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.

Meier's Historicity Criteria

Historians of Buddhism face a difficult task, since the further we go back in time the sketchier the evidence of Buddhism is. Before about 500 CE there are few certainties and this is ostensibly a millennium after the life of the Buddha. Let me give an apposite example. It is widely asserted that the Pāli suttas are the oldest Buddhist texts we possess. This is largely based on a tradition found in the Dīpavaṃsa (a religious text) that the suttas were written down in Sri Lanka around the beginning of the Common Era. That is to say, the idea that Pāli texts were being written down at that time comes from a Pāli text; it comes from within a religious tradition and has not been corroborated.

When we turn to archaeology, however, we get a very different story. The oldest extant Pāli document is from the sixth century CE, while the oldest complete sutta is from the ninth century CE. By contrast, we have a partial and damaged manuscript of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā from the first century CE. The oldest extant Prajñāpāramitā text is some 500 years older than the oldest Pāli text. Moreover, Prajñāpāramitā was also likely an oral tradition at first and, in my opinion, its origins lie in the pre-Buddhist forms of meditation leading to the cessation of sensory experience.

So which literature is really older? Which evidence is more reliable when it comes to history, religious tradition or archaeology? These are the kinds of questions that historians of religion seek answers to. The efforts broadly fall into two main processes: hermeneutics and criticism. Hermeneutics seeks to establish the authority of the text, based on its history, sources, and relations with tradition. Criticism, sometimes "higher criticism", seeks to establish the authenticity of the text based on the language and interpretation of the text.

Unfortunately, when historians of Buddhism write about this, each of them takes an ad hoc approach, eschewing formalised methods of evaluation and interpretation. This can rise to the level of a rejection of the concept of "methodology". My mentor Richard Gombrich, for example, likes to rail against methodology and says that his method is simply "conjecture and refutation". (The young Gombrich is credited as a proof-reader in Karl Popper's 1963 book Conjectures and Refutations). There's nothing wrong with this, per se, but it is too general to be useful in defining methods. In dealing with, say, the historicity of a given person we are often commenting on individual phrases and even words.

In the typical Buddhism Studies history, each piece of evidence, each relevant phrase, is presented and evaluated on an ad hoc basis. In some cases the reader faces a veritable avalanche of "facts" that are supposed to persuade the reader of the authenticity and authority of the words in question. Since each data point is assessed on a unique basis, the critical reader has the extremely laborious task of addressing each point individually. The idea here is to overwhelm the reader with evidence that is difficult to assess.

The ad hoc nature of hermeneutics in Buddhism Studies can be juxtaposed with the highly formalised and structured approach found in Christian Studies. This is partly due to the Protestant doctrine that everyone should read and interpret the Bible for themselves, and partly to the very strong feeling that everyone should come to more or less the same conclusions about the Bible. One way to accomplish both is to specify what methods are valid.

There are some works on Buddhist hermeneutics, but, as far as I can see, these relate to how ancient Buddhists practiced hermeneutics, not to how we as Buddhists and/or scholars should evaluate the historicity of Buddhist texts in the present. Moreover, it has become fashionable for Theravādin monks to write apologia for the authenticity of the Pāli texts. These efforts are quasi-scholarly. The authors have massive, unacknowledged bias in favour of traditional Theravāda beliefs, but beyond this proceed in a scholarly fashion to produce quasi-scholarly works that confirm their most cherished beliefs.

We see the same lack of insight in Nāgārjuna studies where apologist scholars uncritically adopt Nāgārjuna's worldview and then argue for the modern relevance of his conclusions. We almost never see a Nāgārjuna scholar doing the basic philosophical work of identifying the underlying assumptions of Nāgārjuna and putting them to the test. Nāgārjuna's definition of "real", for example, insists that real objects are permanent and unchanging. Since no object of any kind is permanent or unchanging, no objects are real. What we think of as "the real world" is, in fact, merely an illusion or a delusion, or perhaps both but, anyway, nothing really exists, since everything is contingent on something else. As a definition of "real" or "reality" this is completely incoherent, since it assumes from the outset that "real" is a meaningless category. Those who claim that Nāgārjuna "has no view" are simply blind to the axioms of Nāgārjunian thought because they have internalised the dogma and no one ever talks about it. No one ever talks about the way that Nāgārjuna distorts Buddhist thought away from established norms of the time or what might have prompted this.

The point is that there are no formal hermeneutics for Buddhists or scholars to apply. The only attempt to articulate something like this can be found in Jan Nattier's (2003) book A Few Good Men. However, Nattier provides no references for her "hermeneutic principles" meaning that the task of finding out about them is left to the reader. While I have found it very useful to have Nattier's articulation of these principles, I now want to use them in my work. Citing Nattier would probably satisfy most Buddhism Studies scholars, but I wanted to know more about where they came from.

To cut a long story short, the ideas like "the principle of embarrassment" come from Christian theology, especially from Protestant New Testament scholars concerned with the historicity of Jesus. Once I gave up searching for this ideas in a Buddhism studies context, things got a lot easier. One source in particular was repeatedly cited by authors who write on this topic:

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

In Meier we find a clear exposition and evaluation of the most common and/or useful criteria by which theologians have applied to the idea of an historical Jesus. While the obvious comparison might be the historicity of the Buddha, at present I'm more interested in Xuanzang as an historical character. The history of Xuanzang is typically—in a book like Sally Wriggins' (2004) The Silk Road Journey with Xuanzang—based on naïve readings of a narrow range of sources. I have been reading and making notes on a whole series of articles by Max Deeg critiquing the naïve use of historical sources for the life of Xuanzang. I'm also thinking about Jeffrey Kotyk's (2019) article that compares Buddhist and state histories and argues that, at the very least, we cannot understand Xuanzang as an historical character without considering all of the evidence. And into this mix has dropped the fascinating book chapter by Liu Shufen which argues for a very different picture of Xuanzang's later years under Emperor Gaozong.

Briefly, Liu (2022) argues that Xuanzang was held under house arrest by Gaozong for a number of years, and that during this time he was denied qualified assistants to help with translations. Indeed, his translation output dropped precipitously after the death of Emperor Taizong in 649. Moreover, Gaozong appointed a board of censors empowered to change Xuanzang's translations as they saw fit. These observations are based mainly on passages in the hagiography of Xuanzang attributed to Yancong (T 2053).

What I eventually want to do is write an article in which I analyse the historicity of Xuanzang according to criteria that I will state at the outset and apply even-handedly. To this end, I will here articulate Meier's hermeneutic criteria and give examples from my own published works or closely related publications. Meier articulates five primary and five secondary criteria which are tuned to recovering reliable historical information about Jesus from the Bible (and thus will require some tweaking for use in a Buddhist context).

Meier's Criteria

Primary criteria

1. the criterion of embarrassment
2. the criterion of discontinuity
3. the criterion of multiple attestation [aka corroboration]
4. the criterion of coherence
5. the criterion of rejection and execution [specifically related to reports of Jesus violent death]

Secondary criteria

1. the criterion of traces of Aramaic
2. the criterion of Palestinian environment
3. the criterion of vividness of narration
4. the criterion of tendencies of developing synoptic tradition
5. the criterion of historical presumption.

