Early Buddhist Metaphysics

The Making of a Philosophical Tradition

Noa Ronkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134283118
• Subtopic: Buddhism
• Index: History

Early Buddhist Metaphysics provides a philosophical account of the major doctrinal shift in the history of early Theravada tradition in India: the transition from the earliest stratum of Buddhist thought to the systematic and allegedly scholastic philosophy of the Pali Abhidhamma movement. Entwining comparative philosophy and Buddhology, the author probes the Abhidhamma's metaphysical transition in terms of the Aristotelian tradition and vis-à-vis modern philosophy, exploits Western philosophical literature from Plato to contemporary texts in the fields of philosophy of mind and cultural criticism.

1
THE FURTHER TEACHING
Abhidhamma thought in context

1.1 THE ORIGIN OF THE ANCIENT BUDDHIST SCHOOLS AND THE ADVENT OF THE ABHIDHAMMA

The early history of Buddhism in India and of the school now referred to as Theravada is remarkably little known and the attempt to construct a consistent chronology of that history still engrosses the minds of contemporary scholars. There is, however, a generally accepted tradition that in the course of the second and third centuries after the Buddha’s mahaparinibbana (hereafter BE) the Sakgha divided into a number of teacher’s lineages (acariyakula), doctrines (vada; acariyavada) and fraternities (nikaya), and was subject to various doctrinal changes, refinements and shifts of emphasis that were part of the gradual systematization of Buddhism and its development from an oral teaching to an institutionalized tradition (sasana).¹ To understand the processes in question it is necessary first to distinguish the formation of different sects and teachers’ lineages around doctrinal issues from the notion of formal division in the Sakgha (saðgha-bheda).

It was but natural that in tandem with the Sakgha’s spread across Northern India, and subsequently throughout the subcontinent, various groups of monks assembled around charismatic teachers and came to endorse divergent positions on certain points of the teaching. Yet in addressing the complex problem of the origin of the ancient Indian Buddhist schools we must bear in mind that we are dealing with orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy: splitting the Sakgha is a technically precise matter and is always measured in terms of vinaya alone, so that holding a particular view of any doctrinal matter cannot be the grounds for a schism in or expulsion from the Sakgha. Noticeably, the fundamental acts of the Sakgha contrast in their plainness with the ritual elaboration involved in the public religious ceremonies of the lay Buddhist population. Two such communal acts are constitutive of the Sakgha and form the subject of the first two chapters of the Khandhaka portion of the Vinaya-pitaka: the first is the higher ordination (upasampada, as opposed to pabbajja, a novice’s ‘lower ordination’); the second, which the Buddha saw as the focal point of monastic life, is the fortnightly recital of the patimokkha, also known as the uposatha ceremony. Since the quorum for holding a patimokkha ceremony is four, a Sakgha can split only when there are at least four votes on each side, and this occurs when a community of monks (and nuns) has a disagreement which causes two groups of more than three monks to hold separate uposatha ceremonies (and other ceremonies as well, but the patimokkha recital is both the most frequent and the most important). The disagreement is likely to be over a vinaya point, but whatever the source of the disagreement, the result is measured in terms of holding separate patimokkha ceremonies. It is a monk’s or a nun’s loyalty to a certain patimokkha code, then, that determines their Sakgha fellowship. When a body of monks or nuns who share the same patimokkha code develops as a separate entity by holding its own ceremony of higher ordination, it becomes a sect or fraternity (nikaya), and this is what incites the formation of different lineages within the Sakgha.² Thus while the division into Sthaviras/Theriyas and Mahasakghikas, to which we shall refer in greater detail shortly, represents a formal splitting of the Sakgha into two fraternities, under each of these two groups there emerged numerous informal schools of thought and teachers’ lineages.

Tradition has it that by the time the Mahayana doctrines arose, roughly in the first century BCE, there were eighteen sub-sects or schools of Sthaviras, the tradition ancestral to the Theravada, although different Buddhist sources preserve divergent lists of schools which add up to more than eighteen. The number eighteen is symbolic and has evidently become conventional in Buddhist historiography.³ In fact, as L.S. Cousins notes, this number is both too small and too large: on the one hand, the texts seem to struggle to identify eighteen different major schools, while, on the other hand, the likelihood is that the earliest Sakgha was only loosely organized and there must have been large numbers of independent local groupings of monks and monasteries.⁴ The ‘eighteen schools’ were indeed associated with distinct doctrinal views – often on moot Abhidhamma points – but the doctrinal opinion was unlikely to have originally caused their division. As long as distinct groups of monks adhered to essentially the same vinaya and recognized the validity of each other’s ordination lineage, movement between the groups presented no problem and there was no ground for a formal split within the Sakgha. Moreover, not every school had its own distinctive textual tradition: in fact, the vinaya tradition suggests that there were roughly six distinct canonical traditions in addition to the Pali one. These are the Mahasakghika, the Vatsiputriya-Sammatiya, the Sarvastivada, the Kafyapiya, the Dharmaguptaka and the Mahifasaka.⁵

