Santipada

The canon­ical texts are entirely silent about Aśoka, and do not author­ize his inter­fer­ence in the Sangha. This is one of the basic reas­ons why early gen­er­a­tions of Buddhist schol­ars con­cluded they were in the main com­pleted before Aśoka. This seems to have escaped cer­tain mod­ern schol­ars who regard any sug­ges­tion of a pre-Aśokan proven­ance for canon­ical texts as sheer fantasy. This has led to a wor­ry­ing decline in the under­stand­ing of these sources: if we are to take ser­i­ously the claim that the Pali canon can­not be dated before the 5^th cen­tury, we oblit­er­ate the fun­da­mental dis­tinc­tion between text and com­ment­ary that has allowed us to make sense of the dizzy­ing col­lec­tions of Buddhist texts.

Let us take just one example, Lars Fogelin, who has pub­lished a recent and excel­lent descrip­tion of some early Buddhist mon­astic sites called Archae­ology of Early Buddhism. I must apo­lo­gize in advance for the crtiti­cism that fol­lows: it really is a very good book, and I learnt a lot from it. Fogelin tries hard, and usu­ally suc­ceeds, to steer a ‘middle way’ between vari­ous extreme approachs, includ­ing the text/archaeology divide. But his per­spect­ive on Buddhist tex­tual stud­ies is largely derived from Gregory Schopen. I have dir­ectly cri­tiqued Schopen’s work else­where, but here I am con­cerned with how his pro­gram­matic per­spect­ive dis­torts the writ­ings of those he influences.

Fogelin says: ‘Accord­ing to the Pali Canon, Ashoka act­ively pros­elyt­ized for Buddhism, send­ing mis­sion­ar­ies to Sri Lanka, redis­trib­ut­ing rel­ics of the Buddha, and sup­port­ing Buddhist monks’. (Fogelin 24) This is of course non­sense, and Fogelin is con­fus­ing the canon and com­ment­ar­ies. The prob­lem is not merely an isol­ated mis­take. Fogelin is fol­low­ing mod­ern trends in heav­ily rely­ing on schol­ars like Schopen, and has inher­ited the res­ults of his deeply pro­gram­matic attempt to under­mine the find­ings of Buddhist tex­tual stud­ies. In this case the attri­tion of know­ledge has pro­ceeded so far that we have lost touch with the most basic of distinctions.

Fogelin speaks of the two phases of west­ern Indo­lo­gical stud­ies: the first phase depic­ted a rari­fied and eth­er­eal Buddhism of unworldly spir­itu­al­ity; the inev­it­able reac­tion emphas­izes the phys­ic­al­ity, even world­li­ness of mon­astic life. The lonely ascetic hero striv­ing to sub­due his pas­sions in the forest has been sup­planted; and in his place is a hook-nosed Bhikkhu Fagin, clutch­ing his pot of gold with one claw, while other dis­penses ‘rel­ics’ to the exploited masses. Thus the west­ern philo­soph­ical Franken­stein of mind/body dual­ism flour­ishes in Buddhist studies.

This mani­fests as an epi­stem­o­lo­gical apartheid, where things we learn from rocks and realia are ‘cer­tain’, while things we learn from texts are ‘assump­tions’. I hes­it­ate to preach Buddhism to such con­firmed scep­tics, but it does rather occur to me that a read­ing of basic Buddhist epi­stem­o­lo­gical Sut­tas, such as the Cūḷahatthipadopama Sutta or the Caṅkī Sutta, would serve as a reminder that all con­cep­tual know­ledge is based on infer­ence, and as long as ignor­ance per­sists in the mind, we can regard noth­ing as certain.

Fogelin dis­cusses the ‘higher criticism’:

‘The method, on the sur­face, is both simple and com­pel­ling. Those tex­tual and doc­trinal ele­ments that are shared by the dis­par­ate tex­tual exist­ing sources are most likely to have the greatest antiquity.’ (Fogelin 38)

Simple, yes, not to say simplistic. I doubt that any­one famil­iar with the painstak­ing, detailed, and multi-layered read­ing that is required by any ser­i­ous grap­pling with Buddhist lit­er­at­ure would recog­nize their own work in this description.

Fogelin does admit that: ‘The actual prac­tice of higher cri­ti­cism is much more com­plic­ated than the simple out­line presen­ted above.’ But this is in his present­a­tion of the mod­ern cri­tiques of the higher cri­ti­cism, as if those engaged in the study them­selves have no com­pre­hen­sion of the dif­fi­culties of their own task.

