Mahayana Sutras Lack Oral Transmission?

Discuss and learn about the traditional Mahayana scriptures, without assuming that any one school ‘owns’ the only correct interpretation.
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Padmist
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Mahayana Sutras Lack Oral Transmission?

Post by Padmist »


The Mahayana texts are generally very stylistically different than the Pali Nikayas and Chinese Agamas. They are composed as written literature, as opposed to the oral literature of the Nikayas/Agamas. It doesn't take a specialist to notice the difference in style. It is clear that Mahayana texts were composed and propagated as written literature. The ideas contained in Mahayana scriptures may have existed before being written down in the form of scripture, but the origination and preservation was different from the common oral source of Nikayas and Agamas.
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Bodhiquest
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Re: Mahayana Sutras Lack Oral Transmission?

Post by Bodhiquest »

The implication in what you quoted isn't that Mahayana Sutras lack oral transmission but that a literary form is standard in them, rather than an "oral form" as we see in some Nikaya and Agama material, with a highly repetitive structure etc.
karmanyingpo
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Re: Mahayana Sutras Lack Oral Transmission?

Post by karmanyingpo »

Bodhiquest wrote: Fri Jan 15, 2021 1:50 am The implication in what you quoted isn't that Mahayana Sutras lack oral transmission but that a literary form is standard in them, rather than an "oral form" as we see in some Nikaya and Agama material, with a highly repetitive structure etc.
What are the implications of this for the historical aspect of these sutras?

KN
ma lu dzok pe san gye thop par shok!
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Bodhiquest
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Re: Mahayana Sutras Lack Oral Transmission?

Post by Bodhiquest »

karmanyingpo wrote: Fri Jan 15, 2021 3:19 am What are the implications of this for the historical aspect of these sutras?

KN
I think that's difficult to say. There's nothing much that would allow us to conclusively say that certain ideas and teachings were never given by the Buddha and were simply developed later by "philosophers" and the like. We can only say conclusive things about the coming into being of this or that text as we have it... Provided we have enough information to draw such conclusions beyond complete conjecture in the first place.

These things can be quite deceptive. I'm currently reading Kate Crosby's book Esoteric Theravada, and she points out to the fact that mainstream Theravadin practice we know of today is barely 2 centuries old. It's built on some of the texts that are probably truly "early Buddhist texts", but the actual practice itself has no lineage beyond the 19th century. The eponymous subject of the book (although almost extinct today) has lineage that goes at least as far back to the 16th or 15th century, but is built on secret oral transmission first, and instructions or theoretical texts set into writing second. And the language of the texts, from what I've seen, is closer to what we associate with Mahayana sutras than anything. These instructions were not put into writing systematically, and in fact most of the higher teachings have never been written at all. But it's interesting that the material produced by an initiation-based esoteric tradition became "literary" in tone when it was written down.

Something like this might have been the case for Mahayana and Vajrayana teachings as well.
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Astus
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Re: Mahayana Sutras Lack Oral Transmission?

Post by Astus »

Bodhiquest wrote: Fri Jan 15, 2021 10:58 amThere's nothing much that would allow us to conclusively say that certain ideas and teachings were never given by the Buddha and were simply developed later by "philosophers" and the like.
That's not necessarily so. For instance, the concept of alayavijnana is a later development as we can see in the Mahayanasamgraha how Asanga has to explain himself for proposing its existence, and what scriptural sources he can present (abhidharma works and the Samdhinirmocana Sutra), while 5 centuries later Jinamitra quotes from several Mahayana sutras (see 'The Ālaya-Consciousness in Yogācāra Treatises' in the Introduction of 'A Compendium of the Mahayana' by Brunnholzl, vol 1). Similarly, where one finds the mention of ideas that are not found in the Agamas but only in abhidharma texts, unless we attribute such abhidharma treatises to the Buddha, the sutras using such concepts are necessarily later than the Agamas.
1 Myriad dharmas are only mind.
Mind is unobtainable.
What is there to seek?

2 If the Buddha-Nature is seen,
there will be no seeing of a nature in any thing.

3 Neither cultivation nor seated meditation —
this is the pure Chan of Tathagata.

4 With sudden enlightenment to Tathagata Chan,
the six paramitas and myriad means
are complete within that essence.


1 Huangbo, T2012Ap381c1 2 Nirvana Sutra, T374p521b3; tr. Yamamoto 3 Mazu, X1321p3b23; tr. J. Jia 4 Yongjia, T2014p395c14; tr. from "The Sword of Wisdom"
Malcolm
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Re: Mahayana Sutras Lack Oral Transmission?

