Jonney Shih, Chairman of Asustek, which introduced the first netbook three years ago, “ushered in a revolution in the stagnant PC industry.” He partially credits Buddhism for allowing him to “think clearly” enough to create the netbook. But really, is the netbook that revolutionary? While laptops have gradually gotten larger over the years, now they are just getting smaller and more compact. It’s interesting that Apple refuses to produce a netbook…until next year, when they will inevitably own the market… If this lil’ diddy aint Zen, I don’t know what is.
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People are still trying to find Shangri-La. Although the art found in the Nepal cliff is beautiful, it doesn’t prove Shangri-La, or the antiquity of Buddhism. Since Shangri-La was a literary invention of James Hilton, who wrote Lost Horizon, there’s a very good chance it does not actually exist. And here’s another link to people relentlessly searching.
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Did you know that some Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka have their own political party? Venerable Battaramulle Seelaratana Thera will run for the presidency in January. The Venerable monk is the Secretary for the Perekum Housing Project. So I guess he likes helping poor people. At least the Janasetha Peramuna party got two votes (.01%) in an election in September. They got 67 (.01%) in the UVA Provincial Council Elections. As long as there’s a chronological difference between the two elections, there’s at least a slight voting increase. Here’s a thoughtful piece on the campaign for self-determination for the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka.
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Tantra now used in dating in Europe. I don’t know what this means, really, but it sounds fun. Sounds like something Osho could have supported… According to the article, “Tantra teachers are also giving out tips on how to be more attractive.” Sign me up.

From Oshoviha.org

This week’s book:

Relics, Ritual, and Representation in Buddhism: Rematerializing the Sri Lankan Theravada Tradition. By KEVIN TRAINOR. Cambridge Studies in Religious Traditions, vol. 10. Cam- bridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1998. Pp. xiv + 223. $54.95.

Amazon link here
Abe Books used book search here

Review 1: Nirmala Salgado, Journal of the American Oriental Society 119.4 (1999) JSTOR Link

“This study, which analyzes the textual and archeological sources that focus on the ritual, historical, and cultural significance of the Buddha’s relics in the Theravada tradition of Sri Lanka, is very welcome and long-awaited…

It addresses four major topics: (1) it critiques early Western encounters with Buddhist ritual and relic veneration; (2) it documents the appropriateness of the practice of relic veneration by laity and monastics; (3) it discusses the power of the Buddha’s presence and authority in his relics; (4) and it assesses the legitimacy of the relics and their curators in Pali textual traditions…

Yet this investigation…largely evades the issue of how “Sinhala Buddhism” relates to relic veneration in the context of contemporary Sinhala nationalism…

Trainor indicates that early Western attitudes to relic veneration were guided by a distaste for the devotional and cultic as- pects of Buddhism. This is evidenced in the works of Gogerly, Hardy, Oldenberg, Rhys Davids, and Carus, who tended towards a “textual-reification” of an idealized Buddhism. Some of these scholars also viewed relic worship as an “incomplete stage of religious worship” (p. 19) that excluded monastics…

Trainor, using texts such as the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, the Kathavatthu, and the Milindapanha, demonstrates that relic veneration was “a religious act fully consonant with the behavior of members of the sangha who had attained the highest religious ideal of nibbdna” (p. 59), and furthermore that the archaeological evidence indicates “the well-established character of monastic involvement in the cult of the relics by the end of the second century B.C.E.” (p. 62)…

In comparing four cases of relic theft, in which the movement of relics from India to their eventual shrine in Sri Lanka is treated as an outcome of the Buddha’s expressed intention, Trainor concludes that the theft accounts indicate both the desirability of the relics and the risk of disrespect implicit in the relics “changing hands,” which consequently legitimizes the sarigha’s custodianship of them…

He makes brief reference to the role of relics today in phenomena such as pilgrimage, pereharas, and the apparent shift from monastic to lay custodianship of relics that echoes the recent emphasis on the lay-Buddhist religiosity of “Protestant Buddhism.”"

