The Ordination of Women in Buddhism, Old Facts & New Fables

MacBeth vs. MacDuff.

One of the recurrent issues in my own writing is the misconception that "crazy theories" come from the fringes: on the contrary, in Buddhism, the craziest theories can (and often do) come from the pinnacle of prestige, influence and academic authority (sometimes from the centers of religious authority, too).  I dealt with this question generally in my (still-unpublished) lecture, "The Opposite of Buddhism", and I discussed a (stunning) particular example in my earlier work on the "standard misinterpretation" of the 12 links of "dependent origination".

English speakers often work from a false assumption that what is "central" is conservative and reasonable, and what is "fringe" is radical, original, creative, and more likely to be unreasonable.  That may be true of some areas of scholarship, but I can tell you (and I must warn you) that Buddhism isn't one of them.  There is plenty of craziness at the center of the halls of power (and there isn't much power in those halls).

Often enough, however, what academic publications provide is a certain style of obfuscation for just how crazy these theories may be.  In the case of my critique of a theory proposed by Bhikkhu Pāsādika, I honestly think that the theory was refuted simply by writing it out clearly; in other words, as soon as the obfuscation was removed, any reader could see for themselves just how far-fetched it really was.

Below is an alert that I sent out to colleagues several years ago (as an e-mail), about a genuinely crazy theory propounded on the origin of the ordination of women in Buddhism.  I'm not really offering a critique of it here, but simply (1) pointing out that the theory exists, (2) warning the reader about all of the obfuscation, and then (3) restating what the theory really is without that obfuscation.  As with Bhikkhu Pāsādika's theory about a "materialist conspiracy" re-writing portions of the canon, I think that this "feminist conspiracy" theory is (likewise) so far-fetched that nobody could really take it seriously.  However, none of these theories come from the fringes: this stuff is all being published from the pinnacle of power and privilege, with the imprimaturs of wealthy institutions stamped onto the flyleaves.

-----Begin quotation (May, 2010)-----
It would be difficult to imagine how anyone would know that an exciting new article was published by Hinuber in an obscure journal called ARIRIAB in 2007.

In fact, even if you did stumble upon the ARIRIAB website, you would not be able to guess that this article is available for download as part of ARIRIAB-11.PDF, as there's no list of authors, and the files are scanned images (i.e., not searchable as text).  Resultantly, this is a nearly-hidden gem, and I will be so gauche as to send out a fan-club letter alerting my colleagues to its existence:

http://iriab.soka.ac.jp/orc/Publications/ARIRIAB/index_ARIRIAB.html

Now, even if you see the article, and even if you start reading it,
you might well miss its hypothesis:

Hinuber "dramatizes" the article, by delaying the revelation of his
own thesis until the latest stage possible.  Although this approach has
its advantages, the main defect is that you get an easily readable
opening, followed by a lengthy digression into the details of K.R.
Norman's mis-translation of a single passage from the Vinaya in the
middle portion of the essay (and, I think, there's some joy taken in
Hinuber outdoing K.R. Norman in this respect) --alas, I think many
non-specialist readers will simply give up at this point.

However, in the last act of the drama, the article returns to subjects
of mainstream interest that deserve a broader audience than they
are likely to find (hidden away in the pages of ARIRIAB).  Partly by
sheer co-incidence (e.g., an unpublished thesis that I read some years
ago) I happened to be already familiar with most of the passages that
Hinuber draws together here, but (1) many readers will not be, and (2)
some readers will only be familiar with this stuff as re-phrased (and
indirectly alluded to) in the most evasive and obsequious terms
possible.

As suddenly as MacDuff declaring that he was born of no mortal woman,
the last act takes yet another dramatic turn (terminating in a
footnote) as Hinuber decides to take the further step of concluding
that the ordination of female Buddhist monks took place AFTER the
Buddha's death (whereas, formerly in the article, he had merely
suggested that it took place very late in the Buddha's life) --a
reasonably radical change in interpretation of familiar facts (and,
frankly, I wonder if Hinuber didn't add this just to startle his
audience).

The real value of this article, for the larger number of reasons, will be that it draws together the material on the status of women during the lifetime of the Buddha without the usual evasions of what the primary source texts actually say.  In one of the very last footnotes, Hinuber draws attention to the fact that, at a minimum, the women's ordination was neither equal to the men's, nor simultaneous with it --nor was the women's ordination merely a few years after the men's.

Additionally, for those who do not already know it, the middle portion of the argument (that will be difficult for non-specialists to follow) does demonstrate (with some new examples, and some old) just how fragmentary the Vinaya now is --and how many peculiar influences (from Jainism, at least) were able to creep in (both doctrinally and
linguistically) before the canon was closed.

While I am very pleased at my own sheer luck in discovering this
article, others will not be so lucky (and it would be even more
difficult to find if English were not my first language, etc.) --and
this reminds me of my long-ago proposed project to start some sort of
annual newsletter on new publications on/in Theravada Countries (so
that all scholars in related fields at least have a list, perhaps with
a few articles and illustrations to brighten it up).
-----End of quotation (May, 2010)-----

The replies I received from this notice (at the time) were very much along the lines of, "You can't possibly be serious!" --and I then had to reiterate that this is certainly not a theory that I support myself.

From my perspective, this theory that there were zero ordained female monks during the Buddha's lifetime, and that they were instead falsely added into the canon at a later date (as part of a "feminist conspiracy", so to speak) is completely crazy.  It would require an absurd series of assumptions, and would undermine the same textual sources that the theory relies on to support itself as (presumed) historical evidence.  Such an interpretation would be entirely created and sustained by a series of "self-fulfilling-prophecies" of the most absurd kind (discarding evidence of female monks existing during the lifetime of the Buddha, and grossly reinterpreting other evidence, etc.).  Nevertheless, this completely crazy theory passes the highest levels of peer review, receives the highest levels of institutional support, and is supposed to be taken very seriously, etc., etc., just as with so many examples from the 19th and 20th centuries.

In contrasting the 21st century to the 19th: change is an objective fact, but "progress" is merely an ideology.

It is has never been the case that "the center" had a monopoly on virtue, nor that "the fringes" had a monopoly on crazy theories.  There's a great scarcity of virtue all around, and there's a great deal of corruption, nepotism, incompetence, and sheer stupidity at "the center" everywhere I've been (and I've been almost everywhere).

Female Monks vs. Thailand

The news item here is only five minutes long (the second half of the tape is an unrelated story).  Although it may be difficult to endure the narrator's mispronunciation of each and every Pali word mentioned, I'd encourage you to make the effort to endure it.*

* ("I continue to meet Western PhD candidates who cannot pronounce 'Theravāda' correctly. I would imagine that if no-one in their PhD program has informed them that θɛrəvɑdə is wrong, their thesis examiner may owe them a refund." http://www.pali.pratyeka.org/#Phonology)

Vegetarianism and Theravada Orthodoxy

§1.
Buddhism does have an ancient canon that can be treated as preserving (however imperfectly) the philosophy of the Buddha, and it is to that canon that questions of "What did the Buddha teach about ______?" should be directed.  Unfortunately, the misconceptions about what the canon is (and isn't) continue to hamper even the most straightforward of such questions (along with the habitual dishonesty of the small number of scholars who actually have access to that canon).

The question of "What did the Buddha say about Vegetarianism?" should be straightforward, but (for a long list of reasons discussed in this article) it isn't.  I would emphasize that the problem is not the ambiguity of the source texts themselves.  As with the salience of Santa Claus to Christmas, the ambiguities have arisen from many successive centuries of new stories and new excuses arising.  Unlike Christianity, however, the vast majority of people who are now offering new excuses (i.e., in the current generation) do not have the ability to read the Buddhist equivalent of the Old Testament.  The blind are indeed leading the blind (both in robes, and without them).

A large part of the canon is concerned with monastic rules; it is very easy for readers (and preachers) to misrepresent how these apply (if at all) to the lives of laypeople, or to "society" in aggregate.  They aren't social rules; they aren't laws meant to govern a kingdom; but, in fact, Buddhist kingdoms do have a long history of attempting to re-interpret monastic rules as the basis for secular law.  It's absurd to try to create divorce law out of a set of principles set down for celibates sharing property within a monastery; however, this type of absurdity was common (e.g., in pre-modern Burma) because of the assumption that the monastic rules represented a higher authority (that secular law could be compared to).  In the contemporary context, the questions surrounding vegetarianism are especially absurd in this respect: rules that boil down to "beggars can't be choosers" (and monks are indeed supposed to live as mendicants) don't apply easily to the class of people who are supposed to be both donors and "choosers".  If we're talking about laypeople, "vegetarianism" is a question of violence and non-violence applied to one's own diet, one's own shopping, and, possibly, the management of one's own land or farm; this is an ethical category that doesn't exist for monks, and inferences about it can't easily be made from rules that governed monks' acceptance (or rejection) of alms.

It is very easy for authors to misrepresent the source of their quotations (if they use quotations at all) partly because they can omit the audience addressed in the original source: was the Buddha setting down a rule for monks, or a platitude for laypeople?  Is the source a sub-commentary to the vinaya (i.e., the monastic rules) written more than a thousand years after the Buddha died, or is it from the ancient dialogues that are as close as we'll ever come to the recorded words of the Buddha?  Is the source a philosophical dialogue in which all parties are very serious, or is it a jocular story that was written for the entertainment of children?  The canon contains all of this diversity and more, and it is very easy to misrepresent a excerpt from one context as if it belonged to another.

What does the Buddha say about vegetarianism?  The first part of the answer is that you need to know where to look (in the texts) for the answer, and, just as important, you need to be keenly aware of the excuses and misdirections that will distract you from what the texts say (and what they don't say).  The second part of the answer won't be found in this article: anyone can work with the raw materials themselves and, in writing this blog, I am refusing the role of the guru (i.e., I'm not offering any easy answers, just answers).

It isn't sufficient to cite "the Pali canon", because the meaning of the word "canon" isn't precise enough, and, believe it or not, the term allows quite a lot of ambiguity for scholars to deceive their readers.  In my recent article (supposedly in print by now) "Problems of Canon and Reason" I provide a fairly lengthy explanation of what the historical segments of the canon really are (in contrast to misconceptions and some scholarly bafflegab) and I've proposed the term "the core canon", to provide a rapid reference to a certain category of texts.

Anyone reading this (who hasn't already seen the longer work that I'm alluding to, "Canon and Reason") would be justifiably apprehensive for two reasons:
  (1) Why would we possibly need a new term to be coined?
  (2) Why should we trust your claims about historical layers of the text, when so many scholars lie about this very issue, as you yourself repeatedly complain (and warn the reader about) in your published work?

