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The First Chinese Buddhism (3) |
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E Bruce Brooks,
University of Massachusetts at Amherst Abridged Paper (3) Early Buddhism Meditation in India was not the monopoly of any one sect or stratum. Its practice was apparently common to several groups of "renouncers," not only the Buddhists but also their rivals of similar type, including the Jains. There was a Vedic version as well, populated with inner spiritual beings or abstractions of Vedic type. Of all these, it is the early Buddhists, whose home area is the plain of the east-flowing Ganges, and whose style from earliest times (as far as we can gather from what seem to be the oldest traces in the later Buddhist literature) was public preaching, rather than, as with the Vedic tradition, of esoteric monopoly. A traveler to northeast India, within the period when Buddhism existed, might thus expect to encounter Buddhism in any village or inn, and to be beset by rather than excluded from its doctrines and practices. We have previously concluded that the route from Lu to northeastern India, though hard, is practical for small parties sufficiently motivated. We now ask what sort of Buddhism a traveler in the early days of Buddhism might have encountered. The Maha-Parinibbana Sutta My best answer is: That form of Buddhist lore and practice which is contained in the early strata of the Maha-Parinibbana, the central account of the death of Buddha within the Pali Scriptures. It has long been recognized that this is a stratified text, which contains simply extraneous material, but also material from both the early and the later phases of the development of Buddhism as an institution. I do not here give in detail my reconstruction of those different strata, in which I find with pleasure that I agree in many points with the conclusions of Pande, reached at about the same time when I, ignorant of his efforts, was first examining this text, or rather its translation. A few contrasts will suffice to indicate the sort of differences which this text presently juxtaposes. The basic narrative has the Buddha journeying from one little town to the next, receiving hospitality at different houses in turn, and preaching to their inhabitants a not clearly described message of religious aspiration. The doctrine he teaches his followers is one of fourfold truth, amounting that the world is a source of suffering, and that one can be free of suffering only by getting rid of the self. At one of these houses, the Buddha receives a food gift of tainted pork, becomes ill from eating it, and eventually dies, going through several stages of meditation as he does so, and arriving finally at the sought-for extinction or transcendence of the self. All this is suitably modest, local, pedestrian, and except for the final meditative transcendance, suitably quotidian. Against that seeming core of unremarkable events (remarkable only in the moment of transcendance), we have a number of discordantly grand items which now jostle the humble ones within the confines of the Sutta. First of all is a story of a king who wanted to conquer a neighboring state, but found that he could not do so because of the virtue of the inhabitants. This amounts to a recommendation of virtue, not to individuals as in the core story, but to governments, who by adopting it will achieve, not personal transcendance of suffering, but success in the warlike contests between states. This looks like a myth suitable to a time of official state patronage of Buddhism, of which the first known case was Asoka in the middle 03c. There are also prohibitions by the Buddha of the use of magic powers, indicating a time when personal magic had infected Buddhism, as well as stories showing the Buddha himself as exercising such powers. And in contrast to the tacit acceptance of the humble circumstances of the Buddha's death, which I noted in describing the core story, there is a passage in which Yen Hwei, or rather Ananda, complains to the Buddha that the momentous event of his death is occurring in a little unimportant town, and that some great city such as Benares would be a more appropriate site. Buddha responds by recounting the one-time greatness of Kusinara. This tale can only date from a time when Buddhism had become sufficiently important that its key events cried out for a suitably grand setting; that is, from substantially later than the actually modest condition of Buddhism at its beginnings. Another way of dignifying the death of the Buddha, this one metaphysical, is to present Buddha as being tempted to die by the Evil One, Mara. This too should belong to a later stage of the evolving tradition, which is to say, of the evolving self-image and outward success of Buddhism itself. Three Main Strata Not all that is mentioned above as probable later additions need be of the same period. It is somewhat more likely that additions were made at several different times to the MpN core, keeping the text current with Buddhist doctrine, and with the cultural and organizational issues which confronted it. Specifically, beyond the core of the text, we might have something like this sequence:
Summary and Prediction In general, and here foregoing a more elaborate analysis of the probable order of accretion in the MpN text, it is suggested as intrinsically plausible that these particular additions to the text (which are meant to suggest others of generally similar character) were made in the order here given. As a prediction, if it should become possible to observe the text at an early stage in its growth, it would be likely to possess the group here proposed as early, and not the group here identified as late, rather than the other way round.
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