Chronology and Buddhism

gold dinar
Samudra Gupta  335-375 CE
Coin Indian

One of the major problems for historians of Buddhism as an Indian religion is that there are no agreed chronological terms. The disagreement extends to Indian history generally. Those terms that we do use in Buddhist Studies are emic (emerge from the received tradition based on traditional concerns) and sectarian, at least in origin. I've already complained that scholars of Buddhism appear to be in love with their subject and therefore far too reluctant to be critical in the way that interests me (and other people who seek to break away from received traditions). There's no significant scholarly support for attempts by contemporary Buddhists to move beyond the limitations of received tradition.

In the past I have used the terms "early Buddhism" and "pre-sectarian" Buddhism, but both of these are problematic. Early Buddhism is, in effect, simply a euphemism for Hīnayāna. When discussing early Buddhism, we almost always exclude the early development of the that other prominent emic category Mahāyāna, even though these clearly over lap with the time period covered by early Buddhism. Some significant new work has been published recently on the early Mahāyāna showing that it overlapped with the mainstream of Buddhism for centuries, before becoming the mainstream. Those who study early Mahāyāna often exclude late "Hīnayāna" developments from their considerations, even though a figure like Nāgārjuna clearly looks back as much as he looks forward. Some of these divisions are being breached, but the growing prominence of Theravāda bhikkhus in the study of early Buddhism has also reinforced some divisions. We conveniently forget, for example, that the Chinese Āgama texts were not translated until the 5th century. They were not foremost in the minds of missionaries from India for the first four or five centuries, but were translated only when some attempt at comprehensiveness was being made. They were translated as an afterthought. Some so-called Mahāyāna movements are just as divergent from say, Prajñāpāramitā, as Theravāda orthodoxy is. Pure Land Buddhism for example has almost nothing in common with Prajñāpāramitā Buddhism. So emic rubrics are often deceptive if used without due consideration of what period of history the label is being applied to. And at present we apparently have no way of stepping out of the various traditions and categorising history objectively. All our terminology seems to come from within the traditions.

"Pre-sectarian" is a term that emerges from Buddhist narratives of how Buddhism developed. To the best of my knowledge there is absolutely no evidence for a pre-sectarian phase of Buddhism. The idea is simply based on accepting the story that the texts themselves tell - that the stories in the Nikāyas were all told by the Buddha (even though some of them clearly were not). The canons of Buddhist texts, which we take to be the earliest written accounts of Buddhism, contradict each other along sectarian lines. This is so evident that an attentive scholar can make a reliable attribution of which sect the various Chinese Āgama translations were associated with. The Pāḷi version is full of internal contradictions and multiple versions of stories suggesting pre-existing sectarian divides. Something similar emerges when scholars study the early history of Christianity, for example reviewing Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, by Elaine Pagels, Frank Thomas Smith, comments

"What Pagels did not find during the course of her research was a “golden age” of purer and simpler early Christianity. It was not monolithic, but included a variety of voices and an extraordinary range of viewpoints, among saints and heretics alike—the “saints” being the ones who won. From a historical point of view, then, there is no “real Christianity”." 

Every scrap of evidence we have for the earlier phases of Buddhism, show it to be pluralistic. The idea that it has an underlying unity is something I now question. It not only seems more plausible to me to posit an underlying pluralism, but one can see that the idea of an underlying unity comes from within the tradition itself and it not evaluated critically. Commenting on this issue and citing the Pagels's book as a case in point, Johannes Bronkhorst says:

"This directs our attention to an important feature of religious traditions: they may preserve inconsistencies, but are at the same time likely to explain them away. This observation should be heeded by those who point to traditional interpretations of seeming inconsistencies." 

I have pointed out a number of these inconsistencies in my writing. Buddhist metaphysics and Buddhist morality require two different approached to personal continuity, so that some texts assert personal continuity and some deny it. The doctrine of karma is not fully reconciled with paṭiccasamuppāda because one denies the possibility of action at a temporal distance and one requires it. Another type of inconsistency is the great variety of nidāna sequences supposedly representing paṭiccasamuppāda. Were there 5, 7, 10, 11, or 12 nidānas? Or the later imposition of the Three Lifetimes Interpretation. Even the theories to reconcile these differences only produced more divisions. Buddhists simply deny that these inconsistencies exist or resort to hand-waving explanations that serve only to divert attention. As Noam Chomsky has said,

“The system protects itself with indignation against a challenge to deceit in the service of power, and the very idea of subjecting the ideological system to rational inquiry elicits incomprehension or outrage, though it is often masked in other terms.”

We see a steady stream of apologetics from religious Buddhists, particularly from the Theravādins arguing for such propositions as the "authenticity of the texts" or "the truth of rebirth". Authenticity only bears on the authority of the texts, and authority is only interesting when one is using the texts to legitimate an idea or practice. Anthropologists are interested in how religious people use the concept of authority to justify their behaviour, and historians might trace the use of texts as sources of legitimacy, the assertion that the texts are "authentic" (i.e. are what they represent themselves to be) is a religious concern. And one that refuses to die despite the absolute absence of evidence to back up any argument.

The term "pre-sectarian" is based on an assumption rather than evidence. There is no evidence for a pre-sectarian phase of Buddhism apart from the traditional religious hagiographies of the founder of Buddhism. And remember, that founder's name is something we cannot be sure of, and that man is not mentioned in any contemporary literature outside Buddhism. He may not have existed. And the first evidence of Buddhism is centuries after the putative time of the founder.

Similarly, notations based on nation states or ethnicity are exclusive in unhelpful ways since Buddhism often took centuries to develop distinctive national character if it ever did. Sometimes the apparent unity in a nation is due to failure to see the differences. In the case of China, influences to and from India flowed until the end of Buddhism in India; Chinese Buddhism was far from static. China is diverse in so many ways, including in the forms of Buddhism that it adopted and produced. In the West we have this unfortunate tendency to talk about China as a relatively uniform place, with, for example a Chinese language when in fact China is at least as linguistically diverse as Europe is. The number of people I meet who are unaware that Japanese and Chinese languages are not even in the same language family is embarrassing. Anyone talking about Buddhism regularly, has probably experienced the cognitive dissonance of referring to a Westerner as a "Tibetan Buddhist" - the person is not Tibetan, the Buddhism is. But it's not as though Tibetan Buddhism is uniform enough to be a homogeneous category. It isn't. It's simply that we are unaware of the diversity. Making the Tibetan diaspora seem more unified that it really is helps the campaign against Chinese rule for example. It's much snappier to refer to the "Tibetan people" and their "leader" the Dalai Lama than to acknowledge the diversity and sharp divisions that existed before the common enemy appeared to unite them.

Another category widely used these days is "Mainstream". It's used to refer to non-Mahāyāna Buddhism, as a substitute for early Buddhism (because that term is widely acknowledged to be problematic). If we look at Indian Buddhism in the two centuries spanning the beginning of the common era, what we see is that at all times the Mahāyāna in a wide variety of forms is present and grows in importance. The Abhidharma project is also present and perhaps dominant throughout, but divided along multiple sectarian lines, with most sects ignored by modern scholars (partly because we lack sufficient information about them to pay attention to). But is the Abhidharma "early"? Not early, early, for sure. And it continues to be studied by monks right down to the present. Some parts of Greater India harbour progressive and even transgressive innovators while others harbour the deepest conservatism. At the beginning of this period the mainstream is probably Abhidharma oriented, depending on where one looks, but by the end of the period the balance has shifted towards some form of Mahāyāna and Mahāyāna is itself beginning to coalesce as a distinct approach to Buddhism from a series of unrelated cults. So Mainstream Buddhism is meaningless unless it is qualified with a time and place and a keen understanding of the history of Buddhism in that time and place. What was mainstream in 1st Century Gandhāra was almost certainly not mainstream at the same time in Magadha or South India. Two centuries either side of that date completely different forms of Buddhism might have been mainstream. So mainstream turns out not to be a viable short-hand either, though it is as widely used nowadays as early Buddhism.

I've been reading some Chinese Buddhist history recently, and in these texts the authors simply adopt the time periods of Chinese history generally without privileging the history of Buddhism the way Buddhist Studies scholars do when discussing Indian Buddhism. I think the lack of suitable time period notation for Buddhism may reflect a lack in the study of Indian history. In order to remedy this I'd like to propose a basic notation for Buddhist history which avoids emic categories. In this I draw on the terminology that has origins in the study of the European history of ideas as it has been adapted to Chinese historiography.

I began discussing Buddhist historiography and dates in an earlier essay: The Very Idea of Buddhist History. Some of my comments here assume that the comments made there, particularly with respect to dates, are familiar.

