The First Chinese Buddhism (5)
		E Bruce Brooks, University of Massachusetts at Amherst WSWG 18, University of Massachusetts, 6 December 2003 Abridged Paper (5) The LY 9 Layer I pass over LY 8, in which however Confucius's disciple Dzvngdz is shown in another highly symbolic death scene, with a carefully considered final utterance. And come to LY 9, probably written by Dzvngdz's elder son and logical successor, Dzvng Ywaen, sometime near the end of the century, almost fifty years after LY 7. The atmosphere in LY 9 is more prosperous, and the ritual interests that will predominate in the middle or 04c Analects are already making a tentative appearance. Structurally, LY 9 is closely based on LY 7 (and the Dzvngdz memorial piece LY 8), though with considerable rearrangement, but in content, there is a movement away from the extreme portrait of Confucius in LY 7. At the same time, some elements of that picture are taken further. One of them is the ecstatic praise of Confucius by his disciple Yen Hwei in 9:11, already mentioned. Another is a series of passages where Confucius praises and regrets Yen Hwei (9:20-22, expanding on the tribute to Yen Hwei in 8:5). Another is a redo of the Confucius death scene, this time not with finality, at the end of the chapter, but more lightly, in the middle (9:12). This time, Confucius's disciples parade as though they were the retainers of a great officer, rather than a minor master; they hope to delude the delirious Confucius into thinking that he has, after all, succeeded in reaching the rank of minister of state. He rebukes them, and says that dying in the arms of his disciples is good enough; it is not as though he were dying by the roadside. The renunciation of disciple shame over the circumstances of his death is very like the Kusinara scene in MpN 2:41. It will be noticed that the elements seemingly echoed in LY 7 and LY 9 are those earlier tentatively identified as probably belonging to the second and third layers of the MpN text, respectively. Chronology If these resemblances hold, and it seems to me that the constellation of resemblances in LY 7 in particular is very convincing, then we have established the long desired external chronological benchmark for early Indian Buddhism. Given LY 7-9, where the echoes are unmistakably Buddhistic in nature, it becomes likely that the less distinctive meditation technique was also learned from the Buddhists. If so, LY 5 (c0470) reflects a contact with Buddhism. Further, LY 7 (c0450) not only postdates the death of the Buddha, it postdates the account of that death which we find in the core and the first expansion layer of the Maha-Parinibbana Sutta. The presence of a probable second layer forbids our putting the Buddha's death directly before c0450; it must be substantially earlier. That is, it must be not too far from the date once thought to be fairly well attested for it (one common version of that date was 0483). However shaky the reasoning for that date may have been (as the Bechert group have noted), the date itself turns out to be at worst not very wide of the mark. The second layer of MpN is reflected in LY 9, from about 45 years later. We need not posit a standard rate of accretion in this or any other text; circumstances will tend to dominate in the question of whether or not a school produces more text. We thus have no rule to apply backwards from c0450 as a refined guess at the actual date of the Buddha's death; no such precision is possible from the data here presented. But it would be natural to assume, pending other evidence, that the second MpN layer reflects the passage of at least a generation after the Buddha's death, and so a first approximation of c0475 seems a reasonable interim suggestion. This in effect, though not in precise terms, reinstates the "long" chronology of the Buddha. Conclusion The above seems to me to warrant the following conclusions: 1. It is probable that the death of the Buddha occurred somewhere in the vicinity of 0475. 2. Chinese meditation technique was learned from Indian Buddhists sometime before c0470. 3. Something like the second stratum of the Maha-Parinibbana Sutta was in place before c0450. 4. Something like the third stratum of that text was in place before c0405. 5. Transmission of technique and lore was over small-party trade routes, with at least one member of the elite as the contact figure for the party. 6. Meditation was at first confined to a few elite individuals in Lu, and to the Confucian school. 7. In the 04th century, knowledge of the technique was common to all elite groups in Lu and Chi 8. As those groups defined themselves more narrowly, meditation came to be identified with the DDJ group and less centrally with the Gwandz Legalist group, but was decisively rejected by the Analects Confucian group. 9. The retention of meditation as a merely hygienic practice by Mencius represents a survival of the still accommodating position of the home Analects school in his student days there. This takes us to the year of Mencius's death, c0303. To go further would intrude on the Gwodyen evidence (c0288), and I defer to Taeko's paper on the Gwodyen DDJ for the next stage in the above process of diffusion, and also of ideological hardening and rejection, especially in matters of what we might call supernatural belief or mystical self-cultivation.   All lectures and abstracts posted on this site are Copyright © by their authors.   2 Dec 2003 / Contact The Project / Conferences Page