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Original Buddhism: Introduction · Gabriel Ellis, PhD | The Curious Mind Podcast

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Welcome everyone, My name is Gabriel Ellis.
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This is the Curious Mind podcast.
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I'm a psychologist, psychotherapist and a Buddhist
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scholar. And indeed, today I would like
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to present to you an introduction into original
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Buddhism. Original Buddhism is what we can
0:19
assume the historical Buddha taught, and as I will show, it
0:24
is not so easy to figure out what from the Buddhist texts we
0:29
can acknowledge as something more authentic or what was, for
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example, a later introduction into these texts.
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Now this has been basically the topic of my dissertation, so it
0:44
can get quite detailed. I will in order to, you know,
0:49
keep you from having to go through all the small things in
0:54
the video. I keep you the link in the
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description, the link to my dissertation.
0:59
I will give you also some other links to resources where you can
1:03
start to read and research the historical texts yourself.
1:09
So that at the end of a few of those episodes, I hope you can
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get a pretty good idea about the context in which historical
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Buddhism developed and also what is likely or most likely the
1:23
content which the historical Buddha taught.
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Now, as it is quite normal with those complex research topics,
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you will not find another specialist in the field who will
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completely agree with what I'm saying today.
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So keep an open mind and see it as an opinion of one scholar,
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even though I also have to say that there are not too many
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people specialized in the world in this topic.
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There's much more research going on in Mahayana Buddhism, for
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example, Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, and surprisingly less about the
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historical Buddhism. So it is, I think, quite
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grounded what I can present to you, and with a healthy dose of
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scepticism. I can already start by saying
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that I perceive the Buddha as a historical figure.
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Historical like in the sense that we have writings from him,
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but historical just in the more ordinary sense that he existed
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as a person and he indeed taught a path to spiritual liberation.
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Now let me start with the broad historical context.
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When we talk about Buddhism, obviously we talk about India or
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Northern India. And Buddhism, you might have
2:47
already heard, is not the oldest religion on the Indian
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subcontinent. This privilege goes to the Vedas
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or Vedic religion, which developed as far as we can tell,
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about 1200 years before the Buddha.
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Not only that, it did develop in a different historical region.
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And I can show you a little bit here.
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Here's a map of ancient India. I hope you can see that in the
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zoom. Yes.
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So at about the center you will see a region that is called Kuru
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and Ku is about here. This is the region where the
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Vedas were conceived, where as far as we can tell, this is the
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historical center of the Vedas. A little bit to the east of that
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southeast is Panchala, and together this region is
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sometimes called Kukul Panchala and research and Kukul Panchala
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is what we can consider the traditional source of
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Brahmanism. Brahmanism is the name of the
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religion that we call the religion that, you know,
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developed the Vedas and practiced the Vedas.
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The term that we usually use today, Hinduism refers to a much
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later development on the Indian subcontinent comes from
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Brahmanism. But in order to distinguish
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those historical lay layers, we use those terms Brahmanism,
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Buddhism which was more prominent at the time of the
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Buddha and Hinduism came only later and also had different
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texts, for example and its foundations.
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So Kuppu Panchala was the home region of the Brahmins of the
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Vedas and its eastern border is approximately where we have new
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daily today. This is significant because it
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also represented where Brahmins typically lived, as far as we
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can tell, in the cool Panchala region.
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Now with time, over the centuries, they crossed several
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rivers. There they formed the natural
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boundaries and expanded towards the east.
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And in this eastern expansion, in this eastern movement, at
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some point they reached also the region where the Buddha lived.
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And I can show you where this is.
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So we have again Ku and Panchala here, and the Buddha lived most
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of his life. I hope you can see that in the
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region called Kosala and Kosala, and a little bit to the east or
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the southeast of that is magada. Sometimes Magada is the main
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term for scholars where the Buddha lived or the region in
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which the Buddhism and similar spiritual traditions came up.
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But from the the Buddhist texts, most of the regions that are
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mentioned, most of the cities or towns or villages that I
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mentioned are in Kosala. So we are basically in
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northeastern India. This development that the
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Brahmins only slowly moved to North East India to the place
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where the Buddha lived means and this is around the time when the
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Buddha lived and taught. Only then the Brahmins started
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to slowly establish themselves in these regions.
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And this means that Buddhism is not a development out of
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Brahmanism, it's not a development against Brahmanism,
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and it's had relatively little to do with the influence of
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Brahmanism, the Vedic gods, the Vedic texts and so on.
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It was mostly an independent spiritual movement.
