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Significance of Gandhari Scrolls to Mahayana-Theravada Split

DakiniDakini Veteran
edited July 2011 in Philosophy
Last spring someone posted this article, about an archeological find involving the oldest Buddhist scrolls known to exist. I'd like to focus on the implications of the find for the persistent debate over whose tradition is more "authentic", which school best represents the Buddha's words, etc. The analysis of these scrolls stands all previous arguments on their head, and seems to present a reconciliation between Northern and Southern Schools of Buddhism.
www.tricycle.com/feature/whose-buddhism-is-truest

"Fragments of manuscripts [dating from the 1st C. BCE to the 3rd C. CE], recently surfaced, are today stoking a revolution in scholars' understanding of early Buddhist history, shattering false premises that have shaped Buddhism's development for millennia and undermining the historical bases for Buddhist sectarianism. As the implications of these findings ripple out from academia into the Buddhist community, they may well blow away outdated, parochial barriers between traditions and help bring Buddhism in line with the pluralistic climate of our times.

The facts here free us from chauvinist views and give us grounds for respecting differences between and within diverse Buddhist schools. None of the existing Buddhist collections of early Indian scriptures, not the Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese or even the Gandhari, can be privileged as the most authentic or original words of the Buddha."

"Nobody holds the view of an original canon anymore", Oskar von Hinuber, one of the world's leading scholars of Pali, told [the interviewer].

Among the scrolls were found the earliest known versions of the Abidharma and Prajnaparamita texts, among other teachings. Scholars found that Mahayana and (then) Hinayana, rather than evolving sequentially, developed simultaneously, in an intertwined fashion. The conclusion specialists have drawn is that there is no single, original canon. They explain (see article) that two of the Buddha's brightest disciples, those with the best textual memories, attended the first Council and disagreed with each other as to what were the correct teachings. It would seem that a split occurred at that early date, or even earlier, rather than at the 3rd Council, hundreds of years later, as previously believed. (Somebody had better alert Wikipedia! ; ) )

This fascinated me, because it seems to have the potential to bring about a sort of healing between Northern and Southern schools of Buddhism. The Pali Canon is no longer the gold standard of what the Buddha taught, with other texts considered later additions. Suddenly, some of what was long regarded as later departures from the true teachings, now has been shown to be contemporaneous with Pali texts. Undoubtedly, future discoveries will tell us more, and add more to the picture. That's why archaeology is so interesting. Stay tuned for further developments. : )

Comments

  • YishaiYishai Veteran
    Very interesting, @Dakini. Thanks for the info! : )
  • JeffreyJeffrey Veteran
    edited July 2011
    If this can heal things then great. Personally I didn't believe in a gold standard in the first place. I took a medicine that was the gold standard of therapy for my psych illness and it wasn't effective for me so I took another one. I don't believe buddhas words should be taken rigidly to the letter. I believe that we should hold his word lightly and see not only if but how they can be true. Often we think we know but at a later time we see things in a different light.

    Thanks for sharing this dakini :) . Do you have a link so that I can reference this in forum discussions? This url is giving no return for me: www.tricycle.com/feature/whose-buddhism-is-truest
  • The correct url is http://www.tricycle.com/feature/whose-buddhism-truest

    You can also order some Gandhari sutras on Amazon.

    It is truly fascinating. It shows that Buddhism has always been diverse, and it should probably stay that way. This way, there can be no chauvinistic, "my Buddhism is more authentic" attitudes. I also love this quote from the article:
    “We often say, ‘Tibetan translation, Chinese translation, Sanskrit original. As soon as you say Sanskrit original, you drop back into that sloppy but entirely natural way of thinking, that this is the original so we can throw away the copies. But in fact, that Sanskrit original of whatever sutra is just again another version. So the idea that one of them is the original and all the others are more or less imperfect shadows of it has to be given up. But it is very hard to give it up. It’s almost impossible to give it up.” And the irony is not lost on Harrison, who adds, “This is what the teaching of the Buddha is all about.”
  • JeffreyJeffrey Veteran
    Thanks bodhipunk
  • DakiniDakini Veteran
    Thanks for that additional quote, bodhipunk. Yes, old habits die hard, and humans being as they are, will probably continue to cling to the old views, at least for awhile, which, as one of the scholars noted, is not at all Buddhistic. But I imagine it will take quite awhile for old mindsets to absorb the news and re-orient themselves to the new reality.