The origins of Buddhism are on the margins of the second urbanisation and thus the emergence of the second urbanisation is a key milestone in the history of Buddhism. There is considerable evidence for the second urbanisation, which supports the Two Cultures hypothesis promoted by Geoffrey Samuel and Johannes Bronkhorst amongst others (one culture being Brahmaṇa and the other Śrāmaṇa). If there was a single founder figure, he lived in this period, though I suspect that the Śrāmaṇa culture gave rise to new ideas collectively and only in retrospect were they ascribed to a founder figure. There is no archaeological evidence for Buddhism in this period, no external corroborating evidence of any kind. The only evidence for Buddhism at this period is that texts appear to be set during the second urbanisation: walled cities are featured for example.

As I have said, above, to the best of my knowledge there is no evidence for a pre-sectarian phase of Buddhism. The earliest evidence we have is already pluralistic, though the texts do contain founding myths which suggest unity, the actual diversity of the basic teachings on any subject suggest that if there ever was a unified period it was very short-lived indeed. This is not inconsistent with the primitive legends of the founder teaching disciples and sending them off to teach on the basis of their own experience. On this Canonical account, if there is any truth to it, diversification must have begun with a year of the founding of Buddhism as each of these teachers expressed the experience of awakening in their own terms.

I have argued that we have a predisposition or bias to see the past as simpler than the present, and to see the past converging. This is partly because our view of the past is condition by the metaphor of the tree. This view biases us towards seeing convergence in the past. I've argued that the tree is the wrong metaphor for many evolutionary processes, including the development of Buddhism, and that a braided stream would be a far better metaphor: See Evolution: Trees and Braids (27 Dec 2013) and Extending the River Metaphor for Evolution (28 Mar 2014).

The founder myth suffers from confirmation bias. For example the existence of two contradictory narratives of the Buddha leaving home doesn't undermine our confidence in the myth. The fact that Gotama is an extremely unlikely name for a non-Brahmin, because it is a high-prestige Brahmin gotra name associated with the composition of the Ṛgveda and the lineage of teachers of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad; or that the name Siddhattha is never found in the Pāḷi texts does not undermine our confidence that the Buddha's name was Siddhattha Gotama; or that no one in the Buddha's family is called Gotama except his mother and aunt (in a culture were women did not take their husband's gotra name) despite it being natural for his father to be referred to as Gotama if it were the gotra name of his family (in which case our man would be Gotamaputra or some other diminutive). And so on. Contradictory evidence is simply ignored, and its difficult even to get it published.

Evidence external to the texts emerges only around the time of Asoka, the India emperor who aped his Persian counterparts in creating inscriptions asserting his sāsanā or edicts. The stone and pillar edicts mention Buddhists and Buddhism for the first time. Asoka can be dated fairly accurately by his naming of four Bactro-Greek kings in edicts. He must have lived and ruled in the mid 3rd Century BCE. More or less all dates for events in Indian history before the Common Era are given by some assumed relationship to Asoka. Note that Greg Schopen has insistently pointed out that where we have external evidence it almost inevitably contradicts the texts. Traditionalists, scholar bhikkhus like Sujato, hotly contest Schopen's account of early history and seek to discredit his conclusions and assert the "authenticity" of the texts. Perhaps the arguments on both sides are tendentious, but those with no vested interest can see merits and faults on both sides of this divide. My view is that in studying history the most important principle is not to take any tradition on its own terms. Any historical conclusion based solely on Buddhist texts can only ever be provisional despite what apologists for the tradition would have us believe. The archaeology associated with Asoka provides the first evidence for Buddhism, some 150 years after the new consensus date for the death of the Buddha ca. 400 BCE (a date based solely on readings of texts!)

From the period following Asoka, with the collapse of the Mauryan Empire and the rise of smaller political units and the rise of a Brahmanical social hegemony, the basic forms of Buddhism as we know it begin to emerge. Large-scale, settled monasteries, supported by rulers and wealthy merchants became the central institution of Buddhism. The religion is vigorously evangelical and begins to spread to the edges of the Mauryan Empire and beyond. Buddhist texts are formalised, canonised, and begin to be written down within a a century or two of Asoka. Monastic rules exist in a number of recensions and continue to diverge. The different Abhidharma projects, partially aimed at fixing problems inherited from the formative period. These problems are also now denied by Buddhists, but were once the subject of considerable debate and controversy, as evidence from intra-Buddhist polemics that have survived. From the time of Asoka we begin to see what we might call Classical Buddhism emerging in texts and archaeology.

I therefore would like to call the period before Asoka "Pre-classical" and the period beginning with Asoka "Classical". The Pre-classical period was marked by oral transmission of texts, a minimal footprint in terms of social or cultural change (no archaeology). We know nothing for sure about this period in history, but certain features of the texts suggest that they were composed after the second urbanisation had started and before Asoka. This is about as much as we can say.

In Classical Buddhism, ideas are moving beyond the founder myth. At the same time see the emergence of conservative codifications of dogmas and progressive innovations aimed at getting to grips with the problems inherited from the pre-Classical period. The Classical Period includes the development of sectarian Abhidharmas and the emergence of distinct Mahāyāna sects. It was the period when missionary activity spread Buddhism beyond the limits of Asoka's empire into South India and Sri Lanka in the south, into Burma and South East Asia to the East, in West and North into Persia and Central Asia. However, it was also the period when Brahmanism was beginning to dominate the intellectual and religious landscape across Greater India and leave a massive footprint on Buddhism as well. The roots of Mahāyāna are presumably already present and various forms of Mahāyāna practice emerge alongside the mainstream, in the same monastic centres, initially as a series of disparate and distinct cults that have little in common. Standalone sūtra cults focussed on the Saddharmapuṇḍarikā for example are in existence and mature and coalescing into the Mahāyāna. By the end of the Classical Period the era of major sūtra composition is also over.  Key figures of the Classical period include Nāgārjuna, Vasubandhu, and Buddhaghosa. With these thinkers, Buddhist thought begins to drift away from Canonical texts as primary sources and towards sāstric or commentarial texts. Sūtras continue to be important of course, but they are now interpreted through the lens of sectarian śāstra. A pattern that continues down to the present. 

A feature of the Classical period is the gradual adoption of Sanskrit as the lingua franca of India, influenced in part by the hegemony Brahmins now asserted over India. Buddhists began to ignore the canonical injunctions against translating their story into Sanskrit (in favour of the vernacular) and joined other groups in adopting the language. Texts in Prakrit are translated into Sanskrit. New texts are composed in Sanskrit, sometimes a mongrel Sanskrit-Prakrit hybrid, but increasingly often in compliant Pāṇinian Sanskrit. The Pāḷi tradition dies out in India, but continues in Sri Lanka, Burma and South East Asia; with Burma and SE Asia apparently receiving their texts directly from South India rather than via Sri Lanka (according to Alex Wynne).

I locate the end of the Classical Period at the collapse of the Gupta Empire under pressure from Huns, in the mid to late 6th Century. This was the first of a series of incursions from the West that would contribute to the elimination of Buddhism from India. With the end of the Classical Period we move into the Medieval Period (essentially this means a "middle" period between the ancient, or Classical period, and modernity). Chinese history is usefully divided in early and late Medieval periods which may be relevant to India as well. The collapse of the Gupta Empire seems to have been particularly cataclysmic for India. As narrated by Ronald Davidson the result was a breakdown in civil order and trade routes with resulting isolation of cities in stretches of lawless wilderness. If we take the elimination of Buddhism in India to be a key milestone in the history of Buddhism, which occurred sometime in the 12th century, this would mark the horizon between early and late Medieval Period. By the late Medieval, Buddhism is wholly non-Indian and the development into different sects based on local culture is no longer anchored by developments in India.

By the early medieval period Mainstream Buddhism is thoroughly Mahāyāna. Whether there are any non-Mahāyāna schools left by this time is moot because the central institutions, such as the large monasteries, are all dominated by Mahāyāna practitioners. However in the Medieval Period there is a strong challenge to the Mainstream from the emergence of Tantra. Before too long, the Mainstream is Tantric. And this is the essential problem with the term Mainstream: what it means depends on what time period is under discussion.

Buddhism reached out beyond India in the classical period, becoming established, at least amongst the elites, as far afield as Korea, Japan, and Thailand. Tibet however was converted during the early Medieval Period. And this leads to some very significant differences between Buddhism in Tibet and surrounding regions compared to East Asia. Also the Silk Route broke down around the 8th century with the expansion of Islam into Central Asia. This meant that Buddhism in China and its vassal states ceased to be anchored in India before the eventual demise of Indian Buddhism. Japanese Tantra, for example, did not incorporate significant developments in Tantra that are epitomised by the Hevajra Tantra: the rise to importance of female figures and sexual symbolism. The last phase of Indian Buddhism is dominated by Tantra and developments from the Tantric milieu. Tantra rises to become a major force in Indian religion generally, alongside Mīmāṃsā, Vedanta, Yoga, Vaiṣṇavism, and Śaivism. Buddhist Tantra draws on Śaivism, increasingly as time goes on. 