Primary Criteria

1. Embarrassment

When religieux write about their religion, they quite naturally portray it in the best possible light. Accounts of historical figures become hagiographies (from the Greek hagios "sacred, saintly"), that is, they are idealised accounts in which the characters become idealised vehicles for the values of the author. Thus in many Buddhist texts the Buddha is unfailingly good. He is not simply good, but his behaviour in the stories defines for Buddhists what good behaviour is. Scholars call this aspect of texts normative; it defines the norms of behaviour for Buddhists. This does not mean that Buddhists ever behaved the way the Buddha is portrayed as behaving. Indeed, there is ample evidence in the Vinaya to suggest that Buddhist monks were every bit as problematic as other human beings (I'll come back to this).

So, for example, when we read (per my 2004 article on the attitudes to suicide in Pāli suttas) that the Buddha taught a group of monks to meditate on death before going on retreat. On returning from retreat the Buddha finds that the monks have all committed suicide. Whoops. This reflects badly on the Buddha. It is an embarrassment. As a commentator, Buddhaghosa was obviously embarrassed, for example, and concocts a fanciful story in which it is secretly a good thing that the Buddha taught those monks the practice that drove them to suicide.

Another example of this is the story from the Ambaṭṭa Sutta in which the Sakya tribe are revealed to have practiced sibling incest marriages in the past (see Attwood 2012). Across Indian culture there are very strong social prohibitions on sibling incest (though in some parts of India first cousin marriages were and are common). This story doesn't simply reflect badly on the Buddha's tribe. It is one of the most taboo of all social conventions. "Sister-fucker" (Hindi bhenchod) is a very heinous insult for a man in modern India. So no one is going to simply make up a story about their ancestors practising sibling incest.

The criterion of embarrassment applied here makes the idea that Sakya's practiced sibling-incest marriages seem plausibly historical. In my article, I contrasted the strength of the incest taboo in India with the practice of sibling-incest marriages amongst Persian royalty as a way of consolidating power. Persian kings marrying their sisters may well have been following the example of Egyptian royalty who also practiced this.

However, this criterion has limitations. Clear cut cases of embarrassment are rare in religious literature for obvious reasons. Even if the embarrassing fact is true, there is no need to blurt it out. There are things that we simply don't talk about. So while we think this criterion is useful, there are not that many times we can apply it.

Moreover, what seems embarrassing for us may not have been embarrassing for the author. It is common to see people who encounter the myths of Buddhism to see the going forth of the Buddha in the standard account of his life (according to say the Lalitavistara or the Mahāvastu) in a negative way; the Buddha is seen to abandon his wife and baby to go off and become a wandering mendicant. This is sometimes seen as an indictment of his moral character. Even if we grant historicity to the myth of the Buddha we have to see the leaving home in context. In that version of the story, the Buddha lives with his family in a palace. The wife naturally, according to millennia old practice, goes to live with her husband's family. In that palace, Yasodharā lacks for nothing. She lives in luxury. Later, in this version of the story, the Buddha returns home and teaches Yasodharā and Rahula how to be liberated themselves. So it all turns out well in the end and there is no "embarrassment". We might go further and point out that other sources of biography, notably the Ariyapariyesanā Sutta, make no mention of the wife and baby, the Buddha appears to be an unmarried youth and, what's more, his mother lives to see him leave home rather than dying in the first week of his life." It is unlikely that the authors of either account thought of these details as embarrassing. It is only modern sensibilities that make it so.

2. Discontinuity

The idea here is to identify words or deeds attributed to an historical character that cannot be derived from their milieu or from later development of their religion. If we could identify such speech or actions in Buddhist texts, we might feel justified in supposing these to be attributable to the authors of the texts.

The problem for Buddhism is that its not a linear development from an existing culture. The authors of the texts attribute authorship to the Buddha. We only know the Buddha from normative Buddhist texts, since there are no contemporary records from other traditions that mention Buddhism or Buddhists.

The early Buddhist texts are the "Old Testament" of Buddhism, so, unlike New Testament scholars arguing about Jesus, there is no clear backdrop from which the Buddha emerged. That said, it is obvious that early Buddhists did draw on existing culture in formulating Buddhism. The presence of deva and asura figures is clear evidence of Brahmanical influence. The Buddhist doctrine of karma is likely an adaptation of an existing Jain doctrine. Mythic figures such as Yakkha and Nāga seem to be non-Indo-European and borrowed from some pre-existing chthonic animistic tradition. As I have noted (along with Anālayo), it seems very likely that key Buddhist meditation practices (leading to the āyatana states and to śūnyatā-samādhi) were also borrowed from a pre-existing tradition. There is also Michael Witzel's idea, articulated in my article (2012), that Buddhists borrowed from Iranian tradition.

This criterion will be much more difficult to apply in a Buddhist context, simply because the relations between Buddhists and their milieu were complex, but reliable sources don't exist. We are guessing a lot of the time. Moreover, the literature that later traditions produced was huge compared to the Bible.

A potential example is the word paṭiccasamuppāda. This word does not derive from existing traditions, so far as we have evidence of them. Such evidence as we have is extremely sketchy, however, and arguments from absence are weak. However, what about this word insists that the Buddha rather than the followers of the Buddha coined it?

Another problem that I don't think theologians face is that the first literature we meet is already translated, edited, and organised. In other words, the early Buddhist texts are the product of considerable literary effort on the part of early Buddhists. As already noted, the actual dates of the composition of the Pāli sutta are simply guesses based on normative traditions. The archaeology of Pāli texts does not begin until the 6th century CE.

3. Multiple Attestation or Corroboration

This criterion seems fairly self-evident: a historical event is more plausible if it is mentioned in two or more different sources.

A feature of Liu's (2022) thesis about Xuanzang is that the Yancong Biography contains numerous "facts" about him that are not recorded elsewhere. Liu appears to argue that in these cases the Biography is more valuable as an historical source. The criterion of multiple attestation, or what Nattier calls the "principle of corroboration", tells us the opposite. Where details are included in the Yancong Biography but not corroborated by other sources we must judge such details to be less plausible. This is is also Jeffrey Kotyk's (2019) criticism of the use that scholars have made of the Biography.

On the other hand, Kotyk (2019) notes the existence of another source for an event that is recorded in the Biography, namely the gift of a Heart Sutra in gold ink, accompanied by a presentation case (dated 26 Dec 656). This event occurs in a letter (often referred to by Sinologists as a "memorial") sent by Xuanzang to Gaozong to celebrate the first month of life of a royal prince born to Wu Zhao. The same letter is preserved as part of a collection of Xuanzang's letters preserved independently in Japan (seemingly not extant in China). Since this constitutes corroboration, Kotyk is minded to accept this event as plausibly historical. I agree. Furthermore, this is the earliest reliably dated attestation of the Heart Sutra anywhere in the world. The earliest artefact is from a few years later in the form of an Chinese inscription commissioned on 13 March 661.

4. The Criterion of Coherence

This criterion only comes into play after at least a first pass using the first three criteria. The aim is to establish a baseline of style or behaviour that allows us to compare a new passage with our existing understanding and judge how well it fits into the existing whole.

In a sense, this is a particular case of what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls the hermeneutic circle. Understanding the whole requires us to first understand the parts. But in order to fully understand each part, we have to know what contribution it makes to the whole. Each iteration clarifies our understanding of how it all fits together and what contribution each part makes.

The problem for Buddhists is, again, the complexity of Buddhist sources.

