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Peter Terry,
You state:
> "I am personally grateful to him for having elaborated to such a degree his views and his understanding of the Baha'i teachings regarding the Buddha and Buddhism." <
Thank you very much these and your other kind words. I read your msg with much interest. You raise several issues that are common question for Baha'is as they encounter Buddhism, and I think they are important to address. In this msg, given the lengthiness of the reply, I shall only address one issue, and will pick up the rest of your msg in the next reply.
In reference to several passages from Buddhist texts I quoted you comment:
> "These words then are attributed to the Buddha, but do Buddhists believe that these are definitely the words, and hence the teach- ings, of the Buddha? I think you would agree that while academics (and other religionists) may be doubtful of the authenticity of these words attributed to the Buddha, that most Buddhists are now and have historically been certain that these were the words of the Buddha." <
I think most traditional Buddhists would say that these are in fact the Buddha's words. Western scholarship would suggest something a bit different, and here it is worth quoting Shoghi Effendi:
"The Buddha was a Manifestation of God, like Christ, but His followers do not possess His authentic writings." (26 December 1941 to a National Spiritual Assembly)
Over the years I have had this and its companion passage quoted at me as, it would seem, a way of dismissing any claims that the Buddha and his teachings were different from how Baha'is sometime imagine they should be. While Shoghi Effendi may be correct in his claim about not possessing "authentic writings" -- if we take him literally --, he would not, however, be correct if we were to expand "authentic writings" to mean authentic teachings.
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THE BUDDHIST FORUM Vol I, 1987-1988: "Recovering the Buddha's Message" and "How the Mahayana Began," by Richard Gombrich, and Gombrich's excellent book _HOW BUDDHISM BEGAN, the Conditioned Genesis of the Early Teachings_, contain information that addresses important aspects of this question. There is also an article by Lance Cousins, "Pali Oral Literature," in P.T. Denwood and A. Piatigorsky's BUDDHIST STUDIES ANCIENT AND MODERN, London, 1983, that is worth looking at. As is: THE BUDDHIST FORUM, Vol V, K.R. Norman's "Buddhism and Its Origins," and Norman's "Buddhism and Oral Tradition."
Cultural historical scholarship has shown that the Pali texts do a fine job of reflecting the history and culture of northern India at the time of the Buddha, and I do not think it unreasonable to assume the Pali texts also do a fine job of reflecting the teaching of the Buddha. While it may be suggested that the texts were originally composed by writing, for a couple hundred years these texts were an oral tradition. India of the Buddha's time was very much a culture of highly refined oral traditions, and it would be more than somewhat foolish to think that the Buddha in his 45 years of teaching was not very concerned with the preservation of his message. In light of this the first thing we can look at is the founding of the monastic order: "The first function of the Sangha was to preserve the Doctrine and thus preserve Buddhism as such [Gombrich: THE WORLD OF BUDDHISM]."
Richard Gombrich, a buddhologist specializing in early Buddhism and the formation of the Canon, argues in his essay, "Recovering the Buddha's Message," in THE BUDDHIST FORUM, volume 1 from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, that such stock phrases and constructed discourses were very likely developed after the growth of the Buddha's monastic organization such that its size no longer allowed frequent meetings with the Buddha.
As the monastic order and the influence of Buddha grew beyond where the Buddha could not be readily consulted, it would become necessary to have an organized form of the Buddha's teaching, thus the need for developing a way of preserving and transmitting the teachings. As already noted the Buddha had the experience of the Brahmins, who preserved and transmitted a very large body of texts, to draw from
So, what we have with the Pali texts are obvious and deliberate compositions, not the spontaneous "recordings" of the Buddha's words. While they may not be spontaneous recording, they certainly do reflect particular incidences, personalities as well as the teachings of the Buddha. The evidence points to a careful preservation that goes back to the Buddha himself. It also needs to be understood that these texts, as they were composed, were learned by groups of reciters, who would recite the texts together thereby providing a methodology for checking and insuring the accuracy of what was learned and being recited.
We find the Buddha and Sariputta in the Digha 33 (and see Digha 29) commenting on the turmoil in the ranks of the Jains after Mahavira died because their teaching were "not well proclaimed" by Mahavira, but the Buddha states that in contrast he had "well proclaimed" his doctrine and that they were collectively recited by his monastics, then Sariputta goes through a long summary of the doctrines taught by the Buddha, a summary that is obviously structured for oral transmission.
