A Brief History of Buddhist Canons
Dr. John Canti (84000 Editorial Chair) and Prof. Peter Skilling (Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation Founder) talk to 84000 about buddhist canons and their history.
In Part One, Dr. Canti discusses what is meant by “buddhist canons,” how they were formed, and how they dispersed over time.
In Part Two, Dr. Canti and Prof. Skilling elaborate on the composition of the canons that exist in different languages and explain the value of having the canons translated.
Peter Skilling is a Fellow of the Lumbini International Research Institute (Lumbini, Nepal) and a Special Lecturer at Chulalongkorn University (Bangkok, Thailand). He is founder of the Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation (Bangkok), a project dedicated to the preservation, study and publication of the Buddhist literature of Southeast Asia. He is a founding member of the International Centre for Buddhist Studies (Bangkok). Peter Skilling has lived in Thailand for over thirty years, and has traveled extensively in Asia.His interests include the early history of religion in Southeast Asia as known through inscriptions and archaeological remains; the history of Indian Buddhism and the development of Mahayana sutras; and the Pali and vernacular literature of pre-modern Siam, including jataka and sermon genres. He has also written about the history of the Buddhist order of nuns in India and Siam and the development of the Tibetan canonical collections (Kanjur). His publications include Mahasutras, a critical edition and study of ten Sarvastivadin texts preserved in Tibetan translation in the Kanjur compared with their Pali counterparts (Vols. I and II, Oxford: The Pali Text Society, 1994, 1997; Vol. III, translations, forthcoming).Skilling is reported to be overly fond of durian. He lives in Nandapuri on the outskirts of Bangkok with a turtle rescued from the streets after a flood some years ago.
Source:
http://buddhiststudies.berkeley.edu/
people/visiting_scholars.html
John Canti is a Buddhist practitioner, translator, and physician. While studying medicine at Cambridge University in England he first had contact with Buddhist teachers, and started to practice under their guidance. In 1972, he met Dudjom Rinpoche, who became one of his three principal teachers. The others were Kangyur Rinpoche and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, both of whom he met soon afterwards. Qualifying meanwhile as a doctor, he held hospital appointments in London and Cambridge, starting surgical training. But in the late seventies, disillusioned with medicine in an academic setting, he moved to eastern Nepal to establish tuberculosis programs in two remote hill districts virtually without health services.Beginning in 1980, he undertook two consecutive three-year retreats in the Dordogne, France, practising under the guidance of Dudjom Rinpoche, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Pema Wangyal Rinpoche and Nyoshul Khenpo. Afterwards, he helped found with some of his fellow retreatants the Padmakara Translation Group, of which he is now president. He also had the honour of serving Dudjom Rinpoche as physician during his final years, and has subsequently coordinated the medical care of other lamas and practitioners. He currently lives in semi-retreat in the Dordogne, translating texts and providing medical care and counselling for three-year retreatants in the area. His published translations include (all collaborations): The Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones, The Words of My Perfect Teacher, Journey to Enlightenment, The Hundred Verse of Advice, and The Heart of Compassion. He is presently working on a translation of Mipham Rinpoche’s commentary to Maitreya-Asanga’s Uttaratantra-shastra.
Source:
http://www.mindandlife.org/
research-initiatives/sri/sri_faculty
Conversations with John Canti and Peter Skilling:
On Buddhist Canons
Peter:
They’re all big compared to the holy books of other religions like Christianity or Islam. But it’s difficult to compare them because they are measured differently, even within their own cultures and traditions.
The Thais like to measure the Pali Canon in 45 volumes. Of course those volumes are not identical in size.
“Chinese canon” is a very difficult term, because the Chinese Tripitaka was produced since the Tang period and they all have different sizes. The one used today was mainly produced in Japan in the Taisho era. The Taisho Tripitaka has well over a hundred volumes.
The Tibetan canon is usually made into traditional Tibetan volumes of 100 to 108.