Of course, the answer to number 1 is partly just entailed by number 2: we need a new (and simple) term to clear away the confusion of a lot of junk scholarship, and intentionally-misleading bafflegab.  The nature of the category I've created (with the term "the core canon") is so simple that you can easily make up your own mind as to whether you find it credible or not (and, again, read "Canon and Reason" for details, whenever it shows up as a PDF on the internet --the published version on paper is probably hard to find outside of Taiwan).  To simplify something that's already simple: there has never been any question that the first four Nikāyas belong to a separate category of texts from the fifth (however, we have been lacking an English a name for that category).

It's grossly dishonest for scholars to talk about the most ancient part of the canon as if it were identical to (or contiguous with) commentarial literature written 1000 years later, on the other side of the ocean that separates India from Sri Lanka; frankly, I think it's dishonest to treat the Abhidhamma literature as if it belonged in the same category as the first four Nikāyas also.  Within what is commonly called "the canon", not everything is equally canonical, and this is not an alien, European perspective, but in fact one that was expressed by monks in antiquity (again, this is discussed at length in "Canon and Reason").  Philosophical dialogues of the Buddha (in the first four Nikāyas of the Sutta-pitaka) were not regarded as equivalent in religious authority to magical stories of the Buddha's prior incarnations in the Jātakas --i.e., neither in the eyes of ancients nor of moderns-- and the Jātakas are indeed a part of the fifth Nikāya.

This doesn't mean that the Jātakas are of zero historical significance (quite the contrary), but it does mean that you have to be careful about lumping them into one category with all of the other Pali texts.  The same could be said of post-canonical Pali literature, much of which is extremely historically significant (the vaṃsa literature, etc.) but cannot answer the question of "What did the Buddha teach about ______?"  The texts reflect the assumptions of their respective eras of authorship, and the philosophies of their respective authors.  Although there are exceptions, very often the authors did not intend for their works to be taken as "fraud" (e.g., many portions of the Abhidhamma were not written with any pretense of being the direct words of the Buddha, although myths were subsequently invented to sanctify them all wholesale, and this tendency was so strong that it is a wonder that we have any texts like the Milindapañha that openly admit themselves to be of separate, later authorship).

To find the answers to different types of questions we have to direct our attention to different textual sources (that are, indeed, written in different periods, and sometimes in different places, too).  I'm also arguing (inconveniently) that we need to read long tracts of text before we come to our conclusions, and not short excerpts taken out of context.

§2.
Suppose we were to refer the question of vegetarianism to the Jātakas, what would we find?  There was an interesting article written on this matter over one hundred years ago (we're catching up with 1906 here):
E. Washburn Hopkins, "The Buddhistic Rule Against Eating Meat", JAOS [Journal of the American Oriental Society], 1906, Vol. 27 part 2, p. 455–464.
Despite the title, what's striking (and still useful) about this article is not what it says about the Vinaya rules, but what it says about Jātaka sources (surveyed by the author, starting on p. 461).

What that survey shows is that the authors of the Jātakas regarded meat-eating as normal: that doesn't meant that it was morally good, and it doesn't mean that the Buddha taught that it was morally good.  Indeed, the scenes and dialogues that Hopkins surveys are not cases of the Buddha preaching about anything: they are simply the depiction of meat-eating in passing in the context of Buddhist religious literature.  In some ways, evidence of this kind may be more important than statements of principle; in other ways, less so.

To offer an example: the Ucchaṅga Jātaka tells the story of a woman who is asked to choose between saving her son, her husband and her brother, if two of the three were to be executed.  She chooses to save her brother, on the grounds that "the two others were replaceable" (Malalasekera, q.v. Ucchaṅga).  Let us be very clear: this was a story written primarily for the purposes of entertainment, and nobody in their right mind would surmise that the Buddha set down as a rule/principle that that you ought to save your siblings and let your spouse and husband die in such circumstances.  Such an attribution to the Buddha (or even to "Buddhism" more generally) would be absurd; and such absurdities are now normal, partly because of the over-arching misunderstanding of what the structure of the canon is, and where we need to look for the answers to various types of questions.

We should not assume that the authors contributing to this set of texts (the Jātakas) were keenly aware of what was said in another set of texts nor of how the two sets of texts might contradict one-another.  There is no reason to suppose that the author of a story about the Buddha's prior incarnation as a monkey would think, "I should first check this against the philosophical dialogues of the first four Nikāyas to ensure ideological consistency" --nor is there any reason to think this would really be possible in an era of palm-leaf manuscripts (when the only index was memorization).  Further, if the purpose of the genre is not to set down the Buddha's philosophy (nor rules of monastic conduct, nor rules of laypeople's ethics) we should not look to it expecting this function: it's the right place to seek the answers to certain types of questions (such as what "normal" society looked like in the era of the text's authorship) and it is the wrong place to look for others.

This type of dysjuncture between textual sources is real, and it is saddening to me that many Buddhists want to deny it, to instead pretend that the whole of the extant literature is a homogenous whole (or that it forms a single diatribe).  In many cases, it is a demonstrable fact that the authors of "Vinaya stories" (illustrating rules of monastic conduct) were not aware of the meaning of the rule that they were supposed to be illustrating.  When I studied the grammar of Kaccāyana (a much shorter volume) I could even find such misunderstandings between historical layers of the text there (i.e., a rule written in one period would be exemplified, incorrectly, by a layer of text added by some other author, in some other generation, who didn't quite understand the first author's point).

I'm not sure that anyone knows how the story of Santa Claus (drinking Coca Cola on a rooftop) is supposed to relate to the core doctrines of Christianity; I'm pretty sure that nobody in ancient Palestine had ever seen a reindeer, nor that they had any concept of "the north pole".  The stage we have yet to advance to (in the western perception of Buddhist sources) is the detachment to say "So what?" when we encounter cleavages between texts that are of separate authorship and very separate thematic concern (sometimes separated by centuries, sometimes by continents, and so on).  If we stop reading quotations out of context, and start reading whole texts, these dysjunctures simply become "normal", because they are part of the structure of the canon itself.

§3.
Why is this so difficult?  One reason is the countervailing belief in the omnipotence of the authors.  I have met a PhD-wielding western academic who said with a straight face that she considered medieval Jātaka stories (that were written as original compositions in Thailand) to be authentic and accurate descriptions of historical events that transpired many centuries earlier in India, because she assumed that the authors had achieved omnipotence through meditation.  I do not think that her published work states any such belief so openly.  To be clear, the class of literature we're talking about here is referred to as "apocryphal Jātakas", but they are only "apocryphal" in the sense that they have no connection to ancient India, and are original works of fiction variously composed in Thailand, Burma, or elsewhere.  Some of these works make no attempt to deceive their reader as to their place and era of their writing; others do.

If you really believe in the omnipotence of authorship, then you can never know what the Buddha said about vegetarianism, nor the answer to any such simple question: you're stuck with the absurd assumption that stories intended as childrens' entertainment in the Jātakas are just as authoritative as the philosophical dialogues of the core canon.  Worse, you're forced to treat the original source text as equally authoritative as its commentaries, written a thousand years later, by mere mortals who were struggling to interpret a language that was already ancient to them.  If the authors of all eras are presumed to be omnipotent, then the textual sources of any one era can never make sense.  This is a real bias and belief amongst modern interpreters, and I can honestly say that I have never heard it expressed openly by a person of Asian ethnicity (i.e., I have only observed it among westerners).

We can't expect to find an accurate description of Santa's reindeer in the Old Testament, and, vice-versa, we can't expect the inventors of the myth of Santa Claus to know much about camels in ancient Palestine.

§4.
The misgivings that I have in writing about this subject aren't at all the same as those expressed by some of my contemporaries (both secular and monastic, both in their publications and in private correspondence).  Fundamentally, I'm uncomfortable with the distortion of ancient Buddhist sources to satisfy modern expectations; distortion of this kind often starts with the posing of the question itself and then proceeds through the selection of sources to suit the bias of the question.

If you're asking about "ecology" (a modern concept) you're not asking about the spirits of deceased ancestors inhabiting the trees (are you?).  In the answers that modern scholars concoct to satisfy "leading questions" of this kind, you may have the misrepresentation of one thing as another, partly just to fulfill the criteria built into the question.  Vaguely alluded to, badly translated, and indirectly quoted, the worship of ancestral spirits thus comes to misrepresented as bronze-age environmentalism, for the dubious benefit of a modern audience.

Although it's strange to say, I think the problem is similar amongst those who are actively engaged in constructing a "scientistic Buddhism" (i.e., despite the supernatural material found throughout the texts) and amongst those who throw themselves into an uncritical belief in the supernatural.  Both types engage with the history (or "the extant literature") through the scraps of texts that reach them through the selective translation of their respective gurus.  People don't read Shakespeare this way, and they don't see Shakespeare performed this way (not even in Japanese translation); and yet people form fixed opinions about the totality of Buddhist doctrine based on very short selections (often suffering from overly-vague translation) that some biased source had selected on their behalf.  Even if you read a very sober and unbiased collection of philosophical quotations from Shakespeare you would have a very strange sense of what that literature is (and how it once existed for its own audience, in its own time) by relying upon such extracts.  It would probably be possible to concoct a doctrine of "ecology" from the selective use of whatever Shakespeare said about forests and trees --especially if we translated it back and forth a few times.  However, Shakespeare spoke English: the Buddha didn't.

To draw an example from a very different discipline, I was reminded of this problem by the following comments in a recent issue of The Economist:
"[A disaster at N.A.S.A. in 2003 was in large part blamed on] the debris-assessment team's presentation to higher-ups using Powerpoint Software.  Information had been poorly condensed onto 28 slides.  On one cluttered slide the words 'significant' and 'significantly' were used five times with a range of meanings from 'detectable in a perhaps irrelevant calibration case study' to 'an amount of damage so that everyone dies' […]".*¹
Indeed, I've seen interpretations wherein five different concepts in Pali are all translated as "meditation" in English, with no definition of what the interpreter means by the English word, nor any justification for this concealment of real differences in the original Pali.

The article in The Economist then summarizes the thesis of a book by Edward Tufte titled The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: presentations of this kind present information as "verb-less phrases assembled into bogus bullet-point hierarchies".*¹  I haven't read Tufte's work, but this reminded me immediately of the tendency that now dominates the English-language approach to Buddhism (and Buddhist philosophy especially).

I have many times encountered people who are willing to believe that Shakespeare still presents serious problems of interpretation for scholars to pore over, but who respond with real hostility at the suggestion that anything similar could be true of the most ancient texts of Buddhism.  It is a matter of dogma, and the less people read of the content in its original context, the easier the dogma is to believe.