An equivalent body of texts exists in Chinese translation. The Chinese texts belonged to a different school that was located in a different part of India using a different _prakrit_ than Pali. This particular body of texts then was Sanskritized from it original language before it was translated into Chinese.
The Pali Canon, as it was recited, redacted, and finally approved by the Third Council in Patiliputta in the 3rd century, was sent with King Ashoka's son, Mahinda, to Sri Lanka around 250 BCE. Now both the traditions of the Pali Texts and the Chinese equivalent were separated by much distance, and importantly not interacting for over 2000 years, and it is obvious that both these bodies of texts separately under went a lot of handling before they found their final forms. The Pali Canon was committed to writing in the first century BCE, though it is likely that the writing down of portions of the canon started long before that, and the Chinese was written in Chinese 5 cent CE. But when they are compared the correspondences are nothing short of remarkable, being often identical in the phrasing and wording in the doctrinal issues, and there are no doctrinal discrepancies. (See Kalupahana's BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY: An Historical Analysis, which neatly illustrates this point.) Doctrinal discrepancies are found in the secondary and later literature. The point is that the monastics who preserved the word of the Buddha took quite seriously the charge given them by the Buddha.
Speaking of the Pali texts and the equivalent body of texts preserved in Chinese, the great buddhologist Msgr. Etienne Lamotte, SJ in his exhaustive HISTORY OF INDIAN BUDDHISM (Peeters Press, 1988, page 156) states:
However, with the exception of the Mahayanist interpolations in the _Ekottara_ [the Chinese equivalent to the Pali Canon's _Anguttara], which are easily discernable, the variations in question affect hardly anything save the method of expression or arrangement of the subjects. The doctrinal basis common to the agamas [preserved in Chinese and partially Sanskrit and Tibetan] is remarkably uniform. Preserved and transmitted by the schools, the sutras [discourses] do not however constitute scholastic documents, but are the common heritage of all the sects.
In BUDDHIST STUDIES: Ancient and Modern Lance Cousins states in his essay, _Pali Oral Literature_:
"These divergences are typically in matters of little importance -- such items as locations off suttas [discourses], the names of individual speakers or the precise order of occurrences of events. Only rarely are they founded on doctrinal or sectarian differences."
The Ven. Minh Chau is in his THE CHINESE MADHYAMA AGAMA AND THE PALI MAJJHIMA NIKAYA: A COMPARATIVE STUDY (Saigon: The Saigon Institute of Higher Buddhist Studies, 1964) takes a very detailed look at these two bodies of texts. There are differences in the numbers of discourses that each has, but what he finds is essentially what Cousins points out. In some cases the one is clearer than the other in particular passages, but far more often there is a very marked correspondence to the point of identity between the two groups of texts -- a remarkable thing to consider given that the Chinese texts have been translated from the Magadhi spoken by the Buddha into a prakrit then into Sanskrit and then into Chinese.
So, the point is that what we find in the discourse collection of the Pali Canon is common property of all the Buddhist schools and was material that was settled quite early, long before they were committed to writing, which is say that contrary to the usual Baha'i attempt at pushing the sutras and their content away from the Buddha, there is extremely strong reason to push the sutras and their content toward the Buddha. There is no reason to believe that we are not seeing the Buddha's teachings in these texts.
Again, the point is that these early texts and teachings were very carefully preserved, and there is no reason to assume that they were only very carefully preserved sometime after the time of the Buddha. The evidence points to a careful preservation goes back to the Buddha himself. As Gombrich states: "I have the greatest difficulty in accepting that the main edifice [of the Pali Texts] is not the work of one genius."
A nice, easily accessible example of how well the Buddha's teachings have been preserved can be found in Thich Nhat Hanh's book, THUNDERING SILENCE. It is a dialogue of the Buddha that is found both in the Pali Canon of the Theravadin school and in the Chinese Buddhist canon. Hanh gives the variations between to two texts in his translation. Considering the Chinese text had been translated through at least four languages and the Pali, two, and that the Pali tradition and the tradition that gave rise to the Chinese translation were separated very early, not interacting for over 2000 years, the fact that the differences are minimal and not significant to the meaning of the text points to a very careful concern with preserving the Buddha's teachings.
To simply say that the words and the teachings of the Buddha are lost to us, or that we cannot feel assured that we can know what the Buddha taught, is to not understand how carefully these texts have been preserved. Buddhists can feel with the Pali texts and their Chinese equivalent confident that they have the "authentic" teachings of the Buddha.
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