So the periods of history as I discern them are:

700 - 250 BCE	Pre-Classical (second urbanisation up till Asoka; no direct evidence of Buddhism)
250 BCE - 500 CE	Classical (First evidence of Buddhism, formalisation of the basic tenets, move to Sanskrit and Śāstra, ends with collapse of Gupta Empire).
500 - 1200	Early Medieval (from the end of the Gupta to the elimination of Buddhism from India)
1200 - 1700	Late Medieval (Buddhism as purely non-Indian phenomena, until the substantial presence of European colonialism and imperialism)
1700 - present	Modern (the European discovery of Buddhism, influence of West on Buddhism and vice versa, post-colonialism)

All of the dates are approximate and do not represent hard boundaries, but milestones that serve only to divide history into manageable chunks for us to think and write about. Such periodization is always notional and to some extent arbitrary. If we are ever to understand Buddhist history as a whole we need to step outside the emic, sectarian straight-jacket and study Buddhism both synchronically (all the Buddhism being practised and thought about at a particular time) and diachronically (the history of ideas across time). With diachronic studies we definitely need to pay more attention to the long term, tracing how ideas change as we move from period to period. Central ideas like karma change considerably, for example, and yet we still tend to talk about karma as a unitary phenomenon with a single well understood definition. This impression of uniformity is completely false. The doctrine of karma was the locus of considerable competition and innovation for Buddhists. And in synchronic studies we need to break out of sectarian categories to reflect the pluralism of Buddhism more accurately.

Particularly we need to stop thinking of the Pali texts as "Theravādin" or representative of the Pre-Classical period. Of course we have more texts in Pāḷi than other Indic languages, but this fact has been transformed into a measure of significance or importance. After the Common Era the Pāḷi texts played almost no role in the history of Buddhism in mainland India. Serious money is now going into the study and translation in English of the Chinese texts, which might help to correct this imbalance, but these texts are being studied by people with a vested interest in the idea of the historical unity of Buddhism. Big money is also involved in producing a proper critical edition of the Pāḷi Canon, but this project is sponsored by a cult, the leader of which is being prosecuted for financial irregularities. One gets the sense that the Gāndharī texts might just be languishing because the preservation and conservation costs means that they are far more expensive to work with. Certainly information about the Gāndhārī texts we have continues to emerge at a trickle - we do not even have published texts for all of them yet, let alone translations and studies. And since they are the oldest Buddhist manuscripts in existence they ought to be a priority. 

My suggestion may mean that we have to avoid getting bogged down in details and try to get an overview of the themes in each time period. It may also require subdividing time periods to avoid information overload. The Classical Period is particularly dense for example, and may need, for example an early and late sub-division. But the divisions ought to be based on major historical milestones rather the sectarian or purely emic categories. And ideally any synchronic study will take in the breadth of Buddhist ideas and practices current in these times, rather than as now focussing on particular sects or individuals. We also need to more closely link the history of Buddhism to the history of India generally, to see Buddhism in its social and political context.

One can sympathise with all those Nāgārjuna scholars who are still trying to puzzle out what the man was getting at (mostly without trying to replicate the kinds of experiences that informed and underpinned his work), but it seems to happen at the expense of the broader history of Buddhism in the second century. And since his principle commentators are in fact Medieval he tends to be tacitly time-shifted to a later period. Nāgārjuna with respect to his own commentators is somehow more important than Nāgārjuna in relation to his own contemporaries. On the contrary Vasubandhu is often seen to be arguing with his contemporaries and his work is over-cited as representing their views when that can be misleading. Buddhists are notoriously bad at misrepresenting their enemies, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist.

There are barriers to this approach. The Classical texts are preserved in Pāli, Chinese, Sanskrit and Gāndharī, as well as a few in Central Asian languages. To do a thorough job one must have access to the texts in their original languages. Though if one was to start early with Classical Sanskrit and Mandarin, adding Pāli, Gāndharī and Middle (Buddhist) Chinese as required, this ought to be manageable. After Sanskrit, Chinese grammar is mercifully simple, even if the writing is not. Scholars of classical Greece often learn Latin and Greek from a relatively early age and may already have a degree of fluency before starting an undergraduate degree. Ideally we'd have scholars who learn Sanskrit and Mandarin in high-school with a view to studying Buddhist history at university. This is unlikely to happen in Western Countries any time soon. 

Perhaps because of the language requirements, and with having to start from scratch at university, so many of us focus on philology and philosophy, or perhaps anthropology, there are too few trained historians working in the field of Buddhist studies. The lack of research based on sound historical principles definitely hampers progress in understanding Buddhism. Perhaps we need to think in terms of interdisciplinary teams of researchers rather than the typical individual jack-of-all-trades who knows Indic languages fairly well, but has little or no training in history or anthropology?

Lastly a scheme like this means nothing in isolation. Adoption of an historical schema unilaterally, especially by someone who is not part of the mainstream, will change very little. Influential academics need to acknowledge the problem first (by which I mean the problem of trying to discuss Buddhist history in terms of emic terms and categories). There is some progress on this as many scholars are aware of the problematic nature of how we categorise and periodize Buddhism, but solutions to date have been piecemeal, such as using "mainstream" to replace the euphemism "early Buddhism", when we all just mean Hīnayāna but are trying to avoid the unpleasant connotations of that foul word. Even if someone does set out a better alternative, getting a majority Buddhist Studies scholars to adopt this new scheme is likely to be difficult. Even so the current situation is confused and confusing and the more of us who say so, the more likely the situation is to change. 

~~oOo~~

The Ambivalent Religion: An Alternate History of Mahāyānism.

Some weeks ago I summarised a bunch of recent research on the origins of the Mahāyāna. It turns out to have been an amorphous movement made up from a number of distinct cults, to have emerged from within Mainstream Buddhism, from within Mainstream Buddhist monasteries, and to have taken many centuries to coalesce as "the Mahāyāna" (with a possible name change due to a misunderstanding as Sanskrit took over from Prakrit). Eventually, some forms of Mahāyāna Buddhism became the mainstream in North India, others probably remained as outliers.

A lot of my recent work has involved identifying internal contradictions in early Buddhist doctrines. At first I didn't go looking for these, it was just that when I started paying close attention they stood out. And at first I had no intellectual context for them because all the historical narratives are of unity and coherence increasing as we go back in time. In trying to get some background I realised that the problems I was seeing were once live issues for Buddhists. They recorded some of their arguments about these matters in texts. While each sect was developing it own attempts to reconcile the contradictions, they were also trying to discredit their Buddhist opposition. Generally speaking, if you take any given formulation of Buddhist doctrine there is a record of a concerted effort by other Buddhists to discredit it. 

In previous essays and a published article (Attwood 2014), I explored how some Mahāyānists tinkered with the theory of karma, doing away with the inevitability of consequences and introducing some mythology about how meeting the Buddha could eliminate evil karma, as well as a number of religious exercises which could do the same. In this essay, I want to explore another aspect of the way Mahāyānists reacted to the doctrine of karma. 

I've seen some secularists argue that karma and rebirth are not essential to Buddhism. But my view is that karma and rebirth are central to classical and traditionalist accounts of Buddhism. Indeed, I've shown that as problems with the metaphysics of Buddhism became apparent, in the form of a conflict between karma and pratītyasamutpāda, that Buddhists refined their accounts of pratītyasamutpāda to ensure the continued working of karma and rebirth. They were not beyond tinkering with karma as well, but I will endeavour to show in this essay, that what they have in mind in doing so, was concerns about rebirth and the ending of rebirth. 

In their most basic forms karma and rebirth enact a twofold myth common to many religions: the myth of a just world, and the myth of an afterlife (in which justice is enacted). In previous essays, I've showed that the two almost inevitably go together because as the world of everyday experience is clearly unjust, so the other world is naturally conceived of as just. To some extent, this emerges from the basic concepts and metaphors associated with ontological dualism (see Metaphors and Materialism). For Buddhists, karma is the supernatural monitor that "sees" all actions and ensures that we get the fate we earn. In India that fate is experienced primarily as repeated death and life; or in escape from repeated death and life. 

However, in trying to ensure that no permanent entity persisted in the process, Buddhists created an internal contradiction, first explicitly noted by Nāgārjuna: karma requires personal continuity to be the basis of an effective morality (we have to feel a connection to the consequences of our actions or we don't restrain our unwholesome urges); but pratītyasamutpāda, as conceived by early Buddhists, denies personal continuity, thus cutting a person off from the results of their actions. This basic self-contradiction led to a number of innovations prominent amongst which is the doctrine of momentariness adopted by the Theravādin Abhidhammikas and the Yogācārins. 