5. The Criterion of Rejection and Execution

This one is clearly specific to Christianity. The idea here is that the Jewish and Roman authorities would not have condemned and executed Jesus if they did not have cause. However, I'm not entirely sympathetic to this one. The Romans in Palestine are an example of authoritarian control by an foreign occupying power. Authoritarian regimes don't need logical reasons to persecute groups or individuals. As we know, such regimes routinely carry out show trials in which innocent individuals are convicted of crimes and punished. The idea that the Romans executed Jesus for cause is part of Christian mythology, but it's not corroborated by Roman sources. Tacitus is often mentioned as a source, but his mention of Jesus being executed by Pilate was written in 116 CE, a century after the fact. And Tacitus does not mention his sources.

A parallel here might be discerned in Buddhist discussions of the Buddha's last meal. The Parinibbāna Sutta appears to show him eating some dish which gave him food poisoning and led to his death. The criterion of embarrassment makes this detail seem a little more plausible, since being killed off by food poisoning is a rather ignominious death for a saint.

Secondary Criteria

1. Traces of Aramaic

The New Testament was written in koine Greek. Thus when we see traces of Aramaic, supposedly the language spoken by Jesus, this makes a given statement seem more authentic. As Meier immediately says, there are "serious problems" (178) with this criterion.

We see a similar analysis of Pāli, in which we often see evidence of another Prakrit which is close to the language used for the Asoka edicts in Magadha and for this reason called Magadhī. We see examples of Magadhī case endings in particular.

As in the case of Aramaic features in the Greek New Testament, the occurrence of Magadhī case endings in Pāli has been interpreted as evidence of the antiquity and therefore authenticity of the texts where they occur.

2. Palestinian environment

The idea here is that details in stories about Jesus that reflect the known customs, beliefs, and practices associated with Palestine in the first century, are more likely to be authentic. But it is easy for an author to interpolate such details from their own memory, from oral tradition, or from other sources.

The problem here, for Buddhism, is that we only have normative Buddhist sources for this. There is no contemporary literature that we can draw on. All we have for comparison is scant and fragmentary evidence from archaeology. Buddhist Stories are, for example, set in real cities. We know these cities existed because we have the remains of them. We can still visit the ruins (as I have done).

This criterion is more useful negatively. For example, we may say that the appearance of foreign ideas and customs should make us sceptical. As noted above, some of my speculations about the possibility that certain details of Buddhism might be explained if the Sakya tribe had originally come from Iran. Note that this is not the same as relating the Sakya tribe to the Iranian Saka tribe (no, the Sakya were not Scythians).

3. Vividness of narration

This criterion supposes that the kinds of vivid descriptions that we see of Palestine in some Biblical stories indicate an eyewitness account.

The problem here is that supplying vivid details is something that any competent storyteller does to make their account seem more plausible. The example that immediately comes to mind is the fact that Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street, Marylebone, London. This address was not real at the time, although the road has since been extended and now does have a 221. The Sherlock Holmes Museum can be found at 239 Baker St. Again, museums are generally the place where we store and display historical artefacts. But Sherlock Holmes is ahistorical, he's a fictional character.

In his paper Has Xuanzang ever been in Mathura?, Max Deeg notes that a number of vivid accounts in Xuanzang's Record of the Western Regions, are not based on first hand accounts. Xuanzang did not go to Mathura, despite providing a vivid description of it.

4. Tendencies of developing synoptic tradition

Maier Considers this principle "highly questionable". This is because it involves subjective opinions about the internal development of the gospel literature. There were, for example, more Aramaic expressions and syntax in the earlier gospel by Mark, that were gradually eliminated in Matthew and Luke.

There is an exact parallel with Buddhist literature featuring Prakrits gradually being Sanskritised. Early Buddhist texts were composed in various Prakrits, but these tended to become standardised and increasingly Sanskritised. In some texts there is an argument as to whether they reflect a Sanskritised Prakrit, or a Sanskrit with some Prakrit features. And of course there are, by the fourth century, texts composed in Pāṇinian Sanskrit. And after this, Buddhists once again began to use Prakrit. Notably, many dhāraṇī appear to have been composed in a Sanskritised Prakrit, i.e. they have Sanskrit words, with an archaic Prakrit case ending in -e. A good example is the dhāraṇī in the Heart Sutra which uses the Prakrit masculine nominative singular -e ending: gate gate pārasaṃgate bodhi svhāhā. Note that bodhi is also in the nominative singular and svāhā is now considered indeclinable.

The problem for Buddhists, as for Christians, is that constructing such internal chronologies that have no corroboration from external sources is speculative and subjective. All too often Buddhists work on the axiom "older is more authentic" and the people claiming to have discovered internal structures and developments are apologists for a sectarian tradition whose identity and livelihood are tightly bound to the outcome of the inquiry. No Theravādin bhikkhu, for example, is going to undermine Theravāda orthodoxy, since in doing so they risk expulsion from their order or worse, they risk talking themselves into apostasy.

So, for example, some Pāli texts contain elements of a living Prakrit that is similar to the language of the Asoka edicts from Magadha. We call that language Māgadhī. This is the Prakrit that emerged south of the Ganga around the kingdom of Rājagāha, then based in what is now Southern Bihar. We get many hints that there was considerably more linguistic diversity in the second urbanisation period ca. 600 BCE - 200 BCE. Arguments are made that the persistence of elements of Māgadhī in Pāli is evidence of antiquity amongst texts. These are combined with other speculative ideas, such as the idea that the use of certain poetic meters was prevalent in older material.

The problem is that the Pāli that has come down to us is the product of both translation (from various Prakrits into Pāli) and repeated editing (which is inevitable in the process of compilation). The Pāli suttas, for example, may well have relied on older traditions in some form, but they reflect Buddhism at the time the suttas were compiled and, even more than this, they reflect Buddhism at the time the suttas were written down. The trouble is that we don't know when Pāli was written down because the only evidence we have is from normative religious texts that have not been assessed using standardised hermeneutic principles.

5. Historical presumption

The last criterion that Meier considers concerns opinions about where the burden of proof lies. One of the things that Richard Gombrich has said about this issue was: "We have no reason to doubt the traditional accounts." For Gombrich the burden of proof lies with those who distrust the normative sources. But this is problematic. If, for example, we take Gombrich's assertion that the Buddha was an historical person, how can we prove that he was not? We cannot prove a negative. Many religieux take a similar position to the historicity of the Buddha, claiming, for example, that the very existence of Buddhism or the literature of Buddhism, is all the proof we need that someone called Buddha lived.

However, Meier notes the standard objection to this approach: "The burden of proof is simply on anyone who tries to prove something" (183). For example, anyone who wishes to assert that the Buddha was an historical person bears the burden of proof.

And, on the contrary, we have the argument by David Drewes that the Buddha has never been linked to any historical fact or event. There is no archaeology associated with the Buddha, and precious little even from that time beyond some sherds of pottery. The argument David Drewes makes is not that the Buddha was not historical. You cannot prove a negative. Drewes argues that there is simply no basis on which to make a conjecture because he does not consider the Pāli suttas to be a source of historical information. The suttas are normative religious documents that primarily reflect the religious ideas and ideals of the authors of the stories. If they are supposed to reflect the religious ideas of someone other than the author, then let us see that evidence. And let us evaluate the plausibility of that evidence according to standardised criteria.