The nebulous "bullet-point hierarchy" of principles extracted from their original contexts (and cultures) can be made to say almost anything --and very often are so vague and poorly-phrased that they mean almost nothing.  As with the powerpoint presentation (in the executive context), the very vagueness (and verblessness) of these sentence-fragments seems to instill a misleading sense of confidence in the reader, perhaps because the format defies the type of scrutiny applied to the normal use of language in dialogue.  People who can read no language except English are very confident in telling me that I'm wrong about everything that I've seen in Pali, often citing their own reading of such short extracts (as "definitive"), whereas, from my perspective, the sources they rely upon are often of very dubious provenance, and are of equally dubious application to the concerns of the modern reader.

What do I mean by warning that a quotation may have "dubious application" to modern concerns?  You are never going to find an ancient text that addresses our modern notion of "vegetarianism" for the same reasons that you'll never find a text that addresses the modern notion of "ecology", or, for that matter "abortion".  Meanwhile, to be sure, "Buddhism and Abortion" is a subject that fills publications (and perhaps pews) just as surely as "Buddhism and Vegetarianism" does.  They're modern questions, proceeding from very alien sets of cultural assumptions; the definition of the question itself may exclude some of the genuinely salient material in the canon.

This entails a mismatch with an ancient religion that considered it a good deed to wash-out a bowl in a pond, not because the bowl got cleaned, but because the dregs washed off the bowl would provide food for the creatures living in the pond. [A.N. vol. 1, BJT p. 288–290]  This reflects a fundamentally different set of assumptions from a modern person who may become vegetarian for medicinal reasons, and, in fact, I would say it is also different from those who now adopt the diet for the sake of their "supernatural health" (i.e., for the sake of what is now meant by "good karma" in common parlance).

Either you're willing to read the remnants of an ancient (and very alien) culture with an open mind, or you're not.  The taboo against cutting down trees for religious reasons cannot easily be equated with ecology; when the first European travelers reached Bangkok, they found that only men who were already convicted of serious crimes were willing to cut down large trees (but the cultural adaptation to this circumstance was, apparently, to employ convicts in so doing).  Similar issues of mismatched expectations would arise if anyone were sincerely looking at passages on non-violence (in diet and deed) in the Pali canon.

Almost none of the current discourse surrounding the issue is sincere, and this insincerity is a deterrent for anyone who could contribute to the debate by digging up facts from ancient primary sources (myself included).  If anyone were really looking to the ancient texts for dietary advice, they would eat a great deal more rice-gruel [粥] than they now do (see the first illustration).  The vast majority seem to approach these texts (or, rather, short extracts from the texts) seeking only the affirmation for excuses they've already made for themselves; that is an aspect of human nature that most of us prefer to avoid confronting (in loved-ones or in strangers).

I write this article with resignation to the fact that nobody is going to start eating more rice-gruel just because I can produce an authentic quotation from the Buddha endorsing the stuff (and, in fact, I have never seen rice-gruel eaten in a monastery, but I have seen it served in restaurants, both rich and poor).  Although the example may seem trivial to some of my readers, many of us need to look in the mirror and really consider how it is that we have come to regard such things as trivial.  If you compare this situation to the attitudes toward dietary rules in Hinduism, Judaism or Islam, it might be worth pausing to consider why Buddhists are so flippant about these things.  Whether it is thought of as a matter of diet or a matter of ethics, may I ask if there is any other religion that has so little sincere interest in bringing its practice into line with its principles?  Does any other religion take its textual sources so lightly?  Does anyone presume to have such strong views on Shakespeare without first reading his plays?  I regard this all as a knot of a single string, although my reader may well complain that this is a series of unrelated questions.

§5.
Making excuses isn't new: you can't presume that you're looking at a clear break between an "original doctrine" and a "later corruption" in looking at Buddhist philosophical sources.  You also can't assume that there was just one (univocal) teaching on an issue, nor that there was just one later adaptation or corruption of it.

I'm reminded somewhat of the situation with Chinese ceramics and metalware: it isn't the case that a given cauldron can be simply judged against the two possibilities of either being authentically-ancient or else a modern fake.  Rather, every given century produced imitations of the styles of earlier periods, and the craftsmen (in their given period) may not have regarded their own work as a fraud at all (but instead as an attempt to preserve or emulate an earlier tradition).

I once had an expert explain to me the difficulty this presented in the history of Chinese pictographs: a metal cauldron might have a seemingly-ancient inscription on the bottom, reflecting some effort made merely 500 years ago to imitate a style of 2000 years prior.  This entails the study of a moderately-ancient idea of what something truly-ancient was supposed to look like, but it's a tricky thing to authenticate each of the three periods involved.  In this circumstance, even something apocryphal can provide useful historical information if it's regarded for what it is (and, of course, it can be massively distorting if you presume it to be something it isn't).

On the perennial issue of "the 12 links" I recently saw a hilarious comment from Robert E. Florida that makes precisely this mistake:
"From the very earliest days, the theory of co-conditioned causality, or pratītyasamutpāda, the teaching that every thing in the universe is interrelated with every other thing, was interpreted embryologically." [p. 14 of Buddhism and Abortion, 1999, U. of Hawai'i Press]
Of course, this is so hilarious because Flordia is here presuming (without proving) that the modern, western interpretation is correct, whereas the "traditional interpretation" is false; if he were capable of reading the original text, he would see that there is absolutely nothing in it (i.e., not one word) "teaching that every thing in the universe is interrelated with every other thing".  On the contrary, there is a very good basis for that embryological interpretation, if anyone cares about the writ of what the text says and doesn't say (a subject I've already written about at length).  In the very next sentence, the R.E. Florida follows this up by invoking Vasubandhu (!) as an authority for his titular topic of "Abortion in Buddhist Thailand" (without one word to justify what influence Vasubandhu has ever had in the history of Theravāda Southeast Asia, nor explaining why the author has turned to a uniquely Mahayana source first and foremost).  Given that this type of buffoonery is what passes for the highest level of academic expertise (on matters as contentious as the politics of abortion) there can be little wonder that the common run of Buddhists labor in ignorance.

Many of my own findings just deal with the "simple" contrast between modern misconceptions and ancient sources, but not all.  My wildly unpopular essay on the physical appearance of the Buddha actually did trace the change through several periods of history, letting the reader see a succesion of stages whereby the description of the Buddha as a bald-shaven monk (indistinguishable from the other monks in his retinue) was transformed into an image of a magical figure, with a head of magical hair, and other supernatural features about his head.  Methodologically, one of the lessons to be learned from that essay is that we can't assume that authors in any given period of history were fascinated by (or even interested in) the texts produced before: the changing cult of the Buddha's physical appearance both involved the writing of "new myths" (that we do indeed have evidence of) and also that people had limited interest in the contradiction between these new stories and the older ones.

This type of cultural change is possible partly because some matters of religion are taken less seriously than others by the adherents themselves.  The changing assumptions about Santa Claus (gradually transforming the holiday of Christmas itself) are an example from the last century --and, today, only a small minority of Christians have responded to this with an attempt to expunge Santa Claus from their religion, while the great majority see no contradiction in it (or, at least, they do not take the contradiction very seriously).  Similarly, there are small numbers of Buddhists who now insist on depicting the Buddha with a naturalistic bald-shaven head (including, in recent years, the leader of Taiwan's Tzu Chi [慈濟基金會], who certainly didn't get the idea from me: in an earlier period, she had the Buddha depicted with naturalistic hair [i.e., a contrast to the norm in a Sino-Mahayana context] and this can still be seen on the mosaic wall of the hospital she founded in Hualien, but she later moved on to depicting the Buddha as bald, most notably in the illustration of her own vision of the Buddha in her auto-hagiography; it would be interesting to know in what year she made the transition between the two).

 (This photo of the mosaic, above, credited to "Sue W." who posted it online.)

The reality is that in 21st century Buddhism, we do have misconceptions that are as deep (and yet as shallow) as someone thinking that Santa Claus and Jesus-of-Nazareth are one and the same historical figure.  The confusion between the Buddha and Bù-Dài (布袋) is a frequently-cited example.

§6.
An author who is certainly not a philologist made an interesting point on this subject that returns us to the major premise of this article.  Tony Page (who?) pointed out the following about one of the most-commonly-cited sources in debates about vegetarianism:
"[Many people] claim that he said it was OK to eat flesh as long as you yourself have not seen, heard, or suspected that the animal was killed especially for you…
On the second point, if one reads the relevant Pali scripture carefully, one sees that the phrase 'killed especially for oneself' is not used by the Buddha. It is interpolated (in parentheses) by later commentators." [The source is an online interview with an animal rights group.]

The crucial step here (from ignorance toward knowing something meaningful) is the willingness to recognize the difference between the original source text and "later interpolations".  This is a blindingly obvious point that was missed (or intentionally ignored?) in many works by supposed experts.  I am aware that many readers will object at this very point, and insist that "it doesn't matter" what the particular text says, as there are other texts wherein the Buddha himself eats meat; however, my point is that it does matter, and that all of us need to start from an appreciation of just how much it matters that we're reading the original texts, in their original context.  We can't choose to ignore what the text actually says in one case, to then put emphasis on it in another.

It is even more difficult to remedy the self-selecting nature of the evidence gathered (and the evidence ignored) in putting together a picture of meat-eating and violence against animals in the core canon.

Are sermons that deal with killing insects (or not-killing insects) relevant or irrelevant to the question of killing pigs and cows in our own time and culture?  Are sermons that describe refusing to kill rats in one's own house (instead setting them outside in a box without harming them) relevant or irrelevant to such questions?

I have definitely seen some modern monks attempt to evade the whole issue by foisting the most irrelevant sources imaginable onto the question.  One white, western monk insisted to me that all meat is just "form" in the same sense that a carrot is "form"; however, if this were actually a teaching of the Buddha, and not the invention of a modern, white monk, we would have some quotation from the Buddha saying something of the kind.  On the one hand, we have many, many lectures from the Buddha about the nature of "form" (i.e., material reality and our perception of it), and, on the other hand, we have many lectures from the Buddha dealing with violence and non-violence (along with incidental reflections on the attitudes toward treatment of animals and insects, such as the aforementioned case of washing out your bowl in a pond, etc.).  What is the link between the two, and how is it that a modern interpreter has found in one an excuse to ignore the other?  None of this adds up to a doctrine that eating meat is equivalent to eating a carrot; none of it justifies paying money to someone to kill an animal as morally equivalent to paying money for a carrot.  None of it excuses the baleful ignorance of monks who make a career of "teaching" texts that they have never studied in any form aside from short quotations (in English translation) that they have found on websites.  The Buddha did not speak English, and he didn't speak Thai, either.

