The Origin of Buddhist Meditation

Alexander Wynne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134097401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Bouddhisme

Having identified early material that goes back to the Buddha himself, the author argues that the two teachers of the Buddha were historical figures. Based on the early Brahminic literature, namely the early Upanishads and Moksadharma, the author asserts the origin of the method of meditation learned by the Buddha from these teachers, and attempts to use them to identify some authentic teachings of the Buddha on meditation.

Stimulating debate within the field of Buddhist Studies, the following claims are put forward:

• the Buddha was taught by Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta, as stated in the literature of numerous early Buddhist sects, is historically authentic
• Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta taught a form of early Brahminic meditation
• the Buddha must consequently have been trained in a meditative school whose ideology was provided by the philosophical portions of early Upanishads

Shedding new light on a fascinating aspect of the origins of Buddhism, this book will be of interest to academics in the field of Buddhist studies, Asian religion and South Asian studies.

1 INTRODUCTION

The problem of the earliest form of Buddhism

The biggest problem in Buddhist Studies is that nobody knows what the Buddha taught. This is not because of an absence of early literary sources (in Pāli, Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, etc.) that claim to contain his teachings. The problem rather, is that recent studies have shown that the early texts appear to contain a number of doctrinal differences,¹ and it is not clear which formulations might be authentic and go back to the Buddha. The historical claims of the early Buddhist sects only add to the general scepticism. All claim that their canonical literature was compiled at the first council of Rājagṛha, shortly after the Buddha’s death. Unfortunately, however, there are numerous differences between the various canons, even in the details about the extent and classification of the canon supposedly compiled at the first council. Because of this Lamotte has commented: ‘It would be absurd to claim that all those canons were fixed at the very beginnings of Buddhism.’² It seems that the composition of early Buddhist literature was ongoing, and this casts doubt on the antiquity of any canonical text.

To have any chance of recovering the teachings of the Buddha, the early Buddhist literature must be chronologically stratified. But it is not clear how even the oldest stratum in the early texts could be attributed to the Buddha, should it be identified to some degree of satisfaction. For there appear to be no criteria, internal (e.g. a text whose authenticity is obvious) or external (e.g. an inscription from the very early period), that could connect any text or idea to the historical Buddha.³ The problem this creates has been summed up by J.W.de Jong:

One either selects some texts which are considered to reflect the earliest Buddhist doctrines, or one assumes that some doctrines are the original ones and tries to trace their development in the canonical texts. In both cases the point of departure is determined by a subjective decision.⁴

Somewhat inevitably, de Jong concludes: ‘We will never be able to know the contents of the teachings of the Buddha himself.’⁵ A slightly earlier, and simpler, version of this claim is found in A.B.Keith’s statement that any attempt to ascribe texts to the Buddha is futile: ‘All that we can do is to indulge in the legitimate, if somewhat useless, exercise of conjecturing what part of the doctrines which pass later as Buddhist is most likely to have been his own.’⁶

If these sceptical opinions are to be believed, the early Buddhist literature defies any satisfactory chronological stratification, and none of it can be ascribed to the Buddha. The sceptics presuppose, therefore, that the early literature lacks sufficient historical information to assign texts and ideas to different periods. But it seems to me that this The origin of Buddhist meditation 2 overstates the matter somewhat: even by the most sceptical reckoning, it is unlikely that the early literature is devoid of all historical content. The Mahāparinibbāna Sutta, for example, is probably in many respects a quite reliable record of the last few months of the Buddha’s life. It is likely that some of the events recorded in it are historically authentic, e.g. the Buddha’s death in Kusinārā⁷ and his last words on that occasion,⁸ for there is no reason to believe that such polemically neutral passages would have been invented. There are other ways of identifying passages in the early literature that almost certainly go back to the Buddha. Richard Gombrich has pointed out that humorous statements attributed to the Buddha are probably authentic. As he puts it: ‘Are jokes ever composed by committees?’⁹ But it is one thing to establish historical facts and another to identify teachings of the Buddha. Jokes or facts about the Buddha’s death do not establish whether the Buddha taught the Noble Eightfold Path, or even the Four Noble Truths. In short, then, it is difficult to see how the passages of outstanding historical significance— and there are not many obvious examples—could be used as the criterion by which to attribute any of the early doctrinal formulations to the Buddha.