    I guess I was a little optimistic when I envisioned a sort of healing coming about, but the potential is certainly there.
  • DhammaDhatuDhammaDhatu Veteran
    edited July 2011
    [dating from the 1st C. BCE to the 3rd C. CE]
    although some arbitary dates seem insertered above, my research finds the scrolls were dated after Christ

    Wikipedia states: "The Gandhāran Buddhist Texts are the oldest Buddhist manuscripts yet discovered, dating from about the 1st century CE"

    Please note: they are the oldest manuscripts but not the old teachings

    The Pali suttas were written down 200 years prior to this, at around 100BC

    Also, these scrolls are mostly versions of Pali suttas, such as the Samyutta Nikaya and the Rhinoceros Horn Sutta.

    There is no text more "Hinayana" than the Rhinoceros Horn Sutta

    If we never realise the actual Dhamma, we will always doubt the texts

    All the best :)

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandhāran_Buddhist_Texts



  • JeffreyJeffrey Veteran
    edited July 2011
    Matters not written down be speculation. And speculation belongs to everyone.
  • YishaiYishai Veteran
    edited July 2011
    First half of the first century (The British Library scripts). So, we're talking <50 years after Christ, right?
  • JeffreyJeffrey Veteran
    edited July 2011
    Dhamma dhatu do any pali scrolls exist from the date you stated? Do we have them today or is it said that they were written at that time? Couldn't I say that the red sea had been parted because it is also said that is true?
  • Lazy_eyeLazy_eye Veteran
    edited July 2011
    As cool as they are, I don't quite see why the Gandhara scrolls are a game-changer. It's long been thought that the earliest Mahayana prajnaparamita scriptures were written down in the 1st century BCE, so it wouldn't be a surprise to see evidence in the scrolls -- particularly since, if I remember correctly, Gandhara was a nexus of Mahayana influence. If anything we'd expect to see more Mahayana material than has turned up so far.

    Nor is it news that there are other versions of the canon besides the Pali. The Chinese, Tibetan and Sarvastivada canons also exist -- and all the collections, including the Gandhara, include suttas from the nikayas.

    What does this new evidence tell us that wasn't known before?
  • JeffreyJeffrey Veteran
    The newness is that we have earlier scrolls. And it is shown that they are diverse. Archaelogical finds are always new seeming at first when they are found.

    The evidence shown today is consistent with the idea that buddhism was diverse for quite some time. Also it is shown according to the article that the strands were intermarried. There wasn't a card catalog with theravada shelved on one shelf and mahayana on the other.
  • JeffreyJeffrey Veteran
    "Buddhist tradition maintains that after his awakening, the Buddha taught for some 45 years throughout eastern India. Among his disciples were a few, including his attendant Ananda, who had highly trained memories and could repeat his words verbatim. It is said that after the Buddha’s death, his disciples gathered at what we now call the First Council, and these memorizers recited what they had heard. Then all the monks repeated it, and the single and definitive record of the “words of the Buddha” [buddhavacana] was established. Thus was the Buddhist canon born.

    Or was it?

    Every school of Buddhism stakes its authority, and indeed its very identity, on its historical connection to this original first canon. Buddhists of all traditions have imagined that our texts tumble from the First Council into our own hands whole and complete—pristine—unshaped by human agency in their journey through time. This sense of the past is deeply ingrained and compelling. If our texts don’t faithfully preserve the actual words of the Buddha in this way, we might think, how could they be reliable? Isn’t that what we base our faith on?

    But as we’re about to see, history works otherwise. And having a view more in line with the facts here frees us from chauvinist views and gives us grounds for respecting differences between and within diverse Buddhist schools. As for undermining our basis for faith, not to worry. To get in line with the facts, we’re not going to abandon Manjushri’s sword of wisdom. We’re going to use it.