Conclusions

While not all of Meier's criteria are directly applicable to reading Buddhist texts, we have here a coherent account of how some scholars have tried to work with the literature of early Christianity to divine the historical Jesus. In most cases I can see how I would apply such criteria to working with Buddhist normative texts. And have given examples.

These essays of mine are really just my notes typed up into a coherent form. The field of New Testament hermeneutics has thrown up many different lists of criteria and many arguments about which is applicable and to what extent.

The benefits of standardising our evaluations of the historical value of our sources have obvious advantages for scholars amateur and professional, because we have a common basis of evaluation. To date, a lot of the work on historicity is piecemeal; each fact is presented and justified in an isolated fashion so that a refutation of the whole requires a refutation of each fact individually. This makes the arguments for the historicity of the Buddha or the Pāli suttas very arduous and it makes the claims for "authenticity" sketchy, at best. This is the principle advantage of eschewing methods.

The rejection of standardised methods seems to be a conscious thing in Buddhist Studies as though our methods are value-free. A key social studies criticism of science, which also purports to be value-free, or at least value-neutral, is that it is theory laden. Science proceeds from certain axioms and we cannot pretend that those axioms don't matter. This criticism is entirely fair and identifying those axioms has helped to improve the scientific process and make scientific inquiry more rigorous.

It's hard to imagine a more theory-laden scenario, however, than a religious (often one who has given up sex for their religion) writing an apologia for one of the central tenets of their religion. The idea that their writing is value-free or that it is not theory-laden is simply laughable. As Upton Sinclair said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” How much more so when that person, on the basis of their religious convictions, lives in extreme self-denial, is accorded exalted social status, and is praised sycophantically by followers.

And this is the problem that hermeneutic criteria were meant to solve. How can we be confident that anything we read in a religious text has any connection to history in the complete absence of any contemporary archaeology that might shed light on the situation. We examine claims, weighing them against our stated criteria, and then highlight what seems to be the most plausible explanation or narrative.

Such a procedure does not produce certainty, however. We have to treat it in a Bayesian way: using information gleaned from sources to assign finite probabilities to each scenario, and then adjusting the probabilities as new information comes in. Meier emphasises that no single criterion used in isolation would be useful. Rather, we have to view each new piece of information in relation to all the criteria.

Again, this process of going from part to whole and back to the parts in an iterative cycle was identified by Gadamer as the historiographical process par excellence. This is our best way forward in trying to reconstruct history from partial and fragmentary information produced by a community of religieux. And this process is never finished. New information is emerging all the time. And very often this means that we have to weigh up everything anew.

For example, the Chinese origins of the Heart Sutra now seems certain because there is a mountain of evidence for the Sanskrit text being a back-translation from Chinese. How does this knowledge affect other conclusions that we have about the Heart Sutra? If the text is not authenticated as a genuine, Indian, Buddhist text, then on what basis can it be authenticated? Or if we are being more provocative, we might ask, Is the Heart Sutra an authentic Buddhist text at all? If we don't have clear and agreed upon criteria for having such a discussion, then it tends to be a waste of time.

Of course, even within New Testament scholarship the criteria themselves are contentious and contended. Meier's work is widely cited in their literature. Meier values some principles (embarrassment, discontinuity, corroboration) and devalues others (historical presumption). Other authors come to different conclusions. But at least they know which argument they are having and what is at stake. My sense is that parallel discussions in Buddhism and Buddhism Studies are largely incoherent and slaved to sectarian orthodoxy. I think we can do better than a series of disconnected, idiosyncratic asseverations of faith. Certainly, in amateur and professional Buddhism Studies we need to pay more attention to methods and methodology (the study of methods).

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Attwood, J. 2004. "Suicide as a response to suffering." Western Buddhist Review, 4.

Attwood, J. 2012. "Possible Iranian Origins for Sākyas and Aspects of Buddhism." Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, 3, 47-69.

Liu, Shufen. (2022). “The Waning Years of the Eminent Monk Xuanzang and his Deification in China and Japan.” In Chinese Buddhism and the Scholarship of Erik Zürcher. Edited by Jonathan A. Silk and Stefano Zacchetti, 255–289. Leiden: Brill.

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

Nattier, Jan. (2003). A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva Path according to The Inquiry of Ugra (Ugraparipṛcchā). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

The Earliest Buddhist Shrine?

Ira Block/National Geographic

In recent days, there has been quite a disturbance in the force following the publication, in the archaeological journal Antiquity, of an article reporting on an archaeological investigation in Lumbini, the legendary birthplace of the Buddha:

Coningham. R A E, et al. (2013) "The Earliest Buddhist Shrine: Excavating the Birthplace of the Buddha, Lumbini (Nepal)." Antiquity 87: 1104-1123

The title is clearly meant to entice the reader, and it certainly caught the attention of the media, and the article was widely reported around the world. Anyone interested in the history of Buddhism or indeed the history of ancient India cannot fail to be interested in this discovery. But just what was discovered? Some of the headlines are quite dramatic. Here is a selection:

• Science Daily & Durham University News: Archaeological Discoveries Confirm Early Date of Buddha's Life
• Mirror: British professor leads Indiana Jones-style expedition to uncover buried secrets of Buddha
• USA Today: Archaeological evidence provides new insight into dates when the Buddha lived and died.
• New York Times: New Clues May Change Buddha’s Date of Birth
• Financial Express: Buddha 2 centuries older than previously thought.

The National Geographic Society provided some funding for the project and seems to have been closely involved in communicating the findings to the media. Of the various reports I read, only the USA Today and one of the National Geographic articles included any critical comment.

Let me say at the outset that none of the claims made in these headlines are true. They strip away considerable uncertainty expressed in the article itself and even more that emerges from a careful reading of it. And unfortunately, it is Professor Coningham himself who seems to be fostering this misconception if his interview on the National Geographic site is anything to go by. He claims that the results shed light on the "lifetime of the Buddha himself." One of the principles that was drummed into me as a student in the sciences was not to go beyond what the evidence showed. Speculation is fine, as long as it is presented as such and treated with caution. In suggesting that his results shed light on the lifetime of the Buddha, Coningham is going well beyond his evidence. 

This much was quite obvious from the mainstream reports and interviews, and I wanted to see for myself what the team had discovered.  So I called in at the Cambridge University Library and printed off a copy of the article.

Descriptions of the Field Work

The dig was led by Professor Robin Coningham, of the Department of Archaeology, University of Durham and Kosh Prasad Acharya of the Pashupati Area Development Trust. Coningham has a string of publications resulting from work associated with Buddhist sites in India and Sri Lanka and has also done field work in Iran and Bangladesh. Less information is available about Acharya on the web, but he has been involved in previous excavations at the site.

From Coningham et al, p.1109.
Post holes are shown in red in C5
and are visible in the enlarged image
(just click on it)

The team examined several small areas (C5, C7, C13, ENE) around the foundations of the Mayadevi Temple ruins (see left). Like many Asokan period ruins, the foundations are a grid of brick walls about 75 cm thick (they can be clearly seen in many of the photos in the news stories). These are assumed to have formed the base of a temple. A temple to Rūpadevī stood on the site when it was investigated in the late 19th century. The association with Māyādevī relates to a Gupta-period (300-600 CE) statue found on the site which was originally thought to be Rūpadevī but later reinterpreted as Māyādevī (the article does not give dates or sources for this identification, but presumably it was early 20th century).