Review 2: Richard Gombrich, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Apr., 1999) JSTOR Link

“Kevin Trainor (KT) was, he tells us, drawn to this subject by another distinguished historian of early Christianity, Peter Brown. He has written a book about relics in the Pali texts of Sri Lankan Buddhists, but he plays safe: he does not compare any other tradition of relic worship, Buddhist or non-Buddhist. He is not writing history: this is not “a systematic analysis of the historical changes in the relic cult” (p. 191). Nor is it anthropology: “I have also not programmatically compared the results of my textual studies with the contemporary practice of relic veneration in Sri Lanka” (ibid). So no comparison between periods, or between theory and practice.”

The rest of Gombrich’s review consists of lengthy block quotes and a summary of a story from Trainor’s epilogue.

Review 3: Jacob N. Kinnard, History of Religions, Vol. 38, No. 4 (May, 1999) JSTOR Link

“In recent years, there has been a great deal of talk among scholars of Buddhism about … a shift away from text-centered, doctrinally oriented, and frequently philologically driven studies, and toward studies that focus on the long-neglected ritual and physical practices that have always been an integral aspect of the tradition…

Trainor begins the book with a chapter that reviews the nineteenth-century Western representation of Buddhism, a representation largely produced by mis- sionaries who either ignored the place of relics and ritual practice, or devalued relic veneration and other forms of ritual behavior as a degeneration of the tradition…

Relics, Trainor argues, are “a basic strategy through which the followers of the Theravada tradition in Sri Lanka have forged a sense of the unbroken continuity of that tradition over more than two millennia” (p. 26); these material objects, enclosed in stupas, protected by monks, paraded by kings, and worshiped in family shrines, are at the center of what Trainor calls a “technology of remem- brance and representation,” and through their historical connections with the physical body of the Buddha link Buddhists in the present with the Buddha himself, providing for the worshiper what Trainor refers to as a sense of his “felt presence.”

In chapters 2 and 3, Trainor discusses the place and history of relic veneration in Indian and Sri Lankan Buddhism, respectively. Although the dominant scholarly view has, until very recently, been that relic veneration was a rather low form of Buddhist practice confined mostly to the laity … and that this worship is generally eschewed by the monastic community, Trainor demonstrates that there is ample evidence. from both the Pali canon and the Sri Lankan chronicle literature that relic vener- ation was from a very early period held in high regard by the Buddhist elite in India…

This raises an important issue that runs throughout the book; namely, that Western assumptions about the basic character of Buddhism-it is nonritu- alistic, nonmaterialistic, a religion of the mind, and so on-have misrepresented the tradition, and often do not reflect what Buddhists themselves have been thinking and saying and doing for the past two thousand years…

The issue of presence is woven throughout Relics, Ritual, and Representa- tion, as really it must be, since, as Trainor notes, in Sri Lanka the “Buddha’s teaching is indissolubly linked with the Buddha’s physical presence in the form of relics” (p. 77). In chapters 4 and 5, the heart of the book, Trainor explicitly addresses this issue, first by focusing on the locative dimensions of relics and presence, and then on the ritual response to relics. Following both Peter Brown and Jonathan Z. Smith, Trainor argues that relics, in Sri Lanka, have been used to constitute “particular locations as centers of sacrality, that is, to create places of powerful religious significance,” and that this power “constitutes one of the distinctive functions of the relic cult in the Buddhist tradition” (p. 97). Although at first blush this sounds especially Eliadean (and perhaps a bit wooly), Trainor is careful to distance himself from the problematics of Eliade’s sweeping axis mundi discourse. He instead follows Smith’s methodology in To Take Place (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987)…

Trainor’s examination of the dynamics of relics and place is largely insti- tutional, and deals mostly with Sri Lankan kingship and the sahgha. His dis- cussion of relics and ritual, however, shifts the focus from such impersonal institutions to the individual responses to the Buddha’s corporeal remains. In this regard, Trainor illustrates how “the ‘past’ Buddha, manifested through the presence of his corporeal relics, becomes authoritatively present in the here and now in a ritual setting” (p. 144). The Buddha’s relics, then, allow for the followers of the tradition to establish particular relationships, both personal and social, with the long-absent Buddha. On the social level, the ritual response to relics at once forges a common identity amongst the ritual agents as servants of the Buddha, while at the same time establishing certain status distinctions within the group…