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If anything, it was much more connected to the spiritual
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movements that were developed in the same region.
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And there were several of them. And in the next episodes I will
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describe a little bit more who the spiritual competitors of the
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Buddha were at his lifetime. For example, Jainism.
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Jainism is basically the only tradition that developed
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probably earlier then Buddhism and that it's somehow still
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known today. It is not a very big religion,
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but Jainism is still practiced by a minority in India and
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worldwide. You can still look it up, you
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can find videos about it and so on.
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Jainism has a very strong emphasis on non violence, for
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example, much more even than Buddhism.
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So Buddhism was in its own bubble of spiritual development,
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competing or contrasting itself against other spiritual
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traditions there, and not so much with the Brahmanism.
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Why is that important? It is important because the text
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that we have today, the oldest surviving texts, this is a
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Canon, a literary Canon that is called the Pali Canon.
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Poly is the language in which this Canon is preserved.
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This Poly Canon does not come from 1 stratum of time.
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It does not come from one specific period of time.
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This Corp, this oldest corpus of texts has developed over 203
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hundred years and in those two hundred, 300 years the Brahmins
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have gained much more influence in their expansion towards the
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east. They have gained much more
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influence in Kosala, Magada and even further East and Vidiha.
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And these influences have come also into the texts.
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We have seen much more interactions with Brahman's
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Brahman concepts are taking up, discussed, contradicted in the
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texts. And so this is one example where
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we can use the Buddhist texts to see and to filter out content,
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content that was probably added only later.
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One significance of the Buddhist texts is that they typically
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display the Buddha as the speaker.
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So the Buddha starts his conversations by addressing the
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monks or the nuns. And this is a literary form the
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orthodox followers of old Buddhism of this so-called Pali
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Buddhism or Tehavada Buddhism, which is another religious name
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for the countries where this old texts are kind of seen as the
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root of the religion. This is mainly Sri Lanka,
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Thailand and Myanmar or Burma, though.
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So the orthodox followers of Buddhism, they will say the
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texts say that the Buddha spoke these words.
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As scholars, we have to see it as a literary form.
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We have to see that this was used by people who transmitted
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the texts or people who memorized the texts in the first
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centuries after the Buddha to give their texts a authoritative
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form. But we do not take it literally
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as something that the Buddha actually said himself or that it
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is even a verbatim, a precise transcription of what the Buddha
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said. This is certainly not what it
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is. OK, let me go back a little bit
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to the historical context. What years are we talking about?
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Researchers are disagreeing about the, you know, the, the
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precise numbers when the Buddha lived, when he died and so on.
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But many agree that the fundamental years of his
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teaching of the Buddha were about 450 to 400 BCE.
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What is interesting about that time is not only that Brahmanism
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expanded to the East, started to expand to the East, but also
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that city culture started to develop during these years and
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during these decades and the centuries after that.
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In ancient India, there was a civilization that had big
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cities. Surprisingly, this civilization
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disappeared. We have findings of script, but
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we cannot decipher them. We did because we don't have a
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translation key. So unfortunately, we don't know
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much apart from archaeological findings about this old
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tradition. Then there was a break of
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several 100 years and only then new city states started to
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emerge, and this was about the time of the Buddha, maybe
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slightly before. Certainly they continue to
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develop afterwards and to become bigger cities.
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Why is that important? It is important because the
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bigger a city is, the more we have a city culture there.
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And the city culture, of course, is oriented towards the
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satisfaction of the needs of the inhabitants of these cities.
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And these play a bigger part. And a good number of sutras.
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Sutras are the texts, the Buddhist texts where the the
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Buddha is teaching. So there are many sutras,
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Sanskrit sutras. It's the same word in many
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sutras. The lay population, their
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questions, the answers that they are given by the Buddha or some
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of his disciples play an important part.
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And this also helps us to understand that a good part of
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these suitors are probably not original Buddhism.
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Not original Buddhism in the sense that they come directly
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from the original historical Buddha or his direct disciples.
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Probably these teachings, these texts were conceived at a later
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time and then post factum attributed to the Buddha as the
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author, as the speaker. So again we have the main years
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of the Buddha's teaching around 450 to 400 BCE.
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As far as we know from the texts, he became quite old until
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he passed away, maybe about 80 years old.
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So we can assume that he was teaching for about 50 years of
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his life. Now, during the time, India did
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not have a system of writing. Writing developed only about 200
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years after the Buddha, and it was introduced by the famous
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king Ashoka, who was the first eminent, you know, big prominent
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king, ruler of India because he simply had a lot of geographical
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space and regions in his Kingdom.