Early Mahāyāna theorists created a whole other problem for themselves. The Buddhist afterlife (seen from the moral point of view) is a hybrid of the two principle types of afterlife that I identified in my taxonomy. Without an effort, one cycles around dying and being reborn according to one's actions. However, with effort one can be liberated from this cycle and escape from being reborn. Buddhists were extremely reluctant to say much more about nirvāṇa other than that it meant not being reborn. They produced a few metaphors, largely drawing on standard North Indian imagery (cool caves, dried up streams, lotus flowers, etc) of the kind that crops up across the board in Indian literature. The frequent refrain of those who achieve the goal of Buddhism in early Buddhist texts is that they will not be reborn. But the specific question of what happens to a tathāgata (one who is "in that state") after death is inexplicable (avyākṛta).

As an aside in one of the Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad creation stories, just after Brahman has created the world and the gods we find:

tad dhedaṃ tarhy avyākṛtam āsīt | tan nāmarūpābhyām eva vyākriyatāsau nāmāyam idaṃrūpa iti | BU 1.4.7

At that time this world was undifferentiated (avyākṛta); it was distinguished only in terms of name and form (nāmarūpa): [the one with] this name [has] this form.

So it's possible that the choice of words used when refusing to discuss the post-mortem state of the tathāgata was borrowed from this Vedic myth.

In the generations after the Buddha, the stories about him became inflated: he became more magical, more knowledgeable, more powerful. All the worldliness of the Buddha was gradually eliminated from the stories about him. The Buddha became superhuman and took on more and more godlike powers - he walks and talks at birth for example. We can to some extent see this process at work and it's also common in other hagiographies. In this inflationary process was the roots of a tectonic dilemma. If the Buddha was godlike and had infinite compassion for people (and indeed all living beings) then why did he have to die? Even more crucially, why did he have to stop being reborn?

Once in India, being reborn was just an ordinary part of life. By the time the early Upaniṣads were composed rebirth was seen as a burden. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad quietly slipped in the idea of ending rebirth and joining with brahman as a superior goal to a good rebirth within saṃsāra. Brahman is a kind of universal consciousness, a world-spirit that parallels, or perhaps originates, the element of spirit in us. A common image for the relation between absolute and relative being (sometimes erroneously used by Buddhists) is that people are like waves: brahman is water and it can take the shape of an individual wave (ātman) that appears to be independent, but ultimately the waves are water and returns to the ocean. And the Upaniṣads conceived of the end of rebirth as going to brahman. Sometimes brahman is personified as a god, Brahmā, and a theistic variety of Brahmanism is attested in the early Buddhist texts. But Buddhists rejected this kind of cosmology or theology and simply refused to speculate on the Buddha after his death, except to say he was not reborn and that he had "opened the doors to the deathless" i.e. made this escape available to everyone. In this Gautama to some extent resembles the culture hero Yama who opened the way to the ancestors for Brahmins.

The disappearance of this increasingly superhuman Buddha from the scene was a problem for Buddhists. He became an "otiose god", to use a phrase from Witzel (2012), who could play no further role in our lives. The fact that he simply died like an ordinary human being was difficult enough, but his disappearance forever seems have been deeply troubling, particularly for Mahāyānists. One of the places in which this dilemma is openly discussed is the Suvarṇabhāsottama Sūtra, where a bodhisatva called Ruchiraketu does a bit of logic.

• Puṇya leads to long life.
• The Buddha practised the perfections over an incalculable number of lifetimes.
• Therefore, the Buddha has an incalculable store of puṇya.
• Therefore, the Buddha should have an infinitely long life. 
• However, the Buddha died after only 80 years. 

In other words, the received facts about the Buddha's life were at odds with the beliefs about the Buddha that had developed in the meantime. Ruchiraketu then has an expansive visionary experience (not unlike some of the visions described by the well known lunatic and darling of the Romantics, William Blake) in which supernatural Buddhas explain that the Buddha's lifespan is, in fact, infinite. The world of appearances seems unrelated to the true nature of tathāgatas, though we are not told why or how in this text.

In the early model of Buddhism, the Buddha instructed many disciples who went on to recreate his experience for themselves and become liberated from rebirth. People who did this are arhat (worthy). The arhat instructed many disciples of their own and so the community of arhats grew. But within a few generations this scheme seems to have been failing. We don't know the details, but we do know that Mahāyānists began to criticise arhats in their literature. They seem to have seen this scheme of passing on teachings as a failure and the arhats as unworthy. They seem to have have two main responses.

The first response was to invent new Buddhas in other universes who were not dead and therefore still able to intervene in human affairs. This gave rise to texts such as the Suvarṇabhāsottama, Akṣobhyavūyha and Sukhāvatīvyūha Sutras; and eventually to what we know as "Pure Land Buddhism". Despite the fact that our Buddha died and disappeared beyond comprehension, in a next door universe, usually Abhirati or Sukhāvatī, there was another Buddha who was very much alive, omniscient, and omnipotent. This powerful figure would intervene at death and allow the worshipper to be reborn in a land where liberation was easy. No nasty sex or other forms of ritual pollution (that Buddhists seem to have assimilated from Brahmanism) just bliss and flowers and ambrosia and nirvāṇa. Paradise, in other words, as envisaged by celibate men living in the Central Ganges Valley in the early first millennium CE. This form of theistic Buddhism went on to be one of the most popular, if least demanding, forms of Buddhism and remains very popular. It is easily compatible with WEIRD sensibilities because it is so very close to familiar forms of messianic theism.

A sub-thread of the development of theistic Buddhism was the cult of Maitreya, the future Buddha. Maitreya is sometimes portrayed as a kind of immanent Buddha, who is taking a keen interest in human affairs and can't wait to get into the fray, he's just waiting for the previous dispensation to completely die out. This ought to have taken about 1500 years by some accounts, and to have been considerably accelerated by the ordination of women. However, as time went on Maitreya's birthday became further and further off, until it was infinitely far off. I think this is partly because he got tangled up in the deification of the Buddha, whose dispensation could not be seen to die out. Someone as fantastic as the Buddha would not teach a Dharma that only lasted a few hundred years. It would have to last forever. That this conflicts with other aspects of the developing culture of Buddhism is awkward, but not surprising. 

The second response was a lot more complicated. The reasoning seems to have been that the Buddha was a lost cause. He was gone and not coming back (and his replacement wasn't due for an infinitely long period of time). However, there were really hardcore practitioners who attempted to emulate the Buddha (or at least the stories about him). They already referred to themselves as bodhisatta, which we have reason to believe originally meant "committed (sakta) to awakening bodhi". These bodhisaktas conceived of a way that they could be better than the Buddha, or at least better than the arhats, by not disappearing from the world. They retained a commitment to the fundamental worldview in which karma gave rise to rebirth unless one was liberated. And they also inherited a tradition which said that the most helpful thing one could do is become liberated and teach others to liberate themselves. So they reasoned that if they got to the brink of liberation, a point where they have all the advantages of intense meditation practice, they could hold back from being liberated from rebirth. Being unliberated they would be bound to be reborn (they overlook the traditional view that breaking the fetters ensures the end of rebirth within a fixed number of lifetimes and the metaphysical problems that implies), but being so highly attained they could take control over the process, retain all their knowledge, and being eternal good guys in the fight against duḥkha. In other words, by a few twists of metaphysics they made themselves into immortal superheroes.

The superhero myth continued to play out. Fictional characters who embodied this new ideal began to appear in literature and then in art (quite some time later). Ironically, given that Buddhist karma and rebirth was originally a rejection of the general idea of beings reincarnating, the superheroes found a kind of apotheosis in Tibetan men who were proclaimed to be the (re)incarnation of imaginary superhero figures (tulku). Lineages of reincarnated superheroes were established along with procedures for recognising new avatars. Though curiously the young children had to be educated from scratch to be bodhisatvas, rather than being born with all their knowledge intact. Coincidentally, this turned out to be an excellent political strategy for preventing the dissipation of monastic power and wealth under the control of a celibate clergy.

It wasn't enough simply to proclaim themselves superheroes. Their own superiority had to be combined with a negative campaign against the existing mainstream, which may explain the negative attitude towards Arhats in some texts. Those who merely repeated the human Buddha's example and liberated themselves from rebirth had to be portrayed as men of lesser talents and ability, whose selfishness resulted in a lesser attainment. By this time the Buddha had achieved apotheosis and become an eternal god who manifested in human form, but was, in fact, eternal. This enabled Mahāyānists to establish a mental split between the human Buddha and a cosmic Buddha, as evidenced by the Suvarṇabhāsottama. The Buddha, that is the selfish figure of Gautama who died and won't come back, became increasingly irrelevant to Buddhism. Why emulate the mere human being (who isn't coming back) when there was a god-like, omnipresent dharmakāya who would save all beings from suffering, however long it took? Why this cosmic Buddha did not continue to manifest in human form, repeatedly and in parallel, is a question that ought to plague Buddhism the way that the absence of the second coming of Jesus plagues Christianity. Omnipotent beings are not limited to one body at one time. If I was omnipotent, I would simply manifest sufficient avatars to accomplish the goal. Apparently this never occurred to Buddhists or it was a step too far even for the most credulous. 

