Memorization and the Oral Tradition

[PeterC86]

PeterC86

By doing so, they (the people with faith) try to, consciously or unconsciously, convert or marginalize people who doubt this faith, or who deliver evidence to the contrary towards this faith, as a way of keeping their faith.

Translation: “It’s morally suspect to question or argue against my claims to perfection”

Said every cult leader ever.

Just a tip before you start climbing your keyboard; from what point are you spouting your words? Experience or faith?

[Coëmgenu]

The eternal struggle. The epistemically humble cannot argue against one who has no humility in his epistemology.

[PeterC86]

The eternal struggle. The epistemically humble cannot argue against one who has no humility in his epistemology.

This would be relevant if the teachings of Buddhism would lead to a truth, however it doesn't. So where I referred to logic, I referred to someone being able to understand what is being written, not about the inherent meaning of words, but what these words point to. And in the case of the Buddhist teachings, this applies, as Buddhism teaches the emptiness of essence, which leads to a dissolving of epistemology; neither truth nor belief, as one has realized that they are of dependent arising. So the 'knowledge' coming forth out of epistemology, is mere faith.

Which funnily enough also explains why someone has faith in the Tripitaka, and more specifically the Vinaya; because they believe it is the truth.

Hopefully these posts, together with the book that I have written (which is free on his forum), will restore the true Dhamma, and will lead people to Nibbana, which doesn't need faith, nor ordination, nor precepts, nor a leader, nor a following, nor a hierarchy, as Nibbana is unconditioned.

[SDC]

...

Hi Peter,

You and I have been through this together enough times. I'm going to continue to uphold the Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha as the standard to which I hope to realize for myself, pursuing it in a manner where faith is used appropriately as support while enduring non-knowledge with respect to things I have yet to fully understand, relinquished when I do understand them.

It is a shame people don't take the time to find and explore these themes and instructions before they literally go write a book about another way or bank the entire reputation of the what the Buddha taught on whether or not the Dhamma is convincing enough from an external perspective. I could see the legitimacy of concerns about doubt and uncertainty if the Buddha had no record of addressing them, but these things are a fundamental aspect of the pursuit that is directly addressed in numerous ways.

I don't know how much more responsible the Buddha could have been on this matter: use faith to stabilize the practice with the intent to relinquish it when it is no longer needed. No instructions to follow blindly. No expectation that trust must be absolute.

...

I personally know very little about Mahāsi Sayādaw. I'm not partial to the Burmese tradition and have a very superficial understanding of their approach apart from the historical conditions from which the tradition arose. My point is, that even if there was video footage of him reciting the entire Canon, what difference would that make to you? For you to pursue the application of what is found in those texts would require a whole different direction of understanding. So even if you find out that he couldn't recite it, or worse that there are inaccuracies about what happened at the Council, what would that matter? The work is not finished. It hasn't even begun. In the end, you would still have to do the work on your own to understand the Dhamma in order to gauge legitimacy.

[PeterC86]

Hi Peter...

Hi SDC,

That's the way the cookie crumbles.

Although I honestly don't know how I could explore and explain these themes any further.

I wish you swift progress to wherever your journey may lead!

Warm regards,
Peter

[SDC]

Although I honestly don't know how I could explore and explain these themes any further.

Well, occasionally you speak as if you're completely unaware of them at all.

[PeterC86]

Although I honestly don't know how I could explore and explain these themes any further.

Well, occasionally you speak as if you're completely unaware of them at all.

I rest my case.

[lostitude]

There are so many parallels that could be drawn between Buddhism and Islam in this discussion, not just regarding memorization, but also when it comes to the various "standardization" councils which also happened in pretty much the same way in Islam, between the time Muhammad died and the writing down of the Qur’an.

I very much sympathize with Pascal2’s misgivings because I mostly share them. In islamic history, it is pretty clear to all (secular) scholars and researchers that the 2 or 3 (can’t remember) councils that took place in the decades following Muhammad’s death were actually attempts at unifying the text and imposing an official version to the whole community of believers. Of course, the official religious account states that only minor divergences were spotted during those hearings and that the wrong versions/copies were abandoned or destroyed. Scholars completely reject this as pure fantasy / propaganda, and many see several authors behind the Qur’anic text.
Yet I don’t see this story as being very different from the Buddhist story.