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He covered a lot of northern and central India, which was back
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then a huge Kingdom under the influence of Alexander, who kind
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of came into India back then. But actually he just crossed the
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river and reached into today's Pakistan.
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So Alexander, even though we say that he went to India, but it
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didn't go very far. What he did do is he sent
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ambassadors to the regions in northern, northern central
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India. So This is why those two
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cultures were in direct contact, contact.
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And as far as we can tell, Ashoka was influenced by Greek
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writing through the ventures of Alexander.
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And he let his specialists develop his own script so that
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they have his their own Indian script for writing.
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And we know that quite well because there are a good number
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of pillars that were inscribed at the reign of King Ashoka and
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are distributed all over northern and northern central
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India, and they have been found many decades ago.
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And from that we know that he let the script be developed in
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his name. This is written there.
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He sometimes even complaints that the scribes are not good in
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orthography. So these are all hints for very
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fresh new script that was developed back then again, about
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200 years before the Buddha. So for 200 years, whatever the
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Buddha taught was not, was not inscribed, was not written down,
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and had to be transmitted by memory, memory recitation,
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sometimes group recitation and monasteries.
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But it had to be heard, understood and repeated by
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people from mouth to ear so that they could come down and
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transmit it until a time when there was actual writing and
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those teachings could be written down.
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When do we find the first written texts of Buddhism?
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Now in the Pillars of Ashoka we don't have actual texts of
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Buddhism, but some Buddhist texts are mentioned.
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Buddhist texts that we have today.
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At least we have texts with the same titles.
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These Do these have the same content as King Ashoka had back
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in the days? We cannot tell, but it's a good,
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good, good hint that at least a similar content was available
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back then to King Ashoka. So we have few of those.
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Not much. A few sutas or a few contents
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are mentioned. But when do we find the actual
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written first examples of Buddhist Sutar teachings?
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And this is again almost 200 years after the writing was
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developed. So it's about the 1st century
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BCE or around the turn of the Millennium in the 1st century
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CE. This is when we have the first
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finds of Buddhist Suta texts and they are, they have been found
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in Gandhara. This is very quite northwestern
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region and they are quite similar to the texts that have
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been transmitted to us through tradition.
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So there's a good confirmation that some of the texts that we
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have available to us through the normal transmission of the
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monastic order quite similar or quite identical in content to
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the some of the texts that were available back then.
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So this is quite helpful for us to know.
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So to summarize, the society back then was in flux.
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Brahmins shook up the religious, social, religious and political
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landscape by immigrating to the east, moving eastwards.
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The Buddha lived in this very spiritually fertile region of
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Khosala Magada Vidya where many other spiritual traditions
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developed, and thus we have the inception of some of the world
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religions that we have today. I mentioned the language where
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the texts in which the texts are written.
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This is Pali. Pali is almost certainly not the
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language that the Buddha spoke it.
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We know it mostly as a pan Buddhist language back then.
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It is the language in which the Buddhist texts have been
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transmitted. It is closer to be a pakrit,
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which means not a high language like the Vedas have been, but
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more a spoken kind of language, colloquial kind of language.
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And this makes sense when we assume that the interests of the
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Buddha and of Buddhism was for his content to be understood by
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many people. But it is not a direct dialect,
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as far as we can tell, that has been spoken by the Buddha or in
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a certain region. There are scientists,
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researchers, who believe that the Buddha indeed was speaking
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partly, but most disagree on that.
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Which is again a hint that we have a break between historical
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Buddhism, the person of the Buddha, what he actually said,
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and the transmission of what he said, until the form where we
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can quite safely assume that this Canon, that the collection
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of texts was closed off and preserved in a certain form.
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And this was any time between maybe the 1st century CE.
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At maximum it was the 5th century CE.
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But from this again you can see that there were several
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centuries during which an alteration or additions to the
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texts could have been made, so that it is not certain what we
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perceive as the oldest collection of Buddhist texts
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indeed preserve the spoken words of the Buddha.
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Now let me describe to you a little bit in which form we have
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those texts, the Buddhist, the ancient Buddhist texts, they are
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collected in three so-called baskets.
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As far as we can tell, it's called baskets because they were
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written down on palm leaves and those palm leaf collections,
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they were collected in baskets. So there are three baskets.
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Traditionally, the first basket is considered the so-called
22:15
vinaya. Vinaya, the rules that organize
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the life of the monastics, the monks and the Buddhist nuns.
