history of buddhism / buddhist history

Studying history is very useful not because of the facts it gives you, but that it gives you a way of thinking. It tells you the how the ways in which you thought you could think were in fact wrong. It is not philosophy in that it investigates timelesss questions. It investigates one of the timeless questions, of how we can know something to be true. From what do we derive our pride in our heritage, our confidence that we are representing them correctly, and our sense that we come from something and are not mangroves floating in the cosmos.

People are not inspired to study history with history classes they’re uninterested in - like whether the world wars were caused by economic necessity or culural changes. We come with a personal reason to enter the past. Histories of Buddhism exist because we realize that there are many texts and schools, and we yearn to know what is right. We study the history of Chinese art because, in a world of American exports, we want to hear our past and see ourselves in the art, not see the art in ourselves. We go back to study the history of world wars because we are shocked by modern politics and want to know what is happening today, what we can learn from yesterday.

Some of these questions cannot be objectively answered. What is Chinese? What is Correct Religion? Are we doomed to war? The answers are personal, disintegrated with the monsoon rains, or specific to each circumstance. Even the Buddha (so it is said for one school) taught with upaya, skillful means, and adapted his teachings to the language and wisdom of his students.

The history of Buddhism makes me more pessimistic about the potential of truth-seeking by finding the right book or theology. Every position imaginable will be written down somewhere, but to know which one is “right” or befitting your circumstance, you have to have the taste yourself. You will not choose something that you will believe to be correct in five years, and maybe you will also choose wrongly and set yourself back. But maybe this failure is just a part of your life’s path and cannot be avoided. Such is fate.

What in Buddhism makes me pessimistic? I came here looking to understand the history and thus to find a body of text that I can study, so that at least I can advance past the interpretations offered by the modern, US West coast, AI labs version circulating on Twitter. You can find an elucidation of this view here [ADD LINK].

My mind is not really changed afterwards on what to read. I am still skeptical of tantra, jataka, of magical powers, and anything that is more similar to “religion” than “science of phenomenology.” I’ll try the abhidamma and the early sutras.

What is the Buddhist canon? The answer is complicated, and texts recordat least four great Councils of monks in the last two and a half milennia just to gather and stamp the contents of later “texts” (then oral) as canon. The extent to which each gathering actually occurred is debatable, but even the presence of such Councils in text is a sign of fracturing at the time and some need to reassert what is true as distinct from superstition.

Contrary to Christianity or Islam, the earliest Buddhist texts were not committed to text. It arose as an Indian religion, and in line with the dominant Indian religion at the time, the traditions upheld by the brahmins were mostly transmitted orally. The Vedas were thought to be eternal sound, not constructed but always existing in the universe, and more practically, oral transmission was possible from brahmin father to son. Even as they were committed to writing in the various prakrits, they either had to be painstakingly carved into some hard rock or written on palm leaves, which disintegrated over the years over wave after wave of monsoon season. As a result, the earliest texts we have of Buddhist sutras lie on the “outskirts,” not the Indian heartland, and in languages far more dissimilar to that which the Buddha spoke initially, like in Chinese.

The earliest texts recorded Buddhist texts are in classical Sanskrit, and then Chinese. Lopez writes that the Chinese were obsessive record-keepers, and indeed we were. [history of texts]

As sufficient time passed between the Buddha’s time (dated ~400 BC) and its eventual spread, followers had ample opportunity to provide secondary commentary (as we do so here). It would soon become unclear what is canon and what is not, and insofar as there is no “doctrinal text” written in a language that everyone understands and with interpretations everyone agrees on, texts soon become self-contradictory. If there is no self, how can you be reincarnated? If there is no self, how can all beings have buddhahood within them?

Part of the dogmatic answer (lol) is that the Buddha taught to the means of the listener, and so each teaching is like a ladder. Once you climb on top of it, you can throw it away. Each teaching is more like a dumbbell to lift. Meditating on it is like lifting with it, but you will advance past it.

For example, the laity are taught (or maybe just incentivized to) that they can accrue good karma by giving food to Buddhist monks and to monasteries. This trade of spiritual wealth for material wealth sounds much like what Luther protested! But it was also necessary for the sangha to sustain itself. What’s worse - a sangha that doesn’t exist, or a sangha that accepts material gifts?