So they’re all big, diverse; but it’s difficult to compare them without making the equation of imaginary Western pages or something like that.
Peter:
They were produced at different times, with different imperatives of the monastic cultures that were reflected on what they needed at the time, and produced what we can call a “canon” if you like.
So the Pali Canon is an early collection, done even perhaps in an oral period. At that time the tantras and other such texts were not available—maybe not pronounced, maybe not compiled. The others, as collections, are much, much later. More diverse bodies of literature had evolved at that time.
And then within Tibet itself, and in China, too, I believe, there would be debates as to what to include as the authentic word of the Buddha. Because all of them define themselves as containing authentic words of the Buddha or disciples—there are different definitions of authenticity, but that is still the basic rule.
For the Tibetans, for example, they would only include texts that they believed had an Indian original it was translated from, therefore it was authentic.
Chinese also have a similar principle. We have old Chinese catalogs which discussed these questions. Sometimes a later cataloger would reject works that were accepted earlier on and say, “This is not an Indian compilation.” So the main idea was that it should be an authentic work of the Buddha, and it should go back to India if it was in translation.
But the decisions were made at different times, different places, so none of them were fixed really. Even the Pali Canon has some flexibility in it. Particularly the Tibetan and the Chinese evolved over centuries with debates, rejections of texts, taking in new texts and so on. So they are all evolving, changing.
Again, that’s one of the reasons the word “canon” is a little difficult, because the canon itself is an evolving idea.
John:
Almost all. They must mostly have had Sanskrit originals. But some of them were translated from other languages. In fact, some of the Tibetan translations were made from Chinese, because the scholars knew that there had been an original text in Sanskrit which then no longer existed, and so they had to translate it from Chinese.
Other texts were translated from other languages of the area, from Kotanese, Sogdian, and some other languages. In fact at one point, one of the reasons that are given for the revisions that happened later on in the translation period that divides the early from the later translation period is the problem that there were such a plethora of texts—some of them translated from different source languages—that it was really quite difficult for people to know what was really authentic and valid and what wasn’t. And they were translated. Because they were from different sources, they varied quite a lot. The Tibetan that resulted varied quite a lot, and they needed to be made more uniform. But by and large, yes, they were to a very large extent translated from Sanskrit originals.
Well, the wider picture we don’t really know. Some people say, you know, there were a lot of social changes going on in India at that time. But the most obvious answer to that question is the arrival of the invaders – Muslim invaders from the Northwest, who began to spread through Northwest and later Northeast India. The reason they hadn’t been able to invade before was due to the strength of the various kingdoms and republics that existed in Northern India at that time. So you could say that they wouldn’t have been there if there hadn’t been a considerable weakening of the defenses that had enabled the buddhist cultures to flourish in those areas.
But the immediate cause of the disappearance of buddhist culture was probably the arrival of the invading armies. They were extremely destructive. It had actually been happening for several decades, but there was one particularly bad year, which was 1193, I believe, when a particularly strong and violent army swept through the area and destroyed, not for the first time, but destroyed pretty much definitively the universities at Nalanda and Vikramshila and probably others, too. There were some accounts of the destruction of the great libraries and the burning of the books. So this was a very big change.
But I doubt if even an invading army would’ve been able to wipe out Buddhism as a culture, if they hadn’t been many other causes at work. And I think we have to assume, as well, that there must have been movements within India that by which the various different Hindu indigenous Indian beliefs began to encroach in people’s minds, in the way people practiced and in their cultures… the quite extraordinary spread of the practice of Buddhism—its study by monks in monasteries and the influence that it had on the ordinary life of people and over large areas of India. So it’s quite a complex story.
John:
Well we don’t know the answer to that question. So much of the Sanskrit is simply no longer found. It’s said that probably somewhere between 10%, 15%, maybe as much as 20% of the texts of the Kangyur have Sanskrit texts surviving. But the rest don’t. So that’s a large proportion of 80-85%. Those texts, very interesting to know what might have happened to them, but for the moment they simply haven’t turned up. A lot of texts were found in among the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal, which had been relatively stable politically for a very long time. It was never invaded and didn’t change very much. More recently, Sanskrit texts have been found along the Silk Road and in areas much further north; the archeological finds where the conditions for preservation were much better than they were in low-lying India, with its humidity, insects and so on.
We can only guess. But between the two, spanning quite a large period… first of all the Chinese translations which, you know, the translators took great pains to find most of the texts that were really being used at that time and which existed and take them back to China and translate them; and then later on, the same happened for the Tibetans. So covering a very large span of time, almost a thousand years, it’s unlikely that there were many texts that completely disappeared, but that’s sheer conjecture.
We have what we have, and some texts I believe have turned up in Sanskrit, not very many but a few in some fragments of scriptures which don’t seem to exist either in Chinese or Tibetan. So there may be a few. Of course, the other consideration is the different versions of texts which tended to evolve over time and geographically in different areas. So we don’t necessarily have records in the Chinese and Tibetan of all the versions of all the texts as they evolved.
Peter:
There are many ways to interpret the value. So for some people it might be a matter of inspiration, reading the life of the Buddha in different versions. Could it be a matter of inspiration for people, a matter of revealing the life of the Buddha, say in relation to places like Bodhgaya here. Another sense is it can deepen a person’s understanding of practices, as for example, meditation, meditation on the breath, Anapana. We can compare various versions in Pali, in Tibetan, in Sanskrit, in Chinese translation. Here in fact, we see that they’re very close to each other and we could perhaps come to the conclusion that this is one of the core practices of mediation, of Buddhism. So we can see both the kind of synchronic and diachronic relation of text which gives a deepening idea of the teachings or practices.
So I think there are multiple benefits to that. I don’t think there are – I can’t really think of any drawbacks. I think it’s beneficial to expand one’s knowledge. It might increase tolerance, too, amongst buddhist groups if they see that, “Oh, we all have these core, we have some core traditions.” Because sometimes people, because they don’t know the language and don’t read the shared texts, sometimes they have an idea that… people who are from the Pali tradition might think, “Oh this Tibetan is something completely different – there’s only tantras which we don’t have.” Or the Tibetans might think similarly that the Pali tradition is different. And so and and so forth. It has many benefits in many ways I would think.
Peter:
Sporadic translations of buddhist texts from any of these collections began in the 19th century. I don’t think in the 18th, but I might be wrong. That was when the study of Indian texts, the Sanskrit and others, began in Europe, but I’m not sure if there are any real translations.
The first description of the Tibetan canon was by a great Hungarian scholar – Alexander Csoma de Kőrös, published in the 1820s and 30s. He did translate a few things.
As for the Pali, I think the first translations from Pali, excluding French (which might have come earlier or in the mid 19th century on),… the idea of translating the entire Pali collection began in the late 19th century with the Foundation of the Pali Text Society in England. They have more or less translated the whole collection. But that’s done by separate translators, sort of at different times over a long period. But they did have the idea of a single project.
For the Chinese it was much later. Maybe BDK Tripitaka, which was in progress.
For the Tibetan, the idea of a systematic translation has recently begun with the 84000 project.
Peter:
Well I think the benefit for buddhists should be fairly obvious. They can read texts for inspiration, they can learn actually about Buddhism. By the very fact that so many of these texts have not been translated, even when Sanskrit exists, or even when Chinese translations exist but they’ve not been translated into English… so people who know only English, or European languages, if they are buddhists then they don’t have access to their full canon or traditional texts. So it will help a great deal in being aware of the practice, philosophy, history, narratives. There are so many wonderful things in these canons or in the Tibetan canon. So people will be able to be aware of their own tradition.
For non-buddhists, more or less the same thing. That if we talk about buddhist… how can we talk about buddhist philosophy in comparison with Western philosophy when most of the texts are not translated? So it will increase knowledge for the benefit of both buddhists and non-buddhists and others.
Posted: 6 Dec 2012