Vardali wrote:Dmytro wrote:...
I have given the links to articles where Sujato attacks Theravada and puts forward the idea of 'pre-sectarian Buddhism', for example:
It's time
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....
Hm, I wanted to stay out of this, but after reading the article you linked, I fail to see where this is an attack on Theravada.
Frankly, I haven't read anything in there that wouldn't be perfectly consistent with an academic approach to any sort of validation and authentification, be they religious in nature or not.
And unlike many other religions, Buddhism seems to encourage a to explicitly use one's facilities (including the brain) rather than to do anything due to "blind faith".
Seems a valid - standard academic - approach to validate authenticity claims suggested there, so what is so shocking about this?
I don't think it quite measures up to "standard academic" approach. One major criteria for academic standard is citation of relevant information, and reference to other works in the area. This article only contains one or two. Another criteria is peer review, that's what journals are for, not internet pages, blogs, etc.
For this:
The basic conclusion is that the Chinese Agamas and the Pali Nikayas are identical in doctrine. They are two slightly varying recensions of the same set of texts. These texts – popularly referred to simply as ‘the suttas’ – were assembled by the first generations of the Buddha’s followers, before the period of sectarian divisions. They are pre-sectarian Buddhism.
I disagree, and so do many other scholars. (Ven Sujato cites AK Warder, but Warder can't even read Chinese, so he doesn't know either, and is working second and third hand; He also cites Lamotte, who can read this stuff, but he is not a Nikaya / Agama specialist either. Kalupahana is exaggerating, as usual.)
Large parts may be "pre-sectarian", but other parts are definitely not.
One of the big problems is the large majority of all the Nikaya and Agama literature that we have, is all from the Sthavira side (so called Theravada, Dharmagupta and Sarvastivada), and the Mahasamghika side is largely unrepresented (except one very late Agama). So, at best, we can try to work out some sort of Asokan period Sthavira positions. Then, for those points where they disagree, we sometimes cannot know either way, it's kind of a "split vote".
Some of the criteria he provides sounds reasonable, but is actually not necessarily in accord with standard textual criticism methods. eg. simplicity, vs "difficile lector". He also favors a "text that never was" over "best text" methodology, though both have their problems, too.
This is seriously tricky stuff. !!