Going into a village to beg for food (the Pali term for an ordained monk “bikkhu” is “one who begs”) is almost universally acceptable, although some sutras impose harsher constraints on the food that one can accept or the attitude you can hold towards this food. Can you eat after noon? Can you dine in a layperson’s home? Can you accept meat placed in your alms bowl? Opinions exist on the whole spectrum, as customs and sensibilities changed. “One of the reasons that the Buddha resisted calls for a vegetarian diet was that it prevented laity of an opportunity to make merit,” Lopez writes. For one, at some point meat was acceptable as long as [three rules]. The last rule was later said to be [last rule]. It’s just close enough that it’s defensible to anyone except a studied monk - in the [year], comparing translations was no easy feat.

The earliest monks wandered without a permanent home, but after laity complained that wandering monks trampled their fields during the rain season, the Buddha decreed that monks must find shelter during the three months of what is now called the rain retreat. Eventually these temporary shelters became permanent, and rising monk populations and needs led to a certain statism, where Buddhism was intermingled with the state and required it to survive. Even before it needed the state, it also needed the people. Without the ability to be self-sufficient, all religions tied themselves to local powers.

How did Buddhism endear itself to worldly powers? Monasteries offered promises of good rebirth for alms. Monastic schools established rules for ordainment. To prevent Buddhism from being associated with crime, some banned thieves and other criminals from escaping to monasteries. To satisfy the local laity and compete with brahmin priests, some banned certain castes. But it wasn’t just practices that changed - Wu Zetian’s monks presented her with a rewritten version of the Mahāmegha Sūtra (Great Cloud Sutra) that “prophecied” a female bodhisattva and chakravartin, whose reign bore an uncanny resemblance to Wu Zetian’s thus far.

Textual manipulation wasn’t always this obvious, nor did they always occur in societies and times that supported textual recording. How would we know if the sutras were edited in the half millennia between the Buddha’s life and their first surviving writing? Even as texts were written, fragmented transmission of the then-already-large canon meant that canon further fractured. Commentary looking for what the True interpretation is - theology - proliferated and expanded the range of possible believable texts. Fracturing exists everywhere, but most of all in Buddhism.

The nascent untrustworthiness of these texts exists in all religions (and nations! Much debate has occurred over the lengths of Chinese civilization), but perhaps it was most severe in Buddhism. Mahayana and Theraveda were not two unified schools, but a collection of very different sub-schools that accepted different texts as canon. Of course there were broad strokes of similarities, like Mahayana believing that eventually all beings will attain buddhahood, but really we cannot understate their differences. The Buddhist schools of Japan’s Nara period, at that time relatively new imported from China, displayed a wide range of philosophical and textual focuses: vinaya for Ritsu, Proof of Reality (Tattvasiddhi) from the abhidharma for Jōjitsu, Treasury of Abhidharma (Abhidharmakośa) for Kusha, Madhyamaka texts for Sanron, and Chinese Yogācāra for Hossō, and Chinese Huayann for Kegon. In the Heian period, two monks returned fro mChina to establish two more schools - one focusing on the Lotus Sūtra and another on the tantric practices of the mantra, mudra, and mandala.

I am tempted myself to try to trace out what a true Buddhism is via the possible “tampering” that occurred, but there have been many intelligent people before me who preempted this.

“Thus, to borrow a term from another domain, for a text or teaching to be considered authentic and not apocryphal, it is essential to be able to establish a chain of custody hat extends back to the Buddha. We see this in a great many cases across the Buddhist world. In India, we are told that the reason for the gap of several centuries between the death of the Buddha and the appearance of the perfection of wisdom sutras is that he entrusted them to the nagas for safekeeping in their undersea palaces, where they were later retrieved by Nagãrjuna. We see it in China and the Chan school, a school for which there is no textual evidence in India. And so, we are told that it is not a textual transmission but a “mind to mind transmission,” begun when the Buddha, Seated on Vulture Peak, did not set forth a sutra but instead held up a flower, transmitting that silent teaching to Mahakasyapa, tracing the transmission across the centuries to Bodhidharma, who took it to China. We see it in Tibet, where the most damning condemnation that one can make of a Buddhist teaching is that it has no Indian source. We see it in Japan, when in the Zen sect, after death and prior to cremation, the deceased is ordained as a monk or nun, given a Buddhist name, and given a chart called a bloodline transmission (kechimyaku), which provides a line of transmission from the deceased, back through the Japanese, Chinese, and Indian patriarchs, to the Buddha himself.”