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They have rules. Those rules have commentaries,
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they have stories around them, how those rules came to be, why
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the Buddha made those rules, and everything pertaining everything
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related to this aspect of the monastic life is collected in
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the vinaya, in the monastic rules.
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Then we have the second basket, which are the suttas.
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These are the actual teachings of the Buddha that focus on
22:56
spiritual liberation, but also on teaching laypeople
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interacting with people of other sects.
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But we can say that mostly they deal with indeed the teaching,
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the teaching of salvation, of liberation.
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And there's a third basket that developed quite certainly much
23:16
later than the Vinaya and the suttas.
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It's called the Abidama and it's it's a philosophical, it's a
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text of philosophical explorations where the Buddhist
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philosophers of that time who created those collections, they
23:36
tried to homogenize the Buddhist teachings, the Buddhist path
23:42
into consistent shapes, consistent orders, lists.
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Whenever you read many, many suitors of the Sutter Basket,
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you will see that they are not completely identical to each
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other in content. There are ambiguities.
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Sometimes they contradict each other.
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Sometimes they give alternative explanations or alternative
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teachings to very similar topics.
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So if you are interested in precision, this is not what the
24:17
sutters necessarily give us. Yes, they agree on many things,
24:21
but on other things they show a bouquet of variations.
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And in the abidama they have tried to strip it down and to
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answer the question of what consistently the Buddha's
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teaching is. And it is a very specific
24:36
interpretation of that. There are people who try to
24:38
follow the abidama. They look less to the suttas,
24:42
but they want the hardcore philosophical aspect of Buddhism
24:46
without narratives and so on. You know, just teaching,
24:49
teaching, teaching. Historically this is less, much
24:52
less reliable and has to be seen as a certain development within
24:57
Buddhism. There are also different kinds
24:59
of ABI dama. Different schools had different
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abidamas. So this is also a sign that this
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was a later development. OK, so of course I want to focus
25:11
on the teachings, which is the second basket, the sutas.
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And those sutas, they are divided into 5 collections.
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Those five collections are the collections of the long sermons,
25:23
the long texts. There are 33 of those.
25:27
There are there's the collection of the medium length texts,
25:31
there are 152 of those. And there's a collection of
25:36
short or minor texts and there are literally thousands of them.
25:41
Then we have a collection which is organized around numbers.
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It's the so-called Angutara Nikaya and numbers numbered in
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the sense that we have sermons that are organized around number
25:57
principles. There are, for example, the four
25:59
noble truths. What are the four noble truths?
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The first truth is this, the second this, third this, the 4th
26:05
this. Then there are, for example, the
26:08
seven limbs of enlightenment, there's the 8 full Noble path.
26:14
Many, many concepts in Buddhism are organized through numbers,
26:20
which has probably good reasons which I will explain a little
26:24
bit more later. And these are collected in the
26:29
Anguta Vanikaya in the numerical collection, even though we have
26:35
many numerical concepts also in the other collections.
26:38
But here explicitly the Anguta Ranikaya starts from one where
26:42
the Buddha says one thing, O monks, is important.
26:45
And then it gives one principle and there are many, many of
26:47
those. And it goes up into eleven where
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the Buddha says there are 11 things, O monks, that you should
26:53
consider. And then you know, he counts
26:56
those eleven things and explains them.
26:59
So this is the collection of the Anguta Ranikaya.
27:03
And then we have a 5th collection which is thematically
27:06
ordered. So it's ordered for example
27:09
around meditation topics. It is there is a collection of
27:13
verses in that there's a collection on gods, there is a
27:16
collection on the so-called sense sense organs, sense
27:22
realms. There's a content content
27:26
centered around the kandas, which are mental phenomena that
27:31
are grouped. So they are collected by themes,
27:35
both the numerical discourses and the thematic discourses.
27:40
Again, we have thousands of sutas in that.
27:44
All in all, we have many, many thousands of what is sutas.
27:50
Depending on how you count, we can find anything from almost
27:55
9000 to 20 or 30,000. So you can imagine that reading
28:00
those sutas, which I did a couple of times, any researcher
28:05
of old Buddhism does that. But these are thousands of pages
28:09
that you have to go through. So as I said before, the sermons
28:14
are certainly not verbatim records of what the Buddha said.
28:18
You have to keep in mind that the texts, as we have them,
28:21
fulfilled many functions. One function is to be easily
28:25
memorizable. Like I said, for at least 200
28:31
years the monastics had to remember those suitors by heart,
28:37
and to facilitate that, the texts were put in a form that
28:41
helps them to memorize. One of those memorization helps
28:46
or aids is something that I already mentioned is numbers.