Relic veneration thus can be seen as a form of mental cultivation that enables the individual to develop positive mental states and to come to know who the Buddha was by calling to mind his particular qualities, a necessary first step in taking up the Path. But this is not all, since there is also a vital emotive experience to seeing the Buddha’s relics, an experience that evokes both joy and the complex emotion samvega, which invokes shock, agitation, and a subse- quent tranquility upon “seeing” the transient nature of all things-so palpably embodied by the relic…

Indeed, if Relics, Ritual, and Representation demonstrates anything in this regard, it seems to demonstrate that Buddhists in Sri Lanka have, with very few exceptions, had no problems with the veneration of relics, and have seen the monastic, royal, and ritual responses to them as perfectly compatible with Buddhist doctrine. Are we thus imposing our own sense of tension on the Buddhist tradition? It would have been illustrative, I think, had Trainor taken up this issue more explicitly…

This said, however, with Relics, Rit- ual, and Representation, Trainor has indeed made a substantial contribution to the rematerializing of the Buddhist tradition, and to correcting a perniciously persistent set of assumptions about Buddhism as a tradition solely concerned with thoughts and not things…

What is more, by consistently situating his dis- cussion of the specifics of relics in Sri Lanka in a comparative context, he has produced that rare book form, a focused monograph that is nonetheless accessible to the more general reader and that could be fruitfully used in a range of undergraduate and graduate courses.”

Review 4: John S. Strong, International Journal of Hindu Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Apr., 1998) JSTOR Link

“This book, a reworking and updating of the author’s 1990 dissertation at Columbia University, is a significant contribution to current efforts by American scholars to reorient the study of the practice of South Asian Buddhism…

…He focuses mostly on materials taken from three Pali texts, the Mahavamsa (Chronicle of the island of Sri Lanka), the Thupavamsa (Chronicle of the great stupa built by King Dutthagaman?), and, interest ingly, as it has been much neglected by Western scholars, the Dhatuvamsa (Chronicle of the forehead bone relic of the Buddha)…

On the other hand, Trainor does contribute significantly, especially in his final chapter, to the ongoing discussion of the question of the felt ‘presence’ of the Buddha in his relics despite his seeming ‘absence’ in parinirv?na. He shows, for example, how certain miraculous manifestations by relics that inspire faith and devotion and make the relics seem ‘alive’ can be interpreted as due to the force of resolutions made by the Buddha before his death…

Additionally, Trainor emphasizes the importance of ‘seeing’ the Buddha in his material relics (as well as in his dharma), a thematic that could have been linked more explicitly to pan-Indian notions of *darsanay as a way of being in the presence of the divinity…

Trainor also emphasizes the importance of the threefold Theravada classification of relics into corporeal relics, relics of use, and commemorative relics and their correspondence to the three foci of devotion found in virtually every Sri Lankan temple: the stupa, the Bodhi tree, and the Buddha image…”

Review 5: Terry C. Muck, Buddhist-Christian Studies, Vol. 22 (2002) JSTOR Link

“Although many Buddhologists and scholars of Theravada Buddhism have suggested that relic veneration is best seen as a degeneration of the Buddha’s original teaching, an accommodation to “lower-class” values and needs for the concrete and material, Kevin Trainor convincingly argues for a much higher view. Relic veneration, he says, was practiced early in India, played an important role in the spread of Buddhism stimulated by the zeal of Asoka, and is a key to the way Theravadins practice the dhamma today…

This resurrection, however, is not all that simple. Resurrections never are. The ear- lier dismissive arguments were, after all, based on textual evidence themselves. The Buddha downplayed the physical body’s importance, encouraging his followers to seek enlightenment elsewhere. The Vinayapitaka warned bhikkhus against the dis- tracting attachment that might accompany relic veneration. Relics were always in danger of being stolen, counterfeited, and deified…

In the face of this dilemma, what’s a revisionist like Trainor to do?