Most important was a small area (C5) ca. 75 cm x 200 cm in a trench left by a previous examination of the site, and a further area within this of just 50cm x 50cm. So rather large claims seem to be made for a small hole. However, what they found is indeed interesting.

Previously, Indian archaeology related to Buddhism has tended to focus on the large brick structures erected by Asoka ca. mid-3rd century BC. Some of the reasons for this are obvious: bricks survive and big piles of them are easy to find. The centuries have frequently buried sites under meters of soil, and sometimes only these large mounds still stand out. Some of the earlier work on these monuments showed that they were built around pre-existing monuments. Existing stupas were frequently enlarged in stages, each one encapsulating the previous structure. But on the whole, we have no archaeological evidence that predates Asoka. Coningham has dubbed this the "Mauryan Horizon", and the exciting thing is that these new discoveries appear to penetrate beyond that horizon.

At the temple site, the earlier team had stopped digging in the central area when they discovered a pavement edged by two rows of bricks of a different size and shape to the traditional Asokan bricks (which are broader and flatter than modern bricks). This pavement clearly ran under the foundations of the Asokan structure and was partly incorporated into the foundations. Below this pavement, the present team identified two previous "phases". Below the kerb itself was a series of (irregular) post-holes suggesting that the kerb followed the line of a previous wooden fence. Samples from the fill in these post holes were radiocarbon dated to 799-546 BC and 801-548 BC. Note the broad range of values here: 253 years in both cases. Still, even the upper dates are much earlier than any previously associated with Buddhist archaeology, if indeed the structure is Buddhist. A problem here is that if the post-holes are Buddhist and the 801 or 799 BC date is accurate, then we have to rewrite history much more drastically. The press releases carefully ignore the more distant (and less credible) end of the date range. 

Curiously, the video on the National Geographic site shows a team of archaeologists working in a much larger and deeper pit than the one described in the article. And just as Coningham is mentioning the words "wooden structure", the worker in the pit is lifting out a poorly preserved piece of wood. We need to be clear that the article describes a different pit, and no such intact pieces of wood were found. Any talk of a "structure" in the article is predicated on the "post holes" from which the wood had long rotted away. The idea that it was a tree shrine is predicated not on finding a tree, but on evidence of tree root channels and a micro-analysis of the soil.

The earliest phase in this site has been identified as a cultivated flood plain (1112) dating to the end of the second millennium BC. The people cultivating the land ca. 1600 BCE were certainly not Buddhists! They were probably not even Indo-European or speakers of an Indo-European language at this early date either.

In about the 7th century BC, an artificial mound appears to have been created using alluvial sediments. From the presence of post holes and the roof tile shards elsewhere at the site (reported by a previous excavation), the group deduce a covered structure. The lack of roof tiles in the present dig, which is central to the temple, suggests an open centre (however, the centre of the Asokan structure and the probable centre of the tree shrine do not coincide - see below). Various features of the soil excavated at the centre also suggest exposure to the weather. Features of the present site are similar to tree shrines in Sri Lanka. (1113). One of the gateways at Sanchi depicts a roofed structure with a tree protruding through the roof.

Superimposed on these layers are the later brick structures. It's unclear from the article what date they assign to the pre-Asoka kerb and pavement.

Discussion.

So what we have here is a possible tree shrine that might have had a wooden fence. This was replaced by a brick kerb and stone paved walkway, possibly associated with a roofed structure, and then this whole thing was built over by a large brick monument or temple (of which only the foundations remain), probably sponsored by Asoka, since nearby we also find a pillar edict. It is based on the discovery of the pillar edict that Lumbini is considered to birthplace of the Buddha.

The very first question to ask about these findings is this. Is there any indication that the post-holes or paving are Buddhist? And the answer is no. Here Coningham et al. seem to be entirely unaware of the critical discourse surrounding Buddhist historical narratives. Most historians now doubt that the Buddhist texts give us much insight into Buddhist history because we cannot tell what was composed when, nor what was simply passed on and what was invented. My own investigation into the name of the Buddha makes it clear that his name was invented at a time when Brahmanism was ascendant in North India (i.e. after Asoka). The early history of Buddhism is obscured by the lack of reliable witnesses.

It's important to note that tree shrines are not exclusively Buddhist, as Coningham et al admit:

"... [tree shrines] have received little archaeological attention. Perhaps this is even more surprising when one considers that tree shrines are generally held to have been a well-established and ancient form of ritual focus in South Asia, some scholars suggesting an antiquity stretching back to Neolithic times." (1116). 

Given this and the extraordinary claims made for insight into the "lifetime of the Buddha", one might have expected Coningham et al to provide some evidence that the layers they examined were in any way associated with Buddhist activity. But they do not. All we know is that by the time of Asoka, Lumbini was associated with the birth of the Buddha and the so-called Māyādevī Temple was built on top of an existing tree shrine or, as the article is careful to say, "a potential tree shrine" (1117).

It's clear from Buddhist literature that Buddhism in the earliest forms that we meet it is already syncretised with various other religions. It incorporates Vedic gods, for example. It incorporates a variety of animistic deities such as yakṣas and nāgas that play an active role in daily life. We even have a word for tree-spirits (rukkhadevatā) who live in special trees and are propitiated. The earliest Buddhism is a synthetic construct incorporating many elements, just as Tantra does a millennium later. Assimilation of Vedic places of worship was not possible, because apart from the family hearth where the sacred fire was kept burning, they built no temples. Animists, on the other hand, who worshipped trees or the spirits who dwelt in them, seem to have built fences around special trees to protect them. And this aspect of animism was taken up by Buddhists in their stone architecture some centuries later.

In my article on the possible Iranian origins for the Śākyas, I proposed that the major climate change in 850 BC might have been the event which caused them to migrate to the area north of Kosala that is now associated with Lumbini. If this is correct, then the area had been populated for some centuries before Buddhism arose. Indeed, Coningham et al show that the earliest phases in their investigation are associated with agriculture, suggesting the area was occupied by farmers for almost a millennium earlier than this (1681-1521 BC). My theory would make these the Śākya people and would have predicted that signs of agriculture would be evident by at least 850 BC. Though this does not preclude occupation much earlier by other groups.

That the site at Lumbini was occupied before Asoka is not a surprise. That it might have been a shrine likewise. Various theories predict this, including my own. But where is the evidence for Buddhism at this early date? There is none.

Another series of questions concerning the tree remain unanswered. If there was a tree shrine at Lumbini, which was treated as a sacred spot, how did it come to be built over by Asoka? Coningham et al mention the legend of cuttings taken from sacred trees and being grown elsewhere, and particular care being taken of such trees. Compare the situation at Bodhgaya, where the temple was built to one side of the tree shrine. What happened to the tree at Lumbini? Did the tree die of some natural cause? Or was it destroyed? According to legend, the Śākyas were slaughtered by a Kosalan king. If this reflects history, did that king also destroy their sacred sites? What was there when Asoka's temple was built apart from a kerbed path?