Also, I think the whole debate about whether today’s (or yesterday’s) monks can or could memorize thousands upon thousands of pages is moot. The real issue is how the people who witnessed the Buddha’s sermons could memorize them right, word for word, after one single hearing. But taking the authenticity of the texts with a grain of salt is not something that keeps me awake at night.

That said, there are two things that strike me in Pascal’s position:
1/Why does it matter so much, as long as it works, as long as the texts we have now are actually useful? Many Christians tend to believe that Paul was the real founder of the Christian faith, not Jesus himself. So what? The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
2/All your reasoning, which obviously shines with a glaze of healthy skepticism and Pascalian rationality, actually seems to rest on a completely dogmatic and irrational belief: that Buddha is THE go-to source for our spiritual development. All your poking at the Buddhist concept of faith stands in stark contrast to your taking the Buddha for granted. You need proof for everything, except for him. Yet you only know him through the very texts you feel should not be accepted on blind faith. How?

[Ceisiwr]

lostitude

All your reasoning, which obviously shines with a glaze of healthy skepticism and Pascalian rationality

1) Falls into the argument from ignorance fallacy.

2) Subscribes to verificationism.

3) Doesn’t understand what a “lie” is.

Let’s not slander poor Blaise Pascal

[Ceisiwr]

PeterC86

What is intention if empty of self?

Intention (cetanā) is an ultimate reality. It exists apart from concept. Its sabhāva is that of willing. It arises and ceases based on cause and conditions.

How are precepts, which are a form of conditioning, supposed to lead to Nibbana, which is unconditioned?

Nibbāna is an external dhamma. Its sabhāva is that of being the unconditioned, meaning it persists without change. Precepts form the basis of the practice in terms of morality. When the morality is strong then the conditions are there for concentration and insight to occur. Insight into the nature of the ultimate realities removes the defilements. When the defilements are removed then nibbāna is revealed. Nibbāna is always there, we just can't see it. So, the Noble Eight Fold Path does not cause Nibbāna to be. The NEFP leads to the realisation of Nibbāna and awakening.

Faith is not necessary if a teaching leads to the instant release of suffering, or if the teaching can be understood from a logical perspective. Faith is necessary if a teaching does not lead to the instant release of suffering, or if the teaching can not be understood from a logical perspective.

The Buddha taught that the goal cannot be reached by mere reasoning alone, by simple intellectual understanding. One first has to cognise nibbāna, which is beyond thought, in order to fully understand. Until that occurs, faith offers clarity and sustains the practice. What you teach is not what the Buddha taught.

Now to the point of why one needs faith in Buddhism when following the Tripitaka; because the further one gets on the path by following the Vinaya, the less progress one books, because although the Vinaya might be useful in the beginning, the further one gets on the path, the more the Vinaya contradicts the way to Nibbana. For the easily to extract cause being; the Vinaya leading to a conditioning, and Nibbana being unconditioned. So the further down the path one gets by following the Vinaya, the only thing that one keeps cultivating is faith.

This seems rather confused. Essentially addressed above.

Even more so; if someone has put faith in some words, they will defend these words, else this person will lose his faith, if these words are being put under scrutiny. A way of doing this, is by justifying this faith, as it being necessary, because if it was not necessary, this faith would be unjustified.

People will defend their positions, be they based on faith or reason, unless they find them to be untenable. If they directly know something, which isn't based on faith or reason, then they will defend them without ever finding them untenable. This isn't a particularly insightful comment.

By doing so, they (the people with faith) try to, consciously or unconsciously, convert or marginalize people who doubt this faith, or who deliver evidence to the contrary of the base of this faith, as a way of keeping their faith. Which is exactly what I am pointing to in the post of the last link I referred to. It is this faith that generates power. So if followers lose faith, the one in charge will lose power. This is what keeps the whole system in monasteries running.

