Thirty_Years_of_Buddhist_studies,Conze

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Recent Progress in Buddhist Studies 9 condition, but in 1955 A. Bareau brought order into the chaos in his Les sectes bouddhiques du petit vehicule (308 pp.), P. work quite indispensable to all scholars from now on. What has to be done is to compare the documents of various sects, say a Theravadin text from Ceylon with a Sarvastivadin text from Turkestan. Where we find passages in which these twd texts, the one in Pali and other in Sanskrit, agree almost word by word, we can assume that they belong to a time antedatipg the separation of the two schools, which took place during j^soka's rule. Where they do not agree we may, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, infer their post-Asokan date. Much work has been done on these lines during our period, but no systematic survey of the results has y^t been possible. This approach cannot, however, get us beyond 340 B.C. with the Sutra, texts, because their Mahasanghika version is lost. Comparing ten recensions of the Pratimoksha rules, W. Pachow has, on the other hand, shown in 1955 that all sects agree about most of them, and that therefore they must have been formulated within the first century after the Buddha's Nirvana. Some attempts have been made to get back to the original Canon through linguistic studies. Where we have similar texts in both Pali and Sanskrit, we may well believe that the Sanskrit has been translated from the Pali, or vice versa. It is the merit of Prof. Lueders 1 to have demonstrated that in many cases this is impossible and that in fact large portions of both recensions have been translated from a Magadhi original. Quite often this enables us to spot a corruption of the tradition, which is either due to a misunderstanding on the part of the original translator, or, where the text is in verse, to the difficulty of finding a Sanskrit or Pali equivalent which would not spoil the metre. In Dhp. 259, for instance, occurs the senseless dhammam Myena passati, "he sees dharma with his body 11 . The Prakrit version has phasai (" touches >J ), the Sanskrit vai sprset; the Magadhi original was phasai, the Pali equivalent of which, phusati, would not fit the metre (pp. 162-3). This small example may indicate how the method works. Its conclusiveness lies in the philological detail, which we cannot present here. Most of Lueders 1 material seems to substantiate his thesis, but, of 1 H. Lueders, Beobachtungen ueber die Sprache des buddhisiischen Urkamons, Abh. dtsche Ak. d. Wiss. zu Berlin, 1954, I 9^ PP» •
io Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies course, this proves no more than that parts of the existing Canon were translated from Magadhi. Other parts must go back to a Middle-Indian original, as Edgerton 1 has clearly shown. In fact, from the very start Buddhism was preached in a variety of dialects, and in the Cullavagga (5.33) the Buddha gives his consent to this practice. These linguistic investigations are still at their beginning. It should be clear, however, that before they are completed it will be extremely hazardous to make any statements about the contents of the original Canon, and much more so about the Buddha's actual words. No sane man can, in fact, say anything conclusive about the doctrine of the Buddha himself. Even that of the most ancient community is difficult to ascertain. Some Polish scholars, like St. Schayer (1935-8), Constantin Regamey 2 and Maryla Falk 3 have tried to penetrate at least to what they call "Pre-eanonieal Buddhism 11 . Their views are on a completely different level from the arbitrary speculations of Jennings (1947), Guenther (1949) and Bahm (1958), in that they keep in touch with the actual facts of Buddhist tradition. They assume that wherever the Canon contains ideas which conflict with the orthodox theories of the Theravadins and Sarvastivadins, and wherever these ideas are taken up and developed by the Mahayana, we have to deal with a very old, "pre-Canonical" tradition, which was too venerable to be discarded by the compilers of the Canon. How otherwise could one account for the numerous references to q?;"person" (pudgala) 4 or the assumption of an eternal" consciousness" in the saddhdtusutm, or the identification of the Absolute, of Nirvana, with an "invisible infinite consciousness, which shines everywhere" (vinndnam anidassanam anantam sabbato pabham) in Dighanikdya XI 85? Side by side with the oft-repeated negation of an dtman there are traces of a belief in consciousness as the nonimpermanent centre of the personality which constitutes an absolute element in this contingent world. Though generally 1 Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Grammar and Dictionary, 1953. 2 Der Buddhismus Indiens, 1951, pp. 248—64. Le problime du Boudd- Msm$ primitif et hs demurs travaux de Stanislaw Schayer, Rocznik Orientalisticzny, xxi, 1957, pp. 37-58. 3 II mitopsicologico nelV India Antica, 1939. Ndma-rupa and dharmarupa, 1943. 4 See my Buddhist Scriptures, Penguin Classics, 1959, pp. 195-7.
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