28:51
So if there are, for example, if there's the Eightfold Noble
28:54
Noble path and Novice is trying to remember them, he knows by
29:00
title that there should be 8. And then he tries to memorize
29:05
them and he comes only to seven, and then he already knows that
29:09
he forgot something. He can go to a fellow monastic
29:12
and ask them, these are the seven that I remember.
29:15
What is the 8th 1? So it's a direct memory aid.
29:19
Another memory aid is the waxing syllable principle, which means
29:25
in a long list of nouns, for example, typically the sutas
29:30
start with the fewest syllables and for example, words with two
29:34
syllables, and then we have words with three syllables and
29:37
then fourth and five, and so on. This is also something that's
29:42
supposed to help and aid the memorization process.
29:46
Apart from that, this does also have other purposes, for example
29:50
the differentiation from spiritual competitors.
29:54
So you can imagine that even at the time of the Buddha there
29:59
were spiritual competitors for sure.
30:01
Afterwards, and keeping in mind that the Brahmins became more
30:05
and more dominant, monastics had to defend the Buddhist teachings
30:10
for laypeople, for influential donors, but also against the
30:17
other spiritual traditions. And some of the texts are quite
30:22
clearly designed to give monastics arguments and talking
30:28
points. How to defend the Buddhist
30:30
teachings against competing traditions, competing teachers.
30:37
Another aspect of the text is they're supposed to court
30:41
potential monastics. The Buddhist Sangha, the
30:47
monastic order consisting of monks and nuns, needed fresh
30:53
novices all the time in order to replenish itself and to continue
30:57
existing. And for that you need to inspire
31:01
potential potential novices so that they ordain and help to
31:06
continue this tradition to be alive.
31:10
So there are texts to inspire potential aspirants, and there
31:15
are texts, many texts in fact, that help to secure resources
31:21
and conversion. Conversion by influential
31:25
donors, land owners, kings and laypeople.
31:31
Back then for a long time, and even up until today to a certain
31:35
extent, monastics and hermitages and small monasteries.
31:42
They heavily depend on the donations of very simple
31:47
laypeople. There are the grounds they are
31:51
donated. At the beginning of Buddhism
31:54
they did not have many grounds yet.
31:56
Maybe there were few exceptions, but mostly the donations came
32:01
from food. Food, maybe clothes, maybe empty
32:06
huts for meditation, something like that.
32:09
We know from the texts and we can imagine a little bit more
32:13
further on, and they instrumentally dependent,
32:18
dependent on that. A Buddhist monk living by the
32:22
Theravada rules cannot go and buy something.
32:29
They cannot even hint that they want something except to family
32:33
members, for example. But they cannot ask for
32:35
something. So they go on arms food rounds
32:39
once per day typically. They go into the village, they
32:42
go into a town, they stand in front of the doors.
32:45
People usually know that they're coming and they give them food.
32:49
Other than that, monastics have no possibility to feed
32:53
themselves and to survive. So it is not a luxury that
32:59
donors support the Buddhists and monastic community.
33:04
It's a necessity. They dependent on that.
33:06
And by the way, some of the other competing ascetic
33:10
movements in the Buddhist time equally dependent on donations
33:15
by lay people. So securing resources and
33:21
converting, making, allowing people to convert to Buddhism
33:25
was essential for the material survival of the Sangha.
33:30
As I mentioned before, the more we have texts that are geared
33:35
towards pleasing, inspiring lay people and so on, the more we
33:42
have to assume that these could be later insertions into the
33:46
texts that are provided in order to help the survival of the
33:50
Sangha and do not represent the very earliest layers of the
33:55
Buddhist teachings. If you're interested in the
34:01
oldest Buddhist texts, I can give you already a
34:04
recommendation. The recommendation is that of
34:10
the Sutanipata. The Sutanipata is a collection
34:13
within the collection of minor texts.
34:18
So it consists of short texts. The Sutanipata is a collection
34:22
of verses. Now within the Sutanipata there
34:26
is one book, and this is the one that I recommend.
34:29
It's the Attakavaga. It's the book of 8th eighths, so
34:35
to speak. Why?
34:36
Because there are 8 verses in each poem in this collection,
34:41
many researchers agree that this is either the oldest or
34:47
certainly one of the oldest collections within the Buddhist
34:50
texts. They're also quite beautiful to
34:53
read and spiritually inspiring. So if you want to read something
34:58
that quite certainly belongs to the oldest text material that we
35:01
have, then this is what I can recommend.