The negative spin campaign against arhats had three main focusses: the hero of the early Buddhist saṅgha, Śāriputra, the arhats themselves, and the distinction between the mainstream and this new cult of immortal superheroes. New texts were composed on the model of early "sutras" which expounded these new ideas. Śāriputra becomes a figure of mockery (Vimalakīrtinirdeśa), the arhats are dismissed as irrelevant and selfish (Saddharmapuṇḍarikā), and a new pejorative (probably caste based) term for the Mainstream is coined: hīnayāna meaning "defective vehicle", to contrast with mahāyāna (Cf Hīnayāna Reprise). It is in creating this false view of mainstream Buddhism that "the Mahāyāna" really crystallizes as a distinct approach. The common enemy of early Buddhists is usually Brahmins, whereas, in the post-Abhidharma period, it is conservative Buddhists. For a movement which proclaims itself as the most sublime human aspiration, this is pretty dirty politics. It's fairly obvious that this dark side of the Mahāyāna is not motivated by love, compassion, or wisdom. And yet apologies for this misanthropic behaviour are still being made. Where is the critique of any of this in the modern literature of Buddhism or Buddhist studies? It may well exist, but I've never seen it. 

The new cults seemed to have some positive elements as well. They produced intellectuals who grappled with the self-contradictions they found in early Buddhism and who tried to improve upon early attempts at reconciliation. Up to a point, such people were able to look back and see the best of early Buddhism. Nāgārjuna in the 2nd Century CE is at the threshold for this. Two centuries later, Vasubandhu is almost wholly forward-looking. From this point on no school of Buddhism looked to the early Buddhist texts for new ideas. They just made them up or borrowed them from other religions. Not until the Protestant reformation of Sri Lanka and Modernist Buddhism did we rediscover the early Buddhists. Ironically we mistake them for authorities and fail to see the mistakes they made, privileging them on the basis that they are older. We erroneously associate age with authority, but in the history of Buddhist ideas the peak of coherence is not reached until the mid-First Millennium CE.

The new cults also engaged in comparative studies of Buddhist doctrine, though usually with a strong sectarian bias. The Prajñāpāramitā movement seemed to carry on an intellectual current of early Buddhism which emphasise experience and meditation. It offered a useful if somewhat cryptic critique of the incipient realism of the Abhidharma. On the other hand, some of the enduring appeal of Mahāyānist thinkers is in arguing over what they said and what they meant. Nāgārjuna is the prime example of this. There are many ways to interpret his words, but after some 1800 years there is no consensus on what the author intended. His commentators could not agree and modern day Mādhyamikas either regress into a false certainty of one interpretation or incessantly rehearse the commentarial arguments. WEIRD scholars still build careers on reinterpreting his oeuvre. Medieval Buddhists also engaged in philosophical debates with thinkers from other Indian traditions, though by this time what was meant by Buddhist philosophy is almost unrecognisable from early Buddhism. 

Rather than being a single cult, Mahāyāna developed as a number of competing cults, often with very little in common beyond their Vinaya ordination. The advent of the Gupta Empire (3rd-6th Century CE) must have helped this as they opened up trade routes that spanned the sub-continent and allowed disparate elements of the movement to communicate and move around more freely. The resulting collection of cults gradually took over as the mainstream. As they became the mainstream there was an imperative to integrate the disparate aspects of the movement into a more coherent whole. Indian Buddhist intellectuals began to pull the disparate threads together and weave them into something more coherent. 

As with the same impetuous in early Buddhism in response to the Mauryan Empire, the formation and powerful influence of the Gupta Empire in North India likely had a huge effect on Buddhism. During the Gupta period, Sanskrit became the main language of the literati and scripts evolved to handle the more complex task of encoding Sanskrit (with its extra vowels and conjunct consonants). Mahāyānist texts, composed in Prakrit began to be translated into Classical (i.e. Pāṇinian) Sanskrit. By this point, the Theravādins were relatively isolated in Sri Lanka and committed to using the less prestigious Prakrit (or vernacular) that came to be called Pāḷi (the word means 'line'). The willingness to embrace Pāṇinian Sanskrit became another distinguishing feature of Mahāyānist literature.

Conclusions

From its own propaganda, Mahāyāna is a superior form of Buddhism that was the natural successor to the inferior form that initially took centre stage. It's difficult to generalise about such a broadly based movement since many of the separate cults that contributed to the movement had very different ideas and ideals, and superiority is a rather subjective judgement. What we now think of as "the Mahāyāna" is a synthesis of a variety of cults, largely filtered through centuries of adaptation to Chinese, Japanese and to some extent Tibetan culture (depending on who one is talking to). 

Not only did Mahāyānist not solve the doctrinal problems of early Buddhism, they introduced a whole raft of new problems through their failures. If early Buddhists could be described as metaphysically reticent, then Mahāyānists are metaphysically exuberant. They invent whole universes as required. In their literature and art, the Buddha undergoes apotheosis. This partly to explain away his rather disappointingly un-godlike human incarnation and all too final death. And yes, there is a contradiction here: Gautama is simultaneously elevated to virtual godhood and reduced to a bit player. New superhero figures emerge and multiply. Emphasis shifts away from dead Gautama, and towards these new buddhas who are still active in their own worlds, and to superheroes who are not so selfish and graceless as to stop being reborn. These imaginary characters continued to become more and more magically potent and godlike. They approached omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence. In some strains of Buddhist thought, the dharmakāya Buddha is the universe. 

My point is that although we call it Buddhism, the religion of the Mahāyānists is a wholly different religion from what came before. It certainly has some roots in Buddhism, but it repudiates much of what made Buddhism identifiably Buddhist while retaining some pan-Indian features such as karma and rebirth. 

The new religion of Mahāyānists employed a number of dirty tricks to establish itself, but having taken over, acted as though this was simply the natural order of things. They could not quite make Buddhism disappear, but they managed to discredit most of it by the time they were driven out of India. The religion of Mahāyānists these days markets itself as the religion of compassion and (unless pulled up on it) claim that compassion was their innovation. It wasn't. By compassion ancient Buddhists generally meant "teaching the Dharma". Mahāyānists did not invent it or introduce it.

Despite many openings for criticism, most scholars of Buddhism join with Buddhists in taking Mahāyāna on its own terms, or limit themselves to describing Mahāyāna as they find it, careful not to disturb anything. No one ever asks the Dawkins questions, "Why would you believe something that is obviously false?" And yet, because of the proliferation of metaphysical speculation, imaginary beings, and imaginary worlds, the Mahāyāna religion is far more open to such criticism than it's more conservative cousins. My conclusion is that scholars are in love with their subject and don't want to say anything bad about it. We're afraid of being asked to leave the temple, or being thrown out.

On the other hand part of the reason that Mahāyānism receives so little critical attention is that it dovetails into a Romantic worldview so well. It is full of hyperboles, epitomes, acmes, essences, embodiments, and archetypes that appeal to the Romantic imagination. It does not simply allow for magical thinking, it positively encourages it. So for the Romantic escapist, Mahāyānism is fertile ground. One can easily become caught up in the hyperbole, the colour, the excitement, and let us not forget the interminable arguments, and forget for a while that one is a limited, short-lived being whose life is probably quite dull, boring, and pointless. Mahāyānism is a high-quality drama that distracts us from reality while preaching that the very distraction is reality. Which is quite brilliant from a marketing point of view. And if the cracks start appearing one can confidently fall back on some perplexing pseudo-wisdom culled out of context from the Diamond Sutra or that old fraud Nāgārjuna. It's all just śūnyatā. Isn't it? 

~~oOo~~

Attwood, Jayarava. (2014). Escaping the Inescapable: Changes in Buddhist Karma. Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 21, 503-535.

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

Sanskrit, Dravidian, and Munda

Modern distribution of
Indian languages

In this essay I will reiterate some important points made by Michael Witzel about the linguistic history of India. When the first anatomically modern humans reached India ca. 70,000 years ago they almost certainly used language. But all the direct evidence for language is much more recent, the oldest being written forms of language. Comparative linguistics allows us infer a great deal more about the history of language so that we can get a picture of how people spoke long before writing was even invented.