§7.
I realize that many of my readers will regard these as unrelated questions and unrelated problems that I keep posing side-by-side, but to me they truly are a knot made of a single thread: nobody can answer the question of "What did the Buddha teach about vegetarianism?" for the same reasons that they cannot answer any other question in the form of "What did the Buddha teach about ______?".  I remember a detailed anecdote from a western traveler who decided to spend one summer going from temple to temple in Thailand, asking the same question everywhere he went: "What did the Buddha actually say about 'there is no soul'?"  Although this fellow could only communicate in English, he primarily visited the temples that are set up for foreigners, and he wrote to me to report afterward that none of the monks (out of several dozen) had been able to answer the question --although some referred him to other monks, and so on.  When I related this anecdote to an ex-monk (of the Thai tradition) he did not believe it, and he insisted that all of those temples are full of monks that can deliver sermons on "no soul".  In reply, I pointed out that the question was not, "Can you give me a lecture on no soul", but rather, "What did the Buddha actually say about this?"  To answer the latter question is a very different matter.

The problem begins and ends with ignorance of the corpus of extant texts, and the excuses that I hear (both from monks and otherwise) for not being vegetarian remind me very much of the excuses that I hear for not studying the canon.

The most ludicruous calumny is committed against Ajahn Chah on this score: quotations from his lectures "Food for the Heart" are taken out of context as if they were a justification for voluntary ignorance.  In the fourth chapter he remarks, "For the best practice, as I see it, it isn't necessary to read many books. Take all the books and lock them away. Just read your own mind."  What is forgotten in reading such an excerpt is that the lecture was not given to laypeople, and definitely not western laypeople, but to Thai monks who had already completed many years of textual study, and, indeed, written examinations.  This is obvious even in the next sentence of the quotation, "You have all been burying yourselves in books from the time you entered school. I think that now you have this opportunity and have the time, take the books, put them in a cupboard and lock the door. Just read your mind."  I do not think that anyone could read this set of lectures as a whole and think that Ajahn Chah was endorsing the notion that westerners who already live in ignorance should continue to live in ignorance (I say this explicitly because I have both heard and read Ajahn Chah cited as an authority to this effect).  The same set of lectures contains numerous statements about the importance of textual scholarship, and the monks (addressed as the audience) are all presumed to be studiously preparing for Thailand's system of exams throughout (some of the advice emphasizing practice is stated explicitly in terms of the monks' need to recover from the distraction of having memorized and recited so much text for the exams, etc.).  Somehow, this is put into the blender of post-Christian western assumptions (along with unexamined assumptions inherited from 1960s American Zen) and an anti-textual (and anti-intellectual) doctrine comes out of the mix.

On the one hand, westerners insist on "the letter of the law" when it suits them, and then, on the other hand, they ignore a huge volume of text (and philosophical text at that) when it contradicts them.

I've met people who labored in ignorance for 30 years, with some badly-translated scrap of text (most often downloaded from the internet) interpreted to the effect that one should just focus on "practice" (by which they mean a modern, western definition of "meditation", regardless of what the texts may say); with this excuse established in their minds, they then go about preaching Buddhism without ever studying the texts.  After 30 years of such "practice", they're as ignorant as I was more than ten years ago (they repeat the same lesson about "breathing meditation" that some other white person taught them in California, again and again, while neither learning anything nor teaching anything).

When I ask such people if they've ever considered what the Buddha's opinion was about such preachers who teach the dharma without first studying it (syllable-by-syllable) they seem very much surprised to hear that we have such materials in the canon.  Indeed, we do: there was a very real expectation that monks would memorize, recite and correctly interpret the Buddha's teaching verbatim.  The sequence of Bhaddekaratta suttas (MN no. 131–134) provides examples of this process, and also of the social expectations surrounding them: MN no. 133 (the maha-kaccāna-bhaddekaratta-suttanta) opens with the question of why the monk has not yet memorized the poem in question (the verb being dhāreti), and the sequence of these texts demonstrates that while more than one explanation of the poem was then current (and acceptable), all of the monks were expected to have the poem memorized verbatim, and also to be able to offer some explanation of the meaning.

In 2004, Alex Wynne drew attention to a scene in the Pāsādika suttanta (of the D.N.) that gives a sense of the social function of the monks gathering to memorize and recite the texts (again and again) to know both the meaning and also the precise writ of the text, letter-by-letter (byañjanena byañjanaŋ).*2  Although I differ with that article on some details, I think that Wynne makes fair and reasonable use of this passage to demonstrate that ancient Buddhism really was a cult of knowing and transmitting the Buddha's teaching by memorizing it "to the letter".  I don't know how it is that so many modern Buddhists have lost sight of this aspect of the tradition, but they seem to be very eager to cling to any theory (hung on any isolated quotation) that memorization doesn't matter, that the precise wording doesn't matter, or even that preserving the original language of the Buddha's teachings doesn't matter.  All of this falls fairly neatly into the category of "the opposite of Buddhism".

In one memorable passage, the Buddha compares the monks who do not learn the texts to mice that don't even build their own burrows (quoted and cited in the final illustration); I infer that such mice live in a hole that others have dug out for them.  At worst, such mice neither dig nor have such a home, as they have neither learning nor the ability to walk the road leading to the end of suffering.  The canon is full of excoration of ignorance in general, and it is replete with of criticism of monks who don't live up to the Buddha's expectations in specific; this simply isn't the side of the literature that white people seem to be quoting to one-another (perhaps because it makes them feel uncomfortable).

If anyone wanted to be a member of a religion that glamorized pious ignorance, let me tell you, Theravāda Buddhism is a poor choice (you might want to try almost any other organized religion instead).  Nevertheless, I meet westerners again and again who insist on precisely this point: they insist that somehow learning is an obstacle to practice, and that whatever the Buddha may have taught (i.e., in some book they haven't read) the point now is to have blind faith, deaf practice, and silent meditation.  Theravāda Buddhism is built on a corpus of philosophical dialogues, but nothing could be more anathema than actually engaging in philosophical dialogue in the white, western version of Theravāda Buddhism.

I recall meeting a German man who had dedicated about 40 years of his life to Theravāda Buddhism, and who was then running some foundation (and he had some modest publications of his own); alas, he knew no language aside from German and English.  I asked him simply, and with an open mind, if he had any questions about my research (really, I said nothing to provoke him: I told him that I was a Pali scholar, that I had been living in Laos for so many years, and then asked with a smile if he had any questions about my work).  He became very agitated in responding to this (and, indeed, trembled visibly); he launched into a denunciation of textual research itself, and he tried to prove his point by claiming that the canon itself is "anti-intellectual" and that it wasn't the intellectuals who attained nibbāna in the Buddha's teaching.  Although I was tempted to say then what I've said now (i.e., that this really isn't the right religion for you if you're looking for pious ignorance and blind obedience) but I instead responded by asking how he knew these things that he was telling me, as he had never read any of the texts himself, and was now attacking me for having dared to read them.

This fellow's attitude is not uncommon, but it is normally a bit better concealed: it is the fragile and embittered result of a lifetime spent in worshipping and even preaching a religion that the adherents themselves don't understand.  Inevitably, such people attack me (even if I have said nothing controversial to them) because anything that I might say (and anything that I do know) will be a threat to their beliefs, and to their sense of their own religious authority.  The world is full of meditation teachers who claim "30 years' experience" but they have no more ability to know what the Buddha taught about meditation now than they did 30 years ago.

§8.
I've recently heard many of the excuses for meat-eating rehearsed and what struck me was the clear division between an insistence on knowing exactly what the Buddha taught on matters such as meditation, and a real willingness to engage in speculation (proceeding hypothetically from irrelevant sources) when it concerned a problem of daily life that might actually conflict with one's own family, politics or culture.

If you live in the tropics, the refusal to kill mosquitoes and rats is a practice that interferes with daily life.  Straining your water (through a sieve) to remove barely-visible insects before drinking is a practice that interferes with daily life.  Technologically, there has never been any era of history in which vegetarianism was easier than our own; conversely, there has never been any age in which the consumption of meat has been so cheap, so mechanized, so far separated from the sight of the violence and the gore, and so easy for people to deceive themselves about.

As I've said before, making excuses isn't new.  I recall Alexandra David-Neel reporting that the Buddhists she met in India were quite willing to eat meat so long as the butcher was a member of a rival religion or a despised caste.  We have a tradition of many centuries of Buddhists offering excuses along the lines of, "It's okay to eat this meat, because the butcher is Muslim (and the 'bad karma' accrues to him, not me)".  We have to decide in our own century if we're interested in just making more excuses, or if we're interested in the actual teaching of the Buddha (as preserved, however imperfectly, in the Pali canon).  It's a decision that people are going to make individually; facts are powerless before opinion, as in the case of "the Buddha was Bald" before.  I'm not motivated to muster and present the facts, because I'm aware that nobody wants to hear them.

It is indeed the case, as aforementioned, that meat-eating is described as a normal part of ancient Indian society in the Jātakas.  It is also true that torture, execution and war are described as normal.  Within the core canon, the number of descriptions of torture is somewhat amazing, and many of the descriptions are quite long and gory (I am thinking of torture carried out by kings in this world, but there are also descriptions of torture in hell, etc.).  One of the simplest changes in perspective that has to come about from reading long, continuous works in Pali (i.e., not just excerpts) is the realization that what is described as "normal" is not endorsed by the Buddha as "good".  The Buddha does not give us any sense that in the future soliders will cease to be soldiers, nor that kings will cease to be kings, nor that governments will cease to murder and torture people; quite the opposite, all of these things are described (repeatedly) as inevitable and constant features of life on earth.  Equally, the core canon is lacking in any sense of a "vegetarian society" of the future.  It may be important to mention in this respect that while the whole canon is full of invective against the caste system there is absolutely no suggestion that India will ever have a future without caste (this, too, is inevitable and constant, even if "bad" in so many ways).  Although a few of the suttas do describe a golden age of the past in which there were no crimes for kings to punish with torture and execution (and others describe the brahmins of the past as vegetarians, who refused to commit animal sacrifice, etc.) the whole tendency of the literature is to present society as something that is bad, but that extraordinary people can exempt themselves from (by becoming Buddhist monks).  The notion that society can improve itself is alien to the purpose and perspective of the literature; perhaps the experience of wandering the countryside and preaching morality (without ever seeing public morals changed) formed and informed this perspective, and perhaps it is just a corollary of nirvana itself, as a practice that takes the individual away from society, leaving one transformed and the other unchanged.

=====Endnotes=====
1. This appears on page 10 of the separately-paginated supplement (titled "The Economist Technology Quarterly") to the June 2nd–8th issue of 2012.  As is generally the case, The Economist does not name the author(s).
2. Alex Wynne, 2004, J.I.A.B.S. (Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies), Vol. 27, No. 1, p. 97–127.