35:04
And I will leave a link for an online edition of an English
35:09
translation of that in the description to the video so that
35:13
you can have a look and have a read yourself.
35:15
Maybe later on you want to buy one of the new editions of the
35:21
translation with a lot of commentary, a lot of context,
35:24
quite readable, quite interesting for people who are
35:27
interested in old Buddhism. Now this brings up an
35:30
interesting topic. Why are verses so interesting in
35:37
old Buddhism versus are a type of literature that is easily
35:42
retained? This is the important point for
35:45
us. Because they have a certain
35:48
flow, because they have a certain certain syllables, they
35:54
follow poetic rules that the contemporaries back then
35:59
understood. Because of these, they were easy
36:02
to remember. What is also easy to remember
36:08
are formalized lists, for example, hateful Noble, Noble
36:12
path, the Four Noble truths. All these things are also easy
36:16
to remember. It does not mean that all the
36:21
verses that we have, which there are a lot, there are many, many
36:24
verses in the Buddhist texts. It does not mean that all the
36:26
verses are old, but it means that what is old is potentially
36:33
averse. Now, there are layers in the
36:39
transmission. Part of my dissertation was to
36:43
work these out. I'm not the only one that did
36:46
that, but I think I put a lot of work into kind of
36:50
differentiating the layers in which the Buddhist texts were
36:55
transmitted. And this comes from the texts
36:58
themselves. There is a the oldest layer was
37:03
certainly the Buddha and his immediate followers.
37:06
And then we had a structure group of people and they got a
37:11
name. And this name that this group of
37:14
people got were the Dhamma katikas, the expounders of the
37:19
Dhamma. Probably those people were
37:24
either direct followers of the Buddha, of the historical
37:27
Buddha, or of his immediate disciples.
37:31
And they probably had a style of teaching that was spontaneous
37:36
based on core principles. And based on their own
37:40
experience from meditation and their understanding, we can
37:45
assume that it was spontaneous. Spontaneous in the sense not
37:48
that they made stuff up in the moment, but they probably had
37:51
their way of meditating, their insights, the things that they
37:56
have learned from their teachers.
37:59
And they started to give examples to illustrate, to
38:03
inspire around that depending on the context that their opinion.
38:09
So for example, if they had the core idea of how to meditate,
38:13
let's say breath meditation, then they certainly describe
38:17
this breath meditation differently to a learned Brahman
38:21
or to another person that was highly educated, maybe a
38:25
minister of some sort of influential person or someone
38:29
who was, you know, more a simple pharma.
38:33
They would certainly adjust the way of the teaching so that it
38:36
would be understood and this is what is necessary and
38:40
flexibility in teaching so that what you have to teach comes
38:44
across. Some people are very gifted in
38:47
that so they can easily adjust to the mindset of the
38:51
interlocutor. Other people give their standard
38:54
teaching to anyone they meet, but they are certainly not the
38:59
most successful teachers because they're not adaptable.
39:03
So we can assume that the Dhamma katikas were these kinds of
39:07
people. Then we have a different layer
39:12
of transmission by a group of people that are called Dhamma
39:17
dharas, and these are the keepers of the Dhamma.
39:21
Not only were there Dhama daras, there were also Vinaya daras.
39:26
So there are keepers of the monastic code of the Vinaya and
39:31
there is 1/3 differentiation. There are the Martika daras, the
39:36
keepers of the mnemonic lists. So at this stage of transmission
39:42
we already have a specialization of people who are good at
39:46
memorizing the monastic rules. A The teaching material, the
39:55
Dhamma, right, the core teaching of the Buddha and the Matikas,
39:59
those lists, those formulas, those numbered lists, probably
40:04
that may be further developed into the abidama, into this
40:09
philosophical third basket that I mentioned before.
40:15
Just to describe a little bit more what those multicas were,
40:18
they were solidified formulas and they were kind of focusing
40:25
on standardizing and making the teaching consistent.
40:31
Now focusing on the dama, the dama at this stage probably
40:35
consisted of a core text, for example, a verse, and then those
40:42
Dhamma dharas, the the keepers of the Dhamma, they described,
40:49
interpreted, clarified, commented on this verse.
40:54
And because they were held in such high esteem, their students
40:59
memorized not only the verse but also the commentary of the
41:03
teachers. And we have good examples for
41:06
that. In the Buddhist texts.