Like many historians I use the term India, or sometimes Greater India, to mean then whole of the sub-continent, taking in the political territories of modern day Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. Given that the main languages of North India and Sri Lanka are all modern Indic Languages: Urdu, Panjabi, Hindi, Bihari, Bengali, Nepali, and Sinhala, the modern political divisions belie the common linguistic history they share. However we must be a little cautious. Language, ethnicity, and geography can be independent variables when discussing culture. This essay mainly concerns languages and the speakers of languages. We cannot be sure of the ethnicity of these people.

We know with some certainty that the speakers of Old Indic languages (now represented only by Vedic) came from outside India. This is an unpopular thesis amongst Indian Nationalists who try to make a case for Sanskrit arising in India and spreading out. Some would have us believe it is the original language (Cf Eco 1997). However the relationship of Old Indic with Old Iranian and a variety of other internal evidence show that Indo-Iranian -- an early offshoot from Proto-Indo-European that further split into two sub-families, Iranian and Indic -- was spoken by nomadic peoples of the Southern Central Asia. Old Indic is mostly distinguished from Old Iranian by a few sound changes. Later grammatical forms drifted apart as well, though the attested languages, Vedic and Avestan, were closely related. 

Comparative linguists showed in the late 18th century that Greek, Latin and Sanskrit are all so similar that they must have derived from a common ancestor. That hypothetical languages is nowadays called Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and the language family that it spawned is called Indo-European (IE). PIE also has a Germanic branch giving rise to all the Germanic languages (including English), a Slavonic branch incorporating all the Slavic languages, and takes in many of the languages of Iran and Afghanistan, not to mention Armenian. In addition we have written evidence of a number of now dead Indo-European languages such as Tocharian and Khotanese from Central Asia. By comparing the changes in many languages, linguists are able to describe pragmatic 'rules' which describe how sounds and forms of words change. This procedure has been very successful in some areas. PIE is probably the best example. But the Sino-Tibetan language family also gives a clear view of the proto language that underlies them all. 

There have been efforts of varying success to try to cover all the languages of the world in this way. And this has naturally lead some scholars to propose a further ancient layer of relatedness. So for example there is the conjectured Nostratic proto-language (or macro-family) that takes in Afroasiatic (including the Semitic languages), Kartvelian (Caucasian languages and possibly Basque), Indo-European, Uralic (including Finno-Ugric), Dravidian, Altaic (covering the Turkish, Central Asian, and probably Korean and Japanese), and Eskimo–Aleut. These macro-families are still controversial, though many of the objections are ideological rather than logical.

A major branch of the PIE family is Indo-Iranian taking in languages that were spoken throughout the combined sphere of influence of Persia and India, taking in large swathes of Central Asia. In this essay I will refer to the Indian branch of the PIE or Indo-Iranian as Indic. It has previously referred to as Aryan or Indo-Aryan but these terms have been deprecated because of the racial overtones of the word aryan and the discrediting of old ideas about race. Indic is strictly a linguistic term that gives us no information about ethnicity. We can talk about three phases of Indic: Old - principally attested as Vedic though other variations must have existed (before ca. 500 BCE); Middle - attested by Pāḷi, Gāndhārī, and Apabramsa (ca 500 BCE - 1000 CE); and New or Modern (emerging in the last millennia).

When the speakers of Old Indic crossed the Hindu Kush and entered India, ca 1700-1500 BCE, they met people who spoke languages with a much longer history in Greater India.

There is a whole family of Dravidian languages for example, including Tamil, Telegu, Malayalam, and Kannada. Today the people who speak languages from the Dravidian family are a large minority (about 20%). Some linguists (eg. McAlpin 1974, 1975, 1981) have noted a similarity between Dravidian and the language spoken in ancient Elam, near what is now the border of Iran and Iraq on the Red Sea. Written records of Elamite stretch back to 3000 BCE. McAlpin et al believe that Dravidian speakers split off from Elamite speakers and entered Indian very early, perhaps 4000 BC. Others are more doubtful (Blench 2008), dismissing the evidence for flimsy and pointing out affiliations with other language groups as well. 

Less well known is the Austroasiatic family. This family of languages extends from the North-east of India to Vietnam. One Indian branch of this widely geographically spread out family, is Munda, with several languages spoken in small pockets of India today, but probably more widespread in the past. In Burma there is a strong overlay of Tibeto-Burman languages that descended from the north, but there are still enclaves of Austroasiatic speakers as well. Genetic studies of Austroasiatic speakers suggest that the Austroasiatic language family may have arisen in India and spread east. 

Additionally there are a number of languages in India that appear to be unrelated to any known languages. These language isolates, as they are called, are found in the so-called tribal peoples who seem never to have been assimilated into the mainstream of Indian culture (in other words they were never Brahmanised).

Michael Witzel's exploration of the linguistic history of India begins by establishing his parameters, most important for the purposes of this essay is the periods of composition of the Ṛgveda (1999: 3).

• I. The early Ṛgvedic period: c. 1700–1500 BCE: books (maṇḍala) 4, 5, 6, and maybe book 2, with the early hymns referring to the Yadu-Turvaśa, Anu-Druhyu tribes;

• II. The middle (main) Ṛgvedic period, c. 1500–1350 BCE: books 3, 7, 8. 1–66 and 1.51–191; with a focus on the Bharata chieftain Sudās and his ancestors, and his rivals, notably Trasadasyu, of the closely related Pūru tribe.

• III. The late Ṛgvedic period, c. 1350–1200 BCE: books 1.1–50, 8.67–103, 10.1–854; 10.85–191: with the descendant of the Pūru chieftain Trasadasyu, Kuruśravana, and the emergence of the super-tribe of the Kuru (under the post-RV Parikṣit).

These layers of composition have been established on the basis of "internal criteria of textual arrangement, of the ‘royal’ lineages, and independently from these, those of the poets (ṛṣis) who composed the hymns. About both groups of persons we know enough to be able to establish pedigrees which sustain each other." (1999: 3).

Dutch Indologist, F. B. J. Kuiper, had already identified some 383 words in the Ṛgveda that are not Indic and must be loan words from another language family. We know this because they break the phonetic rules of Indic languages. We can use an example from English to demonstrate this. We have a word ptolemaic, which comes from the Egyptian name Ptolemy. It refers to a particular view of the world as earth-centred. Now we know that ptolemaic cannot be a native English word because English words cannot start with /pt/, and indeed native English speakers cannot easily pronounce this sound combination and tend to just say /t/. It is clues like this that linguists use to identify loan words. And we have to take into account that loan words are often naturalised. Many loans words in English are Anglicized. So another loan word like chocolate has been altered to fit English spelling patterns from an original spelling more like xocolātl, which clearly breaks English phonetic rules. We also have a number of Yiddish loan words like shlemiel, shlep, shlock, shmaltz, shmuck, and shnoozle, etc, that defy, but also to some extent redefine English spelling. Similarly no other Indic language has retroflex consonants (ṭ, ṭh, ḍ, ḍh, ṇ, ṣ), but Old Indic absorbed these from languages it met in India and they became a naturalised aspect of the Indic phonology by the time the Ṛgveda was composed.

It's not always possible to identify where a loan word has come from. But Kuiper and Witzel manage to identify most of the 300 words as belonging to Proto-Dravidian or Proto-Munda, with a few from other language families like Tibeto-Burman.

Perhaps the most striking finding that Witzel gives, repeatedly in his essay, is that in the early Ṛgvedic period there are no loan words from Dravidian, e.g.

"It is important to note that RV level I has no Dravidian loan words at all (details, below § 1.6); they begin to appear only in RV level II and III." (Witzel 1999: 6)

Ṛgvedic loans from Drav[idian] are visible, but they also are now datable only to middle and late Ṛgvedic (in the Greater Panjab), and they can both the localized and dated for the Post-Ṛgvedic texts. (Witzel 1999: 19)

This is an important finding. The landscape of the Ṛgveda is that of modern day Panjab. This is clear, for example, from the names of rivers that are mentioned, e.g. the Kabul, Indus, Sarasvati (now dried up) and Yamuna rivers.

Loan words from the earliest period are from the Austroasiatic language family, meaning that the people living in this area when the Vedic speakers arrived, spoke a variety of proto-Munda. This is important because it is believed that the people living in this area were the descendants of the collapsed Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC). They had scattered as the climate became much drier and caused their large scale cities to be unlivable. The IVC had disappeared by 1700 BCE. If the people of the Panjab ca 1500 BCE spoke a variety of proto-Munda, this strongly suggests that the people of the IVC also spoke an Austroasiatic language, rather than is usually supposed, a Dravidian on even Indic language. Indian nationalists often assume that the IVC spoke Sanskrit, but this was never plausible. Interestingly the very name we have for the north of this region, Gandhāra, is itself an Austroasiatic loan word.

