Download PDF | Christopher I. Beckwith - Greek Buddha_ Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia-Princeton University Press (2015).
300 Pages
Preface
In the past few decades a quiet revolution has been under way in the study of the earliest Buddhism. Its beginnings lay in the discoveries of John Marshall, the archaeologist who excavated the great ancient city of eastern Gandhāra, Taxila (near what is now Rawalpindi), and published his results in 1951. The evidence was incontrovertible: the Buddhist monastery, the vihāra, with its highly distinctive architectural plan, appeared there fully formed in the first century ad, and had been preceded by the ārāma, a crude temporary shelter that was also found there.1 Marshall openly stated that organized Buddhist monasticism accompanied the appearance of monasteries then—in the Saka-Kushan period—and had not existed before that time. This partly corresponded to the traditional trajectory of the development of Buddhism, but in delaying the appearance of monasticism for an entire half millennium after the Buddha, it challenged practically everything else in the traditional account of Early Buddhism. Most scholars paid no attention whatsoever to this. However, eventually others noticed additional problems, particularly contradictions in the canonical texts themselves that challenged many fundamental beliefs about the early development of the religion. André Bareau, Johannes Bronkhorst, Luis Gómez, Gregory Schopen, and others challenged many of these traditional beliefs in studies of the canonical texts viewed in the context of other material— archaeological excavations (of which there were and are precious few), material in non-Buddhist texts, and so forth. Their discoveries have overthrown so many of the traditional ideas that, as so often in scholarship, those who follow the traditional view have felt compelled to fight back. But the new views on Buddhism are themselves not free of traditional notions, and these have prevented a comprehensive, principled account of Early Buddhism from developing. The most important single error made by almost everyone in Buddhist studies is methodological and theoretical in nature. In all scholarly fields, it is absolutely imperative that theories be based on the data, but in Buddhist studies, as in other fields like it, even dated, “provenanced” archaeological and historical source material that controverts the traditional view of Early Buddhism has been rejected because it does not agree with that traditional view, and even worse, because it does not agree with the traditional view of the entire world of early India, including beliefs about Brahmanism and other sects that are thought to have existed at that time, again based not on hard data but on the same late traditional accounts. Some of these beliefs remain largely or completely unchallenged, notably: • the belief that Śramaṇas existed before the Buddha, so he became a Śramaṇa like many other Śramaṇas • the belief that there were Śramaṇas besides Early Buddhists, including Jains and Ājīvikas, whose sects were as old or older than Buddhism, and the Buddha even knew some of their founders personally • that, despite the name Śramaṇa, and despite the work of Marshall, Bareau, and Schopen, the Early Buddhists were “monks” and lived in “monasteries” with a monastic rule, the vinaya • that, despite the scholarship of Bronkhorst, the Upanishads and other Brahmanist texts are very ancient, so old that they precede Buddhism, so the Buddha was influenced by their ideas • that the dated Greek eyewitness reports on religious-philosophical practitioners in late fourth century bc India do not tally with the traditional Indian accounts written a half millennium or more later, so the Greek reports must be wrong and must be ignored • perhaps most grievously, the belief that all stone inscriptions in the early Brahmi script of the Mauryan period were erected by “Aśoka”, the traditional grandson of the Mauryan Dynasty’s historical founder, Candragupta, and whatever any of those inscriptions say is therefore evidence about what went on during (or before) the time he is thought to have lived • we “know” what problematic terms (such as Sanskrit duḥkha ~ Pali dukkha) mean, despite the fact that their meaning is actually contested by scholars, the modern and traditional dictionaries do not agree on their etymologies or what they “really” mean, and the texts do not agree either2 These and other stubborn unexamined beliefs have adversely affected the work of even the most insightful scholars of Buddhism. Yet no contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous hard evidence of any kind affirms such beliefs. Moreover, it is bad enough that such ideas have caused so much damage for so long within Indology, but the resulting misinformation has inflicted damage in other fields as well, including ancient Greek and Chinese philosophy, where the traditional construct has been used as the basis, once again, for rejecting the hard data, forcing scholars in those fields to attempt to explain away what seems to be obvious Indian Buddhist influence. This then helps maintain the traditional fiction of three totally unrelated peoples and traditions as “cultural islands” that had absolutely no contact of any kind with each other until much later times, as used to be unquestioned belief as recently as Karl Jaspers’s famous book on the Axial Age,3 and continues, by and large, among those who follow in his footsteps. Setting aside the traditional beliefs mentioned above, and much other folklore, what hard data might be found on the topic at hand? What sort of picture can we construct based primarily on the hard data rather than on the traditional views? In the present book I present a scientific approach, to the extent that I have been able to do so and have not been mislead by my own unrecognized “views”. It is important to note that this book is not a comparison of anything. It is also most definitely not a critique or biobibliographic survey of earlier research. Such a study would be great to have (and in fact, an excellent bibliography on Pyrrhonism was published by Richard Bett in 2010), but I have cited only what I thought necessary to cite or what I was able to find myself, with a strong preference for primary sources.
