The Authenticity of The Early Buddhist Text | Ajahn Sujato | 21-03-2014

[@HighAsia]

Bhante, I am a Tibetan Buddhist but I completely agree with you. I got your book and I found it invaluable.

[@SanditthikoAkaliko]

why care to check if EBT or late? 25:12 39:12 i bought the book few weeks ago , after previously have had glanced at it in a monastery library. great to see a talk about it from a decade ago

[@daleaidenletian]

Thank you Bhante Sujato for this great talk. I think it is for the better that no surviving text exists that can be traced all the way back to Buddha's time. For I imagine such "texts", if they were to exist, people of later generations will credit it an amount of reverence and authority that actually obstructs the propagation of the Dhamma. The reason is that I doubt "texts" that-existed-while-the-Buddha-was-alive could be free from inconsistencies and/or contradictions in them. Scribes can make innocent mistakes while committing the teachings onto paper(or leaves), or scribes may have other agendas, such as those who might simply want to leverage on Buddha's fame and authority, writing their own fabricated teachings and/or adulterating with the "official" ones to further their, perhaps personal, purposes. What of this "texts" that survive would not be reliable at all. And if a set of inconsistent and contradictory texts all dated to Buddha's time were all that were left, there will be debates, divisions, and nightmares later in identifying the real teachings from the erroneous ones or making sense of all the incongruences! Perhaps it is in Buddha's infinite wisdom that the Dhamma that survived today, is sufficient in volume but yet do not have a false veneer of absolute truth based on a "date". The hundreds of years that passed before the known Dhamma was penned down from the oral tradition, prevent sincere Buddhists from blindly relying on an any textual authority, and it also necessitates an empirical examination and application of its teachings to determine its efficacy and hence, its authenticity It seems this way to me...... :)

[@birkmcclain6220]

i've greatly enjoyed this speech Bhante. i have not always agreed with you on matters, but this speech contained a lot of truth value and pertinence IMO

[@ascherrey]

Sadhu! Thank you, Bhante. I wish you'd give a talk on early Buddhist practices and rites, and what early Buddhism looked like. 🙏🏻

[@cheers_chun]

I'm a scientist. When Bhante Sujato answered the audience question on perceived egalitarianism in science as compared to Buddhism (1:03:56), I was hoping that he would point out the fallacy of the question. Thus I'm glad that he did, by pointing out that in science as well there is an established perception of hierarchy. The examples that he gave, of the words from a tenured professor versus those from a student, or the opinions of a Nobel laureate versus a student, are very apt.

[@tintoretto5983]

Hi I actually believe that Bhante Sujato answered well but don't agree with what you say about the fallacy in the question. It's true that power is important in science too (in the question this could not be pointed out since one is limited in the length of the question one asks on the internet and has to keep to essentials). The essential thing is one of the degree of the importance of power. One example: I was a researcher in Cambridge for many years, saw many Nobel prize winners, and none of them ever got their feet washed by their students (unlike the Asian elder monks including Ajahn Chah...). One of them (Josephson) was actually quite openly ridiculed because instead of doing things useful for business applications he investigated things like the influence of mind on matter. More generally, in science people are encouraged to question and doubt: the story say of Hwang Woo-suk who published fake results in the Journal Science but was later found out is a good example of how integrity is achieved through healthy doubt and criticism. Many Buddhist monks I ve met just imply that questioning and criticising elder monks makes 'bad kamma' and should not be done (indeed I met several Theravada monks who think that Sujato made some very bad kamma because he criticised elder monks in his Blog and raised the question of the authenticity of some of the Suttas). But even without considering the terrororistic strategy of using the idea of bad kamma to deter criticism of old monks; the essential difference is this: for Buddhists it is normal to believe things beacause they are written in the Suttas (say reincarnation); a (good) scientist believes something because there is evidence for it, and is ready at all times to question and abandon his/her beliefs if new evidence becomes available pointing in a different direction

[@shuchern]

Thank you for sharing this insightful speech. I agree that there would have been no point for the Buddha to write his teachings down, anyway, as there would (as others have pointed out) been misinterpretation as occurring with other major religions right now. The point of Buddhist practice is empirical and personal experience, which cannot be generalised. The Suttas provide an accurate picture of the experiences others went through when they sat down with the Buddha and questioned him, and can act as good reference to our own lives. It's like reading a story book and seeing the moral behind it, simply speaking. In the Kalama Sutta, the Buddha himself said not to accept some teaching based on pure hearsay or textual evidence, or tradition, so to set down a record for his teaching would have no greater impact than oral transmission. In fact, I personally feel that having a. teacher and learning via oral transmission is priceless. When I read the suttas, I have to picture it, and sometimes it takes months to see the truth behind the teachings (in the modern world, the sutta's examples really doesn't make things easier to decipher). Of course, in the end, I usually slowly understand, but by seeing a master or "another's voice" it would be of greater and much more help

[@RamonMORALESCASTEL]

Thank you very much Bhante. Greetings and gratitude.

[@Phys1905]

Great dhamma talk

[@upasakajan5135]

Love love this talk. My deep respect. Sadhu. :-)

[@stevekessell3911]

Bhante Sujato, many thanks for this talk and the 100+ other talks and guided meditations that I've viewed/heard. AND your sales pitch worked: I've just ordered the book! Kind regards

[@stevekessell3911]

Having just now caught the END of the talk: have you considered selling real estate or used cars?! ;-))

[@neallcalvert]

There was a well-written book on the time of the Buddha published in 2004 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, written by Pankaj Mishra, a great mind, who did a lot of research and also compared the Buddha's ideas with Western thought throughout history: "An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World."

[@andry7350]

Great talk! I've always thought that texts are projections of ideas into a media for communication much like a drawing of a cube. It's a representation of a phenomena, a description, for others to understand or critique. In this case, the actual phenomena occurs within our minds.

[@LamaKungaChoedak]

very nice

[@NewEarth25]

If all suttas in the nikayas are correlated in terms of context, time, location, main characters and significant events would help our understanding of early texts.

[@NJHMhandyman]

Respect

[@markbrad123]

Given variant human neuro-physiology some Suttas may suit individuals better than others.

[@yongsuanlin6255]

🍀singapore

[@ailinchooi3173]

recording not clear unfortunately

[@onkarvigy]

(To me) Buddhism is not so much a religion of Meditation as it is a rebellion of meditative Mediation; not of (mindless) prayer but of mindful practice; Not about (“perfect”) construction of Your “Self” but “Deconstruction” of YourSelf(Your false Self). Here comes my grand departure: Buddhism is not (necessarily)about your Nirvana (Enlightenment) but of your Kalyana (A complete Wellness/Well-being)!! [Gautama himself rejected his own Nirvana for the sake of teaching others his findings!!! That’s why he came back from the woods in the first place into the very world he had deserted with a desire to teach others!!! Thus became the first person(perhaps ) to have rejected his own Nirvana!!! &gifted it to others (Especially to Hinduism)!! He was Tathagata(beyond even his own Nirvana)!!! I’m from India with “lived experience “ of Socio-cultural ChaturVarna(if not political) which makes me (better) appreciate the context of the relevance of Gautama Buddha and his times the undercurrents of which are still remnant!!!! Hence my interest to make Buddhism tangible & accessible instead of making it chimerical intangible intellectual & inaccessible]

[@Gattomorto12]

samboooody

[@charleswey4895]

Buddha actually spoke Magadhi dialect and the other dialect of pali is Prakrit. The pali dialect used in Tipittaka is Magadhi. It's commonly believed that Pali is a dead language which I very much doubt it. Well not completely dead, I believe Pali language is still spoken in India but not in the purest form. I believe pali language has been assimilated into Bengali & Gujurati languages; these two languages have many, many words similar to Pali.

[@zinakan]

Thanks for letting us know this is fake.