It's often suggested that because there are northern pockets of Dravidian speakers, with whom the Vedic speakers presumably interacted, that Dravidian was once considerably more widespread and perhaps that the language of the IVC was Dravidian. The loan words in the Ṛgveda argue against this view. The north-western pockets of Dravidian could be isolated populations left behind by the migration of Dravidian speakers into Southern India from Mesopotamia. Those in the North-East are more consistent with a previously larger territory, but if they were ever on the Ganges Plain they were forced out of it completely, leaving remnant populations only as far north as mountain ranges on the southern edge of the Ganges Valley.

Conclusion

The picture that emerges is that Old Indic speaking people crossed the Hindu Kush in small numbers and met people who spoke a form of proto-Austroasiatic; and then later, perhaps as they penetrated further into the sub-continent, people who spoke proto-Dravidian languages. The Dravidian speakers, themselves probably immigrants had lived in India for some thousands of years already, displacing and assimilating even earlier waves of human migrants. The pockets of people who speak language isolates, not related to any known language, have presumably lived in India for a very long time. Indeed they often pursue a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that reinforces this impression.

Other authors have suggested that the Old Indic speakers had the advantage of superior technology and this led them to dominate the original inhabitants. We can't really know how it happened at this distant time, but in any case Indic languages came to dominate the North of India - from Afghanistan to the Ganges Delta. Again it is worth repeating that language, culture, and location may not be correlated. To the extent that we can make comparisons, there were a few surviving similarities between the people who composed the Ṛgveda and those who composed the Avesta. But in many respects their cultures had diverged along with their languages. Zoroastrianism was the major innovation in Iran, although the dates of the founder are difficult to pin down, the most likely scenario places him a little after the Ṛgveda. Based on informal comments by Michael Witzel, I have argued for an trickle of Iranian tribes entering India ca. 1000-800 BCE, who ended up settling on the margins of the Central Ganges city states of the second urbanisation, especially Kosala and Magadha (Attwood 2012). Genetic studies suggest that though their language came to be spoken throughout the Panjab and down into the Ganges Valley, that the Vedic speakers contributed little to the gene pool, which is remarkably homogeneous in India. The genetic contribution is far less striking than we might imagine by patterns of culture or language family (Attwood 2012).

This poses a difficulty for Indian Nationalists who want Sanskrit to be the mother tongue of India (I'm not sure how they fit Dravidian into the picture) and for it to have originated within the subcontinent. People with this view often express their hatred of Michael Witzel, referring to him in extremely uncomplimentary terms. But as rational people we have to follow the evidence and allow it to guide us to conclusions, even when these are uncomfortable for us. And the evidence is abundantly clear in this case. If any language is the mother tongue then it is probably Proto-Austroasiatic, the ancestor of the modern Munda and Austroasiatic languages. Sanskrit developed from Indo-Iranian, initially somewhere in Greater Iran, then was carried into India with Vedic speaking migrants. Since we know they were nomadic cattle herders (unlike, say, the Śākyas who were settled agriculturalists) they may have made the journey up the Khyber Pass seeking greener pastures.

In Attwood (2012) I tried to show that certain important features of early Indian Buddhist culture could be tied to Zoroastrianism and/or Iran. Unfortunately all too often the history of the region is divided into Indian and Iranian by academics. And thus I fear that many connections between the two regions have been overlooked. The connections that are evident seem to demand more attention from suitably qualified scholars. We know a great deal about the interactions of Greece and Persia, but far too little about relations between Persia and India.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Attwood, Jayarava. (2012) Possible Iranian Origins for Sākyas and Aspects of Buddhism. Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. 3.

Blench, Roger (2008) Re-evaluating the linguistic prehistory of South Asia. Toshiki OSADA and Akinori UESUGI eds. 2008. Occasional Paper 3: Linguistics, Archaeology and the Human Past. pp. 159-178. Kyoto: Indus Project, Research Institute for Humanity and Nature.

Eco, Umberto. (1997) The Search for the Perfect Language. London: Fontana Press.

McAlpin, David W. (1974) Toward Proto-Elamo-Dravidian. Language 50: 89-101.

McAlpin, David W. (1975) Elamite and Dravidian: Further Evidence of Relationship. Current Anthropology 16: 105-115.

McAlpin, David W. (1981) Proto Elamo Dravidian: The Evidence and Its Implications. American Philosophy Society.

Witzel, Michael. (1999) Substrate Languages in Old Indo-Aryan: Ṛgvedic, Middle and Late Vedic. Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies. 5(1): 1–67.

Buddhist Shibboleths

I've already done some work on comparing translation styles between 4th century Chinese translators of the Āgamas and 20th/21st century English translators of the Pali texts (Attwood 2012). Where terms are unique or obscure the strategies available are quite limited. One can try to preserve the Indic word untranslated using your native script to represent the Indic sounds or with an Indic script such as Siddham; or one can substitute a similar word from one's own language, e.g. when the word occurs in a list of similar items (types of bird for example) one can substitute a familiar kind of bird; or, at a pinch one can ignore the difficult term; All of these approaches have their pros and cons, especially when seen in the light of centuries of hindsight. 

But we have some problems with more familiar common words as well. I've been thinking about some of the common epithets of the founder of Buddhist: buddha, tathāgata, sugata, arhat, and bhagavat. These words are devilish to translate into natural sounding English. We end up with a string of phrases in the form "The X One" and/or with meaningless literal translations like "the Thus Gone" or "the Well Gone". None of these work very well as translations. The translations don't convey any more information than the untranslated terms, so add nothing to the comprehension of the text. A phrase like "Thus Gone" still requires translation to be comprehensible. With a translation like "Thus Gone" we might actually be worse off because whereas we might pass over the untranslated tathāgata without much thought, when we see the English words "Thus Gone" we may be tempted to stop and think about them and tie our selves in knots trying to figure what they mean.

Bhagavat

The most successful of the standard translations is probably "the Blessed One" for bhagavat. We're still in awkward territory with the phrasing but at least it conveys something of the Indic and evokes an image in the Western mind. To be blessed, in English, is to have the grace of God, often bestowed by a priest, or to have good luck. Neither of which apply here. The word bhaga comes from the root √bhaj 'to divide, to share' and means 'a share'. The suffix vat or vant (Skt or Pali) indicates possession. So bhagavat means 'one who has their share'. In an earlier essay I explored how Buddhaghosa explained what the word means: see Yāska, Plato, and Sound Symbolism (2008).

Apparently, bhagavat is originally a military term meaning one who has a share in the spoils of war; or a feudal term for a lord is entitled to a share of his vassals production (the forerunner of taxation). Hence, perhaps, many older texts translate bhagavat as "Lord" (though this might also be imitation of the King James Bible). In the Buddhist context we sometimes also see it translated as the "Fortunate One", again with the suggestion of good luck - and the Buddha's awakening was nothing to do with luck! But "blessed" is a good one word translation. We have an English name from the Latin benedictus meaning "blessed" which is Benedict.

One of the tricks that English linguists have when they want to mark a word as serious or sacred is to either use a Latin form or to Latinise it. Thus where Freud wrote in the vernacular about the Ich, Es and Über-Ich the English translators adopted the Latin words ego, id, and super-ego. In becoming Latin the word acquires a substance so that we all think of "the ego" as a thing nowadays even though Freud conceived of it as a process. Such a word also acquires the gravitas of medical terminology since doctors still prefer Latin, or Latinate, to Anglo-Saxon or vulgar (i.e. common) terms for body parts and processes.Of course Germans capitalise all nouns, but the capitalisation of Ego, etc. helped to reinforce this perception.

Another trick, widely employed by Buddhist translators is to adopt Sanskrit syntax for English words. Thus we see the creation of a Buddhist Hybrid English that employs Sanskrit word order, but it is done in imitation of the 17th century King James Bible. As in "Say not so, Ānanda, say not so" for mā hevaṃ, ānanda, mā hevaṃ or "Enlightenment" (capitalised) for bodhi. Likewise Chinese translators created a Buddhist hybrid Chinese (based on Middle Chinese) which retained Indic word order. 

It is true that vulgar English has moved away from Latin forms, if only because the teaching of Latin, which used to be a universal part of education, has fallen away. Where once every educated person was familiar with the Latin and Greek classics in the original, nowadays such knowledge is rare. And yet here we are trying to introduce Sanskrit and Pali words into the language. One might argue that "Benedictus" conveys both the meaning and spirit of the Bhagavat at least as well as "the Lord" or "the Blessed One". However for some the use of Latin is tied to experience of the Catholic Church rather than Horace or Virgil.

The standard Chinese translation is 世尊 world-honoured, i.e. honoured by the world. I'm much less familiar with the history of these Chinese terms. 