Causality and Canonicity, Misinterpreting Dependent Arising

Causality and Canonicity:
A Sequel on the Misinterpretation of Buddhist "Dependent Arising" and/or/as/vs. "Interdependence"

§1.  I was in Taiwan at the time that a conference on this subject transpired at Opole, Poland; despite the huge distances involved, I briefly got into correspondence with the organizers of that conference, as I was sincerely considering (somehow) getting to Poland and back in order to contribute some of my thoughts on the origin of so many of the debates surrounding "causality" in Buddhism.

At that time I had written two essays dealing with this subject (i.e., prior to the one now before your eyes), one of which is still in peer-review, the other posted online by New Mandala.

I then had the educational experience of trying to explain this material to an audience of Chinese University students studying Buddhism at Taiwan's 玄奘大學.  In reviewing the array of European misinterpretations of the "12 links" formula (a.k.a, the 12 nidānas, 十二因緣, "dependent arising", and many other names), one of the suggestions from the Chinese students was simply that I should stop reading European scholarship entirely, and switch to Chinese translations.  In saying this, they were responding (sincerely enough) to the very serious problems that I was pointing out in the European tradition of interpretation.  Alas, we do not have a superior alternative provided to us by Chinese scholars --nor from anywhere else-- and my conclusion now remains (as before) that the alternative to bad secondary sources is to directly interrogate the primary sources.

I do not yet know what progress may have been made in Poland, and I might entertain some hope of hearing back about the proceedings of the conference after posting this latest article (howeverso informally) to the internet.  Of course, I fear for the worst: that new publications will continue to recycle the misinterpretations of the old.

§2.  Fully ninety years ago, A.B. Keith published a textbook (with the imprimatur of Oxford University emblazoned upon the cover) with an influential chapter devoted to the subject of causality and the 12 links formula. (Keith, 1922)  In surveying the competing (European) interpretations of the 12 links, the author listed ten different views, each wildly diverging from the others.  In my own opinion (explained below, and in my prior article) all of these interpretations liberally diverged from the primary source texts, and Keith could have solved the problem by returning to the primary source text, instead of attempting to offer the proverbial "averaging of wrong answers".

For my Chinese audience (when I summarized this in Taiwan), perhaps, it did not seem credible that Europeans had spun out so many contrasting theories almost a hundred years ago.  Even more fantastic interpretations have been devised since that time.

After these ten different interpretations are set out as a series of synopses, Keith adds his own conclusion; however, I would not call this an eleventh interpretation because (remarkably enough) Keith's preferred interpretation is a reiteration of his own paraphrase from (and conclusions on) Paul Oltramare's (1909) La formule bouddhique des douze causes….

Paul Oltramare. Photo Credit: Société Asiatique

§3.  Who was this Oltramare whose opinion took on the aura of the "winner" in Keith's comparative survey?  He was a popularizer of Buddhism and the esoteric Orient; he was not a philologist, and his published works reflect many (imaginative) theories of a bygone era, that are neither accepted nor refuted in our times because, simply, none of them can be taken seriously.  Among other accomplishments, he produced a book-length work (with the imprimatur of the Musée Guimet) arguing that Buddhism is devolved from Theosophy:

[English rendering:] Buddhism is a theosophy that made itself into a religion. This means that in Buddhism, theosophy adapted itself to a whole other set of conditions, and that its force of action increased exponentially.
[Original French:] Le bouddhisme est une théosophie qui s'est faite religion. Cela veut dire que, dans le bouddhisme, la théosophie s'est adaptée à de tout [sic] autres conditions, et que sa puissance d'action s'est accrue énormément.  (Oltramare, 1923 p. x)

[English rendering:] Intellectualist, rational, exempt from mysticism; Buddhism owes these characteristics to its theosophical roots.
[Original French:] Intellectualiste, rationnel, exempt de mysticisme, c'est à ses origines théosophiques que le bouddhisme doit ces caractères. (Idem, p. 481)

As I say, this would neither be accepted nor refuted today: it is on a par with of the extremely sloppy use of Buddhist sources by the "American transcendentalists" of the 19th century that are today only examined for what they tell us about American culture in that century (i.e., they do not reveal anything about the ancient origins of Buddhism).  Likewise, I would suggest that sources like Oltramare reveal many things about the culture of France in his own era, but nothing about Buddhism.  Lest I be accused of favoritism here, I should say that the same complaint can be directed against Schopenhauer, who relied entirely on secondary sources (if not tertiary sources) in spinning out his own theories and opinions about Buddhism without much of a basis in fact.  All three of these examples were much more influential than they deserved to be in shaping the European imagination as it was applied to Buddhism in the century that followed.

§4.  Apart from the question of whether or not Oltramare's interpretation of the 12 links could possibly be accepted as authoritative (in the 21st century), I would note that Keith himself seems to have had a somewhat tongue-in-cheek tone in quoting Oltramare's reinvention of the primary source texts.  I infer that Keith was aware of the (stark) difference between dry philology and popularizing literature, and that he was not so foolish as to regard the sources he was surveying as all being equally valid.

Nevertheless, Keith made the intentional choice to favor a popularizing theory (that was only loosely inspired by the source texts) for the explicitly stated reason that he considered the extant primary sources to be incoherent.  It seems reasonable to impute the further reason that he wanted his own book to seem decisive and entertaining to students and non-specialists: by favoring Oltramare as he did, his chapter comes to a neat conclusion after reviewing ten (mutually-incompatible) theories on the matter.

The process of reading Keith's survey of such divergent European interpretations is enough to convince an average reader that the original texts (in Pali) must be somehow muddled or incoherent, because each of the voices quoted in turn seems to have nothing in common with the other nine.

Keith complains, repeatedly, that the primary source has somehow ceased to make sense, insinuating (but not demonstrating) that there must have been scribal errors in transmission or some such thing.  I do not have any reason to believe that Keith was really consulting the primary sources himself, and this seems to just be an argument of convenience for the sake of muddling through his textbook.

Overall, the textbook does not give the reader the sense that Keith and Oltramare have come to a resounding solution to "the mystery" of the 12 links, but, more dangerously, it does set forth the text as a great mystery, open to nearly boundless reinterpretation.  In reading Keith's account, it seems reasonable to suppose that the 12 links text is written in riddles or complex poetic allusions (hint: it isn't).

§5.  Unfortunately, this loose interpretation (of Keith's) took another step toward unquestioned fact when it was quoted by David J. Kalupahana in his (1975) tome, Causality: the Central Philosophy of Buddhism.  This book, directly adapted from the author's PhD thesis, cites just two sources to back up its interpretation of the 12 links and the gandhabba: one is A.B. Keith (1922) and the other is the selfsame Paul Oltramare (1909) cited within Keith's argument. (Kalupahana, 1975, p. 115–119)

I have said before that Keith had a somewhat tongue-in-cheek tone in resolving the conundrum he had set out for his reader (in surveying so many theories) but this tone completely disappears in Kalupahana: from this point forward, Oltramare's invention appears as if it were an unquestioned matter of fact.

One crucial point here is Kalupahana's assumption that the meaning of the Pali word gandhabba is "…the psychic factor that survives physical death and which, in association with the fetus… helps in the development of the new personality." (Kalupahana, 1975, p. 116)  He directly cites Oltramare as the authority on this point.

Keith's textbook (as cited by Kalupahana) merely summarizes and re-states Oltramare's theory; thus, where Kalupahana cites these two authors, it is not a case of two corroborating sources but of only one and the same source, cited both directly and indirectly.  Unfortunately, Kalupahana gives the reader the false impression that this is a broad consensus of scholars that he subscribes to, and many later authors have (apparently) been convinced by this seeming consensus.

§6.  These old errors are ever new, and the ramifications are ongoing, because the current generation of scholars gleefully repeats them, as the unquestioned assumptions guiding "new" discoveries.  David Webster published an account in 2005 that reiterates all of these misconceptions (dating back 90 years and more) as if their authority remained unquestioned and unquestionable.  On page 148 of Webster's tome The Philosophy of Desire in the Buddhist Pali Canon he makes the following declaration, directly citing Kalupahana as his authority for so doing:

"So, paṭicca-samuppāda [i.e., the 12 links formula] is to be understood as a universal and uniform explanation of 'the functioning of phenomena'. [This is attributed directly to Kalupahana, 1976, p. 26] However, […] this notion is applied with the greatest intensity on [sic?] the process of how we come to be reborn […]."

On the very next page (149) Webster then recycles the misinterpretation of the Gandhabba, which is again cited to directly Kalupahana (he certainly isn't guilty of plagiarism!) without Webster showing any interest in what the primary source actually says (nor in what Oltramare says, and the latter, as aforementioned, is actually Kalupahana's dubious secondary source on this matter).

I have already addressed this erroneous interpretation of the gandhabba elsewhere in print (Mazard, 2011, §2) and I will not re-state that material here.  It is, however, a "pure error", that can be corrected by simply reading what the original texts actually say (and do not say), and by comparing the same tract of text where it appears (verbatim) in more contexts than one.

What I would point out here is that this extremely speculative theory (on the dubious basis of Oltramare's creative license) took on the mantle of respectable scholarly discourse simply through repetition (with greater concision) in Keith's textbook, and then through its reiteration in Kalupahana's thesis.  The assumption was equally false in Kalupahana, in Keith, and in Oltramare; and all of the speculative tenets that presuppose this assumption collapse simply by reading the primary source text on these issues (and, to be clear, "primary source" does not mean "later commentary", and it does not mean "modern European translation" either).

§7.  The quotation I've selected from Webster is tortuous and yet brief: the first principle of the thing, directly cited to Kalupahana, has no support in the primary source texts whatsoever (and, as much of this article shows, it is directly contradicted by what the primary source texts do say).

Even if the reader is a complete naïf in the evils of academic non-fiction, he or she should still wonder, "Why do we have no quotation from the Buddha saying anything like this if he (supposedly) had meant to say it?"  The Pali language does not lack the words to express things that are "universal and uniform", but any such words are lacking from the passages in question (concerning paṭiccasamuppāda, or whatever we're going to call the 12 links formula in plain English).

If this is supposed to be such a crucial (and "central") principle of the Buddha's philosophy why is it that the entire (voluminous) corpus of the first four Nikāyas of the Pali sutta-piṭaka are utterly lacking in a single quotation of the Buddha preaching anything remotely resembling this tenet?  In looking at such vague generalizations from academics, the reader must demand to know why is it that we are not looking at a quotation from the Buddha himself saying that the 12 links are, thus, "a universal and uniform explanation of 'the functioning of phenomena'".