Already been addressed.

And in the case of the Buddhist teachings, this applies, as Buddhism teaches the emptiness of essence, which leads to a dissolving of epistemology; neither truth nor belief, as one has realized that they are of dependent arising. So the 'knowledge' coming forth out of epistemology, is mere faith.

The Buddha did not teach about the "emptiness of essence". He did teach about the emptiness of a self. An essence is another way of saying "nature" or "characteristic". Citta is empty of substance, in terms of a self, but its not empty of essence or characteristic/nature. The essence (sabhāva) of citta is to cognise. To say that citta is empty of this essence is to say that it does not exist. This would be a strange position to take, seeing as how we are both conscious and are having this conversation. Once again, your argument is rather odd for someone who claims to be an Arahant (and so would know these dhammas). Right View is a balanced view of analysis and synthesis arising from direct perception. Epistemology is not demolished, for knowledge is possible.

[Ceisiwr]

lostitude

There are so many parallels that could be drawn between Buddhism and Islam in this discussion, not just regarding memorization, but also when it comes to the various "standardization" councils which also happened in pretty much the same way in Islam, between the time Muhammad died and the writing down of the Qur’an.

I very much sympathize with Pascal2’s misgivings because I mostly share them. In islamic history, it is pretty clear to all (secular) scholars and researchers that the 2 or 3 (can’t remember) councils that took place in the decades following Muhammad’s death were actually attempts at unifying the text and imposing an official version to the whole community of believers. Of course, the official religious account states that only minor divergences were spotted during those hearings and that the wrong versions/copies were abandoned or destroyed. Scholars completely reject this as pure fantasy / propaganda, and many see several authors behind the Qur’anic text.
Yet I don’t see this story as being very different from the Buddhist story.

If I take my traditionalist hat off for a moment, as far as I'm aware textual analysis does show that the first 3 councils likely occurred. The First Council was likely a meeting of the most senior members of the sangha. These would be those considered to be the oldest and wisest monks who were also considered to be Arahants. At this council, leaving aside the controversy surrounding the Abhidhamma and ignoring the Vinaya for a moment, the elders organised the suttas they had heard and memorised, however well or badly or elaborated upon, into the 4 Nikāyas/Agamas. It does make sense for there to be some kind of meeting of the Buddha's followers after he had died and it does make sense that they would want to preserve as much of his words/teachings as they could. Were these exactly the same as the Nikāyas/Agamas that we have today? In truth, we can never know. What we do know however are two things. Firstly, the Buddha taught over quite a large area of India. As the sangha grew many of the monks and nuns became more settled. This would of course mean that there would be groups of monks and nuns who were separated from each other by quite some distance, possible rarely seeing each other. Wandering between these groups, the Buddha would have likely given different dhammas talks to the different groups. After his death, the senior monks organised the teachings/words that they could remember. When monks who were more far flung were contacted, they would have had their own versions of what he taught and so they would be added to the growing body of text. This would have likely gone on for some time, until eventually the cannons were closed. A closing date for these cannons seem likely to be around the time of the 3rd Council, if not just after. Mahāyāna texts had begun circulating around this time and we know that different Buddhist schools were divided over whether to accept them as buddhavacana or not, thus indicating that for some Buddhist schools the cannons were considered to be now closed to new additional suttas/sutras. If we accept 400 B.C. as the date of his death and the 3rd Council as occurring around 250 B.C. then we have a period of 150 years where the Nikāyas/Agamas were open to new material and editing. Of course, being open to new material does not mean changing what was already recorded before. It simply means you add to it.

In terms of establishing orthodoxy, I think we can say that there was great homogeneity when the Buddha had died and so the 1st Council was not about establishing the party line. When we get to the 2nd Council this does become about right practice but, as far as I understand it, it was about Vinaya and not about doctrine. Its only when we get to the 3rd Buddhist council where we find the issue centres around orthodoxy in terms of Dhamma. Thankfully we do have enough material from the other schools to get a fairly good idea of what they were all teaching, and so we can see what the different interpretations of the Dhamma were and indeed are, since many of the same arguments crop up today even in this forum. For example, Jhana vs Jhana lite was debated among Buddhists in Ashoka's time.

