Buddhism, Ancient vs Rational

one of the biggest shadows hanging over
modern Buddhism in every form Mayan antara vada is the idea that what is more ancient is more rational and this is something that you may have seen discussed directly in academic articles but even if you haven't seen it really address straight on it's really kind of lurking in the background of a lot of what gets set up with the history of Buddhism and when people are trying to establish what is and what isn't a legitimate or definitive part of Buddhist philosophy um anyone who states is that clearly it's already like a bad joke you already taught you about something that's just so ridiculous you can't really believe anyone would take it seriously if we're talking about history in ancient Greece does anyone start with the assumption that whatever is more ancient it is more rational is more pure is more definitive no ancient Greece if you're going to really get serious for Greek philosophy you're gonna find totally crazy superstitious magical beliefs in every error of that history and if anything I think people would feel that when you go back to the earlier period things get a little bit worse you never heard anyone talk about each and Egypt or even ancient China with that sense that whatever is more ancient it's going to be more rational but this is a huge preconception that's foisted on Buddhism it's been talked about in a couple of my articles obviously this is going to be a much more shortened straightforward answer the question what is the association between rationality and earlier level of the text well okay to play devil's advocate for half a second year in the 19th century when Europeans were colonizing Asia had a much more rapid rate than ever before although they already had many centuries of colonialism behind them and when publishing in Europe had really opened up to presenting a lot of things that before would have been censored or just would have never gotten published the Buddhism that they encountered in the field was obviously very much involved in ritual and very much mixed up with Hindu ideas ideas that weren't uniquely Buddhist ideas that stemmed from local religious traditions so you know to play devil's advocate from the colonial perspective in the 19th century you start off with the prejudice that makes sense but is just an irrational prejudice okay there's look the normal peasants do and then there's a written canon of texts and the written Canon obviously coming from a Christian perspective there was an assumption that the written Canon will contain the definitive philosophy of the religion in contrast to the very diverse rituals that they would have encountered in places from Tibet to Sri Lanka and you know I mean Buddhism in the 19th century in Tibet included human sacrifice if Europeans are asking this question well is human sacrifice really a legitimate part of Buddhism is meat-eating illegitimate Buddhism is having a secret cows illegitimate part of autism or is that Hindu influenced those kinds of questions that are first digging into it obviously they had to look around to try to establish what were the ancient texts those texts became available to European remarkably late if you look at a philosopher like Arthur Schopenhauer who was very influential over the Europeans became the first real scholars and Buddhism Schopenhauer had access to almost nothing he had a few little bits and pieces that managed to make it over from the study and put some in China Japan and that's one of the story friction for discussion but 1874 is when one of the first big chunks of politics gets presented to Europe and that's the description of the death of the Buddha we call the mahaparinirvana system now part of an Isetta is published in 1874 not in English just in Pali and I mean 1874 it tastes health like ancient history but think about the history of philosophy in Europe generally I mean it's remarkably late in the game that becomes available and the guy who did the hard work of making that available was a guy named our seat shoulders and shoulders if anyone knows that Neiman's because he wrote a dictionary for pally a very imperfect dictionary was the first dictionary that that made it easier a lot easier to do this kind of work and I came up the next year in 1875 ok so that's a big turning point in the life of the first big famous name in the history of Tarragona put of studies who's still one of the most influential authors in Buddhism and that is mr. Rees Davis I've written several essays that attack and criticize Ruiz Davis and there's a lot wrong with his work there's a lot that's worth criticizing the wealth is still worth debating and discussing today but starting from Childers work he translated the Mahabharata - it's a into English and then he brings out the first real volume length work I mean mouth our new bonus is a the description of the foot is death it's like a short novel or a long short story in length but what ruiz david's brings out is the first volume of the Deegan Akaya so that is a book-length collection of texts and that's and that's influential not just in the beat of the translation look from the date of the first publication of the of the polity and that's 1889 now again 1889 it's all that long ago thinking about it flex you won't feel a soft force possible what is them that just hasn't been that that much time not that many scholars not that many influential authors in the game if you actually go to an archive and get a first edition of the 1889 and Deegan Akaya although it is it's empowering it's in a language very few people can read what he did was he translated a one sentence summary in English for each page and that made it a lot more accessible people who had a little bit of a background and some other in the language