Conversely, if it is necessary for contemporary authors like Webster to turn to Kalupahana as a witness (to give flesh to this apparition) we must now be willing to discard his testimony, because we know that it is founded on nothing but Oltramare's imagination, as reiterated in Keith's survey of secondary sources some 90 years ago.

It is relatively easy for me to prove that popular misconceptions are misconceptions; but it is very difficult to deal with the roots of why they are so popular.

(Convincing? This inscription is also a 19th century fraud.)

Soaring abstractions about the 12 links are now the staple (and "stump speech") of lectures from both religious authorities (career monks) and secular ones (career professors).  There are difficult questions of how we really came to know the things that we presume to know (as dogmas) that must now be put to an entire generation of professors who are accustomed to repeating philosophical generalizations about Buddhism without any real skepticism about how these tenets have come to be so generally accepted.

Let us be very clear: either we are debating the interpretation of something that is actually found written in the Nikāyas of the Pali canon, or else we are debating something that modern interpreters invented.  In this case, there is no third possibility.

§8.  The second half of my tortuous quotation from Webster is much closer to the what can be found written in the canon, and yet it also demonstrates how much discomfort these texts cause for contemporary Westerners.  We are told that the generalization conjured up from Kalupahana "is applied with the greatest intensity on the process of how we come to be reborn".

This insinuates that there are canonical texts of "lesser intensity" where we would find this concept applied to other subjects (such as those "universal phenomena" that I hear so much about these days).  The point is neither argued nor proven.

Simply, Webster invites the reader to imagine that this one example exists on a spectrum of various levels of "intensity", but the truth that is waiting to be discovered in the primary sources is that incarnation itself (inclusive of conception, gestation and birth) really is the sole subject and theme being discussed in the presentation of the 12 links.  As I've said in my earlier essay, in these texts the subject of "birth" (jāti) is extended as far as snakes hatching from eggs, and as far as the supernatural nativity of the gods, but there is absolutely no suggestion that this "birth" is an ontological doctrine of "the interdependence of all phenomena", nor anything else so abstruse.

§9.  The present article could end at this point, simply as a "short notice" pointing out (once again) that European sources of this kind need to be read with a very high level of skepticism, and evaluated in direct contrast to the primary sources in the canon.  Instead, I would go a bit further to offer some discussion of a few of the (many) salient sources in the canon, simply to share some of my optimism as to what the next generation may yet make out of the "raw materials" that these texts still present for scholars to set to work upon.  I admit that I do not have so much optimism to share, but I will share what little I have.

The prevalent (but false) notion that all of the scholarship on Theravāda Buddhism has already been done is not only false because of the poverty of that past research (as in the case of Kalupahana and Keith) but also because of the richness of the primary sources themselves, providing us with many questions for philosophers to ask themselves (and each other!) for many generations to come.

§10.  For those who read the canon for themselves, I would cite the passage that I am about to discuss at length (so that it can be found regardless of whether the reader is using the Burmese edition, the Cambodian edition, or any other version).  It is in the second division of the Saŋyutta Nikāya (the Nidānavagga), in the first saŋyutta thereof (the Abhisamayasaŋyutta), in a subsection opening with the Assutavantu-sutta, under the (overly-common) rubric of Mahāvagga.  This spans pages 148–198 of the Sinhalese [B.J.T.] edition, in vol. 14 of the series (published in B.E. 2505 = C.E. 1962), with the first page thereof equating to p. 94 of the corresponding volume of the PTS edition.

§11.  This "subsection" of text (for lack of a better word) is interesting for many reasons, and only a few of them will be discussed within the remit of this article.  In glancing at the first and the last suttantas of the subsection (namely, the Assutavantu- and the Susīma-) we find some philosophically interesting reassurances that the subject-matter dealt with is not reserved for the most advanced monks, but, on the contrary, that it is entirely comprehensible for people who have not attained nibbāna, and even for the common run of humanity.

Last things first: the final sutta here (Susīma-) describes at length the status of those who understand the Buddha's doctrine (and who accordingly define themselves as liberated) but who lack the supernatural powers and transcendent visions of someone who has attained nibbāna.

It is stipulated here (in the Buddha's dialogue with Susīma) that the full understanding of "no-soul/no-self" results in both (i) the individual overcoming birth, and also (ii) knowing as a certain fact that he or she has done this revelatory thing (i.e., they don't merely know it, but they also know that they know it).  This state of liberation is, nevertheless, a thing quite different from possessing other supernatural abilities, visions, etc., associated with nibbāna, and the Buddha demonstrates this to his interlocutor in an interesting way: immediately after the clarification about the nature of this revelation (that one has put an end to birth), the Buddha questions Susīma to verify that the latter monk fully understands the doctrine of the 12 links.  With this affirmed, the Buddha then indicates that (ipso facto) the interlocutor is himself an example of the phenomenon he was just questioning: Susīma himself is liberated in the way described, and lacks supernatural powers, he has not experienced supernatural visions, and so on.

In the checklist of doctrines that the Buddha affirms his interlocutor (Susīma) correctly understands, the 12 links formula appears last (i.e., immediately before the supernatural powers); it is recited both forward and backward (from birth to ignorance, and then from the cessation of birth back again).  Evidently, the Buddha's student knows the formula forward and backward, and the Buddha affirms in this dialogue that Susīma understands it all correctly --and yet he lacks the further (supernatural) achievements.

§12.  In case the reader is afraid that we are nevertheless discussing something that only concerns a small margin of humanity, who have very nearly attained nibbāna (although not quite), the opening suttanta of the sub-section makes it very clear that such liberation is (to some extent) attained by the "average punter", or even by an unlettered ignoramus (thus the title, Assutavantu-suttanta).  The reader will be getting the correct impression that the organization of the texts here is not random: we do seem to have a similar set of themes introducing and closing the subsection.

I can't comment on everything that's interesting about the passage in this article, but I would draw attention to the very down-to-earth context that this affords to the 12 links doctrine: the hypothetical ignoramus is indeed said to be liberated from the body, and from the illusion of the body as the self.  This liberation is expressed with various forms of the verb nibbindati (i.e., a verb with quite a bit of doctrinal resonance in Buddhism!).

The correct understanding of the doctrine of the 12 links among the cognoscenti (…sutavā ariyasāvako paṭiccasamuppādaŋ…) is then compared to the understanding of this ignoramus, affirming that both parties have (or hypothetically can have) the same understanding of the 12 links, and of the body as non-self; therefore, both may be liberated to some extent.  However, the true cognoscenti are not merely liberated from the body and the self, but are also liberated from a further list of factors, such as the appearances of things and our concepts about them (with the same loaded verb employed for the liberation discussed throughout, i.e., nibbindati).

The contrast here is not the same as in the dialogue with Susīma.  The ignoramus does not seem to be in a position to declare that he has overcome birth: although liberated from the body, he is contrasted to those who are both liberated both from the body and from the further list of appearances, concepts, etc. (and the latter are said to have overcome birth, whereas the ignoramus is not).  The ignoramus is capable of being disillusioned with the body (as the self) but, apparently, he does not go on to the more profound disillusionment with the mind and apperception.

§13.  The third suttanta in the sub-section provides us with some very dramatic (and gory) allegories that I pass over without comment for the sake of concision (but they deserve an article of their own), and then the fourth in the sequence (titled Atthirāga-) returns us to the issue that has made some of my readers so uncomfortable with my earlier essay on the 12 links: the explicit connection between this doctrine and the development of the embryo.

This passage is titled the Atthirāga-suttanta, and it opens by stating its subject as the four types of food for beings "or" (vā) those not yet born and awaiting birth.  The original text is very clear that it is not describing the nourishment of beings that do not yet have any existence whatsoever (such as a hypothetical person 100 years hence, who is neither conceived nor born yet); rather, it explicitly concerns those who are already existing/established (ṭhitiyā) but who are (as yet) waiting to be born (sambhavesīnaŋ).  This leaves nothing up to the imagination.

Following after the description of the four types of food we have an explicit statement about the desire and consciousness of the unborn being described (i.e., what we would call an embryo or fetus in plain English) and this then explains the sequence of stages following as resulting from this unborn being's desire both for literal (palpable) food, and also for "food" that is not meant so literally.  The desire for the "contact" of the senses (with things perceived) is the second type of food; apperception is the third (manosañcetana, thinking and/or desire of some kind resulting from perception; the PTSD prefers "volition" [q.v. āhāra]); and consciousness (viññāṇa) is the fourth.

The canonical material on the four foods is yet another subject that deserves an article of its own, and that is indeed very jarring and culturally-alien to European readers (I've neither seen nor heard of a monk offering a lecture on the meaning of "the food of consciousness" to a Western audience).

With this image of the as-yet-unborn being desiring four types of food established, what does the text do with it?  The successive stages of "development" (literally, "growing") are attributed directly to this desire as its origin: …āhāre atthi rāgo, atthi nandi, atthi taṇhā patiṭṭhitaŋ tattha viññāṇaŋ virūḷhaŋ.  This is to say that there is the "growth" of consciousness where there is first the desire for food established; and the location referred to (i.e., "where" the desire is established) is evidently the womb, given both the paragraph immediately before, also the allegory of the painting that follows immediately after (discussed below).

Whereas this preliminary stage (after desire) is said to "grow" (virūḷha), we have a significantly different verb used for the next stage in the process: nāmarūpa (a term discussed at too much length already in my former article) doesn't grow from consciousness, but instead "enters" (the womb) with the verb avakkanti.  This is a verb that is indeed specially linked to conception (see, e.g., the examples of usage of avakkanti gathered in the PTSD entry for Gabbha).  Only nāmarūpa is thus said to "enter", whereas consciousness before it "grows", and the next stage thereafter is again said to "grow" (vuddhi, another word for growth/increase, whereas virūḷha was used before).  There's a further clue here to the correct interpretation of these passages (that I've already been hinting at in my earlier work on the subject).

I do not think that anyone could dispute that this passage is (i) explicitly about the subject of incarnation (punabbhavābhinibbatti) and (ii) that we have most (though not all) of the familiar vocabulary from the 12-links formula presented in a series of stages leading up to that incarnation (that is concluded with a single stage that covers the whole of the succeeding life, old age and suffering unto death, ending the sequence: jātijarāmaraṇa).

I think that some of the resistance to this interpretation arises from a sense of disappointment that the 12 links are no longer bundled up with the abstractions of "the interdependence of all phenomena"; however, while the teaching is about birth, it is not merely about birth, and while it is about the fetus, it is not merely about the fetus.  The grander meaning of the teaching is already very clear (in my opinion) from the texts that open and conclude this subsection: the "soulless" origin of human life is evidently a crucial part of the Buddha's teaching of "no-soul" to adults, and is part and parcel of the liberation from the illusion of the soul/self that is so much talked about throughout the canon.  These are not lectures about the fetus for the sake of talking about the fetus; they very much are part of the teaching of nibbāna, and that is entirely obvious for those of us who are reading the content in its original context.