It is undoubtedly the case, therefore, that the most important problem facing a historian of early Buddhism is that of establishing a relationship between early Buddhist doctrine and historical fact. In this book I will reconsider this problem and propose a new solution to it. I will attempt to prove that facts about the Buddha’s early life are historically authentic and can be used to identify some of his teachings in the early literature. The historical facts in question concern the mysterious figures who are said to have taught meditation to the Buddha-to-be (the Bodhisatta), Āḷāra Kālāma and Uddaka Rāmaputta. I will claim that the primary text in which this account is contained, the Ariyapariyesana Sutta, is probably the earliest and most historically valuable biographical tract in the early Buddhist literature. This being the case, it is quite likely that the Bodhisatta really was taught meditation by these two men. This text does not say anything about the content of the earliest Buddhist teachings, but I will use it to provide a historical background to early Buddhist thought in another way. I will attempt to show correspondences between the early literature on the two teachers and some of the speculations contained in the philosophical literature of early Brahminism. By this means I will try to reconstruct the philosophical presuppositions of the two teachers’ meditative practices. This will lead to a much improved understanding of the teachings that the Bodhisatta rejected and thus, I will claim, some idea of his intellectual development. Such a reconstruction will not provide us with the criteria that will allow us to determine the teachings of the Buddha with absolute certainty. But facts about the Buddha’s intellectual development can help us investigate the early Buddhist literature on meditation afresh. They provide the criteria that make it possible to reconsider the historical authenticity of the early literature.

In the early Buddhist literature the meditative states related to the teachers of the Bodhisatta are termed ‘formless spheres’. These four states are listed as follows in the Pāli canon:

ākāsānañcāyatana the sphere of the infinity of space

viññāṇañcāyatana¹⁰ the sphere of the infinity of consciousness

ākiñcaññāyatana the sphere of nothingness

nevasaññānāsaññāyatana the sphere of neither perception nor non-perception.

Teachings containing these meditative states are numerous in the early Buddhist literature. This is of some historical significance. If the Bodhisatta rejected the goals of his teachers (‘the sphere of nothingness’ taught by Āḷāra Kālāma, and ‘the sphere of neither perception nor non-perception’ taught by Uddaka Rāmaputta), as the early biographies claim, then we must ask why so many practices including them are outlined in the early literature. There seem to be two possible answers. Either the Buddha allowed his followers to practise the pre-Buddhist sort of meditation taught by his teachers, in which case he must have taught a modified version of the practices, or he rejected the practice of the formless spheres and not just their goals, which would mean that their presence in the early Buddhist literature is not a true reflection of his teachings. If so, an investigation of the literature on the formless spheres would not reveal authentic teachings of the Buddha. But the former hypothesis is more intriguing, and it is this that I will investigate in this book. Based on the theory that the Bodhisatta was taught these meditative states by two teachers and later allowed them to be practised by his disciples, I will analyse a few old Buddhist texts from the Suttanipāta. In these texts the Buddha teaches an adapted form of the pre-Buddhist practices; I will attempt to show that these teachings are historically authentic.

The study of Buddhist origins

A basic presupposition of this book is that the early Buddhist literature is heterogeneous. Despite this, I see no reason to deny the historicity of the literature as a matter of course,¹¹ although nowadays scholars are generally sceptical of the antiquity and authenticity of early Buddhist literature. The modern sceptical view has been articulated most notably by Gregory Schopen as follows:

We know, and have known for some time, that the Pāli canon as we have it—and it is generally conceded to be our oldest source—cannot be taken back further than the last quarter of the first century BCE, the date of the Alu-vihāra redaction, the earliest redaction we can have some knowledge of, and that—for a critical history—it can serve, at the very most, only as a source for the Buddhism of this period. But we also know that even this is problematic since, as Malalasekera has pointed out: ‘…how far the Tipiṭaka and its commentary reduced to writing at Alu-vihāra resembled them as they have come down to us, no one can say.’ In fact, it is not until the time of the commentaries of Buddhaghosa, Dhammapāla, and others-that is to say, the fifth centuries CE-that we can know anything definite about the actual contents of [the Pāli] canon.¹²

This view is now so common that many scholars do not see the need to justify it. This can be seen in the Encyclopedia of Religion where the authors of the entry ‘Buddhism in India’ note the following:

Unfortunately, we do not possess reliable sources for most of the history of Buddhism in its homeland; in particular, we have precious little to rely on for its early history. Textual sources are late, dating at the very least five hundred years after the death of the Buddha.¹³