Post holes
click for larger image
from Coningham, p.1115

If we accept the idea that the Asokan structure was built on the site of a pre-existing tree shrine, then there are still some oddities. The kerb and path, which the authors take to surround a tree as the focus of a shrine, in fact occur in the centre of the Mayadevi Temple. The post holes (left), taken to mark out a sacred spot, are found to the east of the central chamber in an east-west line. The holes are far from regular in diameter or placement, but appear to be in a roughly straight line going right through the middle of the Asokan structure. Something is askew with the geometry here. The chamber C5 is not the centre of the tree shrine, but its edge. Thus, a lack of roof tile shards in C5 is not evidence for an open centre of any putative tree shrine.

This in turn raises another question. Why would the Asokan temple be constructed off to one side of the original shrine and not directly over it? If the tree represented, as the authors suggest, an axis mundi (1117-9), why did Asoka not follow the plan? His other monuments are often expansions of existing monuments that concentrically incorporate them. I would have expected the expert archaeologists to address these questions and provide plausible answers, but they do not.

Railing at the Bodhgaya tree shrine

The post hole sizes vary from ca. 5cm to more than 10cm; they are unevenly spaced; and they have cross-sections far from symmetrical. All this suggests that if the posts that fit them represented a fence, then it would have been a rather wonky fence. This means it would be quite unlike the railings erected by Buddhists around sacred trees and copied by later stone masons at sites like Sanchi. And it is the Sanchi stupas and Bodhgaya tree shrine (image right) which provide the model for the authors to interpret a line of post holes, barely more than 50 cm in length, as supporting a fenced enclosure. What seems more likely from the post holes uncovered is a roughly constructed stockade rather than an ornamental railing.

Perhaps it is a naive question, but I would like to have read more about the significance of finding charcoal in the post holes (which provided material for radiocarbon dating).

More than anything, I'm puzzled at being unable to find a date for the kerb and layers of paving in the article. They say (1108) that there were three successive layers of paving. Why were these not dated? If any part of pre-Asokan layers of the site was likely to be Buddhist, it was this paving, but they are overlooked in favour of the post holes, which are entirely unlike known Buddhist styles. There might have been good reasons for this, but they don't seem to have been stated.


Conclusion

There is no doubt whatever that the find at Lumbini is significant and fascinating. But Coningham et al (and Coningham himself) have overstated the claims for what this find signifies. In particular, it tells us nothing whatever about the dates of the Buddha. What it tells us about is the dates of human occupation and use of the site at Lumbini. This is intrinsically interesting, but is only an outline that requires considerable filling in. Specifically, it tells us nothing about who the occupants were. The authors of the article seem to have been carried away by the minutiae of the discovery and the assumption that all archaeology on an Asokan site is ipso facto Buddhist.

We have no indication that the underlying layers were in fact Buddhist. Such evidence as is presented— e.g. that the site may have been a tree shrine—is ambiguous, and in most cases the language of the article, contra the press release, is carefully hedged and qualified as one would expect in a scientific paper. Such questions as the alignment of the different layers at the site; the unknown fate of the tree in the shrine; and the type of fence suggested by the post holes; all seem to point away from a strong connection to the Asokan layer or a relationship with other Buddhist structures. If anything, the evidence suggests a discontinuity. If the suggestion is that the layers under the Asokan structure represent the activity of Buddhists, some extraordinary evidence will be required. Something far more typical of Buddhists must be linked with the layers in question. Until then, there is no question of revisiting the dates of the Buddha. There seems to be false reasoning linking all activity on the site with Buddhism because Asoka thought that Lumbini was the birthplace of the Buddha. Even the Buddhist tradition allows that the Śākyas had lived in the area for some time, so why should the activity be pre-Buddhist? Were the Śākyas unlikely to build tree shrines or even temples? Though I have speculated that they might have had residual Zoroastrian beliefs, we in fact know nothing for certain about the tribe the Buddha was born into. But they must have had beliefs and acted them out since all humans do.

I imagine that a great deal remains to be done and some interesting discoveries lie in wait beyond the "Mauryan Horizon". But we have learned nothing definite about the origins of Buddhism from this research, let alone about the lifetime of the Buddha. Normally, when confronting a gap between the evidence and the media reports, I would lambaste science journalists for sloppy reporting and a poor understanding of the scientific process. It is all too common. But in this case, the study itself has some flaws, and Professor Coningham seems to have played up the connection with the lifetime of the Buddha despite having no real evidence. Media reports largely seemed to regurgitate an undigested press release that can only have come from the authors or publishers of the article. I think this is unfortunate.

In these days when funding for research is thin and obtaining grants competitive, I can understand wanting to create a media buzz around a project and its published findings. How exciting to discover something about the historical Buddha! However, in this case we learned nothing about the historical Buddha, or even about historical Buddhism. I'd love to have some solid evidence one way or the other. I'm a great fan of evidence. As sophisticated as their archaeological methods might have been, the authors of the article have been let down by their hermeneutics and have produced interpretations that seem doubtful at best. That said, I do look forward to seeing what else they come up with in the future. There is a lot of scope for continuing archaeological investigations at Buddhist sites. 

~~oOo~~

Other responses:

• Dhīvan. The Tree Shrine at Lumbini. 
• Danny Fisher. Do Archaeological Discoveries at Lumbini Really Change the Estimated Date of the Buddha’s Birth?
• Richard Gombrich. 'Recent discovery of “earliest Buddhist shrine” a sham?' Tricycle. 12.12.13

All Dhammas

My text today is the Mūlaka or Roots Discourse, a short sutta from the Aṅguttara Nikāya. [1] In it the Buddha advises his bhikkhus what to say if asked by other wanderers (paribbājakā): what is the root (mūla) of all things? How do they arise (sambhava)? What is their origin (samudaya)? Where do they meet (samosaraṇo)? What is the foremost (pamukha)? Who should rule them (pateyya)? Who is higher (uttara)? [2] What is their essence (sāra) ? Where do they merge (ogadha)? And where do they conclude (pariyosāna)?

These kind of questions are quite common in the Buddhist texts. Once you see the answers you can see that they are cliché questions which elicit stock answers in formulaic terms. This kind of question actually has quite a long history in Indian religion. During the development of the Ṛgveda (which was composed ca 1500-1200 BCE probably on the basis of an existing oral tradition) the visionary poets (ṛṣi) would ask each other enigmatic questions. A good ṛṣi would be able to come back with an clever answer and might be selected to carry out the all important sacrifice. [3] These kinds of questions were called 'brahman' (grammatically neuter) . The same word came to mean the absolute enigma of existence: the Brahman which manifested as ātman in the microcosm of the human being. The personification of brahman was the creator God Brahmā (masculine). The name of the ritualist inheritors of the Vedic texts came to be 'brāhmaṇa', often Anglicised as Brahmin(s). Brahma also took on the mean of 'sacred' and was used in Buddhist terms like brahmavihāra, brahmacarya, and brahmaloka. The controversial bhikkhu who ordained four women recently is called Brahmavaṃso with no apparent irony - vaṃsa is 'race, clan, family, tradition, lineage' so the name means something like 'the race of the sacred' or having a 'sacred lineage'.

Such questioning became a feature of Indian religious life - holy men would challenge each other to answer enigmatic questions about the mysterious nature of existence, and sometimes wagered that they, and their followers, would all convert to the the religion of the one with the best answer. Obviously in the Mūlaka Sutta the procedure has become completely formulaic, but it echoes the ancient tradition. The questions asked here are quite reminiscent of similar questions in in the Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad, for instance, and it is thought by many scholars that the Buddha knew this strand of Brahminical teaching, if not the actual text that has come down to us.

