status as Pāli suttas. I'm definitely not on board with this. Romanticism is an ideology and the English Romantic poets were a bunch of feckless aristocrats out of the heads on drugs half the time.  

Since the evidence for the Buddha is inconclusive, at best, some Buddhist adopt a version of Pascal's wager: all things considered it is best to act as if the Buddha was a real person, because if we are right then we are right and it's all good, but if we are wrong there is still the consolation of acting correctly according to Buddhist norms (which Buddhists hold to be the highest form of morality). The Buddhist argues that it is better to be a Buddhist than not to be. Funny that. 

Drewes, however, was talking about academic historians doing academic historiography. As historians we are bound to take the evidence seriously. In the absence of evidence we may speculate, but this has to be sharply distinguished from a claim to knowledge. If we are speculating, then we don't know. As an academic historian, one has to be able to say "We don't know". And in the case of the Buddha, we really just do not know.

Evidence

Positivism is a particularly rigid idea about what constitutes evidence, usually in relation to the empirical sciences. Positivists are rigidly empirical about evidence: if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist.

The false claim put forward by the two doctors was that Drewes and I were excluding valid evidence on ideological (i.e. positivist) grounds. The evidence we are excluding from objective history is the Pāli suttas themselves. And we are excluding them in particular ways. I have no doubt, for example, that the Pāli suttas reflect the culture in which they were written. 

This is completely uncontroversial in the case of the Pāli commentaries. For example, the commentaries construct elaborate family trees for the Buddha and other characters linked to him. But these family trees exhibit a preference for marriage patterns that only exist (in India) amongst Dravidians and their neighbours in Sri Lanka. We see, for example, an emphasis on cross-cousin marriage. A cross-cousin is a first cousin from your parent's sibling of the other gender. So, a Sri Lankan boy might be married to his father's sister's daughter, or to his mother's brother's daughter. Either way, first cousin marriage was considered incest in North India and it is presently illegal to marry a first cousin in India. By contrast in Sri Lanka first cousin marriages are normal, a custom absorbed from Dravidian India, and presently legal. So when the commentaries composed in Sri Lanka make cross-cousin marriage a feature of the Buddha's family, we know that this reflects Sri Lankan culture not the Buddha's culture. 

Those who assert that the Buddha is an historical person ought to be prepared to say how they know. But when you ask them this open, perfectly valid, and not at all positivist question, those who assert the existence of the Buddha respond with one or other of the theological arguments outlined above. But none of those arguments holds water for academic historians.

It should be noted that nowhere in mainstream academia, except perhaps in Christian Studies, does any academic accept these arguments applied to the existence of God. And no Buddhist has ever defended these arguments for God, even when they use exactly the same form of argument for the existence of the Buddha. There are differences, of course, since the Buddha can't be held responsible for the problem of evil, for example, despite being routinely referred to "omniscient" (sarvajñā "all knowing") in later texts. Nor is the Buddha is implicated in the creation of the universe either, though Buddhists still insist on a cyclic universe in blatant contradiction of the facts. We live in a universe that, as far as we know, was created once, and only once, and will exist forever. But still the forms of argument are recognisable.

The supposedly "authentic" texts routinely describe the Buddha in supernatural terms. He reads minds, he converses with gods, he goes to and from the god-realms, he flies, he does miracles, his tongue can cover his face, and so on. These magical elements of his character are only magnified as time goes on. The Buddha of the later hagiographies is far more magical and supernatural than in earlier stories. The plethora of Buddhas that replace Gautama, beginning with Akṣobhya and Amitābha, are almost completely magical and hardly human at all. They exist in other universes and cross the barriers to rescue us (from ourselves) if we only have faith and chant their name. I still have no idea where Bhaisājya Buddha ("the medicine Buddha) comes from or how he works. We have moved well away from Buddhism qua "philosophy", "moral system", or any other bowdlerised European way of talking about it.

As part of their denunciation of Drewes and I, one of the PhDs accused us of being positivist, and I want to circle back to this assertion.

What Kind of Historian am I?