41:08
We have someone who's not the Buddha who repeats a verse that
41:14
is known from another context, so recites a verse and then
41:19
gives the commentary of that. And we can assume that many of
41:23
the pseudos that have this form a verse and then a commentary,
41:27
that this comes from a later time, that the verse represents
41:31
the oldest stratum of the text, and that the commentary is the
41:35
elucidation that came afterwards.
41:40
These are the two layers, that of transmission that existed
41:45
before the Canon was closed, after closing the Canon.
41:50
And there were many sutas, commentaries, enriched material,
41:54
interpreted material, and so on. We had another layer of
41:58
transmission of professional reciters, and these were the
42:02
Bahanakas. The Bahnakas are not mentioned
42:06
in the Buddhist sutas themselves.
42:09
They are mentioned in later material.
42:12
So we know that this was a group of people who lived and worked
42:18
as professional reciters. Most probably their skill was to
42:22
retain a very large amount of texts.
42:26
They were probably more scholastic, which means they
42:30
were good and memorizing, archiving.
42:33
But we're not necessarily meditators, and we're not
42:36
necessarily people who are good or creative or inspiring
42:43
describers, interpreters of the teaching.
42:46
We can assume that those Bhanakas, those reciters, they
42:51
offered their services to maybe townspeople, certainly to
42:57
monasteries. We can think that they were
43:00
travelling around offering their knowledge of sutas to
43:04
monasteries, help them to learn the sutas by heart, to check if
43:10
they are correct, and then to solidify the the kind of the
43:15
retention, the memory of those sutas during communal
43:19
recitations in this monastery. So this is, we can assume that
43:23
this was a profession the Barnac has like I mentioned, but it's
43:28
good to summarize that most robust for transmission were
43:32
verses and lists. So this guided me partly when I
43:37
was looking for the more authentic layers of the texts
43:42
content, though that was outside of the verses and outside of the
43:47
lists that needed interpretation.
43:50
And this is the part of the teaching that is the most
43:53
vulnerable to changes and adaptation.
43:56
When you start to read, and I encourage you to go into Suda
44:00
Central, I will again leave a link below in the description of
44:04
the of the video. They typically start with the
44:10
location of the Buddha and what he was just doing.
44:14
So the Buddha was somewhere in Khosala, and there he walked
44:18
around and then he met a blacksmith, for example, right?
44:24
And then the Smith asked him something or he gave him food to
44:28
the Buddha. And then the Buddha, depending
44:30
on the situation, gave him some teaching, some sermon.
44:35
These introductory parts before we come to the core teaching
44:39
that the Buddha taught at this occasion is very vulnerable for
44:46
changes. We know this also from parallel
44:49
texts within the Pali Canon, within the corpus of those
44:55
thousands and thousands of texts.
44:57
Of course, they're very, very repetitive.
44:59
You cannot assume that this is, you know, a 10,000 page book
45:04
with ever new stories and so on. There's a lot of copy and paste
45:08
within those suitors, and by copying and pasting we can see
45:13
which parts were more or less left untouched and which have
45:19
undergone some alterations. What I did not mention before,
45:24
there was a collection of very old Sanskrit texts.
45:30
Most of them we keep in the form of Chinese translations.
45:35
So in the 1st century CE, Chinese Buddhist pilgrims came
45:41
to northern India. They wanted to take collections
45:45
with them to China to for their studies, for the dissemination
45:51
of Buddhism that translated those Sanskrit texts into
45:56
Chinese. And those Chinese texts are
46:00
preserved. So we have often enough
46:02
parallels of Pali sutas and Chinese sutas, and very often
46:09
the the core content of the sutas remains the same, while
46:15
the prose part of what happened then and when he gave the
46:19
speech, who was talking to and so on.
46:21
They have seen alterations. So rarely do we see exact
46:25
copies. Mostly we see some changes and
46:28
most often in those vulnerable parts of the sutas.
46:31
So again, when we look for reliability of what the
46:34
historical teaching, the original teaching of the Buddha
46:37
was, we should not rely too much on those narratives, the story
46:42
part of this with us. One last thing that helps us to
46:47
interpret the age of the texts. There was, and I described this
46:52
in detail again in my dissertation, there was
46:55
something like a forest Buddhism and a city Buddhism.
47:00
When you read historical descriptions of Buddhism, they
47:04
might often say that Buddhism developed in a city environment.
47:08
And this, according to my research, is not true.
47:12
And there are some indications for that, one of them assuming
47:15
that the Buddha had a teaching of spiritual liberation,
47:19
assuming that meditation was one core aspect of this liberation.
