Christian Anthropology, Buddhist Anthropology: Stumbling Blocks

In the West, Buddhism is usually presented as a philosophical system and not as a religion, which has the advantage of freeing it from all superstition and presenting it as an almost rational way of living a better life and eventually achieving a hypothetical awakening.

Every great civilization rests on a certain idea of man. If we understand anthropology as the major fundamental options on what man is, from which a certain way of living and also of dying, or of not living, will derive, then there is a “Buddhist” anthropology, if not of Buddhism. Its essential features are “atheism, a disdain for worship and tradition, the conception of an all-spiritual religion, contempt for finite existence, belief in transmigration and the need to escape it, a weak notion of man’s personality, the imperfect distinction or rather confusion of material attributes and intellectual functions, the affirmation of a morality having its sanction in itself”. (Auguste Barth, Les religions de l’Inde, 1879).

If we examine the great frameworks of religious thought, what do we see? The Christian religion is based on a Revelation in time, and the Buddhist religion is based on the somewhat enigmatic experience of a religious personality whose existence has not been established historically.

A number of stumbling blocks arise from this: the semantic area of law, “order” versus Buddhist “dharma;” the great constitutive springs of human nature: desire and reason; the question of rite, and therefore sacrifice, which Buddhism rejects, since there is no God or divinity to honor; conceptions of body and soul; and the respective founders and historical foundations or underpinnings of these two religious phenomena.

The fundamental features of “doctrinal” Buddhism come from the Vedic ground. The whole grandiose ritual apparatus of white and black magic could only have developed, concealed behind the screen of a set of doctrines whose origins are primarily Indian. Buddhism is in no way a “disembodied tradition dependent only on the mind.”

What are we talking about when we speak of man in Western paradigms, whether conscious or not? We are talking about two aspects that are often poorly distinguished: his human nature and the conditions of his existence.

There is a flaw at the heart of Buddhist doctrine. The idea of human nature does not exist; what exists is the human condition: an ocean of suffering from which the Buddha shows the way out. There is therefore the idea of a possible salvation, for which he shows the way, which he himself explored by entering a state of perfection given by a kind of transformative experience called “Enlightenment.”

There can be no clear distinction between nature and the human condition, because Buddhism has no idea what human nature is. As for the human condition, it is understood as radically bad.

Buddhist anthropology is therefore radically opposed to that of Christianity, and in essential respects: in the way it conceives of relationships between men, spirituality, morality, the status of the body, the idea of the soul, the human condition itself and consequently human nature, the idea of beauty, justice and even truth; in the way it apprehends the two fundamental human drives, desire and reason.

There is no cure for the human condition, because there is no cure for life: for its joys, its sorrows, for the bereavements that touch us, for a time only, inconsolable; for the failures, and therefore the risks taken; and then there is no cure for love and the desire to love, to learn, to know, to exchange and also to fight, and therefore for the need to take blows and, if need be, to return them. Because that is life, and life cannot be put at a distance: it can only be lived.

Buddhism is based on ancient Indian concepts, such as “karman” (karma), which is nothing other than the theory of causality transported into the moral world. Buddhism is the exaltation of karman. The logical framework of causality is implacable. How can we contradict what we all know: that every act has effective consequences, however deferred? Karman,” a self-sufficient substance-force, sums it all up: it is at once the act, the effect of past acts, the condition of future acts and the chain of events that follows or governs them, the law that presides over all this with the weight of a physical necessity, since it attaches itself to the soul in the form of joy or suffering, depending on whether it functions as a reward or punishment, which can be deferred. Karman can remain latent, and then one day come to fruition. Unless we condemn ourselves to inaction, it is inescapable, and in any case perceived as such.
It is absolute determinism: an Asian Ananke.

Buddhist wisdom is in no way comparable to Christian wisdom. Both the Brahman and Samana (or Sramana) states of Vedic India imply the idea of two possible paths to liberation: through knowledge or asceticism. The essential thing is to save man from suffering, illness and death. And the only possible way out of this ocean of misery is the all-too-common Victorian wisdom of an ascetic elevated to the dignity of icon and supreme guide.

The Semitic world of the Bible conveys the idea of a human nature in solidarity with Creation, in solidarity with a succession of divine operations (the days) that speak of Man. Christianity’s response is consistent with that of the revealed text, which formulates it under the concept of the “Fall;” in other words a metaphysical catastrophe that seriously damaged “human nature,” and consequently altered its very condition. Suffering, sickness and death were not part of the original program (which had become unimaginable, even if Augustine sometimes tried), but they entered the world, altering human nature and modifying the conditions of existence.

Where does man get the goodness and righteousness of his actions? Where does the drive to know and explore the unknown come from? Where does he get his strength, his rationality and his prudential perfection? What is the source of the singular dynamism that drives him to support, guide, care for, devote and even sacrifice himself to others? To integrate the idea that he is “his brother’s keeper.” By already being his own guardian. And that man is not a wolf to man, but a friend, even a brother.
Christianity puts all this in the One who supports, guides and sets free, the One who gives the Word, a Promise and a choice: between life and death, between blessing and curse.

For over three decades, Western Europe has lived under the reign of intellectual fashions, such as Freudism, Marxism and structuralism. These ideas turn human nature into a process of lying to hide the beast within man (repression): they have given new power to the old programming that makes force and violence (the right of the strongest) the essence of human relations.

The men and women who choose Buddhism are looking for new ways out of the spiritual prison in which these deleterious ideologies have imprisoned them. But we owe them the truth, because we are the guardians of our brothers and sisters: Buddhism is a swindle that has succeeded in making people believe that its marvelous meditation techniques lead to a state that puts the world, stress, anxiety and anguish—real and imaginary—at bay. These doctrines of appeasement are witchcraft. They throw Christian spirituality and the asceticism that goes with it into a deep pit of oblivion and ignorance. They anaesthetize the soul, plunging it into a deadly torpor.

How do you stop a butterfly from flying off into the deadly light?

A higher light must be lit.

Marion Duvauchel is a historian of religions and holds a PhD in philosophy. She has published widely, and has taught in various places, including France, Morocco, Qatar, and Cambodia. She is the founder of the Pteah Barang, in Cambodia.

Featured: Face of the Buddha, Gandhara, ca. 1st-2nd century AD.

And The West Invented Buddhism

In 2012, a group of English-speaking scholars published a book with the austere title, How Theravada is Theravada? Exploring Buddhist Identities. This was the first time that an epistemology of Buddhism was presented that was so historicized and documented, and remarkably coherent. In 2014, the French orientalist, Gregory Kourilsky, wrote a review of this work with an incendiary title, at least for those who have a sense of what is at stake: “Le ‘bouddhisme theravāda,’ cette autre invention de l’Occident” (“Theravada Buddhism, Another Invention of the West”). France, which prides itself on bilingualism to the point of now broadcasting commercials in English (with French subtitles in some cases), only put this remarkable synthesis on the Persée website in February 2019.

What is established in Kourilsky’s work can be summarized in a few lines: The expression “Theravada (or Theravadin) Buddhism” is an invention of twentieth-century European orientalists, which was gradually adopted in Asia by the Buddhists themselves.

The questioning of these concepts which have filled entire libraries is not so new. Already back in 2004, Peter Skilling, one of the authors of the book, had thrown a stone into the pond of Buddhist studies by questioning the relevance of the usage that establishes a necessary link between “Theravada” and the Pali Canon. He established that this usage is the product of norms established in Europe from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the following century and that this reinvented Theravada, mainly English-speaking, had progressively gained an international influence, including in the Buddhist communities of Asia.

In early academic publications, “Theravada” referred to the canonical corpus itself before designating a religious trend. Today, the term refers to the form of Buddhism systematized on the island of Ceylon during the first centuries of the Christian era, transmitted to Southeast Asia through its texts and its language, Pali. Although now universally accepted, the term appears in this sense only in Western sources, and not before the end of the colonial era. It is never used in the sense of “sect” or “school” in the religious texts of South, East and Southeast Asia. One would look in vain throughout the Tipitaka (the supposed Buddhist canon) for a single occurrence of this term and at most a dozen times in the Commentaries, and again never in the sense of “school” or “sect”. Theravada is only used to underline a symbolic link with the “elders” (thera in Pali), i.e., the five hundred disciples of the historical Buddha, and thus to claim the authenticity of their teaching).

A researcher from Manitoba, David Drewes, has recently established that three centuries of research have never been able to “scientifically” establish the Buddha’s embodied existence.

Todd LeRoy Perreira then examined the terminological uses to which scholars and observers have resorted to, to designate religious practices. He traced the history of these practices in Ceylon, Burma and Siam, which is already a key discovery. He examined in detail the orientalist works published over the previous two centuries and drew up a semantic history, from the first appearance of the term (in 1836) to its “official” adoption on the occasion of the Colombo Resolution in 1950; and he has gone so far as to tackle (or to focus on) other expressions familiar to the Buddhologist but which turn out to be just as much the fruit of academic constructions. For example, Hinayana.

The term Hinayana (“Small Vehicle”) only began to circulate at the very end of the nineteenth century, when a rivalry arose between the proponents of the Mahayana (“Great Vehicle”) and those of Pali Buddhism, whose reputation for authenticity they wished to delegitimize. At the time, the Sinhalese school was considered to be the purest expression of the Doctrine, and Mahayana was seen by Europeans as a degenerate form of Buddhism. As exchanges between Buddhists multiplied on an international scale, those who claimed to be followers of the Great Vehicle – the Japanese in the first place – were anxious to restore the reputation of their dogma, which they did by winning what Kourilsky describes as a veritable war of terminology.

This ideological opposition was superimposed on another which, although older, was no less artificial – that which opposed “Southern Buddhism” to “Northern Buddhism,” proposed by Eugène Burnouf and adopted by most Orientalists, although it referred to a somewhat simplistic geographical division.

In fact, Burnouf, an honest researcher who was considered the founder of Buddhology, had worked more or less alone, exploring a field of the history of religions about which little was known at the time. The conventional character of these designations did not prevent them from making their way into the Buddhist communities of South and Southeast Asia, whose members, receiving the growing influence of the West, appropriated them to the point of claiming to be “Theravada” Buddhists.

Thus, the nomenclatures that have been legitimately used are not based on vernacular sources but, to a large extent, on assertions imposed by the scientific community. The term “Buddhism” itself was challenged by a Sinhalese exegete as nonsense invented by Europeans.

Certain events constitute key stages in this process: the Orientalist Congress of Chicago, organized in 1893, and that of Colombo, in 1950. But before that, there were those ardent English, German, and Australian proselytizers, whom Perreira calls the “Europeans of zeal.” Renowned orientalists such as Eugène Burnouf, Thomas William Rhys Davids (founder of the Association for the Pali Language, a questionable researcher whose article modestly hides the fact that he was accused of embezzlement in Ceylon, where he was stationed and had to leave after a trial, and whose wife was a theosophist); the Russian Hermann Oldenberg; improbable theosophists like Henry Steel Olcott.

And there were also Buddhist monks whose European origin was hidden under a locally colored conventual name, the most representative of whom were Nyanatiloka (alias Anton Walther Florus Gueth) and Ananda Metteyya (alias Charles Henry Allan Bennett, the same one who imposed the expression “Theravada Buddhism” with the meaning we know today). Forgotten in this list is the most ardent propagator of Buddhism, Sylvain Lévi, who gave French Indianism all its weight, and whose disciple Jean Filliozat contributed to extinguishing the new breath of air brought by Daniel Schlumberger, who dared to question the dogma of the birth of Buddha.

The categorization of Buddhism into two “vehicles,” Mahayana and Hinayana, directly borrowed from European typology, was unknown in Siam before the second half of the 19th century. No Buddhist in Siam, before Chulalongkorn, could have defined his religious practices as belonging to one or the other of these two “schools.” It was under the influence of Europeans that Mongkut (who was to ascend the throne as Rama IV, then wearing the yellow robe) undertook to invent a Pali alphabet (called the Ariyaka) which he wanted to be universal, with the aim of interacting with his co-religionists in Burma, Ceylon, or other countries that shared with the Siamese this “authentic Buddhism” based on the Singhalese Tipitaka.

The adoption of a language (in this case, Pali) and a phraseology does not de facto imply an adequacy with the dogma usually associated with it. The Burmese ruler Kyansittha invoked Śāsana and Dharma not so much to affirm his fidelity to a “religion” (the modern meaning of which is unknown in Bagan) as to instrumentalize a rhetoric on which he could base his disposition of power and establish his legitimacy. This opened up a new research perspective for the King Ashoka, whose Buddhist character appears today as a dogma in the same way as the birth of the Buddha at Kapilavastu, never scientifically established, not even archaeologically.

(Note that the translation into English by T. Rhys Davids’ Dialogues of the Buddha was published under the patronage of His Majesty Chulalongkorn, King of Siam).

Whether one refers to the primitive texts or to the practices, whether one places oneself from the point of view of Asian Buddhists or European Orientalists, whether the methodology is that of the philologist or the epistemologist, the conclusions of the articles of these Anglo-Saxon researchers all lead to the same observation: “Theravada Buddhism” is indeed the product of an arbitrary taxonomy imposed for practical and, above all, ideological reasons.

In all this, the French colonial period is obscured, and consequently the geographical areas of the regions formerly administered by France (Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam) omitted. But this is rectified by Grégory Kourilsky, in his review, when he reminds us that “the process that led to the adoption in these regions of modern terminologies (Hïnayana, Theravada) is indebted to the initiatives taken by the administration of French Indochina to make Buddhism a vehicle for the unification of these states. redrawn by political contingencies. The Buddhist Institute, set up in Cambodia and Laos under the patronage of certain members of the École française d’Extrême-Orient (Louis Finot, George Cœdès, Suzanne Karpelès, Pierre Dupont), was one of the main tools of this dynamic, and the sources highlight the efforts made by the colonial authorities to assert the unity of “Hïnayana Buddhism” with a view to federating the Khmer and Lao peoples.

“This book,” concludes Gregory Kourilsky, “is proof that primary sources speak, to anyone who will listen, better than many of the self-sustaining theories that flood the current literature on Buddhism… In Buddhist studies, there will undoubtedly be a before and after How Theravàda is Theravàda?”

This makes perfect sense. Having said that, apart from specialists who are fluent in Pali or Sanskrit, who has access to the primary sources? A few months ago, the magazine, l’Histoire, was interested in the art of Gandhara. It was happy to reproduce, with a certain brilliance, Alfred Foucher’s thesis, which however has been revised by Daniel Schlumberger, and which recent works (especially those of the Russians) have made somewhat obsolete. It is that French Orientalism, dying, is now only represented by a few pundits who live off an intellectual heritage that has never been re-examined, and for the most part, is sclerotic. And it is these researchers who write in specialized journals for a so-called cultivated public.

But then, if these researches are so revolutionary, why don’t we abandon terms that do not correspond to the reality of what is called “Buddhism?” Why are we still happy to use them, despite our greater knowledge and caution? Why not give up these terms if they are wrong?

Because the consequences would be far-reaching. A whole bunch of charlatans living on the credulity of poor, spiritually lost and empty people would lose their golden goose. Most of the Buddhist or transcendental meditation institutes which claim to have a totally imaginary knowledge of Buddhism would have to be closed down. We would be freed from a whole bunch of scholarly chatter, including on the Catholic channels and Le Jour du Seigneur. Libraries would have to be emptied of the chattering and pedantic theses which clutter them up. It would become necessary to urgently inform INALCO and Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat, whose father, Jean Filliozat, was the gravedigger of the idea supported by Daniel Schlumberger in 1962, and his new thesis on the date of birth of the Buddha, not to mention all the priests who have risen to the top of their rank and who strut and repeat pompous and vain ecumenism, fed by all the apparatus of a hollow erudition.

What a job!… So, on second thought, let’s not give up on these terms – not to mention the fact that were the research to be renewed, there would be a lot of unemployed people lining up at job centers. It would also make a lot of people worry about the only really important question when you take your nose out of your library – who do I believe in?

As for all those prelates who claim to educate the little people of God, it could lead them to ask themselves an even more decisive question: Who do I serve?

Marion Duvauchel is a historian of religions and holds a PhD in philosophy. She has published widely, and has taught in various places, including France, Morocco, Qatar, and Cambodia.

The featured image shows the head of a Bodhisattva, Gandhara region, 3rd–4th century AD.

Sanskrit – Language Of The Buddhists?

