neander wrote: ↑Sat Jan 23, 2021 11:26 pm
I think historical research is fundamental and we are lucky that we live in an era with the internet where we can access for free information
Fundamental to what though? Certainly living Buddhist traditions, which are extant today, were just fine before this kind of research. That is not to say it has no value (I think it definitely does), but the tradition is not reliant on it for continuity or for quality. I have asked for years how advocates of "Early Buddhism" use it to inform their actual practice, and I have never gotten anything but more prapanca in response. How exactly does this kind of research inform people's actual Buddhist practice?
prof Bronkhorst for instance in "two traditions of mediation in ancient India" states that is very likely that non-authentic views and practices found their way into the canonical collections and he examines possible the Jaina contaminations,the text is very interesting in relation to meditation history and he points out how difficult in any case is to prove anything since centuries elapsed after the historical Buddha
From my perspective it is really not for academics to say what is "non authentic" in the case of something being Dharma with a capital D, unless they are actually Buddhist teachers. "Authenticity" in Buddhism is addressed in a number of different writings, and virtually none say that something is Buddhavacana because a professor somewhere develops some new theory about a text. Even if it's a sound theory, it uses a completely different schema for the type of "truth" being looked into.
I don't remember if Bronkhort is just a Buddhologist, a practitioner, or something in between, but his opinion on "authenticity" of a tradition means little to the people who actually practice in a tradition, rather than trying to (I guess, somehow, no one can ever define how exactly) base their practice on modern historical findings.
nothing can be proven but a critical eye must be always present, the Kalama sutta for le is the reference, staff must work..in another post, I personally doubted that temples and monastic life were part of original Buddhism as it looks to me an extreme that enfeebles men and that was rejected by the Middle Way path but that is my opinion ..
in the Kalama Sutta itself, Buddha invites his followers to doubt history and traditions, and this is awesome, you cannot find this in any other religion..
This is just insulting to the monastic community and I would request that you stop referring to it as "something which enfeebles men" and similar hyperbole, it is close enough to being a ToS violation to skirt the line of what's acceptable. If you have a-specific- criticism of monastic culture in this or that way, no problem.
That seems like the common nterpretation of the Kalama Sutta one sees from outside of Dharma, like taking it farther than the text recommends. The Kalama Sutta says absolutely nothing about using modern historical research methods as method of finding truth in the Dharmic sense, it does not encourage a modern sense of naive realism or materialist skepticism, or using empirical measurement of outer phenomena to establish "truth", but rather to establish truth by testing the Buddha's words in one's own experience.
Those are not the same thing, and I would argue that if you contextualize the Kalama alongside all the other Pali literature, that becomes very obvious. The are exhortations all over the place in the Pali Canon that fly in the face of "Buddhalogical" approach to crafting one's Dharma practice after something like modern textual research, in far greater quantity than the recommendations in the Kalama - even if they are (in my opinion wrongly) interpreted as meaning that one should approach Dharma with complete skepticism . I mean yes critical thought is vital to the Dharma, but it is not the same critical thought as the Buddhologists exhibit, from my point of view.