Fogelin goes on to say:

‘Des­pite claims by its pro­ponents, com­mon­al­it­ies in Chinese and Sri Lankan texts only demon­strate that the com­mon text exis­ted at an unspe­cified time prior to the exist­ing texts in the fifth cen­tury AD. There is no reason to believe that this recon­struc­ted Buddhism resembled any­thing pro­pounded by the Buddha.’ (Fogelin 38)

Such claims again mis­rep­res­ent the meth­ods of the higher cri­ti­cism. The basic hypo­thesis – which is always sub­ject to test­ing and modi­fic­a­tion in spe­cific cir­cum­stances – is that the pos­tu­lated ancestor text pre-dated the sep­ar­a­tion of the exist­ing tex­tual tra­di­tions. In Buddhist con­text, the scrip­tures are usu­ally found to be asso­ci­ated with a par­tic­u­lar school, which pre­serves its own tex­tual redac­tion. Thus the com­mon ancestor is hypo­thes­ized to belong to a period before the sep­ar­a­tion of the schools.

Again, while this is far from abso­lute, it remains a valid gen­er­al­iz­a­tion, con­firmed by the recent work of Salomon, for example, who shows that the Dharmagup­taka Gand­hārī ver­sion of the Saṅgīti Sutta is very close to the Dharmagup­taka Dīrgha Āgama ver­sion of the same sutta in Chinese, and is less close to the Pali and other Chinese ver­sions. The pre­vail­ing view has been that the schis­matic period star­ted around the time of Aśoka. Thus the com­mon texts are, on a pre­lim­in­ary basis, assigned to that period. In this work I have ques­tioned the dat­ing of the sep­ar­a­tions to Aśoka or pre-Aśoka, and have argued for a sep­ar­at­ive period in the cen­tur­ies fol­low­ing Aśoka. How­ever, this does not change the hypo­thet­ical dat­ing of the scrip­tural col­lec­tions: rather, it changes the basis on which the texts were sep­ar­ated. The texts were not sep­ar­ated into dis­tinct sec­tarian or dog­matic col­lec­tions until some time after Aśoka; nev­er­the­less, they were clearly sep­ar­ated geo­graph­ic­ally from the time of Aśoka, per­haps even earlier in some cases.

Fogelin admits that the higher cri­ti­cism becomes more robust as the schools become fur­ther spread out, but claims that the schools lived close to each other in earli­est peri­ods. But, as the chances of his­tory would have it, most of our early texts derive from schools loc­ated in two places: Kaśmīr/Gandhāra and Sri Lanka. These were estab­lished as part of the mis­sions around the Aśokan period, and are at the very oppos­ite peri­pher­ies of India, 3000kms apart. It is meth­od­o­lo­gical mad­ness to assume that schools at the polar ends of India primar­ily derived their com­mon canon­ical texts from later borrowings.

As long as the texts are rel­at­ively (not totally!) isol­ated, we may regard their his­tory as primar­ily (not com­pletely!) sep­ar­ate. The exist­ence of bor­row­ing is a modi­fic­a­tion of details, but does not change the over­all pic­ture, unless it can be demon­strated that bor­row­ing has taken place on a very large scale. Things fall down accord­ing to the law of grav­ity: I can throw a ball in the air, but I don’t dash off a thesis claim­ing to have dis­proved Newton.

While this prin­ciple is doubt­less import­ant, to sug­gest it is the sole or main method of tex­tual cri­ti­cism is highly mis­lead­ing. In fact, the whole enter­prise of mod­ern Buddhist stud­ies, includ­ing the gen­eral strat­i­fic­a­tion of texts still use use today, was estab­lished in the 19^th cen­tury by the European Indo­lo­gists. And in those days, there simply were no com­par­at­ive stud­ies avail­able. There were a few remarks and occa­sional trans­la­tions, but no sys­tem­atic work on com­par­ing the Chinese or Tibetan scrip­tures with those in Pali was under­taken until Ane­saki and Akanuma in the 20^th cen­tury. Not only was the com­par­at­ive method not the sole method, it was not used at all! What then did they do? Here are some remarks by T. W. Rhys Dav­ids, from his Buddhist India, pub­lished in 1902:

As to the age of the Buddhist canon­ical books, the best evid­ence is the con­tents of the books themselves—the sort of words they use, the style in which they are com­posed, the ideas they express. Objec­tion, it is true, has recently been raised against the use of such internal evid­ence. And the objec­tion is valid if it be urged, not against the gen­eral prin­ciple of the use of such evid­ence, but against the wrong use of it. We find, for instance, that Phallus-worship is often men­tioned, quite as a mat­ter of course, in the Mahāb­hārata, as if it had always been com­mon every­where through­out North­ern India. In the Nikāyas, though they men­tion all sorts of what the Buddhists regarded as fool­ish or super­sti­tious forms of wor­ship, this par­tic­u­lar kind, Siva-worship under the form of the Linga, is not even once referred to. The Mahāb­hārata men­tions the Ath­arva Veda, and takes it as a mat­ter of course, as if it were an idea gen­er­ally cur­rent, that it was a Veda, the fourth Veda. The Nikāyas con­stantly men­tion the three oth­ers, but never the Ath­arva. Both cases are inter­est­ing. But before draw­ing the con­clu­sion that, there­fore, the Nikāyas, as we have them, are older than the exist­ing text of the Mahāb­hārata, we should want a very much lar­ger num­ber of such cases, all tend­ing the same way, and also the cer­tainty that there were no cases of an oppos­ite tend­ency that could not oth­er­wise be explained.

On the other hand, sup­pose a MS. were dis­covered con­tain­ing, in the same hand­writ­ing, cop­ies of Bacon’s Essays and of Hume’s Essay, with noth­ing to show when, or by whom, they were writ­ten; and that we knew noth­ing at all oth­er­wise about the mat­ter. Still we should know, with abso­lute cer­tainty, which was rel­at­ively the older of the two; and should be able to determ­ine, within a quite short period, the actual date of each of the two works. The evid­ence would be irres­ist­ible because it would con­sist of a very large num­ber of minute points of lan­guage, of style, and, above all, of ideas expressed, all tend­ing in the same direction.

This is the sort of internal evid­ence that we have before us in the Pali books. Any one who habitu­ally reads Pali would know at once that the Nikāyas are older than the Dhamma Sangaṇi; that both are older than the Kathā Vat­thu; that all three are older than the Milinda. And the Pali schol­ars most com­pet­ent to judge are quite unan­im­ous on the point, and on the gen­eral pos­i­tion of the Pali lit­er­at­ure in the his­tory of lit­er­at­ure in India.

But this sort of evid­ence can appeal, of course, only to those famil­iar with the lan­guage and with the ideas…

So Buddhist stud­ies were estab­lished primar­ily on the basis of the internal evid­ence of the texts them­selves. The next sec­tion of Rhys-Davids’ work dis­cusses the epi­graph­ical evid­ence, which he inter­prets, surely reas­on­ably, as show­ing a broad cor­res­pond­ence with the exist­ing texts. While the epi­graphic find­ings do not them­selves prove the exist­ence of a closed ‘canon’ in the time of Aśoka, they cer­tainly prove that sim­ilar texts exis­ted. Aśoka’s word­ing clearly indic­ates he is present­ing a col­lec­tion extrac­ted from the Buddha­va­cana, and the demon­strated links between Buddha­va­cana and Aśoka­va­cana provide fur­ther evid­ence that other canon­ical texts exis­ted and influ­enced Buddhist prac­tice. Aśoka was obvi­ously not try­ing to describe the Buddhist canon, but to select a few spe­cially recom­men­ded texts. While the scep­tics would try to leap on the absence of a ref­er­ence to the over­all cat­egor­ies of ‘Tip­itaka’, etc., as evid­ence that such things did not exist, the edicts in fact sug­gest that texts that we now regard as canon­ical did exist, while texts we now regard as post-canonical did not. Thus, far from under­min­ing the over­all pic­ture of the devel­op­ment of Buddhist lit­er­at­ure, Aśoka’s inscrip­tions are per­fectly in accord with the find­ings of the higher criticism.

So the internal evid­ence of the texts, and com­par­ison with Brahmanical and Jaina lit­er­at­ure, is tempered with archae­ology, but the dir­ect com­par­at­ive method is not used.

Prac­tic­ally, the situ­ation has not changed all that much. While there is a small but vig­or­ous circle of schol­ars pur­su­ing com­par­at­ive stud­ies, and a tiny group of greats who have mastered a wide range of texts in the Buddhist lan­guages, the real­ity is that most stud­ies, even today, are based on the texts of only one school or tra­di­tion, with occa­sional ref­er­ences to other tra­di­tions, usu­ally based on sec­ond­ary sources. Com­par­at­ive study is not a mono­lithic ortho­doxy that needs des­troy­ing so that Buddhist stud­ies can get mod­ern, it is a fledgling and under­nour­ished inquiry that needs long years of sup­port before we can truly eval­u­ate its worth.

But, and again this seems to have totally escaped the mod­ern crit­ics, dir­ect com­par­ison of cor­res­pond­ing texts is merely a start­ing point. Hav­ing estab­lished a hypo­thesis that the texts may be pre-Aśokan, we then test this. Do they actu­ally refer to Aśoka? Con­tra Fogelin, the canon­ical Pali texts, des­pite what must have been a great tempta­tion, do not. This sug­gests that they are pre-Aśokan; moreover, it implies that by the time of Aśoka they were already regarded as in some sense fixed or canon­ical, so that at the very least blatantly later things were not added, but were reserved for the com­ment­arial or other post-canonical lit­er­at­ure. Sim­il­arly, though we think the texts were trans­mit­ted to Sri Lanka about this time, there is no men­tion of Sri Lanka in the body of the canon­ical literature.

Next we might look at the state of doc­trinal devel­op­ment evid­enced in the texts. As is well known to tex­tual schol­ars, the canon­ical Sut­tas must, in any mean­ing­ful inquiry into Buddhist doc­trines, be con­sidered fun­da­mental. Doc­trinal vari­ation within the early strata exists, but is start­lingly minor. Sig­ni­fic­ant devel­op­ment emerges with the class of lit­er­at­ure known as Abhid­hamma, which must postdate the Sutta lit­er­at­ure. But it is not until the latest strata of Abhid­hamma lit­er­at­ure (as evid­enced by doc­trine and the testi­mony of the schools) that we start to see fully artic­u­lated sec­tarian doc­trines. Again, much of the philosphical con­tent of the Mahāyāna sut­tas only makes sense as a reac­tion to late– and post-canonical Abhid­hamma doc­trines such as the svab­hāva. But the Mahāyāna began around the begin­ning of the Com­mon Era. Thus we must see the entire course of doc­trinal devel­op­ment pre-dating this time. Doc­trinal devel­op­ment was slow and inher­ently con­ser­vat­ive, and to allow suf­fi­cient time for this com­plex evol­u­tion­ary pro­cess we find ourselves once more back in the time of Aśoka or earlier.

I have yet to see any attempt by archae­olo­gical rad­ic­al­ists to explain how such a situ­ation could exist if we aban­don the evol­u­tion­ary per­spect­ive developed by the higher cri­ti­cism. Per­haps Buddhaghosa wrote his com­ment­ar­ies in the 5^th cen­tury and delib­er­ately forged a whole body of canon­ical lit­er­at­ure in order to author­ize his own doc­trines. I am reminded of the fun­da­ment­al­ist Chris­tian argu­ment that God placed dino­saur bones deep in the ground to test our faith in cre­ation­ism; sim­il­arly, it would seem that the con­niv­ing Buddhist monks, with a degree of tex­tual soph­ist­ic­a­tion hitherto unknown to human­ity, delib­er­ately cre­ated a highly strat­i­fied lit­er­at­ure in order to sep­ar­ate the goats of higher cri­ti­cism from the sheep of the archae­olo­gical faith­ful. It would be impol­ite to point out that, just as tex­tual schol­ars are sup­posed to rely on the equa­tion ‘com­mon = older’, archae­olo­gists rely on the equa­tion that ‘lower = older’. Isol­ated from the com­plex­it­ies of real dig­ging, this is as ludicru­ous as the cari­ca­ture of tex­tual crti­cism we find in the archae­olo­gical rad­ic­al­ists. Indeed, Fogelin notes that the received dat­ings for South Asian chro­no­lo­gies has been recently upturned. Back to the draw­ing board.

Again, we might ask what is the lan­guage of the texts? Pali is not the same as the Sin­halese tongue. It is incon­ceiv­able that the Sin­halese would have delib­er­ately com­posed a canon in a for­eign lan­guage, so they must have brought their scrip­tures from the main­land, where they were already rel­at­ively fixed in a a canon­ical lan­guage. There are a couple of ref­er­ences to Sri Lanka in the late Parivāra, as well as in one colo­phon in the Cūḷavagga, but these are obvi­ously not part of the basic canon­ical texts. I am not sug­gest­ing that no changes were made in Sri Lanka: there were, but these were minor alter­a­tions to a pre-existing main­land lit­er­at­ure. The per­sist­ence of the scrip­tures in a non-native tongue is fur­ther evid­ence of an early date for the Pali canon.

I could con­tinue at some length, but per­haps the point has been made, though no doubt it will have to be made again. The con­clu­sions of Buddhist tex­tual stud­ies were not made on the basis of the child­ish assump­tions described by Fogelin and his ment­ors. They are the out­come of a long, patient, and detailed exam­in­a­tion of a vast cor­pus of texts, scru­tin­ized from every pos­sible angle. Of course this pro­cess is imper­fect, of course the find­ings do not always agree, of course we can pick holes in one approach or the other. But the sta­bil­ity of the find­ings – and in broad out­lines, there has been a remark­able degree of sta­bil­ity – is indic­at­ive of their sub­stan­tial and var­ied found­a­tions. The find­ings of the archae­olo­gical revi­sion­ists have not with­stood such a test of time.

And indeed, if we are to take the more rad­ical claims ser­i­ously, they are dis­tress­ingly uro­boric. Wynne has already poin­ted out that we often would not know how to inter­pret the inscrip­tions without a know­ledge of the ter­min­o­logy of the texts. But the prob­lem goes deeper than that. If we are to stick with what we ‘actu­ally know’, we would have to admit that we have no texts earlier than the first cen­tur­ies CE. And there are no Pali texts until some time later than that. Schopen has a touch­ing faith in the exist­ence of the Pali canon from the time of Buddhaghosa, since he wrote the com­ment­ar­ies on them: but in fact our inform­a­tion about Buddhaghosa is slim, so we should really push the date back much later.

Clearly, we can­not use evid­ence for such late texts to refer back to the early period. This, and let us take a deep breath as we pre­pare to take this ser­i­ously, also includes the gram­mars, without which we could not read Indian lan­guages. Of course, the Hindu writers of the gram­mars can hardly be regarded as object­ive schol­ars, so in util­iz­ing them we may be uncon­sciously read­ing later con­cepts back into the early writ­ings. Thus we can­not even read the inscrip­tions.

Let alone read them, we can­not even pre­sume that they are writ­ing. There is, after all, a lively debate as to whether the Indus Val­ley script is a writ­ing sys­tem. We note that the Indian Hindutva schol­ars are the ones who claim to be able to decipher this script, and they are clearly driven by ideo­logy. Could not the same be the case for the early inscrip­tions? Could not the much later Hindu/Buddhist gram­mari­ans have devised a sys­tem for read­ing mean­ing into arbit­rary symbols?

Hav­ing sternly for­gone the whim­sical reli­ance on later texts, we are left with no notion of what, say, a ‘mon­as­tery’ is. Fogelin’s exem­plary exam­in­a­tion of the sites at Thot­lakanda must be entirely redone, remov­ing the text-based, and hence unreal, assump­tion that we ‘know’ what a mon­as­tery is.

In fact, I begin to doubt more and more the pos­sib­il­ity of know­ing any­thing at all from Fogelin’s work. All I have is a book: this con­tains mark­ings that I assume are writ­ing, and that I can decipher accord­ing to a symbol-system I learnt as a child. But how does Fogelin use that symbol-system to con­vey mean­ing — does mean­ing not mani­fest in the dynamic inter­ac­tion between text and reader? Is Fogelin, then, a reflec­tion of my own dark side, an ille­git­im­ate spawn of my repressed fear and doubts regard­ing the the truth of my own chosen path?

Indeed, in the absence of any actual con­crete evid­ence, we would be bet­ter advised to speak of pseudo-Fogelin, the pur­por­ted writer of a book which appears, on the basis of admit­tedly incom­plete invest­ig­a­tions, to be about early Buddhist archae­ology. Per­haps the best evid­ence I have for the exist­ence of pseudo-Fogelin is the undoubted fact that I, Sujato, am writ­ing a cri­tique of his cri­tique of the higher cri­ti­cism. But, when I see thus set in bald con­crete real­ity the self-referential and self-validating nature of the crit­ical pro­cess I am engaged in, I begin to doubt even my own essay.

For my author­ship too is an assump­tion, one which demon­strably flick­ers in and out of exist­ence with the speed of thought, not bound and solid like a lump of rock, implac­able and unim­peachible in being. I am only Sujato when I think of it. And of all the Suja­tos in the world today, which one am I? I believe I am the same Sujato who has writ­ten sev­eral com­plic­ated and polem­ical diatribes on mat­ters of Buddhist prac­tice, doc­trines, and texts that are of interest to him­self alone. But this is a mere memory, as unre­li­able as the memor­ies of the monks who, sup­posedly, were respons­ible for the oral trans­mis­sion of the Buddhist scriptures.

Thus I am forced to admit, in the interests of schol­arly pre­ci­sion, that I do not know who I am. Hence­forth I will refer to the author of this essay as pseudo-Sujato. Like Zaphod Beeblebrox, whose sunglasses – on both his heads – would turn pitch black at the first hint of danger, pseudo-Sujato shall close his eyes at the first hint of uncer­tainty, tak­ing refuge in the only thing that he really knows for cer­tain: the utter dark­ness of ignorance.

But a small doubt will not give up its nag­ging: just what was the point of all this in the first place?