Trainor begins with a methodological consideration: The often acknowledged error of the earlier scholars of Buddhism was that they relied too heavily on textual and generic, global understandings of Theravada Buddhism. They either ignored the findings of archaeological, anthropological, and cultural studies, or they considered those findings evidences only of corrupt and/or syncretic versions of “popular reli- gion.” Many have made note of this early overemphasis on texts, but some of those scholars have “overcorrected,” considering only archaeological, anthropological, and cultural findings as valid, dismissing the study of texts as passe. Trainor considers this a mistake. He advocates utilizing both texts and social science studies…

Some texts say relic veneration lies only on the periphery of the dhamma. Other texts place it nearer to the center. An unsolvable ambiguity? It is possible this represents the dual purposes and audiences of the Sri Lankan chronicles and Pali texts. One of those purposes (and thus one of those audiences) was to hold in high- est regard the arahant ideal of Theravada Buddhism. The audience for this empha- sis, of course, was the large monastic community of Sri Lanka…

A second purpose (complex of purposes, actually) resulted in textual emphases extolling Buddha relics and relics of use. These texts might be called “continuity texts” that acknowledged the indebtedness of Sri Lankan Buddhism to its tradition: to the Buddha, to the Bo-Tree and other material artifacts, to the Asokan stupa- building initiative, to house relics, and to the close relationship between Sangha and statecraft so typical of the Theravada tradition…

Illiterate laity do not read. Trainor rightly rejects this traditional reading of relic veneration as degeneration of the sasana. In its place he posits a theory that accounts for the dual purposes of the texts that sometimes seem to contradict one another-both emphases were intended for all Buddhists, literate and illiterate, high and low…

This is an important book. In brief compass (223 pages) it makes advances on several fronts. Primarily it is an effective argument for the role of Buddha relics in the Sri Lankan Theravada Buddhist tradition… Finally, he gives his readers an intriguing way of accommodating two important streams of Buddhist scholarship, Western European literary approaches and social scientific data on Buddhism as practiced on the ground.”

Fully Ordained Sister Dhammavijaya with Nepalese girls, from Dhamma Moli’s website

On October 22nd, 2009, in Perth, Australia, there was a controversial ordination of a number of Theravadin nuns (Bhikkunis). However, now, Thanissaro Bhikku, a semi-famous white Buddhist convert from the United States, has written a testy rejection of the ceremony according to his knowledge of the Pali vinaya. Whether or not his logic computes or not, I have to wonder how two particularly bold Burmese bhikkunis feel about the matter. Look at Dhamma Moli’s website to see what the courageous Bhikkunis Molini and Dhammavijaya (both holders of PhDs) are up to now-a-days. From their website: [The Dhamma Moli project provides] shelter and education in a Buddhist monastic environment to needy young Nepalese girls who may fall victim to human traffickers and child labor.
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In Bodh Gaya, there is still tension over the control of the sacred Mahabodhi temple. The tension began in the late 19th century when Anagarika Dharmapala (1964 – 1933), a Theosophist, visited Bodh Gaya and “spontaneously” decided to wrestle the site away from the controlling Hindus. He credited Sir Edwin Arnold’s “The Light of Asia” as inspiration. Dharmapala separated from the Theosophists later and established the Mahabodhi Society, a group that still exists. The group strives for Buddhist control of the Mahabodhi temple and urges its followers to create an awareness of Buddhism in India.
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Archaeology continues to be employed to deceive people about the truth and non-truths about ancient Buddhism’s antiquity. According to The Buddhist Channel, two terracotta figures were discovered in the Gujarat. The article dates the two Padmasana figures to the Third Century BCE. This “remarkable” discovery sounds sketchy, at best, as 1.) evidence for the existence of Buddha images before the 1st century CE is scarce if not entirely absent; 2.) what is Padmasana pose? Did they mean Bhumi-sparsha-mudra? If so, the development of the Shakyamuni bodhisattva is not until well into the Common Era — this stylistic fact would place these figures into the Common Era and not before it. However, historical skepticism aside, if these figurine truly are 3rd century BCE, then this changes everything we might know about early Buddhist art in India; 3.) who excavated this site? The article is remarkably barren of citations and a single reference to ASI State Director YS Rawat does not justify this so-called major discovery.

