Parable of the Hamlet in Ruins

Transcription

If I were doing this really "F.A.Q. style", [i.e.,] "frequently-asked-questions", one of the most frequently asked questions I get is, "But do we really know what the Buddha originally said?" How can we actually know what the Buddha taught, thought, what his philosophy was, before all these mysterious centuries came and went. People ask me all kinds of questions about Buddhism, and, at least half of the time, they ask me questions that they think they already know the answer to, as if they're going to trap me in some kind of cognitive-dissonance-conundrum, and then they're shocked that, no, I just know the answer to the question, and it's just a fact, and they could have known it, and they never did. So, here's a big one: do we know what the Buddha actually said? Do we have an historical record of what the Buddha said, and taught and thought, or, is it some mystery, lost in the passage of centuries? Guess what? The answer is, yes, we do know. And we know the same way we know what Plato thought, and how Aristotle thought, and how all kinds of philosophers from the Han dynasty in ancient China thought. And we know it because somebody wrote it down. It's not surprising at all that Buddhism survived, as a written philosophy. Buddhism is one of the most influential philosophies in the world, and it happens to be a philosophy that was paired with a religion that convinced millions of people (not thousands, but millions) that the most important thing they could do with their money was donate it to Buddhist monks so they could copy out the texts by hand to preserve them and recite them orally in public performances. When you've got that kind of weight, that kind of patronage backing you... Let me just translate, "Patronage" means money. When you've got that kind of money supporting your philosophy, then it's not really surprising at all that it survives the centuries. Let's look at a comparison that failed: the philosophy of Lucretius. Maybe 80% of you don't know who Lucretius was, or the name is just slightly familiar from something you heard on National Public Radio, or some kind of pretentious source like that. Lucretius was one of the most influential philosophers in the history of the world. Did his philosophy survive? Yes. How? It was written down on paper. Is anyone surprised, is anyone impressed, that this ancient philosophy managed to make it through the centuries? Well, only for one reason, and that is that a different religion, a different philosophy tried to persecute the followers of Lucretius, tried to destroy the texts written down about Lucretius (and his own texts), so that none were left. What was the religion that persecuted the philosophy of Lucretius? Christianity. So, history is funny that way. Yeah, sometimes we're surprised, we're impressed that something ancient survived into the modern era, because, in the centuries in-between, some group of people who had money, and violence, and armies behind them, tried to destroy it. That was the case with Lucretius, but still Lucretius is still here, you can get him out of the library, in almost any language. It has been translated into English a lot better than the philosophy of the Buddha has been translated. There's a sad comparison: how many translators have worked on Lucretius, as opposed to how many translators have studied the Pali canon, just in the last few hundred years. Well, um... Did Buddhism encounter any similar obstacle in its history in the last few centuries? Yes. Yes, actually. There was another religion and another philosophy that tried to exterminate the followers of Buddhism and destroy all of the texts, and all of the statues, and every remnant of Buddhism, and it was pretty successful in a little country you might have heard of called India, and another area to the north of India that's today known as Pakistan and Afghanistan. Do you know where I'm going with this? Yes, that's right, Islam, as a religion, was very, very successful in destroying Buddhism, in destroying any trace of its teachings. You can look further east to a country like Indonesia. There are still a lot of tourists who go to visit the ruins of Buddhist civilization in Indonesia, places like Borobudur, but, (guess what?) today, the vast majority of people in Indonesia are Mulsim, and the Buddhists who are there immigrated more recently from China. The indigenous tradition of the religion has disappeared. Ah, but maybe I'm not addressing the real question looming here. Why do people find it so surprising when I give this simple, direct answer, that, yeah, the philosophy of the Buddha is written down. Yeah, you can know what it is, if you just do the same kind of work I did, you can read it. There's no excuse for being balefully ignorant of one of the most influential philosophies in the history of the world. Well, it's because Buddhists themselves like to tell a lot of lies about this. I can't blame Muslims for telling these lies: Mulsims are straightforward about what their religion is, and what Buddhism is, and why one group of people hates the other. But Buddhists themselves have this long list of excuses for why everybody's got time... [roaring