THIRTY YEARS of BUDDHIST STUDIES
Selected Essays by EDWARD CONZE
BRUNO CASSIRER (1967
Quote from p. 10f
No sane man can, in fact, say anything conclusive about the doctrine of the Buddha himself. Even that of the most ancient community is difficult to ascertain.
Some Polish scholars, like St. Schayer (1935-8), Constantin Regamey and Maryla Falk have tried to penetrate at least to what they call "Pre-canonical Buddhism.
They assume that wherever the Canon contains ideas which conflict with the orthodox theories of the Theravadins and Sarvastivadins, and wherever these ideas are taken up and developed by the Mahayana, we have to deal with a very old, "pre-Canonical" tradition, which was too venerable to be discarded by the compilers of the Canon. How otherwise could one account for the numerous references to a "person" (pudgala) or the assumption of an eternal" consciousness" in the saddhdtusutm, or the identification of the Absolute, of Nirvana, with an "invisible infinite consciousness, which shines everywhere" (vinndnam anidassanam anantam sabbato pabham) in Dighanikdya XI 85? Side by side with the oft-repeated negation of an atman there are traces of a belief in consciousness as the nonimpermanent centre of the personality which constitutes an absolute element in this contingent world. Though generally Nirvana is kept transcendentally remote and defined only by negations, there are distinct remnants of a more positive concept, and of an unorthodox ontology, which regards Nirvana as a place (pada) or an entity (and not merely a state), identical with the eternal and absolute reality (dharma), and with the translucent {prabhdsvara) Thought (citta) or consciousness. Deliverance is then conceived as the gradual purification of this consciousness which finally attains to the summit of the "Realm of Dharma" (dharmadhatu), from which it will no longer fall back (aeyuta).
The suggestion that these "aberrant* doctrines represent a "pre-Canonical" stratum of Buddhism, is proffered by our Polish friends as merely a tentative hypothesis, and it is no more than that.
The real issue is this: Did Buddhism originate among an elite of intellectuals, of philosophical ascetics, and then become a popular religion only at the time of Asoka? Or was it, even from the earliest times onwards, a popular religion based on the cult of the Bhagavan, of the Lord Buddha? And if so, was this religious side a part of its very essence, or just as propagandistic concession to laymen?
As Regamey (1957, p. 43) puts it, "is it more probable that a system which was originally a simple religion, developed in time an increasingly subtle and elaborate theology and scholastic philosophy, or that the philosophical doctrines of an elite were, as they gradually spread, vulgarized and diluted into something more accessible to the masses?
Although I personally am inclined to see in Buddhism from the very beginning a popular mass movement, I must admit that no decisive argument can be found for either alternative. Nor is this really surprising. A hundred and forty years after the Nirvana this very same question was already debated, no agreement could be reached on it, and it led to the first split in the community. Now, 2,500 years later, how can we hope to reach any certainty on this issue?
August 14, 2010 2:17 PM
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