I find it hard to credit that anyone would call me a positivist, though this is not the first time. I mean, just look at how I handle evidence in my history articles. We have to be quite flexible in many cases. I know for example that the Fangshan stele was commissioned on 13 March 661 because an inscribed colophon says so. The positivist might ask what evidence we have to support this date? I mean, the scribe could have been lying, right? We don't know the date of the Fangshan stele except when we assume that the scribe wasn't lying. The positivist would not accept this, but with some caution, I do. Because there are times when it is reasonable to trust the evidence, even as an academic historian. 

My approach is roughly speaking Bayesian. I look at all the possibilities based on what I currently know and give each a probability. All possibilities have a non-zero probability. Then I see what more I can learn and use what I've learned to reassess the probabilities. I don't do this formally. I don't, for example, assign numerical values for the probabilities. I weigh them up quite intuitively, though I'm usually more conscious of deciding which factors I consider salient to the question. I try to adopt the most likely position, but with a mind open to and actively seeking further evidence.

If we are dating the Heart Sutra then we know, for example, that the commonly cited date of 609 CE for the copying of the Hōryūji manuscript is objectively false. This date first appears in a Japanese book published in the 1800s. And it is widely acknowledged amongst academic historians that the book lacks credibility. Moreover, it contradicts more weighty evidence. The script and writing appear to be consistent with the 9th or 10th centuries. 

Also I have suggested that the Heart Sutra was composed after 654 CE, based on the assumption that Xīn jīng copied the dhāraṇī from Tuóluóní jí jīng 《陀羅尼集經》 (T 901). This text was translated by Atikūṭa in ca. 654 CE. It didn't arrive in China until ca 651 CE. Since the Xīn jīng has apparently copied the dhāraṇī in Chinese rather than Sanskrit we may conjecture that it was composed after 654 CE. I don't know this. But I think it is the most likely scenario given the evidence. It is of a piece with better established facts that I have discussed in my publications. No positivist would give this the time of day. 

Based on the present state of our knowledge, the Heart Sutra simply could not have existed in 609 CE and the Hōryūji manuscript itself is highly unlikely to be from that date.

Now this evidence is vague and my conclusions provisional. I'm proposing what seems like the most likely scenario, given the evidence. Where the evidence is vague or ambiguous discussion may ensue about which is the better interpretation of it. And in these circumstances we may expect historians to wade in and express opinions, but not to express their opinions as a kind of knowledge. The only escape from (typically ego-driven) opposition of opinion is to find and write about new evidence. Which is what I have been doing to the Heart Sutra for 10 years now. 

There is little point arguing about the existence of the Buddha until new evidence arrives. We've seen all the theological arguments for interpreting the texts as being the product of one person, but most academic historians find this far-fetched at best.

And so on. No one who took the time to read my historical scholarship could rightly accuse me of being a positivist. I'm far more flexible than that. I do try to be clear about how confident I am about various claims to knowledge, and in each case I have published the extensive arguments for what I take to be the case. Unlike some of my interlocutors, I don't make unsubstantiated claims in my published work and I do raise many still unanswered questions. I may indulge in more speculation informally, but the argument here is about academic historiography and, given that, I'd prefer to be judged on my publications in academic journals than on work completed under less rigorous conditions.

If you are going to accuse me of intellectual bad faith then you had better have a bit more on your side than not liking me or not liking my conclusions. You better not be promoting religious claptrap on the side. 

Objectivity is Not Neutral.

Modern academic historians, even the non-positivists, strive towards more objective accounts of history. At the same time we still argue about what "objective" means. I take it to mean that which is the same for all observers. Even then, seeing the objective requires clearing away the subjective, which we do by comparing notes (which is why scholarship is necessarily a dialogue).

One of the reasons history is so often about famous people and battles, about dates and numbers is that the objectivity of these can be confirmed with reference to multiple sources. Ancient history presents increasing problems as we go back in time because evidence simply no longer exists. Ancient written records, especially religious tracts are, generally speaking, highly unreliable historical sources, as any number of academic historians have said and continue to say.