In any case, I have found a very interesting article by political theorist Michael Parenti that documents some cases where Buddhist monks have gone “bad.” The main thrust of his article, though, is that Tibetan Buddhism fueled a brutal feudal government pre-Chinese occupation. Controversial as it is, he does have quite a bit of evidence. Check out the article for yourself at http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html

I have included various quotes from the article below in an attempt to “summarize.” Since it is an article published online, there are no page numbers. Enjoy!

The various quotes (that are disconnected chunks of text, spliced together in order) below are from Michael Parenti’s “Friendly Feudalism — The Tibet Myth” :

“Along with the blood drenched landscape of religious conflict there is the experience of inner peace and solace that every religion promises, none more so than Buddhism. Standing in marked contrast to the intolerant savagery of other religions, Buddhism is neither fanatical nor dogmatic–so say its adherents.

A glance at history, however, reveals that not all the many and widely varying forms of Buddhism have been free of doctrinal fanaticism, nor free of the violent and exploitative pursuits so characteristic of other religions. In Sri Lanka there is a legendary and almost sacred recorded history about the triumphant battles waged by Buddhist kings of yore. During the twentieth century, Buddhists clashed violently with each other and with non-Buddhists in Thailand, Burma, Korea, Japan, India, and elsewhere. In Sri Lanka, armed battles between Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamils have taken many lives on both sides.

In South Korea, in 1998, thousands of monks of the Chogye Buddhist order fought each other with fists, rocks, fire-bombs, and clubs, in pitched battles that went on for weeks. They were vying for control of the order, the largest in South Korea, with its annual budget of $9.2 million, its millions of dollars worth of property, and the privilege of appointing 1,700 monks to various offices.

As with any religion, squabbles between or within Buddhist sects are often fueled by the material corruption and personal deficiencies of the leadership. For example, in Nagano, Japan, at Zenkoji, the prestigious complex of temples that has hosted Buddhist sects for more than 1,400 years, “a nasty battle” arose between Komatsu the chief priest and the Tacchu, a group of temples nominally under the chief priest’s sway.

But what of Tibetan Buddhism? Is it not an exception to this sort of strife? And what of the society it helped to create? Many Buddhists maintain that, before the Chinese crackdown in 1959, old Tibet was a spiritually oriented kingdom free from the egotistical lifestyles, empty materialism, and corrupting vices that beset modern industrialized society. Western news media, travel books, novels, and Hollywood films have portrayed the Tibetan theocracy as a veritable Shangri-La.

A reading of Tibet’s history suggests a somewhat different picture…In the thirteenth century, Emperor Kublai Khan created the first Grand Lama, who was to preside over all the other lamas as might a pope over his bishops. Several centuries later, the Emperor of China sent an army into Tibet to support the Grand Lama, an ambitious 25-year-old man, who then gave himself the title of Dalai (Ocean) Lama, ruler of all Tibet. Here is a historical irony: the first Dalai Lama was installed by a Chinese army.

Within 170 years, despite their recognized divine status, five Dalai Lamas were killed by their high priests or other courtiers.

In 1660, the 5th Dalai Lama was faced with a rebellion in Tsang province, the stronghold of the rival Kagyu sect with its high lama known as the Karmapa. The 5th Dalai Lama called for harsh retribution against the rebels, directing the Mongol army to obliterate the male and female lines, and the offspring too “like eggs smashed against rocks…. In short, annihilate any traces of them, even their names.”

An eighteenth-century memoir of a Tibetan general depicts sectarian strife among Buddhists that is as brutal and bloody as any religious conflict might be.

Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas. Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth. The Dalai Lama himself “lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.”

Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they were bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He himself was a victim of repeated rape, beginning at age nine.

In old Tibet there were small numbers of farmers who subsisted as a kind of free peasantry, and perhaps an additional 10,000 people who composed the “middle-class” families of merchants, shopkeepers, and small traders. Thousands of others were beggars. There also were slaves, usually domestic servants, who owned nothing. Their offspring were born into slavery.