§14.  This lecture from the Buddha about the stages leading up to birth is followed immediately by an allegory that is clearly intended to make the whole sermon less mysterious (not moreso).  The process of development just described here is compared to an artisan who works with color or dye (rajako vā cittakāro) who is making an image of a man or a woman on a flat wall or canvas.

There's nothing tricky or elusive about it: the formation of an actual person is compared to the process of painting of a portrait of a person.  It's an allegory that would make sense in any cultural context, in explaining what it cleary is meant to explain; conversely, it wouldn't make much sense at all if we were trying to foist a "a universal and uniform explanation of 'the functioning of phenomena'" onto this passage of text.

Immediately thereafter the sermon reiterates that "in just the same way" the desire for the four foods (that, at the top of the sermon, was clearly indicated as being the desire of those who exist but are not-yet-born) leads to this series of other stages, concluding (as I've said before) with birth, and then old age and suffering unto death.

§15.  All of this could be discussed at greater length, and, in a simple sense, it should be: we should have a situation wherein five different Pali scholars really look carefully at primary source texts of this kind and discuss their interpretation productively, with comparative reference to similar passages, and so on.

Instead, the baleful situation we've now inherited is a milieu with a thousand scholars uncritically repeating what can be found in secondary sources like A.B. Keith and Kalupahana, with only a thin veneer of interest in the original texts.

Although I'm not convinced that the relationship between K.R. Norman's criticism and his infamy is one of causation rather than correlation, it seems that Norman made himself infamous for complaining about this type of problem openly (e.g., denouncing other scholars for providing block quotations in Pali that they obviously had not read themselves).  Similar dysphoria surrounds the life and times of A.K. Warder, whose shadow was still darkening the halls of the University of Toronto when I was there (over 10 years ago), and about whom gossip has remained unremitting in his retirement.  Both men have left us a legacy of published texts; neither has left us a legacy of living scholars to supersede them (and, on the contrary, their former students have tended to make them all the more infamous in retrospect).  The legacy of the now-retired generation's enmities is a basic fact of life for anyone working on Theravāda Buddhism in the 21st century.  None of us can ignore it; all of us live with it.  Even when I was living in Vientiane (as far removed from any PhD program as could be imagined) this would routinely be the first subject that professors would want to advise me on when they first met with me (i.e., they would hasten to impart their view of who hated whom and why).

As a corollary, perhaps, the tiny number of scholars who can (and do) read Pali in 2012 are incapable of corresponding or cooperating with each other.  Indeed, the few legitimate scholars may have something to learn from the snake-oil salesmen (who fraternize amongst themselves relatively well, despite the open competition between them).  The invidious divisions that have separated this tiny discipline into a series of even smaller camps (each sharpening its knives against the others) provides a bleak portrait of human nature.

I have heard reflections on this subject both from J.M. Masson and from A.K. Warder; I have heard such reflections from Buddhist monks who spend more time in caves than in universities, and I have heard them from careerist PhD candidates, who have no plans of ever meditating in a cave.  This problem is much the same amongst scholars who are openly religious and amongst those who are avowedly secular; in my experience, those who call themselves secular often turn out to be "true believers" in a religion of their own devising.

§16.  Among the responses to my earlier article on the 12 links was the objection that my reading of the texts concerned "cannot" possibly be correct (as if this were a matter of logical inference) because such an interpretation entails that an as-yet-unborn baby can think and desire.  This comment came to me from two Europeans who both consider themselves experts on the subject, both of whom have published articles and books on Buddhism (and who have dealt with the 12 links here and there in their respective works, at varying length).  In their shared opinion, my interpretation cannot be correct because they (as modern readers) consider it absurd to attribute consciousness or desire to an embryo or fetus.

This complaint results from the reckless imposition of a modern, western cultural expectation onto an ancient (and culturally alien) source text as a criterion.  In effect, the interpreter is demanding that the primary source should reflect his own cultural expectation, or else that it must be disregarded as logically "impossible" for failing to do so.

§17.  As a first reply to this objection, I must say that modern Europeans should not pose such questions with the conceit that they are the first generation to ask them, but must (at a minimum) check the record of such questions that have already been asked and answered within the ancient texts themselves.  This is one of many examples about which we do have related questions that were asked by skeptical monks or early followers of the Buddha, with the ensuing debates recorded in the canon.  (I note that there is more salient material of this kind than I can deal with in the remit of this article.)

In this case, I would refer to a tract that is not famous, but also not entirely obscure, as K.R. Norman took some interest in it when constructing his own interpretation of the 12 links;¹ it is called the Moḷiyaphagguna-suttanta (SN vol. 2, PTS p. 12 et. seq.; BJT p. 22–24).  Here the doctrine of the four foods is cross-examined in terms of the "eating" of the "food of consciousness" (by beings "or" those waiting to be born, the wording is identical to the passage discussed before: …bhūtānaŋ vā sattānaŋ ṭhitiyā, sambhavesīnaŋ vā anuggahāya).  The question is posed as asking "who" is doing this "eating" at this stage (…ko nu kho bhante viññāṇahāraŋ āhāretī-ti?).

A direct answer to "who?" would entail a person, and this is a possibility that the consistency of the philosophy of no-soul must guard against carefully (i.e., Buddhist orthodoxy cannot admit that a soul as present to perform the eating, nor even allow the presence of any "thing" apart from the physical body that could be taken as a supernal self of any kind); and, indeed, we get some circumlocution in the answer.

The Buddha's reply insists that these stages of development should only be asked about (and explained) as a sequence of stages leading up to future birth (with each stage reliant upon the one before it as a precondition, …viññāṇāhāro āyatiŋ punabbhavābhinibbattiyā paccayo).

Much of the text here is familiar (more or less verbatim) from passages already discussed in this essay.  The locus of the debate is established with exactly the same statement about the four foods being consumed by the one who is already "established" (ṭhitiyā) but yet awaiting birth that I summarized in §13, above.

The question of who eats is followed by "who is it that has this contact [of the senses]?" and "who is it that desires?"  In other words: the question of how it is that a fetus desires was asked within the canon itself.

There are other things that are interesting about this passage, but all that I am here drawing attention to is that a passage of this kind is sufficient to remove any doubt that this "food" and also the desire for the food really does concern a stage leading up to birth itself (and really does pertain to a being awaiting birth).

I can't say that I find this so incongruous as some of my critics pretend it to be: relative to any other ancient theory of gestation that is still extant, it is hardly amazing that the people of India had the notion that the fetus consumes nutrients, and also desires to do so, before birth.

§18.  The idea that an unborn fetus thinks, eats, and desires is not really very surprising in any cultural context.  If the same ideas were found in an ancient Greek text from the same era, I don't know if anyone would now find it controversial.

Anyone who has placed their hand on the belly of a pregnant woman can (or could) infer that the movement of the unborn infant indicates consciousness.  All around the world the spectacle of birth and still-birth has inspired tremendous speculation (and a great diversity of religious doctrines) concerning the stage at which the spirit enters the infant, or at which the infant begins thinking for itself, and so on, entailing discrepancies about the stage at which a child should be assigned a name by its parents, and receive various rites of passage.  This is the stuff of Anthropology 101.

For peoples of all cultures and languages, the gore and mortal danger of child-birth has inspired religious doctrines.  As a subject of myth, it is perhaps second only to death and war, and what the Pali canon has to say about it really isn't so shocking (indeed, post-canonical Buddhist literature has some much stranger ideas on the subject that are outside of the remit of this article).

The idea that an unborn infant eats and desires food while it is in the womb is even less surprising when we consider the same things are supposed about ghosts in the literature of ancient India (including the Pali canon), without any ontological conundrum.  If a given culture believes that hunger and desire continue after death, why would they hesitate to imagine that these things are going on prior to birth?

To my knowledge, none of the world's traditional (religious) views of gestation coincides with the discoveries of modern science overmuch; it may be that modern readers rebel against the notion that the Pali canon contains these passages because they would prefer to imagine that the Buddha had (supernatural) foreknowledge of things that science was later to discover.  This kind of anachronistic scientism is a perennial pattern of popular religion.  It arises in almost every creed, with or without any doctrinal basis; it appeals to the imagination because it seems to confirm the supernatural origins of the religion by pointing to knowledge of natural science in ancient texts, and acclaiming this knowledge as "impossible".  The idea that the Buddhist canon contained all the "modern wisdom" of theoretical physics and ecology was in fashion when I was an undergraduate (and seemed laughable to me at the time); it seems to have gone out of vogue, whereas similar notions about Buddhism and psychotherapy still seem to be in business.

Neither in Laos nor in Canada have I encountered people with rational attitudes toward pregnancy.  Instead, everywhere I've lived, I encountered people who were adept at presenting their own superstitions as if they were rational, and at rationalizing their preferred superstitions.

I remember hearing a "scientific" defense of the traditional Lao practice of mothers starving themselves during the last trimester of pregnancy (from a Lao government official).  He explained this to me in response to my asking about a report from an international health agency that had identified this traditional practice as a major cause of lifelong health problems in Laos.  He explained to me that this tradition was "scientific" because the mothers ensured that the baby was relatively small and easy to give birth to in this way.  In reply, I explained that the foreign experts were concerned that the lack of nutrition could be impairing the brain development of the fetus; he was not hostile to the suggestion.  In the most common form of the practice, reportedly, the would-be mothers subsist on nothing but a traditional soup of some kind (i.e., it is not absolute fasting, but an obstetrician's nightmare nevertheless).  Others in Laos remarked to me that the practice was just motivated the vanity of the mothers, who wanted to remain as thin as possible despite pregnancy.

I am sure that similar dialogues have transpired all over the world, as one culture tries to impose its notions of science onto another.  Within the decadent west, any excuse seems to be good enough when it comes to cigarettes, alcohol, meat-eating and other vices, despite whatever science may say (or whatever may be said on its behalf).

Modern science is not so influential over peoples' attitudes as schoolmasters suggest it should be, when they lecture children on the subject, in the hope that the next generation will be more rational than the one before it.

§19.  In reflecting on the ancient past, nothing could be more spurious than a modern judgement as to whether or not the received text "makes sense" by some scientific (or scientistic) notion that could not possibly have been known to the authors of these texts in ancient India.  If we think it is impossible for a man flying through the air to touch the sun or the moon with his fingertips, that does not entail that it is impossible for this to be the correct interpretation of the text itself.

All of this is neither more nor less absurd than the medieval Chinese complaining that the Buddha could not have possibly encouraged people to shave their heads because such an act would be an offense to their ancestors: it is simply one cultural set of expectations held up as a criterion for the judgement upon another.