An account of the first two Buddhist communal recitations or Councils (saðgiti) is found in all the surviving recensions of the Vinaya-pitaka, and according to all these versions the decisions taken at the second communal recitation, known as the Vesali Council (roughly 70–80 BE), were accepted by all parties.⁶ Later sources, however, suggest that at some point following the Vesali Council the primitive Sakgha formally divided into two parties, the Sthaviras and the Mahasakghikas, each of which thenceforth had its own ordination traditions. The traditional accounts of this event are much later, and hence are already the products of the sectarian division in question that have their own underlying ideologies. There are two inconsistent accounts of the emergence of this first division of the Sakgha. The first, of Sarvastivadin origin, is based on the Mahavibhasa (third century CE) and on the Samayabhedoparacanacakra (T 49) – a Northern treatise attributed to a *Vasumitra (third or fourth century CE), extant in three Chinese and one Tibetan translation – as well as on many later sources that follow them. According to this line of thought, the division of the Sakgha was provoked by a dispute over the ‘Five Points’ advanced by a monk named Mahadeva, concerning the behaviour of an arahat and whether he might be provided by others with material things or with mundane information due to his lack of knowledge and uncertainty, and whether he may make utterances and hear sounds while in a meditative attainment.⁷

The second account, of Theravadin and Mahasakghika origin, attributes the division to a disagreement over certain questions of vinaya. The Dipavaìsa (V 30ff.) (early fourth century CE) thus traces the origin of the Mahasakghikas as deriving from the defeated party at the Vesali Council, and is followed in this by the later Sinhalese chronicles. Yet, as Cousins remarks, the commentarial tradition of the Mahavihara was unlikely to have preserved an account of the origin of the ‘eighteen schools’, for the Samantapasadika does not explain this issue while the commentary to the Kathavatthu does, relating in this context to the Dipavaìsa’s and Mahavaìsa’s reports.⁸ The source that attests to the Mahasakghika version of the first division of the Sakgha is the Fariputraparip

ccha (T 1465: 900b) – an eclectic text of a Magadhan origin extant in Chinese and dated roughly to the third century CE. Unlike the Ceylon tradition, this treatise sees the Mahasakghika not as the defeated party at Vesali, but as the conservative party that preserved the original vinaya unchanged against reformist efforts of the Sthaviras to create a reorganized and stricter version.⁹ Yet given the subjective perspective of this source the likelihood is that the Mahasakghikas were but the larger party resisting a reformist change in the discipline than the bearers of the ‘original’ vinaya.¹⁰

The emerging picture as portrayed by recent scholarship is that the earliest division of the Sakgha was primarily a matter of monastic discipline, though the Mahasakghikas cannot directly be traced through the defeated party at the Vesali Council.¹¹ In view of the growing scholarly consensus that dates the Buddha’s death at the end of the fifth century BCE,¹² this fundamental division into Sthaviras and Mahasakghikas occurred some time around the beginning of the third century BCE. Throughout the subsequent two centuries or so doctrinal disputes arose among these two parties, resulting in the formation of additional sub-schools. Again, the sources available to us of the history of these schools are quite late: aside from the references to the Buddhist Councils contained in the vinaya collections of various sects, these include certain inscriptions in Kharosthi or Brahmi from the Kusaja period that indicate the presence of certain schools in various places, lists of masters, records of Chinese translators and the diaries of Chinese pilgrims, fragments of Sarvastivadin Abhidharma texts, and traditional works documenting the disputes among the schools, such as the later strata of the Kathavatthu, the abovementioned treatise attributed to *Vasumitra, and Bhavya’s Nikayabhedavibhaðgavyakhyana (fourth century).¹³ It is legitimate to assume, though, that the early Buddhist schools must have been for a long period fraternities based on minor vinaya differences only, and it may well be the case that at least some of these schools represent de facto divisions. Thus rather than portraying the Buddhist community in its early formative period as a homogeneous order within which an initial schism resulted in subsequent fragmentation, it might be better to adopt a model of a haphazardly scattered community in which natural variation in doctrine and in disciplinary codes was interpreted by the later tradition as the foundation of subsequent sects and schools of thought. We are not dealing here with schisms in the tradition, but with doctrinal dissensions; not with disparate denominations, but with informal intellectual branches that developed spontaneously due to the geographical extension of the community over the entire Indian subcontinent and subject to the particular problems each Sakgha confronted. In fact, differences in the patimokkha code may have arisen not so much from disagreements on vinaya matters as from the geographical isolation of different groupings of monks. Each monastic community tended to specialize in a specific branch of learning, had its own practical customs and relations with lay circles, and was influenced by the particular territories, economy, use of language and dialect, the types of clothing and food prevalent in its environment. Indeed the names of the ‘eighteen schools’ are indicative of their origins in characteristic teachings, geographical locations, or the legacy of particular teachers and founders: for instance, Sautrantikas, Haimavatas, or Vatsiputriyas respectively).¹⁴

In conformity with the Sammatiya tradition cited by Bhavya and with the Sinhalese ‘long chronology’ which places Afoka’s accession in 218 BE, all the ‘eighteen schools’were already in existence by 200 BE, before Afoka came to the throne. Yet according to both the ‘short chronology’ provided by Sanskrit works of Sarvastivadin origin and the treatise of *Vasumitra that places Afoka’s accession in 100 BE (a suspiciously round figure which should properly be seen as ideal and symbolic), divisions among the Sthaviras do not begin until the third century BE, a century after Afoka came to the throne.¹⁵ Indeed *Vasumitra presents the early S...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION: SITUATING THERAVADIN DOCTRINAL THOUGHT – TOWARDS A COMPARATIVE BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY
• 1: THE FURTHER TEACHING: Abhidhamma thought in context
• 2: WHAT THE BUDDHA TAUGHT AND ABHIDHAMMA THOUGHT
• 3: THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPT OF SABHÅVA AND BUDDHIST DOCTRINAL THOUGHT
• 4: INDIVIDUALS: REVISITING THE ABHIDHAMMA DHAMMA THEORY
• 5: CAUSATION AS THE HANDMAID OF METAPHYSICS: FROM THE PATICCASAMUPPADA TO THE PATTHANA
• CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY