Todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, and#8220;Mahayana Scripturesand#8221; by Nagapriya is an overview of the vast literature of Mahayana Buddhism. He discusses how the new texts emerged, why so many are still preserved, and how they found legitimacy in the larger Buddhist tradition. In the full talk, Mahayana Buddhist Scriptures, he further explores ow Mahayana texts are different than those of the Pali Canon, why they emphasize imagination and myth, and why it remains useful for modern Buddhists to explore them despite their length and repetition. Talk given at Manchester Buddhist Centre, 2009 This talk is part of the series Visions of Mahayana Buddhism.
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Mahayana Scriptures
[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you, and happy listening. Okay, so the first thing to say really is that the Mahayana scriptural tradition is absolutely huge. It's vast. I have to concede that I've not counted up exactly how many Mahayana scriptures there are, and there may not even be a clearly defined number, a tightly defined number, but there are certainly hundreds of them. Many of these exist in a number of different versions that developed over time, and many of them exist in many different languages, and as they became translated, they are often changed, added to, or developed in various ways. So even if there are a number of texts that are called the same thing, they aren't necessarily the same text, so there are many, many of these texts. Not only that, but over time, commentaries were written on these texts, and the commentaries began to multiply and multiply and multiply, and still further commentaries upon commentaries, and so on. One edition of text that describes itself as a Mahayana canon runs to about 100 volumes, and these are not kind of thin volumes, these are kind of encyclopedia-type volumes, huge volumes. So we're talking about a huge corpus of text here. Probably, in fact, almost certainly nobody has ever read this whole corpus. I mean, it would take perhaps the rest of your lifetime, and obviously you'd have to learn a number of different languages to do it. Some of them haven't even been translated into Western languages yet. Many have, but some still haven't. So it's a huge corpus of text, and so in trying to offer some kind of account of Mahayana scriptures, I'm obviously going to be simplifying quite a diverse range of texts, but I hope to pin down a bit more fully which texts I'm referring to so that you don't think, well, obviously I've missed out some important ones. In fact, the ones that I'm going to be looking at, they're generally called, they're called Vipulya sutras, and Vipulya means extensive. So the Vipulya sutras are a particular division of Mahayana scriptures, and they tend to be quite long, and they tend to be quite, to offer quite a unified narrative. They tend to be quite coherent, I suppose, on the whole. I'll come back to that a little bit later. Texts that I won't really be looking at today are more the perfect wisdom text. I'm not really going to talk about those this evening. There is a very particular order, and they often are quite terse and quite philosophical, but that will be the theme of next week's talk, so I'll come back to that then. So I think in order to try and understand the concerns, and the style, the content, the form of Mahayana scriptures, we need to take a step back into the Buddhist scriptural tradition and look at the early Buddhist scriptures, or the scriptures of what I've been calling nikaya Buddhism. You may or may not know that Buddhism began as an oral tradition, and none of its teachings or texts were written down for some, perhaps 300 years, certainly 250, perhaps more years. None of these texts were written down there, transmitted orally, remembered orally, and in fact they were even edited and organised orally, quite a feat. And over time, divergences began to emerge between different sects, so one sect would have a slightly different version, perhaps, of the remember teachings from another one. Eventually, these texts were written down, but they reflected the oral forms that gave birth to them. So if you read any early Buddhist scriptures, you'll notice that there's a huge amount of repetition, there's a lot of stock phrases and formulae, and there's a lot of lists, because these ways of organising material is very easy to remember. It was a bit like, well, I don't want to say painting by numbers, but it was a little bit like you had these building blocks that you assembled together to make your scripture. And so there'd be a stock phrase for describing how somebody became awakened, or how somebody appeared when the Buddha asked them a question, or how the Buddha seemed when someone came to see him, and so on and so on. There's an awful repetition owing to this oral nature. But besides that, the nature of these early texts is, in some ways, one could say, quite ordinary. You could almost imagine being there, I think. So the Buddha's described, often, not always, but often, in fairly ordinary terms, he might be described as just having finished his arms round, or he might be described as just having finished meditating. He might be described as sitting with some friends, and so on. There's nothing really exceptional, nothing out of the ordinary, perhaps apart from the Buddha's wisdom, we could say, which is out of the ordinary. But aside from occasional miracles, it's a day-to-day world, it's an ordinary world. Around about the common era, and so this is around about maybe 500 years after the time of the Buddha, some new texts, some different texts started to emerge. And these texts began to show quite a different style from the texts that I've just described. For one thing, they didn't originate orally. So they weren't teachings that were given orally and then written down. They were written down first. And being able to write things as opposed to having to transmit them orally and remember them enables you, enables one, to write in a very different way. There's not so much a need for stock formulae, and also there's not so much a need to be brief. You know, if you're having to remember stuff, you want to be as brief really as you can. You don't want to remember unnecessary material. You don't want to gill the lily unnecessarily. But these texts that began to emerge didn't have that problem of having to be transmitted orally. And so what that meant was they were longer. That was one of their features. And some of them were very, very long. In fact, over time, they tended to accrete more and more material. My teacher, Sangha Akshita, has described a Mahayana sutra as being like a planet, which has satellites in its orbit or even asteroids in its orbit. And over time, its gravitational pull sucks this material in, sucks these satellites and asteroid in, and it grows bigger and bigger and bigger. Its mass becomes larger. And this, I think, is quite a good analogy for describing how some of these texts grew over time. And the largest one that I'm aware of is a text called the Avatamsika sutra. And in some ways it's like it's a mega text because it actually sucked in whole sutras. There's several other scriptures, whole scriptures that are in the Avatamsika sutra. But that runs to about 2,000 pages in length. So it's a really, really massive text. And that's just one Mahayana scripture. There are many, many of them. Anyway, these texts began to emerge. And one story is that they became quite popular. It's believed that they became quite popular because they survive. And so it has been assumed that, well, if these texts survive from that period, there must have been quite a lot of people who were reading them, studying them, being devoted to them. More recently, it's become, that view has become questioned, really. But that's been called into question. It now seems much more likely that these texts were actually read by a very small number of people, maybe even a tiny group of people. And this is kind of just my speculation, really. But I almost imagine that maybe it could just be a study group. Just one study group wrote this scripture and they were the only ones that knew about it. Nobody else, maybe five or six people could have been. Or just maybe a couple of dozen. But if there was only a couple of dozen people who knew this scripture, well, why did it survive? How come it might even survive until today? I think the obvious explanation is that it was written down. I don't know if any of you are familiar with the poet Emily Dickinson. But Emily Dickinson is a famous American poet. And she, I believe, never wrote, sorry, she never published any of her poetry in her own lifetime. Never published anything. But she did write it down. She wrote quite a lot. And after she died, it was published. And over time, it's value has been seen more and more. And she's become a celebrated and famous American poet. But actually, in her own day, perhaps just a handful of people were familiar with her poems, maybe just an immediate reading circle. And so, some of these scriptures, I suggest, maybe, were a little bit like that, that their importance grew a long time after they were first written. And when they were written, they were perhaps only noticed by a very small number of people. We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bight. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donnie. And thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] You [BLANK_AUDIO]