whether it was Sanskrit or modern any language above Marathi of Marathi crack right there were enough people around who could muddle through that text especially in the way it was presented because it was really made easier by having a one sentence summary for each page to let you find what you were looking for give you an idea what was going on and then you could sit down and and then deal with the themes of text and anyway English translations came out in the decades after of the full text so that opened the door on to tera vaada Buddhism in a sense of canonical and you know hold on court authentic Buddhism for Europeans that was easy to get it it was on a bookshelf it was a pill and put with the cover it wasn't a trunk full of handwritten palm leaf manuscripts in a language nobody could understand okay so coming back to the fundamental question I'm asking here why would people regard what is more ancient as more authentic well I mentioned the kind of colonial background of what people saw in the village and at the temple in terms of ritual and superstitious beliefs and then we have these two landmark text coming out Mahabharata bonuses oh there's one sort of describing the death of the Buddha and the events leading up but it lends itself to this kind of perspective the nature of the text is heavily laden with supersuit with supernatural imagery magical things happen throughout the text and for people from a Christian background they say okay this looks like a text that's been sort of corrupted and embellished and it's had legend added to it and on the other hand you can see human aspects of it shining through oh come back to a little bit of a why that is I think I'm second put him who you to begin to study with that's a lot to say about it still today um but the contrast was between the narratives of the Buddha's death the next big thing mark is Deacon cut Deacon the gaya only one verse 20 back well guess what you know the Deacon Akaya which is a major collection of Buddhist philosophical texts including also some not so philosophical texts but stories that war on the push tradition it's not arranged in random order it is actually arranged fanatically and the first volume of the DNA kya as it happens is about morality so it doesn't open with it nearly as much supernatural material it doesn't open with material of cosmology ancient Buddhists just like ancient Greeks had a complex and very magical view of what the world was you know there's a mathematical mountain at the centre of the world in that ancient Indian cosmology that's in many ways like Mount Olympus there are wars between gods and demons there are ghosts there's heaven and hell it's a very you know this is mythology and the whole palette cannon is heavily laden with ethology but as it happens what was the first part of the Canon that really opened the door for your teams to to look at this material and in contrast to the narrative of the Buddha's death the answer is happen to be the first one with Deegan attire now it's cut me short I'm only talking about a couple of historical figures people were really inspired by this and this reinforced the tenants who think okay there's there's a more rational less supernatural original core to these texts it's it's not true in case you're fighting the force at one year this is really a misconception that Europeans brought to bear but an example person who was really inspired by the publishing of the Deegan Akaya was the woman who became mr. V Stephens wife so I normally call her mrs. Ruiz Davis - what confusion her name is given in CAF Wiis david's she really got very inspired by her husband's work and you can read her sense of disappointment with almost every Buddhist texts she calendars in her career because she was comparing to the expectation she had that were based you know on the two types of already mentioned she worked for very long time on a be Dhamma texts I'm not gonna spend what that is it's a different section of Canon and you can read both in her articles and in her introduction to post her sense of a total disappointment in dismay you know she was expecting to find a kind of perfect rational philosophy when she dug into these ancient texts and then she's horrified when she finds even the son gets a nakiya so the the nakaya's are major sections of text even when she was working on that you have this sense of dismay comer including in the introductions to her to her books there were volumes on that subject so a whole generation of people had a set of expectations that they probably brought to Buddhism anyway just a sheer of prejudice confirmed about what happened be the the leading scholarship of the time just in the years leading right up to 20th century this is at the ragged end of the 19th century what's my date for first first translation of Deegan Akaya the whole thing in English is 1899 so the call at 19th century 19th century was running at a time um there's a lot more I could say about this and a lot of its discussed in you know longer view in my essay the opposite of Buddhism that goes back several centuries and then focuses on more ethical issues and some of these issues are discussed from a more practical perspective in another very long essay called Canon and reason that is coming up both in Chinese in English the second Chinese translation is supposed to be done next week but what's the cultural background really briefly why is it the europeans have come to this with these expectations um you know when you look at certain flash points in the history of christianity of 19th century i think that one of the major cultural trends of that century that's now forgotten because it's not as controversial anymore it's not as emotive was the passion to try to reread the bible and to establish a sense of the historical Jesus