47:25
Again and again, consistently in the old Buddhist texts, we see
47:29
that the meditation took place in secluded places, in the
47:33
forest, at the root of a tree, in an empty Hut.
47:38
These are mostly the places that are referred to or advised even
47:42
to meditate. It is also explicitly said that
47:47
the monastics should avoid groups of people that should not
47:51
indulge in chit chat in contact with many people.
47:55
So there are many hints that tell us that strictly speaking,
48:01
the spiritual development has been going on outside of urban
48:08
environments, outside of the village, outside of the town,
48:12
outside of the forming cities. At the time, those people even
48:16
had their own name, Hanyakas, forest people, forestry people,
48:22
forest guys, and these were considered rather to be
48:25
meditators, which is another hint that they represented more
48:29
the original approach and there were people who were closer to
48:34
the cities. The life of a forest meditator
48:41
is relatively harsh. This might explain why in the
48:45
development of Buddhism, the monastics gravitated towards
48:49
city or close to city life, close to be to live in
48:54
monasteries and not so much in the wild.
48:57
It is simply very uncomfortable and even dangerous if you think
49:01
of the wild animal life in the forests in the India back in the
49:07
days. The monastics also were advised
49:11
to be not affected by sensory stimuli, by sensory lust.
49:16
And again, it makes sense that these were more prominent in
49:19
city environments where usually people try to distinguish each
49:23
other by you know, you know, by the dresses and by the hair and
49:28
by the smells and so on. So again, it makes sense that
49:32
serious spiritual practitioners shunned and avoided city life.
49:42
One probable development was that with the growing influence,
49:47
with the growing reputation of Buddhism, that they that those
49:55
people, the monastics that they gravitated towards, the
50:01
laypeople who admired them and who give them financial and
50:07
financial resources and food, reliable sources of food and so
50:12
on. We can assume that this took
50:14
place. We can assume that from this
50:18
more houseless wandering style of monasticism that monastic
50:25
started to settle down in monasteries or monastery like
50:28
structures and that those were formed forsake of convenience
50:32
clothes to the urban centers. Now with time, when it came to
50:39
the preservation of the texts, you have to understand that the
50:44
undertaking of writing down those texts several 100 years
50:50
later, let's say 300 years, 400 years after the Buddha, this was
50:55
back then a huge undertaking. Again, we're not talking about
50:59
writing down a verse here and there that might have been
51:02
taking place also in forest environments.
51:05
We're talking about an undertaking of collecting,
51:08
summarizing, categorizing into those collections that we have
51:12
today. And this took many, many
51:14
monastics scholars, professionals, material writing
51:20
material, ink like material, candles for working in dark
51:25
hours and so on. This was materially quite
51:29
intense, and this makes sense much more to have been taking
51:34
place in urban environments. As a consequence.
51:38
It might well be that the texts that we have today have
51:42
originated to a large extent from city monastics and that
51:49
hence it would be not. It would not be a great surprise
51:53
if those city monastics reflected more the context and
51:58
the environment that they were in at that day, which means to
52:02
reflect the needs of the lay population, to reflect the need
52:06
to collect resources on which they depended on to maintain the
52:11
monasteries, to maintain the monastic life back then.
52:13
So it could be that the teachings of the Aranyakas, the
52:18
forest people, represent only a smaller minority of the texts
52:23
that are available today, and that there was a systematic bias
52:28
through the way of transmission of these texts because they were
52:32
likely transmitted by city monastics.
52:36
Which is another reason to make us skeptical towards the texts
52:40
that are available to us today, not knowing where from which
52:47
authentic source they come from. OK, so as I mentioned in the
52:52
next episodes, I will focus more on the content and try to make
52:58
it understandable what most likely were the contents of the
53:02
original Buddha and his immediate followers today.
53:07
For today, I'm wrapping up this session and I hope that I could
53:11
give you an overview over the not so trivial, quite complex
53:16
research that goes into trying to find the different layers of
53:22
texts and periods of time when we are reading those ancient,
53:28
those old Buddhist sutas. Again, I will leave in the
53:32
comments. I will leave a link to my
53:34
dissertation. I will leave a link to sit as
53:36
central and to this text collection that I'm recommending
53:42
to you, the Book of Aids, which consists of some of the oldest
53:46
Buddhist material that we have. Those verses that are quite
53:50
inspiring and beautiful to read. Thank you for your attention.
53:53
Let me know if you have questions to what I dealt with
53:56
today and I see you the next time.