sound above] (Air-force jets passing overhead.) ...everybody's got time to worship a statue, everybody's got time for a long list of rituals and ceremonies, but nobody gets around to studying the philosophy of the Buddha. I remember I had a funny experience with a Zen Buddhist monk (in the Korean tradition of Zen) who was actively trying to convert me to Korean Zen, and I kept pointing out to him, "Yeah, but, you guys don't study the philosophy, you don't have any contact with the philosophy of Buddhism," "You just perform these rituals, day after day, and you chant the same one sutta again and again." (A sutta that barely managed to get over the fence from badly-garbled Sanskrit into garbled Chinese, and then from Chinese into Korean.) And, you know, from a Zen perspective, from the perspective of a lot of modern, authoritarian traditions, anyone who reads the texts is a threat to the authority of the monk in charge. It's a lot more convenient to organize your religion around silence, subservience to authority, nobody asking questions, nobody debating the philosophy. And if anyone says, "Wait a minute, what about this guy called, 'The Buddha'?" "His name is the same as the name of the religion." "Shouldn't we be reading what he actually wrote or said or something?" Oh, [there is] a list of excuses ready to go, one of which is, "Oh, oh, well, there are more than 40,000 sutras recording the Buddha's teaching, we could never study them all." Yeah, that's a great excuse, like, you can't read all 40,000, so why even bother trying to read, say, 500 or 1,000, right? Other [excuses] are, "Oh, no, no, the real teaching of the Buddha is lost in the mists of time, so, you know, there's really no point." "Therefore, just perform this ritual, just do this meditation practice, just drink this magic tea...". Buddhists [have] a lot of interest in drinking fancy tea for some reason, not so much [interest in] reading the philosophy. And, you know, this will be the substitute [offered as an excuse]. [As if] somehow you're going to magically re-capture the essence of the original Buddha's teaching, not through study and hard work, but through rituals and drinking tea, and asking for donations, and then spending the money from those donations, that's been going on for a few centuries now, and, mysteriously, nobody gets back to the original philosophy of the Buddha, so, I think, maybe we could all afford to change tactics at this point. However, another big comparison is to something like Jesus: his original teachings were not very well recorded, and yet Christians are obsessed with reading the Bible, and with getting familiar with the earliest writings available about Jesus. That doesn't seem to be a big hang-up for them, so... there's more than one comparison possible. But Buddhism came out of a cultural background very different from Judaism, very different from Jesus-ism, whatever you call that these days, and, y'know, that was different partly because ancient India (before Buddhism emerged) was already a culture obsessed with the idea that a man should memorize and recite sacred text every day. A man who was a lawyer, or the equivalent of a mayor, a chieftan, he wouldn't rely on written law, no, no, no, the law of the county or the kingdom, that would be something set out in simple verses to be memorized and recited, and one of the reasons for that is that when you have a text memorized, you can call it to mind immediately. You can seem very authoritative, you can seem like you're in charge. In Europe, we don't have a tradition like this. We don't expect the chieftan or the king to have the laws memorized, and ready-to-mind at a moment's notice. But it's humanly possible, I mean, the number of people who have memorized the entire text of Hamlet is amazing, because Hamlet is really long and hard to memorize, and many of the actors who are chosen to memorize Hamlet aren't particularly intelligent, they're just really good-looking, or charismatic, or, y'know, they're chosen for the role for some other reason. So, ordinary people can memorize a lot of text. Human history has shown that again and again. But ancient India was obsessed with this notion... well, let's not fault them. This was a central, cultural value, already under Hinduism with reciting the Vedas, with reciting law, with reciting sacred texts in the ancient Hindu tradition. And Buddhism emerged in that context, so did ancient Jainism. Jainism, again, volumes and volumes of text were produced by Jainism, recited, memorized, performed. Right? Then we transition into a period of history when that's backed up with meticulous, hand-made books, copying these texts out, again and again. Hey, how did Lucretius survive? Lucretius was a philosopher, he didn't have millions of people devoting their lives to copying out his writing by hand and memorizing it, and performing it in public. He didn't have millions of people who believed that this was a profoundly meaningful, magical, transcendental act, to try to keep his words alive, in exactly the form he wrote them, but Buddhism did. Buddhism had the weight of this cultural obsession behind it, from day 1. And so did Jainism. Jainism, again, the text still exists. It's not that surprising. Maybe it's much more surprising that we have any texts left from a culture like ancient Egypt, but, we do. We have texts from ancient China. The ancient Han Chinese didn't have this culture of preserving text. So, Buddhist texts survived, despite being conquered by Islam, because Buddhism spread outside of the area that was conquered by Islam. Buddhism disappeared in India, Buddhism disappeared in Indonesia, if the Muslims had conquered all of Asia right up to Japan, then, yeah, Buddhism would have disappeared from this world, and we wouldn't know what the Buddha taught. But in places like Sri Lanka, in Myanmar, yup, you can read what the Buddha really said... I'll come back to how that is, [but] to me, it shouldn't be surprising, it shouldn't be shocking to anyone, and, yeah, in fragments, it survived in Tibet (Tibet was never conquered by Muslims), it survived in China in a very garbled form, in the Chinese Agamas, you can [barely] piece it together [from Chinese sources], yeah, China, also, [was] not conquered by Muslim armies, although they've had their own tumultuous history. That's the long and the short of it. Of course the texts exist. Any monk who tells you the texts don't exist is offering you the most pathetic excuse for his own ignorance, and it is his job to be a custodian of these texts, it is his job to represent this philosophy, to give voice to this philosophy, and to practice the philosophy. It's nobody else's job. It's not my job! If you're a Buddhist monk, you should step up, and rep your set; you should do the bare minimum here. Okay, then, the other area of slightly phony skepticism is, "Well, you got this thing called the Pali Canon." "There are a lot of pages, and it's very heavy." "It looks like hard work to study." Y'know, "How much of this is the recorded word of the Buddha?" Well, look, man, go to the library, and look at the works of Plato. Y'know, it's also really big, it's really heavy. Yeah, if you want to dig into the footnotes with Plato, how do we really know what Plato wrote? Y'know, there's more than one version, there are comparisons, there are minor differences in wording, it's heavy, it's daunting. Guess what? So is Shakespeare. How do we know what the real text is of Shakespeare's Hamlet? It was a lot of work for somebody, sure. You can go through, you can compare different extant manuscripts, you can look at minor differences in wording, different versions, yeah, that exists. But, for 99.9% of people, those issues are irrelevant. 99.9% of people see Hamlet, read Plato, hear about Lucretius on the radio, and they're not digging into the text in that kind of detail. I have! I've written some essays, you can read Canon and Reason, it deals with some of these more detailed issues of "How did the text survive?" What are the issues with comparative reading of different sources, and how do we know what we know. Man... are five people going to read that essay? Maybe 15 people are going to read that essay? Very few people have the kind of detailed interest to dig into that issue. And I'm not complaining! It's natural! It's the same with Shakespeare or Plato: almost nobody wants to know. So, don't pretend that those issues, those kinds of footnoted, scholarly issues, in establishing the details of the text, are a valid excuse for not knowing the philosophy at all. They're not a valid excuse for the average person, and they're definitely not an excuse for a Buddhist monk, who has a kind of professional obligation to know about this guy called the Buddha whose name is in the name of the religion. [Noise of an airplane overheaed.] We're still fighting World War Two here. It hasn't ended yet. So, you look at a text, for example, like the Bhaddekaratta Sutta. You have multiple versions of the text that are grouped together in the Pali canon, and already in the ancient period, there was an interest in preserving more than one interpretation of the text. There's a poem at its core, which is the same in the different versions, and then we get different Buddhist monks, and the Buddha himself, offering, uh, an interpretation or an explanation of the poem. Also built into that example is the idea that it's the obligation of the monk to memorize and recite this kind of religious poetry. So, yeah, at its core, Buddhism was a religion obsessed with memorizing and reciting the philosophical poetry written down by the master, by the founder of the religion, the guy we call the Buddha, and, y'know, any concerns you might have, that the poem as it exists today is not precisely what existed 2,500 years ago, it's a valid concern, and I'd encourage you, if you've got the brains, you can apply that concern to Plato, you can apply it to any other ancient text, but, when you dig into those details, it's not going to give you the answers to the questions you want to know. The questions that most people are interested in --philosophically-- are not philological details. And the fact that those philological details exist isn't an excuse for your own ignorance. I can do another Youtube video dealing with philological details, but, I mean, like, maybe 5 people are going to watch it, right?