Tathāgata & Sugata

Tathāgata and sugata may really be untranslatable and the common translations are all quite hopeless in that they communicate nothing. Indeed Buddhists may long have misunderstood the meaning of these words. Richard Gombrich has pointed out that -gata at the end of a compound means 'relating to, existing in'. Some examples include:

• antar-gata - in the middle
• kaṇṭha-gata - reaching the throat
• guru-gata - belonging to a particular teacher
• nīca-gata - at the lowest point
• bhūmi-gata - fallen to earth, on the ground
• mukha-gata - in the mouth, in the face
• hṛdaya-gata - dwelling in the heart

Of course it can also take the more obvious meaning of a past passive participle, i.e. 'gone', but the special meaning has some advantages. Tathā is a modal adjectival pronoun: 'thus, that way, in that manner, like that'. We can see where the more usual translations of tathāgata might have come from: he is 'one who has gone in that way'. However tathā-gata might also mean something like 'one who resides in that state', i.e. one who is awakened. Paul Harrison's Vajracchedikā translation uses Realised One for this term, which I quite like. Some consider that there an ambiguity with tathāgata because it might also result from tathā-āgata where āgata means 'come'. I think this is pretty unlikely, especially given the unambiguous sugata, but some lineages see it as the primary sense of the word and in this sense it is translated as "Thus Come". Chinese texts translate tathāgata as 如來 "as come". Even if this were the meaning, what does a reader make of "The Thus Come One"? 

Similarly su is a prefix meaning 'complete, well, or good' (cognate with Greek eu- which comes into English as euphony, euphemism, euphonium etc.). Sugata then means 'completed, one who is well, in a good state'. The fashion at present is to leave these two epithets untranslated and perhaps to footnote the most common interpretation of the Indic. The standard translations of "the Thus Gone" and "the Well Gone" really don't communicate anything. There is a Latin word which has more or less the same meaning as sugata which is beatus from which we get words like beatify. Beatus carries the connotation of blessed, but also of happiness. When a person is "beatified" (beatus + facere 'to make') by the Catholic Church, the first step on path to sainthood, the implication is that they are even now experiencing eternal bliss. This is also the implication of sugata. I know one woman called Beata, and I suspect it's a relatively common name in some Slavic/Catholic countries.

Sugata is translated into Chinese as 善逝 'well gone'. Where the character 善 is also used for Sanskrit words like kalyāṇa (beautiful), kuśala (expert, wholesome), and śubha (lovely, beautiful). Apparently they could not make up their minds where the Buddha was coming 來 or going 逝! In a weird quirk of history 逝 now means 'dead, passed away' in Mandarin. So in modern Chinese 善逝 means 'well dead'.

Arhat

The other common epithet is arhat (Skt) or arahant (Pali). This is from the verbal root √arh which means 'to be worthy, to have a claim, to be able, to be allowed'. The present participle arhat (Pali arahant) means 'worthy, capable, entitled, deserving'. According to PED it was used in pre-Buddhist times as an honorific for those in high office, similar to 'His Worship', and in a sense very close in meaning to bhagavat (one who is entitled to a share). We might think of it as referring to someone who has claimed to have done what needed to be done in the holy life (brahmacārya) which is how it is often phrased in the texts. The arhat is effectively a 'saint' from Latin sanctus 'holy, consecrated'.

There is a folk etymology for arhat as well. This derives the word from ari-√han 'to strike an/the enemy' or sometimes 'foe-destroyer'. This etymology was given a boost by Richard Gombrich, who has has argued that the present participle is "jarring" in this context and there is perfectly good adjective from the same root, i.e. araha. Since Jains used two Prakrit forms of the word arahanta and arihanta, the folk etymology may well be the correct etymology, Gombrich argues that this stems from the same metaphor as the Jain title "jina" or conqueror, from which jaina means 'connected with the jina' (2009: 57-8).

The Chinese term is 阿羅訶 which is a transliteration pronounced āluóhē or 阿羅漢 āluóhàn. It is perhaps best known in the abbreviated form 羅漢 luóhàn.

Saṁbuddha and Samyaksaṁbuddha

Perhaps the most difficult to translate when used an an epithet is samyaksaṁbuddha. Samyañc means 'accord, concord, agreement' (literally 'bending together'). My understanding of this term is that it refers to the being in sync with the way things are (and its opposite mithyā means to be out of sync).  Saṁ means 'complete, together' and buddha as we know is the past participle of √budh 'to know, to understand, to wake up to'. So saṁbuddha means something like 'fully cognisant'. And samyaksaṁbuddha means 'fully cognisant of the way things are' though it is usually translated as "fully and perfectly awakened", where samyañc is somewhat reduced in significance to just mean 'perfectly', which plays to Romantic tendencies in Buddhism.

As often happens there are many different Chinese translations of this term: 正徧知 or 正遍知 or 正等覺. We also find partial transliterations such as: 三耶三佛 sānyésānfó and 三耶三佛陀 sānyésānfótuó where 佛 is a translation of Buddha and 三耶三 transliterates saṃyak-saṃ-. 

Epithets and Titles

Clearly these epithets fall somewhere between names and titles. An epithet is something which is "put on" from the Greek epi 'in addition' + tithenai "to put". A name we hang on something. Sometimes we resort to epithets because the name of the person concerned is taboo. The Buddha seems to have forbidden his disciples from using his personal name (Ariyapariyesanā Sutta). An epithet might also be used when a person's name is prosaic and followers wish to highlight some aspect of their character or recall some event or achievement. All of these seem to apply to the Buddha. 

It is interesting to compare the ecclesiastical titles adopted by Tibetan priests in exile. Amongst the Tibetans we find a variety of His Holinesses and His Eminences. In fact these come from the Roman Catholic Church. A Pope is addressed as His Holiness or Your Holiness, and a Cardinal as His/Your Eminence. If we were also to ape the Catholics then the most common form of address to the Buddha would be, bhagavan (vocative case) = Your Holiness. But these titles are finely tuned to indicate hierarchies and to indicate power and subordination. They now have a medieval ring to them which no longer trips of the tongue (though arguably the Tibetan priesthood get on very well with them). Roman ecclesiastical titles are surely inappropriate to the Buddha, if not to Tibetan priests, and got quite a strong negative reaction when I tried them out on a few friends. The words under discussion are not really titles anyway. In fact they're adjectives rather than nouns and they all describe someone who has had a particular kind of life changing experience.

Other forms of address are routinely taken over from ecclesiastic or temporal hierarchies. For example "Venerable" seems to substitute for āyuṣmat 'possessing life, vital, long lived, elder'. Buddhist monks are routinely referred to as "The Venerable". In the FPMT I've met the Venerable Robina Courtin and the Venerable George Churinoff for example. The word "venerable" comes from the Latin venerari "to worship, revere" and means 'fit to be worshipped or revered'. No doubt some monks are fit to be worshipped, but it's a rather grand title unrelated to the Indic term for an elder. In early times Europeans were more automatically respectful towards their elders, nowadays hardly anyone commands respect. 

Buddha is of course an Anglicised term and hardly needs much explanation, though too many people mistake him for the Chinese god 布袋 Bùdài the so called "Laughing Buddha". For new-comers the epithets are inevitably odd and difficult to understand. And when they ask questions it quickly becomes apparent that no one really knows what they mean. No one does any more. And yet we have to keep repeating these words because they crop up so often in the texts. 

Whether Latin words would aid or hinder us in communicating our history and ideas is moot. No doubt some people recoil at the very thought of using archaic Latin to communicate modern Buddhism, and for others it invokes the Catholic Church, though personally I find I associate Latin mainly with medicine, the Romans, and early Enlightenment writers such as Newton's Principia Mathematica and Hooke's Micrographia. And yet on the whole Pali and Sanskrit are more archaic and foreign to the ear than Latin or Greek. I find that most of my colleagues want to use English (or their mother tongue) most of the time and only use the minimum of Indian jargon. Most cannot tell the difference between Sanskrit and Pali.

On the other hand, English is a language which is more than happy to borrow words from other languages. For example from Hindi we borrowed: shampoo, pyjamas and bangle; or from Persian: caravan, divan, ghoul, jackal and shawl. However the problem here is that most of these are concrete nouns. They have a specific referent and there is no doubt what they refer to.

I don't really see any resolution to the problem of translating the epithets. They all apply specifically to the Buddha (though some are borrowed from other contexts), but the specific meaning is long lost. So we're left with all these different ways of referring to the Buddha, none of which really convey anything meaningful to anyone any more that forced to retain them because they are traditional. They only value they have nowadays is as shibboleths, i.e. the ability to pronounce these terms is a marker of Buddhist identity. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Attwood, Jayarava. Translation Strategies for the Cūḷa-Māluṅkya Sutta and its Chinese Counterparts. Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. Vol 5, 2012. http://www.ocbs.org/ojs/index.php/jocbs/article/view/54.

Gombrich, Richard. 2009. What the Buddha Thought. London, Equinox.