India is a recent state created by the conjunction of three historical sequences: The old civilization dominated by the Sanskrit language; the Mughal civilization where Persian and Muslim components were predominant; and mostly the British colonization that opened India to the contemporary world.

In the 18th and especially the 19th centuries, the Sanskrit language discovered by the Europeans left them intoxicated, having essentially turned them towards the past; they now had access to some of the oldest texts in the world. Unlike Germany, French Indianism did not completely lose its mind over Sanskrit, and began to study the language at the beginning of the 20th century. But the idea of the great antiquity of Vedic and other texts (and therefore of Indian writing) was a kind of ineradicable dogma.

Before The Discovery Of The Ashoka Edicts.

The religious texts of India do not translate any historical reality nor clarify historically the history of India. For that, it is necessary to turn to the testimonies of foreign authors, generally Greek ones. Hence the importance of monuments, which very early became the initial point of support for the historical reconstruction of the past. In 1801, we discovered the first datable inscription – which we attributed to a king by the name of Ashoka (circa 260 BC). Then were found a set of edicts of this same Indian sovereign. Both finds became rare and firm islands in the sea of fog that is otherwise the history of India.

Grandson of Chandragupta, the founder of the Maurya dynasty, Ashoka completed the unification of India, begun by his grandfather and continued by his father. He governed a kingdom that encompassed the entire sub-continent (except for the extreme south of the peninsula), as well to the north, Gandhara and part of Bactria, and then won over the Hellenistic kingdoms that were the consequence of the conquest of Alexander.

European Indianism made Ashoka a convinced Buddhist, and attributed to him the organized diffusion of Buddhism throughout Asia, with “missionaries” being sent out, and a grand council, whose legendary character is now well established.

However, neither the Sanskrit known by the literary tradition, nor the religious language of the Vedic hymns is the language of Ashoka. Nor is it one of the Prakrits, (languages that have disappeared but are consecrated either by dramatic or religious literature). His inscriptions are everywhere written in a dialect which is distinct from Pali, especially by the phonetics (which therefore makes it not Pali), and which thus makes it possible to write the different dialects of the Ashokan empire – that of West India (Girnar recension); the dialect of north-west India (the inscription of Kapur-di-Giri); the dialect of Eastern Hindustan (the inscriptions of Orissa). We knew nothing about this alphabet, when we discovered the first edicts on stone, or on a column. And it was not until 1837 that a young English engineer, James Prinsep, succeeded in deciphering them. We called this “Indian” alphabet, Brahmi.

We know today that these inscriptions were “proclaimed,” and that the engraved edict was a kind of witness, so that the people did not forget the royal instructions of an empire under the close surveillance of a solidly organized administration. Three decades later, another series of Ashokan inscriptions were discovered – but in another alphabet, called Kharosthi (also called Gandharan). In north-western India, none of the Mauryan rulers had touched local customs. Ashoka just left an old bureaucracy, probably effective, in the south and east, comprised of officials from other parts of the empire, regions formerly under-administered, or whose loyalty remained doubtful.

The Role Of Émile Sénart: The Linguistic History Of India

In France, the one who studied Ashoka’s language was the Indianist Émile Sénart. But it is less the language of the king that interested him than the difficult question of the linguistic history of India, of which he wanted to try to lay some foundations. In a small, dense, and concise article written in 1886, he took up the analysis made in his work on Ashoka’s inscriptions. He attacked a double dogma: that of the antiquity of Indian texts in general and that of the antiquity of Sanskrit.

Traditionally, there were three types of Sanskrit: the Vedic language (an archaic Sanskrit), classical Sanskrit, and the group of Prakrits. But Sénart added a fourth category – an idiom “in a way intermediate between Sanskrit and Prakrit” – the dialect of the Gathas, used in fragments and versified by northern Buddhist literature, but also in secular works (such as a treatise on arithmetic).

Why, Sénart wondered, was Sanskrit not used by King Ashoka, which in its “literary” form would have been adequate for official or literary use? The answer is simple – because this literary Sanskrit, in its written form, did not exist in the time of Ashoka.

But if it did not exist in its written form, it did indeed exist elsewhere, sheltered in the schools, where it was developed without any other application than the cult from which it hardly dissociated itself, and within the dominant religion, Brahminism. The Vedas dominate. The Vedic hymns are the eternal word that regulates everything, that decides everything; worship governed by Vedic ritual is the source of all prosperity in this world and in the next.

In the history of Indian scriptures and Sanskrit, the presence of the Brahmins and of their language has been essential. Sanskrit is the standard language. The distance between the truth that they state and the reality that they inspire (or imagine themselves inspiring) characterizes the Brahmins, as does the relationship that they have established with their language of worship – the language that states the fixed norm, unchangeable and sacred, which governs the Word that must also be sacred. Through the transmission of ancient songs, these Brahmins found themselves in possession of an idiom that belonged to them in their own right. Exclusive depositaries through oral tradition of a religious literature on which their authority was based; and they have shown themselves reluctant to relinquish their monopoly.

From the analysis of language, the Brahmins draw consequences, sometimes surprising, on the world, on its structure, its future, on things, or on man: “There is the blue sky, the sea, the stars and … Sanskrit,” which is, as the grammarian Patañjali says (around 200 BC?), “the support of the world order.” Hence the weight of grammar, as Michel Angot rightly noted, has an almost metaphysical dimension. All traditional knowledge adopts the method developed by the master-founders of the grammar of Panini and Patañjali. Adopting the old archaic Vedic language, the Brahmins thus adapted it to their spiritual and intellectual needs to work out the Sanskrit which they thus fixed, perpetuated and made sacred. The development of this language has therefore been almost completely controlled, being subject to this small group of statutory scholars.

At the time of Ashoka’s reign, in the 3rd century BC, what therefore existed was an archaic religious language that was essentially liturgical, and the object of a certain culture. Buddhists, on the contrary, might have been rather in a hurry to use writing to spread their doctrine. And their relationship to speech was not that of the Brahmins. For the latter, what was first, was the sacred Word. For the Buddhists, it was the “Law,” allegorized by the key moment of the “gesture” of the Buddha – the sermon of Benares, when he formulated his preaching for the first time. Now the “Law” and the “Word/preacher” were on the same plane. But that was not formulated doctrinally; and whatever the moment when this gesture of the Buddha was elaborated and transmitted, the Brahmins were not be mistaken: Buddhism was an enemy religion.

Speaking of this legendary Sanskrit language, Sénart said aptly that if we attributed all authority to it, it is pure fiction. We sit her on a throne, but she is dead. Indianists called it “archaic” or “Vedic Sanskrit” to distinguish it from classical Sanskrit and corrupt Sanskrit. It was Colebrooke who made the first distinction between states of the Brahminic language, which the Sanskritizing Indianists then readily adopted.

On the basis of this idiom, which was primarily religious and liturgical, the priestly caste no doubt created a learned language, which may have had profane use. But the idiom thus created could not long remain an instrument without use in the hands that forged it. Modified by the reaction of popular writing on religious language, Sanskrit once “thrown into general circulation” passed to the status of literary language, and entered the secular sphere and found new applications. In other words, it was secularized.

What is called classical Sanskrit was born and became the standardized language of a specific civilization, by assuming analogically the role that elsewhere was played by Greek or Latin. A language of scholars, it took the name of samskrita vac, “refined word;” that is to say. prepared according to the canons of Panini’s grammar. It then became the language of the spiritual; and it was reserved for this job. A largely artificial language, it was now a “language of thought,” to use Michel Angot’s expression.

It is this classic Sanskrit that the Germans discovered, as “the egg of Columbus in linguistics,” during the “Eastern Renaissance” which intoxicated the great German dreamers of the early 19th century. But was it the language of the Buddhists? There is nothing to suggest it. Sénart made the assumption that King Ashoka, with the edicts engraved almost everywhere in his kingdom (in particular on the borders), played an eminent role in this event, which constitutes the emergence of classic Sanskrit. He did not have his edicts engraved in Sanskrit, but in a unique alphabet (Brahmi) which made it possible to write the different Prakrits spoken in the different regions of his kingdom, in particular in Peninsular India. And in the northwest regions, it was another alphabet entirely, this one from Aramaic (Kharosthi), in which he had these edicts engraved with a religious, but above all a political, purpose. Before their Hellenization, linked to the conquest of Alexander, these regions of the northwest were included in the great Achaemenid federal state, that which the Macedonian took over. The language chosen by the Achaemenids was Aramaic, the “lingua franca” of the ancient world. We can thus legitimately assume that it was under the influence of the Hellenized scribes, in their meeting with Indian scribes, that these Ashokan alphabets were designed.

If the language of Ashoka was not Sanskrit – if it did not appear in its written form until about a century later, and then in its grammatically fixed form another century later – at what point was this presumed Buddhist canon fixed? And was it in Sanskrit?

The Role Of The Buddhists

Buddhists were recruited into the Brahminic caste, as into the others, and were introduced, to a certain extent, to its knowledge, including linguistic. And over time, they were also able to form themselves as a class of scholars who eventually adopted Sanskrit, first to communicate with the Brahmins, and then as a religious language. As the use of Sanskrit led to the scholarly immobilization of the language, there was thus fashioned a convenient literary instrument which allowed the grammatical elaboration of Prakrits, those languages which had a literature. This is how the northern Buddhists, in their mixed Sanskrit, deployed Prakritic spellings that resembled literary Sanskrit. This also explains how their spelling in “mixed” Sanskrit (a term that Indians prefer to the perceived depreciative phrase, “corrupt Sanskrit”), tended to come closer and closer to correct Sanskrit. And this can help shed some light on the mystery of these legendary “Buddhist Scriptures.”

If classical Sanskrit has undoubtedly been the subject of an elaboration by the Brahmins, (and on this point we can follow Sénart), it was the Buddhists who indirectly caused its diffusion. Unlike the Brahmins, they were animated by a strong missionary spirit, eager to spread their doctrines by all means. Early attempts at writing, undoubtedly gradually, introduced into circulation the processes of a fixed and learned spelling – with probably less mastery than the Brahmins. At least at first.

If, as it has sometimes been argued, that Pali was, despite Magadhi, fixed in Western India, its relatively archaic character can be explained either by the tendency for etymological spelling, sensitive to the North West; or (during the period of development of classical Sanskrit) by the divergence of the tradition among rival sects, to then become immobilized in each of them. This could explain the two identifiable and identified traditions: One in Pali, the other in Sanskrit. But this does not account for Magadhi, with many Indianists even claiming that the language of the Buddha could be Magadhi.

But it was apparently in Sanskrit that Buddhism continued to expand outside the subcontinent. To understand this, it suffices to remember that in the first century AD, it was the Kushans from the steppes who took possession of this entire area of North-West India and part of the Maurya kingdom. And they chose two languages of chancellery, Sanskrit and “Bactrian,” another Indo-Aryan language. Their religious indifference largely contributed to the expansion of Buddhism out of its original cradle (in southern Nepal). This is how Sanskrit was able to continue its expansion outside the subcontinent. From the third century AD, it undoubtedly began to play the role of language of the Buddhist koine. Thus, when Chinese pilgrims set off for India (from the north), in search of the “sacred” texts of Buddhism, which they took to be written in Sanskrit, Sanskrit itself spread throughout Eurasia.

Between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, Buddhism disappeared from the Indian lands where it was born; but it persisted outside India, where it had been exported, and with it Sanskrit, despite the tough competition from Persian, linked to the rise of Islam in India. It is this persistence of the sacred language of Brahminism, held (wrongly) for the original language of the doctrine of the Buddha that has resulted in the same texts in Chinese, Tibetan and Mongolian, on the basis of a “table” Sanskrit texts. The first corpus of Buddhist texts was collected by the Englishman Brian Houghton Hodgson, in Nepal, where he was stationed. Working in monasteries, he affirmed that Nepalese texts had Sanskrit originals. But often the Sanskrit originals had disappeared, and the remaining text was only known in the language of translation.

The second corpus was collected by Sándor Csoma de Kőrös, a Hungarian who mastered the Tibetan language with heroic dedication, and included in the journal of the Bengal Asian Society, with detailed analyses of the great Tibetan library.

The third corpus was especially cited by Russian orientalism which claimed to have it, as per Isaac Jacob Schmidt.

Philippe Édouard Foucaux, a pupil of Émile Burnouf, who is considered to be the founder of Buddhist studies, had only one Tibetan copy. His Sanskrit copy is very late (18th century); and the first translation was made from the Burmese.

In the 20th century, the expeditions of Dutreuil de Rhins and Fernand Grenard, of Albert Grünwedel and Albert von le Coq, of Sir Aurel Stein, of Sergey Oldenburg, that of Otani Kozui and Zuicho Tachibana and of Paul Pelliot and Louis Valliant unearthed from the sands of Central Asia and caves of Kansu a mass of documents in various languages (in particular, Sogdian). Among these texts, the Sanskrit ones correspond to the sutras translated into Chinese.

What Buddhist Canon?

What then can we say about an alleged Buddhist canon?

It is impossible that a primitive Buddhist canon existed prior to the concomitant written fixation of the orthographic reform described by Sénart, which may have spanned two or three centuries, (from the 2nd century BC to the first century BC).

The French Indianist very clearly posed the question: “Is it believable that a sect, Buddhist, Jain or other, which would have possessed, either written, or an established oral tradition, that is, a definite and consecrated canon, would have consented to modify and to subject canonical writings to a new grammatical regulation? The codification of an idiom specific to the sect and applied to its fundamental texts can only be imagined on the very date when traditions hitherto imperfect or dispersed were united. Fixed earlier in a canonical body, they would have made law; their authority would have made the reform both useless and impossible.”

Between the language of Ashoka’s edicts and the Prakrit of grammarians, the similarities are obvious; but there is no complete agreement between any of the dialects described by grammarians and those represented by the edicts. Sénart’s conclusion is clear: the Brahmi alphabet has no precedence. It is an alphabet designed for Ashoka, probably by scribes at his service.

However, for the same alphabet to adapt to different languages, a deep knowledge of Indian languages was required. It could not have come from the Brahmins, grammarians specialized in Sanskrit, and who, moreover, did not form a body of administrators in the service of the State. These two functions, scribes and administrators, were reserved for a specific caste whose status was always lower than that of the Brahmins, even if some of the latter could participate, as advisers, in the exercise of power. It is undoubtedly a conglomerate of this specific caste of scribes, undoubtedly Hellenized, especially those in the Northwest, who conceived the two alphabets intended for King Ashoka. Whatever the religion of these scribes, the concept of Dharma (Law) was familiar to them. And it could be Buddhist or Hindu or Vedic.

But if the alphabet was designed by the king (or his language technicians) and for his particular use, and if it did not have prior existence, the inscriptions could not be read by anyone. It was therefore necessary to proclaim them. Hence the existence of emissaries sent by the king. “Oyez, Oyez good people, King Ashoka makes his instructions heard for the happiness of his people, and the happiness of his people is to obey Dharma, the Law” – that is, the Law defined and identified by the king. The Mauryan state was indeed a police state, as suggested by Megasthenes, the Greek who spent some time at the court of King Chandragupta. King Ashoka’s alleged Buddhist teachings enveloped close administrative surveillance, for political rather than religious ends.

Buddhism: Sect Or Heresy Of Brahminism?

None of the founders of the modern Indian state, Nehru, Gandhi, Jinna for Pakistan, knew Sanskrit. When they were of Brahmin origin, they sometimes knew some hymns or prayers as we can still know some prayers in Latin, or can know them in Aramaic. The pandits converted to politics. If Sanskrit had been the language of this radiant Buddhism throughout Asia, it is difficult to believe that we cannot find more originals – especially when you think of the profusion of Buddhist texts in various languages found in the cave of a thousand Buddhas. If we had had a Buddhist canon, “Living Word of the Blessed One,” there is no doubt that it would have been preciously preserved by his followers.

When, at Benares, during his first sermon, the Buddha “turned the law,” what can it mean except that he instituted by this gesture (whether he existed historically or not) the new legislator: a new Manu for the Hindu world. As for Brahminism, the preaching of the Buddha claimed to replace this sacred Word, so sacred that it was reserved only for the legislators of the language which conveyed and preserved it. Little wonder that Buddhism competed with both of these religious currents. And that, no doubt, if a primitive cannon existed, it was destroyed.

Marion Duvauchel is a historian of religions and holds a PhD in philosophy. She has published widely, and has taught in various places, including France, Morocco, Qatar, and Cambodia.

The featured image shows the head of the Buddha, Gandhara, ca. 1st-2nd century AD.