    I first heard about the Gandharan manuscripts while living in Germany in 2009, when I attended a lecture on early Buddhism by Professor Salomon, who was visiting from Seattle. The complex details of the talk he delivered left me mystified— at that point the technicalities of early Indian philology stood as a dense forest I hadn’t yet entered. But I was curious about those scrolls. I wanted to understand what this new literary tradition meant for Buddhist practitioners like me.

    While searching online, I found a 2006 talk by Salomon in which he first unveiled for a general audience the importance of translators’ findings. Toward the end of that talk, my attention became riveted. As Salomon was explaining, scholars had traditionally expected that if they traced the various branches of the tree of Buddhist textual history back far enough, they would arrive at the single ancestral root. To illustrate this model, he pointed to a chart projected on the screen behind him. The chart showed the Gandhari canon as the potential missing link along an evolutionary ladder—the hypothetical antecedent of all other Buddhist canons. “This is how someone who began to study this [Gandharan] material might have thought the pattern worked.”

    As scholars scrutinized the Gandhari texts, however, they saw that history didn’t work that way at all, Salomon said. It was a mistake to assume that the foundation of Buddhist textual tradition was singular, that if you followed the genealogical branches back far enough into the past they would eventually converge. Traced back in time, the genealogical branches diverged and intertwined in such complex relationships that the model of a tree broke down completely. The picture looked more like a tangled bush, he reported."
  • JeffreyJeffrey Veteran
    edited July 2011
    I would be interested to see what his wife says about this. Is she upset at him for his views?


    "I am a Mahayana practitioner; my partner practices in the Theravada tradition. The challenge of accommodating differences in the Buddhist family is an occasional cloud that hovers over our dinner table."
  • JeffreyJeffrey Veteran
    "Very informative article. Mitaky reminds us that the Gandhari manuscripts, as products of their time and place, also reflect Greek (i.e. Western) influence on Buddhist (i.e. Eastern) thought, and vice-versa.
    And the picture of a brambling bush or an interweaving river, rather than a single trunk, many branched tree, also reveals what Buddhism really is: a universal philosophy of life that belongs not to a single individual country, culture, school or sect, but rather inherently exists within the life of each human being on this planet."

    ~commentor dominic gomez

  • The newness is that we have earlier scrolls. And it is shown that they are diverse. Archaelogical finds are always new seeming at first when they are found.

    The evidence shown today is consistent with the idea that buddhism was diverse for quite some time. Also it is shown according to the article that the strands were intermarried. There wasn't a card catalog with theravada shelved on one shelf and mahayana on the other.
    But we knew this already! There were the "eighteen schools" of early Buddhism...plus my understanding is that Mahayana did not start off as a distinct school in its own right, but was practiced by monks in a number of schools.

    It seems to have been King Asoka or his successors who invented the Theravada "card catalog".

  • JeffreyJeffrey Veteran
    Its a bush not a tree is the new thing. Maybe its not new to everyone but I think that the guy who wrote the article was quite excited.
  • How's that for sequined pattern! Lol. The ways of the Buddha are totally new to my views of being. My knowledge is next to nothing about the ways. I have just started reading the Tipitaka of the Pali Canon and have read up to the Samannaphala Sutta, so far. I chose to start with the Pali Canon because it seemed to be as close to the original words of the Buddha is it gets based on the readings of Therevada Buddhism.

    Am I on the right track here?

    Ugh-My humble mind is so limited to this; however, origins do not interest me as much as the dharma, compassion, and simplicity towards being and the increase of forbearance, compassion, and simplicity of being as their supreme rewards towards fulfillment. It is such a blessing that it becomes a burden if not shared.

    LOL!!!! That is sooo cheesy, yet sooo true. LOLOLOLOL!!!!!
  • *sequenced pattern
  • DakiniDakini Veteran
    edited July 2011
    The Gandhari manuscripts were complete in 100 BC. Pali suttra began to be written down then, but were not completed until 800 AD. (see article) Teachings began to be written in Pali in100 BC, but they weren't compiled into manuscript form until much later, according to the article.

    Lazy-eye, you may have heard about this before it hit the newsstands last spring, because the British Museum has been working on deciphering the scrolls for years, close to a decade, if I'm not mistaken. But this just came to the attention of the world at large, that is, via the popular media, a few months ago. I'm a fan of archeology buffs, so if you are able to keep abreast of developments as they break, please feel free to keep us up-to-date.