Also, I think the whole debate about whether today’s (or yesterday’s) monks can or could memorize thousands upon thousands of pages is moot. The real issue is how the people who witnessed the Buddha’s sermons could memorize them right, word for word, after one single hearing. But taking the authenticity of the texts with a grain of salt is not something that keeps me awake at night.

Its unlikely it would have been a single hearing. For those in regular contact with the Buddha they would have heard the same things, in different formulations. For those far flung monks and nuns, if we ignore our religious ideas about them being Arahants and so understanding the same ultimate reality (thus teaching about the same things), its likely they would have remembered core teachings/ideas which they would have heard more than once. Being elders of the sangha, and so well instructed, they would elaborate upon these core teachings. So, when teaching their specific group of novice monks they would elaborate in line with how they knew the Buddha would elaborate a teaching from their own training (or how another elder had done).

[Ceisiwr]

Just a tip before you start climbing your keyboard; from what point are you spouting your words? Experience or faith?

A mix of both.

[PeterC86]

..........
Once again, your argument is rather odd for someone who claims to be an Arahant (and so would know these dhammas). Right View is a balanced view of analysis and synthesis arising from direct perception. Epistemology is not demolished, for knowledge is possible.

Is someone willing to clear this all up for Ceisiwr? I am neither theravadin, nor an Arahant. I mentioned to be an Arahant at the time I was under the impression that Theravada also leads to Nibbana. Later, when it came apparent to me that it doesn't, I also distanced myself from the term Arahant.

This cannot be cleared up from a Theravadin perspective, as it stands outside of that doctrine. This is also why I will leave it at this here, and I don't see any way to make this all any clearer. I am not trying to convince you though; you, and everybody else, are free to believe whatever you want to believe, or how they say in French; soit.

Safe travels!

[lostitude]

If I take my traditionalist hat off for a moment, as far as I'm aware textual analysis does show that the first 3 councils likely occurred. The First Council was likely a meeting of the most senior members of the sangha. These would be those considered to be the oldest and wisest monks who were also considered to be Arahants. At this council, leaving aside the controversy surrounding the Abhidhamma and ignoring the Vinaya for a moment, the elders organised the suttas they had heard and memorised, however well or badly or elaborated upon, into the 4 Nikāyas/Agamas. It does make sense for there to be some kind of meeting of the Buddha's followers after he had died and it does make sense that they would want to preserve as much of his words/teachings as they could.

The scenario you choose to believe in clearly is the most favorable of all imaginable scenarios. Others are just as likely. It is just as likely that disagreements and/or gaps regarding the teachings became apparent and were dealt with in the most politically correct way of that time. It is also possible that this council story was made up several decades later to hide an uglier truth that would jeopardize the future of the new religion.
Again, pretty much the same thing happened in islam, I suggest your read up on it if it interests you. The case of islam can be very informative because it is much closer to us (600-700 C.E) and the islamic tradition is the epitome of this oral tradition in which you put so much stock. Millions of hadith have surfaced after Muhammad’s death, each one of them being claimed by its transmittor to have been uttered by Muhammad himself. A whole hadith science then developed to examine the solidity of chains of transmission, rate them and compare the well-established ones with the more doubtful ones in order to tell which ones are pure fabrications and which ones can be regarded as authentic. This work has kept thousands of Muslim scholars busy for the better part of their lives (some of them are said to have memorized hundreds of thousands of such hadith, on top of the Qur’an). Many scholars even specialized in the biographies of the first generations of Muslims, the ones who transmitted such accounts (hadith), in order to be able to verify, for example, if such and such person really spent time in such city at such date where it would have been possible to actually hear the words of the Prophet that he claims he’s heard. They also documented things such as their level of education, their mastery of Arabic, and the strength of their memory. For example, if they recounted hadith that were similar to those transmitted by other reliable people but changed a few words or meanings, then their memory was questioned and rated and added to the criteria used to determine their overall reliability as transmitters.