I have attempted to solve several major problems in the history of thought. The most important of these problems involves the source of Pyrrho’s teachings. I would like to call it philosophy, and I have sinned—sometimes willfully—by doing so when I talk about Early Pyrrhonism’s more “philosophical” aspects, but in general to call it philosophy in a modern language is to seriously mislabel it. The same would be true if I called it religion. It was to some extent both, and to some extent neither, and it was science, too. I first spent a great deal of time reexamining and rethinking the Greek testimonies of Pyrrho’s thought, and in 2011 finally published a long article on the topic in Elenchos (reprinted with minor revisions in Appendix A). I then looked into the studies which claim—in accord with statements of ancient authors—that Pyrrho acquired his unusual way of thought in India. I also read studies that claimed the exact opposite—that he did not learn anything at all of major importance for his thought there—and other arguments which essentially claim that Indian philosophy is basically Greek in origin. That forced me to investigate Early Buddhism in depth, with the result that I discovered the above problems, among others, and my study became much longer and more involved than I had expected. My research set out to determine whether Indian thought— particularly Buddhism—had influenced Pyrrho’s thought. It ended up delving very deeply into the problem of identifying genuine Early Buddhism: the teachings and practices of the Buddha himself, and of his followers for the first century or two after his death. As mentioned above, in my view all scholarship, regardless of its subject matter, should follow the dictum “theories must accord with the data”, with the corollary that the earliest hard data must always be ranked higher in value than other data. In addition, theories and scholarly arguments must be based on rational, logical thought. These are among the core principles of scientific work in general, and I have done my best to follow them. One of the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript of this book has different ideas about how I should have proceeded. He says, “A strong case could be made that even relatively specific features of the history of philosophy such as the Problem of the Criterion (relative, that is, to the general phenomenon of skepticism) could be explained as a generic motif rather than, so to speak, as a patented idea”. He contends that “two figures saying similar, or even identical, things in different parts of the world is never enough to establish direct influence.” This is a problematic claim with respect to philosophy and religious studies. The field of biblical studies is founded on the ability and necessity to do text criticism. It is purely because textual near identity is recognizable that textual scholars can identify interpolations, university teachers can recognize plagiarization—even cross-linguistic plagiarization5 —and so on. Is it really conceivable that, for example, the famous statement of Protagoras, “Man is the measure of all things”, is unrelated to the Greek original, or is not recognizable? The ancient Greek πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἐστὶν ἄνθρωπος has exactly the same meaning as the modern Chinese translation, 人是萬物的尺度, the modern Russian translation, Человек есть мера всех вещей, and so on. Assuming it is correctly translated, the quotation is famous, easily recognizable, and not liable to be confused with any other, whatever the language, despite its brevity. But why? It is the highly distinctive content of the text that makes it easily identifiable. Translation converts the meaning expressed from one language to another. It does not do it perfectly because with perfect identity no translation occurs—the texts are identical. The reviewer’s assertion denies the possibility of communication by language even in the same language (not to speak of the possibility of understanding, say, a German translation of an English textbook, or vice versa, as students manage to do every day), and the necessity of intelligibility assumed by the very existence of the field of linguistic typology. Aristotle talks about exactly this topic in his Metaphysics. For example, no doubt many ancient Greeks, Indians, and Chinese said, “It’s a nice day today,” and proceeded to take a walk somewhere to enjoy the fine weather. Many people everywhere do that, and my wife is liable to say the same thing to me when it is warm and sunny. So it is easy for us to imagine that countless Greeks, Indians, and Chinese have said the same thing. But to paraphrase Aristotle again, we can hardly imagine that anyone in ancient India or China could then have said, “Let’s walk to the Odeon in Athens!”