Yet as in a slave system, they were bound to their masters, guaranteeing a fixed and permanent workforce that could neither organize nor strike nor freely depart as might laborers in a market context. The overlords had the best of both worlds.

The serfs were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a tree in their yard and for keeping animals. They were taxed for religious festivals and for public dancing and drumming, for being sent to prison and upon being released.

The theocracy’s religious teachings buttressed its class order. The poor and afflicted were taught that they had brought their troubles upon themselves because of their wicked ways in previous lives. Hence they had to accept the misery of their present existence as a karmic atonement and in anticipation that their lot would improve in their next lifetime. The rich and powerful treated their good fortune as a reward for, and tangible evidence of, virtue in past and present lives.

In feudal Tibet, torture and mutilation–including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation–were favored punishments inflicted upon thieves, and runaway or resistant serfs.

In 1959, Anna Louise Strong visited an exhibition of torture equipment that had been used by the Tibetan overlords. There were handcuffs of all sizes, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting off noses and ears, gouging out eyes, breaking off hands, and hamstringing legs. There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for disemboweling.

As much as we might wish otherwise, feudal theocratic Tibet was a far cry from the romanticized Shangri La so enthusiastically nurtured by Buddhism’s western proselytes.”

The title of the talk is “In Search of the Words of the Buddha” and can be located in its digital form at the following link: http://depts.washington.edu/uwch/katz/20052006/richard_salomon.html.

I have done my best to write-up a quick summary of the talk by Salomon. In the summary, I attempted to avoid academic jargon and the summary is, by no means, an academic piece of work or a reflection of my scholarly aptitude. It is simply a 30 minute write-up for blog publication. Please forgive my grammatical shortcomings.
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A young nobleman named Siddartha Gautama lived in Northeastern India around the fifth century B.C.E. (Before Common Era). He obtained enlightenment, earned the title Buddha, and his followers orally transmitted his teachings and words (Buddha-vacana) in the first few centuries of the new religion’s existence. During the first century B.C.E., it is hypothesized that the Buddha-vacana first began to be written down. However, the earliest manuscripts available to researchers date to the extremely late centuries C.E. (5th-10th). With the production of a written Buddha-vacana came canonization. A single Buddha-vacana canon, however, is extraordinarily voluminous and with such a large collection comes a fundamental problem: nobody can master all of it. Over the ages, many anthologies and commentaries were produced to abridge the lengthy canons. The canons available to us today are the Pali, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, and, most recently, the Gandhari, which is the primary subject of Salomon’s talk.

The canons have broad commonalities that are found in virtually identical form all over the ancient Buddhist world. For example, in Merv, Turkmenistan, a terracotta seal is inscribed with the so-called Buddhist creed. Looking at a map, it is easy to see that Merv is the very far northwest edge of the ancient Buddhist world around 500 C.E.. This inscription is in Sanskrit. In Xoai, Vietnam, the extreme most southeast edge of the ancient Buddhist world, we also have the very same Buddhist creed inscribed on another terracotta. At the site of Ratnagiri, in modern Orissa, India, there are dozens of terracotta seals from Stupa 1 (and others) with the same inscribed Buddhist creed. From this little amount of archaeological evidence we can map the ancient Buddhist world and infer that the Buddhist creed was a universal summary of the Buddha-vacana. However, as Salomon argues, the Buddhist creed, however important, was not spoken by the Buddha.

In the vinaya story about Asvajit we are given the origin of the famous Buddhist creed. Sariputra commands Asvajit to recite the Buddha’s teachings in the simplest manner possible, and instantly with his words Asvajit converts Sariputra who eventually becomes second only to the Buddha in knowledge. Because the Buddha himself did not come up with the “Buddhist creed” it is strongly inferred that the Buddha-vacana does not have to be understood literally. The Buddha-vacana, therefore, can also be words “under the inspiration or model of the Buddha.” To put it simply, it is the meaning that matters, not the words. This historical instance is telling us to value spirit over letter.