Yet in spite of such tremendous efforts to build a scientific and systematic system to preserve the authenticity of the teachings during the few decades that separated the death of Muhammad and the first written records of his words and deeds, most Western scholarly research has debunked those efforts as later whitewashing.

I would be extremely surprised if a close scrutiny of the Buddhist case by independent, non-Buddhist scholars, did not result in similar conclusions. In the case of islam, we’re talking about a gap of a few decades between the end of the revelation and the time when it is said to have been written down. In Buddhism isn’t it a few hundred years?

Were these exactly the same as the Nikāyas/Agamas that we have today? In truth, we can never know.

And I don’t think it really matters that much if you ask me. However recognizing this risk leads you to remain cautious when stumbling upon a particularly odd passage in the texts, and I think it’s a good thing.

What we do know however are two things. Firstly, the Buddha taught over quite a large area of India. As the sangha grew many of the monks and nuns became more settled. This would of course mean that there would be groups of monks and nuns who were separated from each other by quite some distance, possible rarely seeing each other. Wandering between these groups, the Buddha would have likely given different dhammas talks to the different groups. After his death, the senior monks organised the teachings/words that they could remember.

Replace "the Buddha" with "Muhammad" and "monks" with "companions" and you have just described the official islamic account of the birth of Islam.

When monks who were more far flung were contacted, they would have had their own versions of what he taught and so they would be added to the growing body of text.

Probably not without questions and disputes. And possibly not without the occasional ego trip, as much as one would want to believe those people were all arahants. Just like in islam where the "companions" (the first generation of Muslims) are regarded as saintly figures incapable of lying.

In terms of establishing orthodoxy, I think we can say that there was great homogeneity when the Buddha had died

It always looks like that after you’ve done a bit of unofficial but assertive tidying up.

and so the 1st Council was not about establishing the party line.

There is absolutely no way you can tell. The opposite would be much more expected. After all they were only humans.

Its unlikely it would have been a single hearing. For those in regular contact with the Buddha they would have heard the same things, in different formulations.

Yet many passages start with "on day A we went to B to meet C who was doing D with E, F and G, so the Buddha did XYZ and delivered a sermon". It’s so highly contextualized that it doesn’t leave an impression that it happened several times. And even if it did, then one has to accept that the recollection is not word-for-word but rather a reformulation of what the monk has understood, and then we depend on his correct understanding of the Buddha’s teaching and are at the mercy of his missing the point entirely and unknowingly distorting the Buddha’s message.

In a nutshell I don’t see any problem with you (or anyone) taking the texts as completely authentic and being 100 % convinced that they were written down the way it is said they were, but you should recognize that this is an act of faith rather than a factual conclusion, based on established facts.

[SDC]

In a nutshell I don’t see any problem with you (or anyone) taking the texts as completely authentic and being 100 % convinced that they were written down the way it is said they were, but you should recognize that this is an act of faith rather than a factual conclusion, based on established facts.

Well said, and my point in this thread has been that there is no other choice but to recognize the act of faith. Trust is fundamentally impossible in a situation of non-knowledge, so the only option is to put something there in order to fill in the space. Ajahn Nyanamoli called this "borrowed wisdom" in a recent talk. There is no confidence, but if you don't put something in that space, there is nowhere to go.

Each person has there own criteria for what is inspirational and worth their time. Only when that criteria is met can a person begin to have interest enough to pursue it. I imagine it is important to many to see very popular teachers such as Masashi Sayādaw being able to meet that criteria, but such an expectation only reinforces the idea that excellence and greatness is available in droves throughout the contemporary Buddhist world. Unfortunately I've never found that to be the case, and although I do believe there are a handful of such excellent monastics, it will eventually come down to the work a person is willing to do in order to expose themselves to those themes found in the suttas. There is no external assurance profound enough to bypass that personal exposure.

I hope pascal returns to discuss this aspect if it is at all part of his/her situation.