Post by Malcolm »

Astus wrote: Fri Jan 15, 2021 2:09 pm
Bodhiquest wrote: Fri Jan 15, 2021 10:58 amThere's nothing much that would allow us to conclusively say that certain ideas and teachings were never given by the Buddha and were simply developed later by "philosophers" and the like.
That's not necessarily so. For instance, the concept of alayavijnana is a later development as we can see in the Mahayanasamgraha how Asanga has to explain himself for proposing its existence, and what scriptural sources he can present (abhidharma works and the Samdhinirmocana Sutra), while 5 centuries later Jinamitra quotes from several Mahayana sutras (see 'The Ālaya-Consciousness in Yogācāra Treatises' in the Introduction of 'A Compendium of the Mahayana' by Brunnholzl, vol 1). Similarly, where one finds the mention of ideas that are not found in the Agamas but only in abhidharma texts, unless we attribute such abhidharma treatises to the Buddha, the sutras using such concepts are necessarily later than the Agamas.
The answer is that there is an oral transmission for the Tibetan canon. Questions of the source of the Mahayana are adequately answered in traditional accounts. Text critical scholarship is fine, but it has nothing to do with the aim of Mahayana.
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Bodhiquest
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Re: Mahayana Sutras Lack Oral Transmission?

Post by Bodhiquest »

Astus wrote: Fri Jan 15, 2021 2:09 pm That's not necessarily so. For instance, the concept of alayavijnana is a later development as we can see in the Mahayanasamgraha how Asanga has to explain himself for proposing its existence, and what scriptural sources he can present (abhidharma works and the Samdhinirmocana Sutra), while 5 centuries later Jinamitra quotes from several Mahayana sutras (see 'The Ālaya-Consciousness in Yogācāra Treatises' in the Introduction of 'A Compendium of the Mahayana' by Brunnholzl, vol 1). Similarly, where one finds the mention of ideas that are not found in the Agamas but only in abhidharma texts, unless we attribute such abhidharma treatises to the Buddha, the sutras using such concepts are necessarily later than the Agamas.
What I was trying to say is that we don't have such data for every single idea and teaching we might identify as "Mahayana". And for the ideas we might be able draw certain conclusions on, there might be a risk that the available data is coloring the premises going into the conclusions. In Asanga's case for example he obviously didn't have the internet nor necessarily an access to the entirety of the available literature at all times and all places.
tingdzin
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Re: Mahayana Sutras Lack Oral Transmission?

Post by tingdzin »

It is useful to remember that what we know as Mahayana scriptures did not just suddenly appear in the form we know them. Even the earliest translations from Prakrit into Chinese have supposedly distinct sutras containing vast amounts of text from each other ("intertextuality", to use the academic phrase). Presumably there was common source material which was made "literary" over time, in various ways. A good metaphor might be a braiding river rather than a single, well-defined channel. This of course complicates historical analysis enormously.
PeterC
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Re: Mahayana Sutras Lack Oral Transmission?

Post by PeterC »

Bodhiquest wrote: Sat Jan 16, 2021 2:08 am What I was trying to say is that we don't have such data for every single idea and teaching we might identify as "Mahayana". And for the ideas we might be able draw certain conclusions on, there might be a risk that the available data is coloring the premises going into the conclusions. In Asanga's case for example he obviously didn't have the internet nor necessarily an access to the entirety of the available literature at all times and all places.
If we're going to text critical route, we also can't place all of the agamas in the mouth of the Buddha either. No (non-monastic) academic supports the argument that all of that corpus can reliably be ascribed to an oral transmission from the Buddha.

The views of the academic and the practitioner can't ever be fully bridged. Shantideva had good advice on how to approach the authenticity of a text from a practitioner's perspective (and he was talking specifically about Mahayana sutras, I believe). But his advice is incompatible with the textual academic approach.
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Bodhiquest
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Re: Mahayana Sutras Lack Oral Transmission?

Post by Bodhiquest »

PeterC wrote: Thu Jan 28, 2021 2:40 am
Bodhiquest wrote: Sat Jan 16, 2021 2:08 am What I was trying to say is that we don't have such data for every single idea and teaching we might identify as "Mahayana". And for the ideas we might be able draw certain conclusions on, there might be a risk that the available data is coloring the premises going into the conclusions. In Asanga's case for example he obviously didn't have the internet nor necessarily an access to the entirety of the available literature at all times and all places.
If we're going to text critical route, we also can't place all of the agamas in the mouth of the Buddha either. No (non-monastic) academic supports the argument that all of that corpus can reliably be ascribed to an oral transmission from the Buddha.

The views of the academic and the practitioner can't ever be fully bridged. Shantideva had good advice on how to approach the authenticity of a text from a practitioner's perspective (and he was talking specifically about Mahayana sutras, I believe). But his advice is incompatible with the textual academic approach.
I don't agree that textual academic approaches necessarily have to be secular, but yes, when they have to be, the two approaches cannot be bridged. My point was that this doesn't mean that secular academics are accurately describing things by default.
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