Text

Question 1

canonical scriptures

Answer 1

Scripture: Buddhavacana, “the Buddha’s word” Canon: (Tri)piṭaka, “the (triple) basket”
Ø An earlier scheme to organise scriptures: the ninefold division (Pali navaṅga): sūtra, geya, vyākaraṇa, gāthā, udāna, itivṛttaka, jātaka, vaipulya, adbhutadharma.
“There is no such thing as the Buddhist canon” (cf. Harrison 2004)

Question 2

The “triple basket” (Tripiṭaka),
the ideal structure of Buddhist canons

Answer 2

-Sūtra: Discourses of the Buddha
-Vinaya: Monastic Code
- Abhidharma: Systematic Dogma

Question 3

The first basket: 4 or 5 collections (Skt. āgama/ P. nikāya)

Answer 3

™ Long (dīrgha) Discourses
™ Middle-Length (madhyama) Discourses ™ Connected (saṃyukta) Discourses
™ Gradual (ekottara, aṅguttara) Discourses
™ Miscellanea (khuddaka, kṣudraka).
Ø In the Pāli canon: 15 works (including the Dhammapada). The Kṣudraka sections of other canons are lost.

Question 4

The Abhidharma

Answer 4

™ Aim: discrimination of the various events and components (dharma) that combine to form all of experience
Ø “soteriological exegesis” (cf. Cox 2004)
™ Origins: mātṛkā, lists of topics found in the sūtras, arranged numerically and qualitatively, then further elaborated in teachings and discussions.
™School-specific: no Abhidharma text recognized as canonical by several schools.

Question 5

Reasons for the huge diversity of Buddhist scr–iptures

Answer 5

Buddhism is, from the start, a religion of translation.
™ Insistence on the contents of the teaching, rather than on the
letter.
™Flexible definition of “scripture”.
™ No central authority that would have set the contents of a canon.
™ Oral transmission of the scriptures during many centuries through a variety of lineages of monks with various scriptural specialties.
™ Plurality of schools, all of which give authority to the canon they hold.

Question 6

How does a teaching gain the status of buddhavacana?

Answer 6

Strictly speaking, Buddhavacana = “the Buddha’s word” Ø “Whatever the Buddha said, this is well spoken”
By extension, the teaching of a group or a person of authority can be recognized as buddhavacana if it conforms to what is found in (1) the sūtras, (2) the vinaya, and (3) the nature of things (not in the Pāli text).
Ø Whatever is well spoken could have been said by the Buddha.

Question 7

Authentication strategies

Answer 7

™ Sūtras of all periods start by the for–mula “Thus I have heard” + description of where the Buddha was.
Ø Points to their recitation, by Ānanda, at the (legendary) First Council of Rājagṛha.
™ Creative ways of relating new texts to the life of the Buddha (just after his Awakening, just before his death, during his visit in heaven)
™ Visionary experiences: teachings received from Buddhas in distant worlds.
™ Hermeneutic devices: the Buddha said this, but he really meant something else (neyārtha “implicit” vs. nītārtha “explicit” meaning).

Question 8

Text Meanings

Answer 8

Sheldon Pollock’s three meanings
™Textual meaning, cf. Skt. pa–ramārthika-sat
Belief (conceit?) about the recoverability of a early/original meaning
of a text.
™Contextual meaning, cf. Skt. vyavahārika-sat
Attention to “vernacular mediations”, to traditional hermeneutics,
to use of texts in given historical settings.
™Philologist’s meaning
Impossibility for the philologist, even if applying an objectivizing method, to erase himself from the philological act. Identification of one’s situatedness in a genealogy of knowledge and an academic field.

Question 9

Editing texts: The stemmatic method

Answer 9

Basic aim: establishing the text of a work on the basis of that of existing witnesses or documents.
Two major stages of the critical edition:
1.
recensio: survey of the testimonies, comparison of the readings (esp. common errors) and drawing of a genealogical tree
Ø Selection of the manuscripts to be collated in the edition.
emendatio (when not helped by the genealogical tree), called conjectural emendation (or: divinatio)

Question 10

A useful hypothesis: The common case of Buddhist texts preserved in multiple languages

Answer 10

For texts composed among Indian communities (e.g. sūtras, Vinaya texts, or treatises)
™ when an Indic witness is preserved, the consultation of Chinese and Tibetan translations might help the establishment of the text (to address a problem in the transmission)
™ when no Indic witness is preserved, triangulation of the various Chinese and Tibetan versions.
Ø Lost Indic had a compound containing Skt. artha > the śramaṇa’s reasons (for living in the wilderness)

Question 11

Problems of the Ur-text model

Answer 11

1. Presupposes an “autograph”, i.e. a singl–e author and a unique redactorial moment.
   But:
   a. Some genres of texts, such as Buddhist sūtras, are from their very origin, plural.
   u The stemmatic method does not account well for oral or hybrid transmissions. b. “Authored” texts can in fact have a complex genesis.
   u The “author” is not so much an isolated genius as he/she is (like the title and other paratexts) an ordering factor of discourses, cf. Foucault, Genette.
2. Disregard the creative involvement of the copyists, often taken as passive agents in the textual transmission, or as responsible for corruptions.
3. Editors have at times overlooked that the product of their work is not the re- establishing of an original, but an abstraction, only a hypothesis.
4. The generalization of the stemmatic method to multi-work traditions raises considerable historical problems.