Given that modern Europeans do not believe that the ghosts of their ancestors can eat (nor that they require feeding), what would be the result if we applied this same criterion to all the canonical passages about feeding deceased ancestors?  Am I making an interpretive error, when I read that ancient Buddhists believed that monks could fly through the air and touch the surface of the sun and the moon with their fingertips?  If this is all supposed to be "logically impossible", is it therefore the role of the interpreter to lie and misrepresent the texts, so that modern Europeans can imagine that they had much more in common with ancient Indians than they do?

Should we (mis-)interpret all of these passages to force them to "make sense" relative to a totally alien set of cultural expectations?  The answer must be a resounding "no"; meanwhile, anyone who opts for "yes" instead will end up in the same category as Oltramare.

We must allow the ancient texts to tell us what Buddhism is supposed to be, and not (the other way around) impose a modern notion of what Buddhism is supposed to be onto these ancient texts (to then ignore all of the evidence to the contrary).  As soon as the reader has taken the step of imagining what the text "cannot" say, he or she has taken an insupportable step beyond simply letting the text speak for itself.

§20.  When, in my former article, I pointed to the word mātukucchismiŋ that appears in the middle of the 12 links formula (and means, "in the mother's womb", locative) I was neither making any claim about what the text "must" say, nor about what it "ought to" say.  We can debate the significance of what the text says; however, we cannot debate what the text hypothetically ought to say, to then disregard all evidence to the contrary as found in the text.

I did ask both of my correspondents (who rejected my basic premise) how they would instead translate words so blatant as mātukucchismiŋ that appear in the middle of these texts (given that the presence of this word alone utterly contradicts their interpretations).  They have offered no answer; both responded as if this were some new word that I had invented for them to consider, and not something I was directly quoting from a passage of text that they had allegedly read for themselves many times over, become experts in, and already published their opinions on.

This type of direct question and answer (although not quite Socratic) is sorely missing from the peer-review process.  The printed page can divert the reader's attention away from evidence that contradicts the interpreter but the simplicity of asking such a question brings a great train of bafflegab to a halt.

Progress cannot consist of one generation after another offering ever more soaring generalizations (about "causality", "interdependence", etc.) with ever less salience to the source text.

§21.  I previously pointed out that the Upanisa-suttanta (PTS SN vol. 2, p. 29 et seq.) provides the reader with an obverse set of 12 stages leading from suffering (dukkha) to salvation (nibbāna) following after birth. (Mazard, 2011, §3)  In my former essay, I only discussed this text to show the incompatibility of the (canonical) 12 links with the (post-canonical) "three-incarnations" interpretation (found in the commentaries).  The Upanisa-suttanta thus presents the 12 links with a "pleasing symmetry" that is missing when the 12 links appear in isolation.  I would here draw attention to another text that attempts to add a very different ending onto the 12 links formula (i.e., instead of just concluding with birth, and then suffering unto old age and death).

The text is the Upayanti-suttanta (Sinhalese SN [B.J.T.] vol. 2, p. 186, PTS SN vol. 2, p. 118–119).  I think it is fair to say that this sutta is not famous (although none of the suttas on the 12 links formula are really famous in the sense of popular Buddhist literature).  To my knowledge, this Upayanti-suttanta has not been influential in Western theories about canonical causality.

It received a peculiar synopsis in Malalasekera's Dictionary of Pali Proper Names:

When the ocean rises with the tide, the rivers, their tributaries, the mountain lakes and tarns, all rise as a result. Likewise rising ignorance makes, in turn, becoming, birth and decay and death to rise and increase.  (Malalasekera, 1937-8, s.v. Upayanti)

From this summary translation, a reader could not guess that this image (of the rising waters) illustrates the 12 links formula, nor that it is salient to the Buddhist philosophy of "causality" (as broached by the conference in Opole, and in so many dozens of theories that have proliferated since A.B. Keith made his list of just ten).

The image of the waters rising, becoming full, and then flowing from one stage to the next, is applied to all 12 links in the primary source text:

[1☛2] Avijjā upayantī saɲkhāre upayāpeti.
[2☛3] Saɲkhārā upayantā viññāṇaŋ upayāpenti.
[3☛4] Viññāṇaŋ upayantaŋ nāmarūpaŋ upayāpeti.
[4☛5] Nāmarūpaŋ upayantaŋ saḷāyatanaŋ upayāpeti.
[5☛6] Saḷāyatanaŋ upayantaŋ phassaŋ upayāpeti.
[6☛7] Phasso upayanto vedanaŋ upayāpeti.
[7☛8] Vedanā upayantī taṇhaŋ upayāpeti.
[8☛9] Taṇhā upayantī upādānaŋ upayāpeti.
[9☛10] Upādānaŋ upayantaŋ bhavaŋ upayāpeti.
[10☛11] Bhavo upayanto jātiŋ upayāpeti.
[11☛12] Jāti upayanti jarāmaraṇaŋ upayāpeti.

The parallelism here is a refreshing contrast to the vagueness of so much that has been said on the subject in more recent centuries.

The sequence moves from largest to smallest, i.e., the allegory pairs ignorance (avijjā) with the ocean (mahāsamuddo), and the subsequent stages of the sequence (of 12 links) correspond to smaller and smaller bodies of water, concluding with a what we might call a mud-hole, or at least the smallest order of pond (the word is kussobbha/kussubbhe, which the PTSD renders as "a small collection of water" in its entry for sobbha, and instead as "a small pond" under Kussubbha).

Although it might seem that everything that could be said on this subject has already been said, it seems like a strikingly original thought to conceive of this sequence of 12 stages as one wherein the subsequent stages are smaller than (and subsidiary to) the earlier stages.

This is part of the aforementioned optimism that I wanted to share with the reader: there are still "new" things worth reading in these ancient texts, and there are new debates of interpretation worth having, although I sincerely hope that we can dispose of some of the older ones.  Frankly, there might be some original thought yet needed to sort out what this image of the rising water entails for the assumptions that the original authors had as to what any of this means.

The sense in which this text (the Upayanti-suttanta) is mutually-illuminating with the one I mentioned in my earlier essay (the Upanisa-suttanta) is that both describe the 12 links in two directions.  In this case, the tide doesn't just flow in (from ignorance through to birth), but it also drains out again.

In what sense does it "drain out"?  It is important to note that it does not begin with birth draining out, for the others to flow back in a symmetrical sequence; instead, the first thing to drain out is ignorance, i.e., first the tide of the ocean goes down and then each of the smaller bodies of water drains out in the same sequence as before, dependent upon the prior, larger one draining first (regardless of what we might know about the modern science of hydrodynamics).

This is decidedly not an image of the smallest pond drying up before the tide recedes; instead, the tide recedes first at the largest scale, and subsequently in the smaller (and subsidiary) bodies of water.  Ignorance drains out first, and birth drains out last (with all the other stages named in-between, of course).

This allegory (of the tide) is incompatible with the various abstract theories of modern Europeans about the source text: in addition to the explicitly stated location of this whole sequence "inside the mother's womb" (already quoted and cited from various contexts above) we here have the relationship between the stages of development illustrated with the filling up and overflowing of successive bodies of water.  We cannot possibly be reading about the epistemology that transpires in so many mind-moments within an adult brain, nor some implicit argument about ontology that provides a "universal and uniform explanation of 'the functioning of phenomena'" (are the phenomena located one within the other, on smaller and smaller scale?).  I also do not see how this could be reconciled with the "three lifetimes" interpretation of the 12 links (discussed in my earlier essay, and not repeated here) without some sort of hermeneutic trapeze.  Clearly, it is one incarnation as the water flows in, and it is within one lifetime that the water flows out.

§22.  The lesson that I hope my readers will take from this is that the primary source texts really do have new things to teach us.  My point is not solely to draw attention to how unreliable western sources can be; I would also indicate in a positive sense that the primary sources can speak for themselves, if only we will put aside our preconceptions and be willing to listen.

We can only proceed to further understand this ancient doctrine of "causality" with the frank admission that the Pali text stating "inside the mother's womb" (mātukucchismiŋ, locative) really does mean what it so blatantly says.  Further, we must accept (despite many creative interpretations to the contrary) that the word "birth" (jāti) really does mean the physical birth of an infant at the end of this process of development.  However, with these basic assumptions established, the relationship between the 12 links and other aspects of the Buddha's philosophy (such as the liberation arising from the understanding that there is no soul, discussed above) start to become obvious.

If we could set aside the seeming-consensus that Kalupahana has burdened us with, we could start to deal with the genuine (and genuinely interesting) problems of interpretation that the ancient texts still present for a new generation of scholars.




Endnotes
¹ I believe this argument concludes around p. 260 of Norman, 1993, with the suggestion that ignorance itself (as the first link of the 12) is the bridge between rebirths.  I do not recall ever seeing this aspect of K.R. Norman's interpretation of the 12 links cited (or paraphrased) by anyone other than K.R. Norman, whereas I see Kalupahana's view cited (and paraphrased) frequently.


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Bibliography
• I-Tien Hsing.  2005.  "Heracles in the East."  Asia Major.  Vol. 18, part 2 (third series).
• D.J. Kalupahana.  1975.  Causality: the Central Philosophy of Buddhism.  Reprinted by Routledge in 2003.
• D.J. Kalupahana.  1976.  Buddhist Philosophy: A Historical Analysis.   University of Hawaii Press.
• Keith, A.B.  1922.  Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon.  Oxford University Press.
• G.P. Malalasekera.  1937-8 (2 volumes).  Dictionary of Pāli Proper Names.  Pali Text Society: Oxford, U.K.  (This is now widely available as a digitized resource on the internet.)
• Eisel Mazard.  2011.  "Discarding Dependent Origination, Returning to the Primary Source of the 12 links (十二因緣) in Theravada Buddhism."  New Mandala (website, edited by Prof. Andrew Walker & Nicholas Farrelly of A.N.U.).  http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2011/01/27/unpopular-facts-about-one-of-buddhist-philosophys-most-popular-doctrines/
• K.R. Norman.  1993.  Collected Papers vol. IV.  Pali Text Society: London.
• Paul Oltramare.  1909.  La formule bouddhique des douze causes: Son sens originel et son interprétation théologique.  Georg et cie: Geneva.
• Paul Oltramare.  1923.  L'Histoire des Idées théosophiques dans l'Inde: La théosophie Bouddhique, Paris: Librairie orientaliste Paul Genthner, Annales du Musée Guimet, Bibliothèque d'Études, tome 31.
• David Webster.  2005.  The philosophy of desire in the Buddhist Pali canon.  RoutledgeCurzon Critical Studies in Buddhism.  Routledge and/or Psychology Press.