Buddhism thrived and spread throughout Asia because of this very liberal and flexible attitude on the preservation of sacred Buddhist scripture. From within this scripture the Buddha taught that “Dharma should be preached in a people’s own dialect.” Sanskrit, then, was avoided early on by Buddhists (but, as some scholars such as Sheldon Pollock have pointed out, Buddhism, too, succumbed to the urge to Sanskritize). Given this attitude, Buddhism became a religion of translation. In fact, translation into regional varieties was encouraged in the early sangha, which made for greater accessibility (though I personally argue against this point).

Very significantly and sometimes disturbing, the fundamental problem for Salomon in his talk is that local canons gradually became divergent and different. For instance, the Tibetan and Pali canons are very different. There are more differences than commonalities. The primary question, then, is this: What are the true words of the Buddha? Which canon is most accurate? This series of questions is boiled down to a single question about authenticity.

Nineteenth century scholars considered the Pali canon the most original of the known Buddhist canons at the time. They privileged it for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that it is the only in-tact Indian language canon. The Pali canon is also “complete.” Interestingly, the Pali canon was also the first to be studied, which surely led to a Pali-centric perception of ancient Buddhism. Over time, however, the privileged Pali canon began to be questioned. Eventually, among scholars the Pali canon was the primary focus of much scholarly debate. New discoveries, though, shed some interesting light on this entire matter.

The discovery of the Gandhari canon in the late twentieth century is the most recent development in the search for the “original” Buddha-vacana. The fact that a canon was found in Gandhara is not surprising, given the Gandharan region’s importance within the ancient Buddhist world. Gandhara played a crucial role in the spread of Buddhism to the rest of Asia, particularly China and Central Asia. Salomon refers to Gandhara as the “jumping off point.” The nature of Gandharan Buddhist culture is revealed in the Gandhari canon. A clay pot, dating to around the second century C.E., contained many scrolls inscribed in the Kharoshti language. The fact that these birch-bark scrolls were discovered on Indian (technically, Pakistani) soil, was huge – but even more important were the fact that these scrolls are significantly older than any known Buddhist canon manuscript. In other words, these scrolls are the earliest direct record of the Buddha-vacana. Immediately upon discovery we must ask: will these scrolls answer the fundamental question about Buddha-vacana? Salomon and his colleagues sought out to find out. And they found that it isn’t exactly as simple as many thought it might be.

The Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project found an unexpected pattern within the scrolls. The new corpus contained considerable similarities to Pali, Sanskrit, and Chinese canons, however there was no real, firm established link. In short, the corpus was a unique, unparalleled large piece of literature. To showcase the Gandhari canon, Salomon discussed the found version of the Rhinoceros Horn Sutra and The Book of Fours. Salomon talks about the parallels of this project with the project to trace human evolution.

Early evolutionists conceived of a linear timeline for the evolution of “man” and searched for a “missing link.” However, upon a lot of further research (that continues to this day), a “tangled bush” was created instead of a simple evolutionary “tree.” Similarly, the Gandhari manuscripts show that there is also no clear-cut missing link between the “original” Buddha-vacana and later canons. It had been popularly perceived that the Gandhari canon was not only older, but also clearly closer to the theorized “original” canon than the Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, and Pali canons. However, Salomon shows that the Gandhari canon is simply another canon that contains no earlier or later version of the “original” Buddha-vacana. All canons, he has decided, influenced each other and shared material. Since the original is purely theoretical, it could very well not exist at all. The conclusion here is troubling, and certainly not what we were expecting. If no canon is more authentic than any other, how can we ever hope to answer the original question (of “what are the true words of the Buddha?”)? Salomon argues that this dilemma is not really important. The vinaya story about Asvajit and Sariputra illustrates the fundamental attitude towards precise wording. The difference is the packaging, not in the essence. The chief lesson learned from the academic study of Buddhism is that we’ve been asking the wrong questions. To try to find the “most original” Buddha-vacana is innately faulty. We should study to find the subtle nuances in the tradition and appreciate them.

On the other hand, there is one significant answer that can be gleaned from the Gandhari manuscripts. The Gandhari hypothesis has been proven true. The Gandhari hypothesis is that Chinese Buddhist texts were translated from Gandhari, not Sanskrit or Pali. This may be the only “missing link” we might ever find in the “tangled bush” of the evolution of the Buddha-vacana.