The reviewer instead compares the historical appearance of Pyrrhonism to that of “the widespread phenomenon of world-denying mendicants or for that matter cultural motifs of lycanthropy, unicorns, or night-walking.” He proposes that “pan-Eurasian social dynamics could be enough to explain the independent appearance of philosophical theories that deny the attainability of certain knowledge and that reject all positive doctrine.”6 Yet Pyrrho’s declaration in the Aristocles passage has challenged not only the manuscript reviewer but a century of scholars, who have not been able to explain it no matter what approach they have adopted, thus demonstrating both how unique it is and how difficult it has been for anyone to deal with it. This is only one part of the actual, complex problem that needs to be discussed and explained. Another of the reviewers of the manuscript of this book suggests that I should discuss the controversial issue of the date of the foundation of Jainism, its relationship to Buddhism, and so on, in greater detail. I strongly agree that it would be great to have a careful, historically sound study of this topic, and I have long encouraged other scholars to undertake one. So far, however, Indologists, including Buddhologists, have not examined the Jain dating issue carefully and thoroughly from a historical point of view, and no such comprehensive study yet exists, though the issue is mentioned by a number of scholars, including Mette (1995), who though evidently pro-Jain concludes that Buddhism seems to be in all respects earlier than Jainism. The earliest incontestable hard evidence for the existence of Jainism is not earlier than the Saka-Kushan period (first century bc to third century ad), about a half millennium after the Buddha, as shown by the fact that none of the explicitly identified and datable Jain material listed in Ghosh’s authoritative register of Indian archaeological sites is earlier than the Saka-Kushan period, the earliest being caves dated (generously) to ca. 100 bc to ad 200.7 My approach in the book is to base all of my main arguments on hard data—inscriptions, datable manuscripts, other dated texts, and archaeological reports. I do not allow traditional belief to determine anything in the book, so I have necessarily left the topic out, other than to mention it briefly in a few places, with relevant citations. Here I quote a century-old summary that remains the received view: Jainism bears a striking resemblance to Buddhism in its monastic system, its ethical teachings, its sacred texts, and in the story of its founder. This closeness of resemblance has led not a few scholars—such as Lassen, Weber, Wilson, Tiele, Barth—to look upon Jainism as an offshoot of Buddhism and to place its origin some centuries later than the time of Buddha. But the prevailing view today—that of Bühler, Jacobi, Hopkins, and others—is that Jainism in its origin is independent of Buddhism and, perhaps, is the more ancient of the two. The many points of similarity between the two sects are explained by the indebtedness of both to a common source, namely the teachings and practices of ascetic, monastic Brahminism. However, he then comments, “The canon of the White-robed Sect consists of forty-five Agamas, or sacred texts, in the Prakrit tongue. Jacobi, who has translated some of these texts in the ‘Sacred Books of the East’, is of the opinion that they cannot be older than 300 b.c. 8 According to Jainist tradition, they were preceded by an ancient canon of fourteen so-called Purvas, which have totally disappeared . . .”.9 With regard to the idea that any kind of monasticism, least of all Brahmanist asceticism, could be the “common source”, it may be noted that monasteries per se in India cannot be dated earlier than the first century ad, when they first appear in Taxila; they were introduced from Central Asia, where Jainism was and is unknown.10 finally, my discussion here, and throughout this book, is concerned only with issues of historical accuracy. In my opinion, all great religions have much that is admirable in them, however old or new they may be. I would like to emphasize that this book does not belong to any existing view, school, or field, as far as I am aware, so that it does not subscribe to any tradition walled off from the rest of intellectual life.
It therefore has no gatekeepers, clad in the traditional metaphorical chain-mail armor and bearing the traditional metaphorical halberd, proclaiming threats to their perceived enemies in archaic languages, dedicated to keeping new knowledge out and stamping out all possible threats to those inside its walls so that the residents can safely continue their traditional beliefs without the necessity of thinking about them. The book is also inevitably imperfect, though I have tried to make it as correct as I could, despite the limitations of my own imperfections. So I hope it is not the “last word” on the many topics it covers, but only the “first word”. My goal throughout has been exclusively to examine the evidence as carefully and precisely as possible, and to draw reasonable conclusions based on it—while of course considering other studies that shed light on the problems or in some cases argue for a different interpretation. This sounds like a rather un-Pyrrhonian enterprise, but ultimately, and somewhat unexpectedly, it is what Pyrrhonism is all about.
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