Buddha the author of Mahayana sutras?

[Huifeng]

Of course they call them 'sutra', but the canon is not, and probably has never been, closed.

Hi Venerable Huifeng!

In Chinese they are called jing 經, but that designation doesn't necessarily always correspond to sutra as it is understood in English or in Sanskrit. In English if you call something a sutra in the Buddhist context most people would probably agree it refers to a sermon by the Buddha or a Buddha.

My point is that if somebody in our present day announces they have a new Mahayana sutra and that it is just as authentic as the Heart Sutra or the Brahma Net Sutra (both of which are generally thought to have been penned in China), I doubt few would take that person seriously. It wouldn't be categorized within the same sutra division 經部 and would most likely be called apocryphal and dismissed as the writings of a modern author.

The first questions would be, "How did you get a sermon from the Buddha? Or did you see this in a vision? A dream? What makes you so special as to have access to this sermon from a Buddha?"

Sure. This is why I said that the content of the Chattha Sangayana, Jiaxing Zang, etc. are called by other names, not as "sutta" / "sutra". Still, they do appear within the "canon" (not "tripitaka" in the narrow sense), and are accepted as such.

[Huifeng]

Greetings venerable,

The notion that "in the early days, the Mahayana tradition would have been more homogenous (sic)" is interesting, but I don't know how many specialists would agree that that was the case. What makes you think that early Mahayana was "homogeneous"?

Thank you for the insights.

The logic was only that this is what tends to happen to everything over time. The more time that elapses, the more opportunities for diversification... and diversification seems more common (particularly in the sense of Buddhist schools) than unification.

Metta,
Retro.

As Huseng says, it is still not even certain that the Mahayana was a "unity" in the first place.

The "unity" to "diversity" reason sounds okay. However, there is also a tendency in Buddhism to come up with over-arching systems to incorporate a wide range of (superficially at least) disparate material. This is the process of delineating what is nitartha and what is neyartha.

A classic Chinese example would be Tiantai doxography. It unifies all teachings under the position of the Saddharma Pundarika and Mahayana Parinirvana Sutras. Other schools had similar systems to "unify" things. A kind of "grand unified theory of everything" as it were. Take a three yana system, for instance. Or multiple yanas of tantra.

Commentaries then use these theories to read the earlier material. As time goes on, this becomes the standard, now "unified" explanation. What becomes standard "Mahayana" in the Pala dynasty, for instance, is a combination (and thus type of unification) of a number of earlier disparate teachings. Choices are made here and there for each doctrine, and combined into a whole.

So, though unity to diversity sounds reasonable and okay, it is not necessarily the case. Things are more complex than that.

[Ngawang Drolma]

Tibetan monks are still producing, uh termas or tormas or something they call them. Hidden scriptures that amount to new revelations. Some are quite radical, representing substantial changes in practice. And of course, written commentary is endless.

Terma

*usual wiki disclaimers

[catmoon]

Tibetan monks are still producing, uh termas or tormas or something they call them. Hidden scriptures that amount to new revelations. Some are quite radical, representing substantial changes in practice. And of course, written commentary is endless.

Terma

*usual wiki disclaimers

Good, and the people who find them are termites, right?

[Ngawang Drolma]

Good, and the people who find them are termites, right?

Tertons

[Aemilius]

It wouldn't be conducive to the greater good nowadays to call something a sutra because unless it is dug up out of the ground and dated to an ancient period, the canons have been fixed and any new scripture appearing would be subject to too much doubt.

Reminds me of today's questionable compositions like the 'True Buddha Sutra' or also known as 'The Sutra of Authentic Dharma that Removes Hindrances and Bestows Good Fortune' and the yesteryear's Tang/Zhou Dynasty's Empress (Emperor) Wu Ze Tian's infamous 'Great Cloud Sutra' [ see here and here (although we are indebted to her for the famed 'Sutra Preface/Opening Verse' recited by the Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese Mahayana Traditions and elevation of the Buddha Dharma then)]...

There is a difference between the True Buddha Sutra and let's say Medicine Buddha Sutra in that the True Buddha Sutra begins with a description of how it happened, which is a vision or experience of Lian Shen, and the Medicine Buddha Sutra begins with a description of how, when and where Buddha Shakyamuni delivered it.