These days the only people producing tracts with titles like "The authenticity of the Pāli Suttas" are Theravādin bhikkhus and their academic allies. I once upset Sujato by referring to him, in passing, as a Theravāda apologist, though this was some years before he and Brahmali published the apologetic tract just mentioned. Bhikkhus submit to the Vinaya (an Iron Age code of monastic etiquette) and notably take a life-long vow to refrain from all sexual activity. No one who is attempting to live such a vow can be objective about the circumstances in which the vow makes sense. Because, for most of us, monastic chastity makes no sense and has been demonstrably harmful. Yes? Having strong, lifelong commitments, that in turn shape one's role and status in one's community and beyond, makes it hard to be objective. Because if being objective disproves some basis on which your commitment is based, then you are in real danger of losing that role and that status.

An historical Buddha seems intuitive to a Buddhist who has spent decades talking about the Buddha as a special kind of person (a magical person, though perhaps not quite a god). Of course, the familiar seems intuitive to the person immersed in it. What always seems counter-intuitive is the new and novel. The sensibilities of Buddhists, therefore, have to be eliminated from consideration of academic history. We fully expect Buddhists to believe in the Buddha, but that belief is not evidence for the Buddha anymore than Christian faith is evidence for the existence of God.

The Buddhist anxiety about issues of legitimacy and authenticity seems quite universal. We see it in the earliest texts in which Buddhism is apparently a heterodox view that has to be carefully distinguished from other contemporary forms of religious asceticism. Buddhists were also at pains to insist that Buddhist methods were distinct from those of other religions, though there is some evidence to suggest that Buddhists inherited existing meditation techniques and modified them precisely to make such a distinction. Hence the complex position that we see in Pāli suttas on the respective jhāna and āyatana meditations and the weird combination of them both in some places.

The much vaunted "underlying unity" is clearly a figment of the imagination. And if you want a demonstration then I suggest looking into the various formulations of the nidānas. Here is the diagram I made when I was studying them:

I count seven distinct formulations of the nidānas, sometimes using completely different terminology. The underlying unity here seems to be "one thing leads to another" and I doubt even the most ardent Buddhist theologian would claim that this idea was profound or only found in Buddhism. Back in 2011, I did a blog on many historical examples of the idea that everything changes. A completely ubiquitous idea across cultures that owes nothing to Buddhism. It's just that Buddhists also noticed this thing that everyone notices eventually (getting older makes this a lot more clear).

And this is the norm. What we see in Pāli suttas is an unevenly imposed uniformity that barely hides a pluralistic past in which Buddhists believed a much broader range than can be accounted for in traditionalist approaches, including the modern Theravāda.

Afterword

As I was thinking about this and scanning the historical literature I came across some academic accounts of why arguments are inherently adversarial. The problem according to Howes and Hundleby (2021), is that beliefs are not something we choose. Beliefs are involuntary. And this means, that whenever a believer enters into an argument they risk a belief-changing event and this makes for a certain kind of vulnerability.

This is interesting, because if true, it explains why Buddhists tend to be so vicious in debate (and my goodness Buddhists can be extremely vicious if their beliefs are challenged). Just being in a debate, they risk losing their faith and they fight as if that would be the end of the world. For example, a Theravāda bhikkhu with both institutional and ecclesiastical titles and privileges could lose both if they stopped believing. Even for a rank and file Buddhist, loss of faith might result in social isolation and loss of status. For a social primate these are very high stakes indeed.

By inadvertently starting an argument about the historicity of the Buddha with true believers (PhD's notwithstanding) I accidentally triggered that sense of vulnerability that all religieux have. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Barrett, Justin L. (2004). Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Altamira Press.

Drewes, David. (2017). "The Idea of the Historical Buddha". JIABS 40: 1-25.DOI: 10.2143/JIABS.40.0.3269003

——. (2022). "The Buddha and the Buddhism That Never Was". XIXth Congress of IABS, Seoul, August 2022.

Howes, M., and Hundleby, C. (2021). "Adversarial Argument, Belief Change, and Vulnerability." Topoi 40, 859–872. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-021-09769-8

Mercier, Hugo and Sperber, Dan. (2017). The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding. Allen Lane.

Witzel, E. J. Michael. (2012). The Origins of the World's Mythologies. Oxford University Press.