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Significance of Gandhari Scrolls to Mahayana-Theravada Split
Dakini
Veteran
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 As the implications of these findings ripple out from academia into the Buddhist community, they may well blow away outdated, parochial barriers between traditions and help bring Buddhism in line with the pluralistic climate of our times.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. : )
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. : )
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Comments
Thanks for sharing this dakini
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.”
I guess I was a little optimistic when I envisioned a sort of healing coming about, but the potential is certainly there.
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
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?
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.
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."
"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."
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
It seems to have been King Asoka or his successors who invented the Theravada "card catalog".
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!!!!!
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!"
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."
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.
It doesn't bode well to deny the possibilities described by him. Accept them as possibilities, and dismiss the rest.
The pali canon provides the clearest picture of what the Buddha taught, minus all the distractions.