I definitely wouldn’t believe such crude explanations, I think, but many Buddhist historians have come before me:

For the historian of Buddhism, questions of authenticity and apocrypha are far more complicated. As has been discussed, nothing that the Buddha taught was committed to writing until some four centuries after his death. Thus, al

• womanhood

And hence I arrive at a scientific Buddhism
But I realize that this is also just the modern, Western reinterpretation. The version of the Buddha I find familiar, the version of Buddhism I recognize from Twitter threads. history 97.

How do I reconcile this view that suffering is not necessary and can be reduced, with the other sense that Deutsch expresses in The Beginning of Infinity?

“Here is another misconception in the Garden of Eden myth: that the supposed unproblematic state would be a good state to be in. Some theologians have denied this, and I agree with them: an unproblematic state is a state without creative thought. Its other name is death.”

Problems do not equate suffering. Solving a math problem need not be suffering, in the way putting together a puzzle is not. Suffering is the friction burn that comes from grasping at experience when solving the problem, and it just happens that we grasp more when we experience things that we label with negative valence, like mulling over the possibility of failure and its consequences.

Vannevar Bush starts his memoir with:

He who struggles with joy in his heart struggles the more keenly because of that joy. Gloom dulls, and blunts the attack. We are not the first to face problems, and as we face them we can hold our heads high. In such spirit was this book written.

The sutras say: renounce the consequences of your actions

• buddhism book. buddhism as intermingled with the state, requiring it to survive. the spread of it is from translation and basically just a monk bringing it over. but how did it endear itself? and then the slow progressive complication is from reinterpretation upon reinterpretation. buddhism says learn through skillful means, no sheer translation. thats also why there was integration, to survive.
• as a history it is hard because nothing written down. people read thru own eyes, esp since not monks who discovered.
• religion always intermeshed with state
• in discovery of truth. bernouf. the picture today.
• story of meat is one of religious reinterpretation. story of history / council / canon about the total absence of canon and constwnt need to reinterpret. this is theology / philosophy
• chapter on korea and japan - the japanese sects are kind of crazy. and politics - they acted to protect themselves and gain influence, whether they take wives is the result of circumstance (japan did and korea did not, within korea led to two orders)
• rules - are to restrain as the undeveloped grow, you do not need to follow the minor rules. rules are developed then ad hoc to restrain for poiltical purposes, like against the untouchables and the criminals (to avoid state anger), or still to restrain the undeveloped as any lawmaking is (as for nuns).
• prophecies say more about the present than about the future. nuns prophecy of 500bc probably more like 0ce when someone was sad that buddhism was failing after 500 years.
• texts like this with long lists of names because need to name who was there to situate. just like how thus i did hear is to pretend it was there.
• tathagatagarbha on buddha nature.
• is this explanation of teaching to the skill also a myth, to account for contradictions
• monastery rain season, then rulers coopt. true artists?
• vessel and confession 356 story is funny? ever-lasting. why smalk things matter kike pork or truffles
• 358 amitabha, hopeless because over
• chariot 372
• 394 (2) degradation of views
• texts without words, 无字真经

So what is my version of the shared truth behind Buddhism? The path isn’t the Path because something divine decreed it so. It is how reality happens to have been wired. When you fail the precepts or act with craving, you are psychologically “punished” with suffering, but not because the gods are punishing you. It’s just how your attention and mental processes are wired. To be evil is to introduce guilt, to do good because it makes

The mechanisms of phenomenology mean that to become happy, you must learn to act selflessly and without the sense that you “must” do so. The challenge in this path is obvious already - how can you learn to act “selflessly” if your motivation is to maintain happiness? How can you learn to act without a sense that you “should” if you’re told that you “should” live without the “should?” How can you try to not try?

Not only is this the shared truth within the Buddhisms. I also wonder if this is the shared, guiding truth behind all the religions. Selfless service is the path to wellbeing, and all the meditation, prayer, and practice are to ensure that you will do service and that your heart of hearts will be selfless.

[nov 26 photos]