in Christianity now yeah if you search within YouTube right now you can see people were so passionate about those issues to some extent controversy is still going on you know Thomas Jefferson wrote his version of the Bible in 1819 that's what's called the Jefferson Bible Oh what do you mean so my net what do you mean he wrote his own Bible well it's pretty much literally that he actually took a knife and scissors and cut up the Bible and he literally cut out the parts he didn't like and sold together the parts he did like and he produced a version of the Bible that removed all the supernatural material now Thomas Jefferson was wealthy and powerful enough that he could get away with this he was not going to be censored he's not going to be tortured by any kind of church authority and the 19th century the nature of censorship was changing just a few centuries before people in Europe when you'd have to really be afraid for your life to do some of this and even within the u.s. the whole history of the witch trials and what have you and many of the outstanding atheists and freethinkers you know in Europe's history that we have any evidence for were also aristocrats of powerful people politically who could get away with asking the questions that has thinking of a pair of figures pulled off that held ETS they were one of the most influential pamphlets on atheism in the years leading up to the revolution in France the first French Revolution had a few since then much twist you know this tendency of wanting to find something more rational but looking within the Bible among many people who didn't really want to make the leap to over atheism but he wanted to kind of maintain a connection with Christianity is a religion while basically rejecting the notion that Jesus came back in the day that was a tremendous cultural movement and it found a kind of lit fuse in the controversy over the ending of the Gospel of Mark that controversy was known for from more than fighters who's basically known from from early medieval times but the ending of mark mark chapter 16 in the 18th century in the 19th century it became a little more possible for people to discuss and chat about the fact that there really was evidence that the ending of that particular book of the Bible originally did not include the resurrection of Jesus that Jesus dies and he's put in a tomb and that's it he Steve's dead he doesn't he doesn't come back from the dead now that sort of factoid in isolation who was just the kind of footnote in the history of Christianity it wouldn't be a big deal but a lot of people today underestimate how many people many centuries didn't want to reject Christianity entirely but wanted a less narrow religion that they could continue to be a part of so the short answer is in the 19th century tremendous cultural impetus to find the historical Buddha and the assumption that the historical Buddha is more rational than any other but the people won't think about that doesn't just have a parallel in what was going on with the the historical Jesus it's an intersection they really are the same kind of quest and that's one of the reasons why this was so influential within Asia this is by no means an exclusively European phenomenon as soon as European scholars aged installed scholars were working together which is really the whole history of European scholarship they relied a great deal in cooperation for local local amongst local translators and specialists you know for the same reasons why many Christians didn't want to just become atheist or maybe put us who didn't want to reject what isn't entirely but it was tremendously appealing for them to imagine that there was a non mystical non-supernatural historical Buddha to be discovered inside the pages though the most ancient sutras in the Pali Canada okay I think I've said a lot for one YouTube video human attention span is what it is you know in case I haven't ceded it explicitly enough the problem with this thesis is that it's just not true and in what sense is not true if you told me that the real Plato or the real Socrates or the real Herodotus three different in Greece he told me that the real original Colossians people continue no superstition nothing magical I would say I can imagine emotional reasons why some people don't believe that you might want to think that the greatest philosophies of ancient Greece or that if you dig into pre-socratic philosophy that there will be a theistic rationalistic or scientific in their outlook but we know anyone who wants to do the reading - no that's not true you know and one of the things that makes ancient Greek philosophy exciting is the tension that exists between skeptical sources and sources that that really embrace not just superstition but a magical view of the world that reflects all the fears and ignorance and hallucinations that people had you know in a much more primitive and desperate time I think you know to try to end with see positive - that's a bit because that's an end note you know if if you if you don't respect that when you're reading ancient texts if you feel compelled to censor hell and ghosts and demons so to cut them out of the Bible the same way Thomas Jefferson did then you should not be a scholar of any ancient religion you should work on ancient Greece you shouldn't or come up and put a soup or anything else and if you have the attitude a basically a sympathetic attitude that these books were written by human beings and reflect their culture and their attitudes at that time then you can be a stolen it's not even that hard to make exciting and original discoveries working these texts because so few people that work with them and as I mentioned in a lot of ways that's opened up to Western involvement nation's involvement a little more than 100 years okay