So, onto the Buddha's answers:

chandamūlakā, āvuso, sabbe dhammā, manasikārasambhavā sabbe dhammā, phassasamudayā sabbe dhammā, vedanāsamosaraṇā sabbe dhammā, samādhippamukhā sabbe dhammā, satādhipateyyā sabbe dhammā, paññuttarā sabbe dhammā, vimuttisārā sabbe dhammā, amatogadhā sabbe dhammā, nibbānapariyosānā sabbe dhammā’ti

Desire is the root of all experiences, they arise from attention, their origin is contact, they meet in sensation; concentration is the foremost of experiences, all experiences are mastered by being mindful, wisdom is higher than all experiences, their essence is liberation, all experiences merge in the deathless, and conclude with nibbāna.

We need to pause here to consider what is meant by dhammā - the plural of dhamma. As I recently discussed there are many possible meanings. [4] However finding the word in the plural and in this context narrows it down considerably. It has to mean 'things' or 'mental objects'. Bhikkhu Bodhi opts for 'things'. This is natural since it follows tradition, but I wonder if it really makes sense? Is every 'thing' rooted in our desire - is a mountain, is that ball point pen? Well, no. So 'things' is more likely to refer to the subjective end of existence - hence I've translated it as 'experiences', though dhammas are the units of experience (I'm still searching for a good term for this - qualia?). Regular readers will be familiar with this quirk of mine, but I think it is worth insisting on because the Buddhadhamma makes more sense generally speaking if we adopt this point of view.

I want to look at this text in terms of the 'truths of the nobles' (ariyasacca) [5]: dukkha, samudaya, nirodha, magga.

The Buddha repeatedly stated what his teaching was about: it was not about God, or Heaven, or about any kind of absolute; it was not about how the universe began or will end. In fact he dismissed all of these subjects out of hand. The Buddha said that his teaching was about dukkha, it's cause, it's end, and how to end it. By dukkha the Buddha means all unenlightened experiences - ranging from physical pain, to the various disappointments of life, to existential dissatisfaction with the world of the senses. As I said in my commentary on Dhammapada verses 1 & 2: "Dukkha, then, is the opposite of nibbāna". In today's text the Buddha suggests that desire is at the root of all of this. Desire directs our attention which leads to contact with objects of the senses, which in turn give rise to sensations (vedanā). The text leaves unspoken the fact that it is sensations we crave, that we think of as able to last, able to satisfy desire. This is demonstrably not the case, but the idea is rooted very deeply. (I've speculated that in fact it gave an evolutionary advantage earlier in the history of the species - see Why Do We Suffer?). So these are the first two truths of the nobles: dukkha, samudaya - pain/disappointment/disatisfaction, and it's cause.

The Mūlaka Sutta deals with the third and fourth truths in the opposite order, ie with the way to end dukkha first, and then the cessation of it. Sticking to the usual order, how does this text deal with the cessation of dukkha? Firstly it says that wisdom (paññā) is higher (uttara) than other dhammas; that the essence of dhammas is liberation, they merge in the deathless and conclude with nibbāna. Paññā (Sanskrit prajñā) here is a dhamma - an object of the manas or mind. Contra to more mystical approaches to describing the enlightenment experience this is saying that there is an important cognitive aspect. Paññā is knowledge about the nature of dhammas, it is the meta-knowledge of the nature of all dhammas as anicca, dukkha and anatta - impermanent, unsatisfactory and insubstantial. Indeed the statement that the essence (sāra) of dhammas is liberation may well prefigure the Mahāyāna idea that all dharmas are marked by śūnyatā (sarvadharmāḥ śūnyatā lakṣanā - The Heart Sūtra). The conclusion of dhammas comes with the extinction (nibbāna) of desire. At first sight this could be considered nihilistic - it seems to be saying that all dhammas, all experiences simply cease - and we need to say something about this. However I think what is meant here is that dhammas all have this characteristic of anicca and that if we noticed this in any dhamma, we can see it in all dhammas and this leads us inexorably towards nibbāna - paraphrasing somewhat I might phrase it that the conclusion we come to is the extinction of greed, hatred and delusion. This extinction is the end-point of suffering and disappointment because we know the true nature of experience and cannot be disappointed by it.

The way to liberation is condensed into two statements in this text: concentration (samādhi) is the foremost of experiences, all experiences are mastered by being mindful (sati). We could go further and sum this up as meditation is the way to liberation. I'm aware that some people dispute this, but as a scholar it seems clear enough to me that the Buddha's completely consistent message is that meditation is indispensable. My experience suggests that concentration is invaluable as a prelude to insight reflections - else the requisite focus, clarity, continuity of purpose and positivity are simply not enough to go deeper. Here, all dhammas are mastered by sati 'recollection'. Sati can be taken as mindfulness (awareness) generally or as one of the ten recollection (sati or anusati) meditations. I think what's intended here is the twofold distinction between samatha and vipassana. Samādhi being synonymous with the former, and sati with the latter - I'm thinking especially of the Satipaṭṭhāna style meditations.

No doubt other ways of interpreting this text are possible. I'm always intrigued, however, by the way that one formulation can be used to understand another. I think the possibility is open because all of the various formulations represent various approaches to Buddhist practice which stem from a common principle. The underlying similarity has been much clearer since taking on board Sue Hamilton's observation that the Buddha was always talking about experience. Scholars call a way of interpreting texts a hermeneutic - from the Greek hermeneuein 'to interpret'. The God Hermes was a messenger and god of speech and writing. Our hermeneutic can condition what we understand a text to be saying. The experiential hermeneutic is a key that unlocks many doors.


Notes.

1. Mūlaka Sutta AN x.58; PTS A v.106. My translations. Also translated by Bikkhu Bodhi Numerical Discourses of the Buddha (anthology) p.250-1. Pāli text from http://www.tipitaka.org/romn/
   
2. uttara is the comparative degree of ud- (English 'up', or 'upwards') i.e. 'higher'; while uttama is the superlative 'highest'. Bodhi translates this as a superlative.
3. There are some superficial similarities here with the monastic debates held in Geluk monasteries.
4. See my trilogy on the word dharma/dhamma:
   
   • Dharma: Early History
     
   • Dharma: Buddhist Terminology
     
   • Dharma as Mental Event
5. Following K.R. Norman I take ariyasacca to be a tatpuruṣa compound meaning 'truth of the noble(s).'
   

image: Buddha head in banyan tree roots, Thailand. [original]

Reading Buddhist texts

The average Buddhist reader has a naive approach to Buddhist texts. At worst we take them at face value as being what the texts themselves say they are: the actual words of the Buddha. At best we are slightly suspicious about translations, and might compare more than one when studying a text.

We all interpret texts. The study of the methods we employ when we read a text, the presuppositions and assumptions we bring to text, and the ideas that underlie how we understand a text, is known as Hermeneutics. The hermeneutic we employ in reading a text, or what we believe the text to represent even, determines to a large extent what we understand a text to be saying. As an exercise in this post I'm going to write about some of my working assumptions in reading a Buddhist text.