Such are the sceptical assumptions made by modern scholars of Indian Buddhism. It is easy to understand certain aspects of this scepticism, since no manuscripts of our most complete source—the Pāli canon—date back to the fifth century AD. Thus it makes it theoretically possible that this canon was periodically revised up to and beyond its commentators (c. fifth century AD). Nevertheless, I do not see this as a sufficient reason to reject its antiquity. Scholars such as Schopen would have us believe that the Pāli canon is evidence for Buddhism up to the time of the commentators, a view that implies that texts commented upon by fifth-century authors are not necessarily older than the commentaries themselves. But this is absurd. The very existence of the commentaries presupposes a textual tradition of some antiquity. If so, it is only to be assumed that the early Buddhist literature contains passages of considerable antiquity, even if it is possible that such passages have been corrupted in the course of time. To be sure, the sceptics, whose arguments are based on the lack of textual sources from the early period, can only go so far as to doubt the possibility of identifying very old parts of the canonical literature. But that passages of genuine antiquity exist cannot be categorically denied. Indeed, it seems to me that the opposite can be proved. The internal evidence of the texts themselves, as well as archaeological and epigraphical evidence, suggests that ancient texts have been preserved in the early literature, in spite of the corrosive effects of time.

The evidence concerning the transmission of the Pāli canon can be summed up as follows. The first remarkable fact, as has been noted by T.W.Rhys Davids, is that the texts seem to belong to a period of Indian history before the third century BC: they do not mention Aœoka, which is hardly likely if they were still open in his time.¹⁴ This evidence is supplemented by epigraphical and textual evidence suggesting that Buddhism arrived in Sri Lanka in the middle of the third century BC.¹⁵ Moreover, Pāli is a North Indian language that appears to show no traces of a Sinhalese dialect.¹⁶ If the language of the canon was not changed in spite of its Sinhalese surroundings, it is reasonable to assume that its contents were not changed either. This suggestion is supported by the fact that texts received by the Buddhists of Sri Lanka from other Buddhist sects in India were not placed in the Pāli canon, even when there were good reasons for doing so.¹⁷ This suggests that the early Sri Lakan Buddhists regarded some of the Pāli literature as canonical and transmitted it conservatively. Furthermore, if literature borrowed from other sects was kept outside the Pāli canon, it means that correspondences between the Pāli canon and the canonical literature of other sects probably predate the formation of the sects.¹⁸ The evidence suggests, then, that the literature introduced to Sri Lanka in the third century BC was changed very little after its introduction.

According to another sceptical argument, the early Buddhist literature cannot be used to construct historical events, no matter how old it is. Proponents of this argument claim that antiquity is no guarantee of historicity, since religious literature is normative rather than descriptive. Indeed, according to Schopen:

Scholars of Indian Buddhism have taken canonical monastic rules and formal literary descriptions of the monastic ideal preserved in very late manuscripts and treated them as if they were accurate reflections of the religious life and career of actual practising Buddhist monks in early India.¹⁹

As he puts it, ‘Even the most artless formal narrative text has a purpose, and…in “scriptural” texts, especially in India, that purpose is almost never “historical” in our sense of the term.’²⁰ This view is widely accepted and implies that any attempt to read Buddhist texts as historical documents is flawed. In more recent times, some scholars have even argued that the tendency is based on the suspect political motives of the early Orientalists. According to King:

Western scholars located ‘Buddhism’ in classical texts, which they then tended to accept uncritically as accurate descriptions of ‘primitive Buddhism’ rather than as prescriptive and ideological representations of Buddhist belief and practice. This provided a justification for those accounts that emphasized the apparent degradation and corruption of contemporary Buddhist religion and society.²¹

If this opinion is to be believed, the historical study of early Buddhist texts was part of an Orientalist plot to belittle the society and culture of the modern East.²² This sort of suspicion about the methods of the early Orientalists is of course a development of Edward Said’s argument that ‘all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed by the gross political fact’.²³ Such a critique of Orientalism has been taken very seriously in recent times. Following Said, some Buddhist scholars have declared that they have moved beyond the old textual methods, which they see as ‘inadequate’,²⁴ and others have lamented the methods of the early Orientalists and subsequent dominance of textualist approaches, the adherents of which have been dubbed ‘Pali text puritans’.²⁵

No matter what the modern critics say, it seems to me that there is very little evidence that ‘Orientalist’ methods of studying Buddhist texts are invalid. The early Orientalists assumed that the early Buddhist texts contain historical facts that could be revealed by text-critical means.²⁶ Some modern scholars have taken the opposite view, i.e. that Buddhist texts have little or no historical value. They take it as axiomatic that Buddhist texts are prescriptive and idealistic, and because of this imply that any attempt to construct history from them is deeply flawed. But this opinion is based on an a priori assumption that religious literature is normative and prescriptive. Such an assu...