Buckwheat wrote:
Right view with effluents... I understand it to be mundane not because it is less true but because it entails suffering. It lays the foundation so that one may proceed to the kind of right view that totally relinquishes suffering.
I can see that. And it would do that -- for someone moving from Wrong View (the denial of moral views) to an improvement over Wrong View, that tainted right view would help one "proceed". But I wonder if that is the situation we are encountering with those we (in our time) encounter, those who are new to Buddhism. Are they following a-moral Wrong Views and do they need to be encouraged to take up a foreign belief system they will need to relinquish before they can reach liberation? In the Buddha's day, taking a step towards the views common in the day might have made sense -- but it seems to me that in our day and age it would make more sense to encourage Christian beliefs. Or, honestly, my take is this: We aren't a proselytizing bunch at all, trying to bring heathens along -- we just take those who come to us and talk to them -- so I think we start with good folks, already well ensconced in some Morally Right View and we should just be showing them the way to the Buddha's path and not teaching people to adopt a new view first. (And aside from all that, the evidence I have indicates that with his tirades against Wrong View the Buddha was probably working on overall social change, not necessarily trying to convert the heathens. He saw the group who held wrong view as teaching a dangerous doctrine that was antithetical to his own doctrine, and he spoke about it so often because he was trying to get popular opinion to turn against the deniers' pernicious view.)
"Entails suffering..." Yes, this is the way the traditions read the text, and here's my theory: Texts that make statements against rebirth as a belief did not get passed on (they would be interpreted as "corrupted texts" and therefore dropped, or get "corrected" like MN 60 did) UNLESS there is some way to give the text a spin that supports rebirth as part of the path. So in MN 117 the spin is to say "Well, this 'sammādiṭṭhi sāsavā', this 'right view with taints'" this means that it entails suffering. But the Pali doesn't just say it *entails* suffering, it says 'upadhivepakkā', it "ripens in acquisitions". The view (diṭṭhi) is the problem. The word choices for the view being described should also tell us this: sacrifice, oblations, gifts? (And look at the translator's choice of word for the oblations -- "offerings"? Our modern translators want us to interpret this as the Buddha's view, and not see it as a reference to Brahmins' practices. I don't say they are part of a conspiracy; I do say that the tendency of translators to translate in a way that supports their beliefs tends to perpetuate that belief in us, the readers.)
A close look at these sorts of paired texts -- speaking now of the pairings of wrong and right views, not of tainted right and factor-of-the-path right -- shows that what's being described with Right View isn't actually the Buddha's view, but popular views in the day -- ones that he can, granted, skew with some effort (Sacrifices are great! he says, As long as you don't kill anything!) but the arguments AGAINST those views definitely aren't arguing against the Buddha's take on things, they are arguments by group X about the positions of group Y. You'll find suttas in which people are talking about how people are arguing with each other about this and that, and these pairings get brought up, and if we pay attention we can see that these weren't conversations and debates about the Buddha's teachings, these were just people talking about the pop-philosophies of the day, arguing in the town hall -- prime entertainment in the days before TV. This is *why* the Buddha would give the Safe Bet sutta the way he did, to give general guidance about how to approach all these philosophies.
But the interpreters of the Pali canon did not imagine a larger culture that had nothing to do with the Buddha. They imagined that every single thing in the canon happened in direct reference to their fellow, and so all the mildly-right right views got blurred into being his view.
This reading of the suttas *is* subtle, but it has to be subtle to have survived the editorial process. It also says that the people who passed on the suttas were actually making every effort to pass on The Buddha's Words as they had them. I am deeply impressed -- and grateful -- to all those who faithfully passed this corpus on to us. (I am a little less grateful to those who made the emendations.)
That a person with access to *all* the surviving canon *and* historical perspective (including access to the Vedic texts) can see the sharp logical structure in the Buddha's talks -- and therefore find emendations when they break the logic -- and see patterns of language in the Pali canon that pairs up neatly with patterns in the Upanishads (for example the denial of Right View in MN 117 matches to denials in the Upanishads -- and the Upanishadic denials are not denying the Buddha's take on things) -- shows us that the original composition of the stories in all their complexity is still there. We just need to study it more -- particularly in partnership with Vedic scholars -- to better understand what was being said (because much of it is in the context of the times).