I am strongly influenced by contemporary Buddhology. For instance on the basis of scholarship - linguistic, historical, and text critical - I do not believe that the words preserved in Buddhist texts can have been literally spoken by the historical Buddha. The evidence is overwhelmingly that the Buddha did not speak Pāli or Sanskrit or any of the other languages in which texts are preserved. Therefore the texts have been translated at least once. Equally I do not accept that all of the teachings literally came out of the mouth of one person. The Buddhist doctrine evolved over time and new ideas and practices were added at each step along the way. Clearly some texts were written after the lifetime of the Buddha (I do accept the high likelihood of there having been a historical Buddha).

The Buddhist texts were preserved as an oral tradition for several centuries, and there is little or no evidence for the use of sophisticated mnemonic techniques as used by the Brahmins to preserve the integrity of the text. Also as you read the texts it's clear that some passages have been inserted rather crudely by some later editor. Presumably other more skilled editors were at work. Then there are differences between the Pāli texts and surviving parallels in other languages. Comparing the Pāli and Gāndhārī Dhammapadas for instance one can immediately see that they are far from identical. Some doctrines have been played down by some schools -0 such as the practice of mettā in Theravada. So Buddhist texts can not have the status of divine revelation.

One problem that emerges out of assuming that all the teachings came at once is that there are contradictions. In attempts to resolve these difficulties Buddhists have historically had to make some teachings provisional, and others ultimate. But this is problematic because each text proclaims itself to be the ultimate and final teaching of the Buddha, only to be superseded as something new emerges. The centuries have left us with many unstable towers of texts each one claiming to be the final teaching. Sangharakshita has said that there are no higher teachings, only deeper realisations. Following Sangharakshita I think it is time to dismantle the hierarchies of value and accept that texts emerged over time. If a text is profound, then it is profound. The fact that some later disciple wrote it on the basis of their own experience should not lessen it's value. in other words are we interested in truth or lineage?

Another important aspect of my hermeneutic is that I see texts as idealised. Texts are unreliable guides to history because they are what some people thought the ideal was at some point in time. We need an historical perspective which is not available from the texts themselves in order to fully appreciate that this is so. Greg Schopen for instance, in a long career of iconoclastic debunking of sacred cows, has emphasised the point that epigraphical and archaeological evidence often provides flat contradictions to the texts. Monks not only frequently handled money, for instance, but in at least one case actually printed it! Generally speaking we could say that a text represents the social and spiritual ideal as it was conceived by a particular community at the time it was written. The Pāli commentaries to the Suttas for instance tell us more about Buddhism in 5th century CE Sri Lanka, than they do about 5th century BCE India. They are still useful for understanding the texts they comment on, especially in terms of philology, but must be read cautiously for historical value. In fact some scholars have concluded that Buddhist texts have nothing useful to say about the history of Buddhism. This is going too far I think, but highlights the dilemma.

Many scholars now point to influences in the Buddhadharma. It seems pretty clear that many early Buddhist teachings are in response to Brahminical and Jain religious discourse for instance, and that Tantric Buddhism was in dialogue with Śaivism. I have found one or two examples of this myself, but Prof. Richard Gombrich has lead the scholarly investigation of the sources of the Buddha's ideas. Some concepts can't really be understood without reference to Vedic or Vedantic doctrine. The clearest example of this ātman (Pāli attā) which has it's roots in the general religious discourse of the day, a discourse which is seldom if ever replicated in the modern West. This should not be confused with the early 20th century idea, also popular with Hindu scholars, that Buddhism is a kind of reformed or even unreformed Hinduism. The point is that the Buddha responded to his audience which was frequently deeply versed in Vedic lore. He had to communicate in terms which would be understood by his audience - though he frequently redefines words as he goes. But there are also examples of Buddhist and Hindu texts (for example the Dhammapada and the Mahābharata) which draw on a common pool of religious or moral stories. Aspects of the Pāli canon, the obvious worship of yakṣas for instance do not seem especially Buddhist, but relate to what the people around the Buddhists believed.

We must also remember that Indian religious traditions interacted in a way that it quite foreign to the West. In an earlier post [Religion in India and the West] I compared the Indian religious attitude to the Microsoft business model. Each Indian tradition has adopted and adapted ideas from the others. Where one tradition begins to dominate, the minority religions will borrow their ideas, symbols, and practices. During the time when the Tantra emerged amongst the ruins of the Gupta Empire in the 6th century, many different traditions were synthesised into a grand new pattern incorporating various strands of Buddhism, Vedic ritual, Śaiva ritual and iconography, Vaiṣṇava devotional practices and so on. Westerners have tended to characterise this as a degeneration. Contemporary scholarship has exposed the origins of this attitude in Protestant criticisms on the Catholic church based on the model of the Roman Empire. In fact Tantric Buddhism was a much needed revitalisation of Buddhism, but one which may have had too little influence on mainstream Buddhism to save it from collapse. The decline of Buddhism is often attributed to the invasion of Islamic forces from Persia, but they were only the final nail in the coffin of a moribund institution. The vigour of Tantric Buddhism is obvious in Tibet. In Japan Tantric Buddhism dominated for 400 years, but was eclipsed to some extent by indigenous forms such as Zen and Jodo Shin Shu - although not many people know that Shingon is still the largest Buddhist sect in Japan.

Finally I would say that over recent times I have become increasingly suspicious of translations. Translations often hide a multitude of sins. There are huge problems with representing the intellectual content of Buddhism in English. English language and culture is vastly different from Indian. Often the connotations of an English word used as a translation of a Buddhist technical term are entirely unhelpful. For instance it is quite misleading to translated Dharma as "Law", but this frequently happens. The translator must make a large number of discriminations and decisions in translating a text. Just as in English a word in Pāli or Sanskrit may have a range of meanings (polysemic). Some words are highly polysemic and deciding which of sometimes a dozen or more potential senses are indicate depends on how well the translator knows the language (and English), how deeply they understand the Dharma, and

We need also to be aware that what is available in English translation is not the entire corpus of Buddhist texts. While the Pāli canon has been translated more or less entirely, the older translations are unreliable. In the case of Māhayāna Sūtras we have only a small proportion in English. It is most likely that this has skewed our understanding of the development and emphases of the Mahāyāna. [see also Which Mahāyāna Texts?] Many scholars think for instance that the influence of the White Lotus Sūtra in India was negligible, and that it is a rather idiosyncratic text.

I hope that all of this skepticism does not add up to cynicism. But it's clear that I express a lot more doubt about the provenance of texts and the uses that they are put to, than most of my peers and colleagues. I find that I continue to be fascinated by Buddhist texts and textual studies. I have also found that my studies inform and enrich my practice of Buddhism. I suppose I want to call for an intelligent and informed approach to texts. I am far more intellectual than most of my peers and don't expect them to adopt my rather intellectual approach, but I do hope that if you've read this then you might spend a bit of time examining your beliefs about the texts. Where do your beliefs come from, and on what are they based? Are their elements of blind faith in there for instance? It's good to be aware of biases, of likes and dislikes, and to see how they operate to shape your experience of the world.

Often we are looking for certainty and there is a lingering desire for the texts to be the Absolute Truth (paramartha satya). This is both generally true of humans, but especially true in the post-christian west where ideas of absolutes, and concrete answers remain in our psyches. Since Absolute Truth cannot be summed up or put into words we should be at least a bit suspcious of texts. What words are good for is giving us the recipe. They cannot give us the experience of eating the cake.


image: Sinhalese Buddhist text. Jayarava on Flickr.