    The implication from the story is that the development of what eventually were to become Mahayana and Hinayana began when to disciples of the Buddha came away from their experience with two different interpretations of the Buddha's gist. That's how I read it. In any case, it means that the two schools developed together, there is no single, foundational, authoritative canon. Unless you take the whole in all its diversity as THE Canon.

    @SimpleWitness This means the Pali is no longer the one source of original words of the Buddha, no longer the authenticity standard. Those suttras are still very worth reading, but they can no longer be used to browbeat followers of other schools as adherents of "later texts". There are no later texts, or division between early school and later school. It's over. That's Old Think.

    So the schools can quit bickering, and everyone can live happily ever after with this contemporaneous diversity. " Vive la difference!"
  • @Dakini I'll second that and I'll keep reading the scrolls. Thank you very much for sharing such information. What a gift it is to know generous people like you and jll on this forum. ((Much gratitude!)) SimpleWitness
  • ThaoThao Veteran
    That article doesn't mean much to me except that in those days people were still mixing teachings, in other words, it doesn't mean that Buddha taught the Mahayana texts or not. People have been mixing teachings for ever.

    I also found this online in regards to history of Buddhism:

    "Stories of "The Buddha" are compiled stories from multiple people and multiple events, canonized and amalgamated. There was no singular "Buddha" as is traditionally taught in Buddhism, and no aspect of Buddhism is other than that you'd expect to find in early India. In short, it is entirely possible that there was no Buddha at all and that the stories of the Buddha's life were merely the same stories of similar lives of other sages, given a new catchy name. Such is the way religions are developed! Some modern Buddhist apologists have acknowledged this and said that Buddhism is the revival of the stories of the last Buddha, thousands of years beforehand, therefore claiming that Buddhism pre-emptively informed Indian beliefs. This is similar to the Christians saying that Satan planted on the Earth many religious beliefs similar to Christianity in the first century, so as to discredit Christianity when it emerged. Such explanations seem to be rather paranoid and rash! The truth is, Buddhism and Christianity were copies of earlier beliefs developed in the same way as other religions developed from culture and history." You can google" criticism, Buddha by Vexan Crabtree.

    I like what Jeffrey said: "I believe that we should hold his word lightly and see not only if but how they can be true. Often we think we know but at a later time we see things in a different light."

  • ShutokuShutoku Veteran
    edited July 2011
    That is simply the opinion of one person who it appears is all about criticizing religion. (and apparently he is a Satanist)

    I don't think there can be much doubt that there is a lot of mythology, and some of it borrowed, which is ascribed to the Buddha, which may not have any historical truth, but I think the vast majority of scholars would agree that he did indeed exist as an individual person.
  • edited July 2011
    This report inspires me to read the sutras, including the Mahayana ones mentioned in the article, that are among the earliest texts. Take a chronological approach to reading; rather than by school, read by period, starting with the earliest. You might get closer the real experience of how Buddhism evolved, that way.
  • @shutoku.... What do you mean, that he's satanist? Exactly, how do you know that? Even if he is, there's nothing wrong with inquiry. Even if it is done by an iconoclastic personality.

    It doesn't bode well to deny the possibilities described by him. Accept them as possibilities, and dismiss the rest.
  • jlljll Veteran
    From my personal experience, a big Yes!, you are on the right track.
    The pali canon provides the clearest picture of what the Buddha taught, minus all the distractions.
    How's that for sequined pattern! Lol. The ways of the Buddha are totally new to my views of being. My knowledge is next to nothing about the ways. I have just started reading the Tipitaka of the Pali Canon and have read up to the Samannaphala Sutta, so far. I chose to start with the Pali Canon because it seemed to be as close to the original words of the Buddha is it gets based on the readings of Therevada Buddhism.

    Am I on the right track here?

    Ugh-My humble mind is so limited to this; however, origins do not interest me as much as the dharma, compassion, and simplicity towards being and the increase of forbearance, compassion, and simplicity of being as their supreme rewards towards fulfillment. It is such a blessing that it becomes a burden if not shared.

    LOL!!!! That is sooo cheesy, yet sooo true. LOLOLOLOL!!!!!
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