How Buddhism Began: The Conditioned Genesis of the Early Teachings

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How Buddhism Began: The Conditioned Genesis of the Early Teachings

By Richard F. Gombrich

Reviewed by Holder, John J. Jr.

Philosophy East and West

Vol. 50, No. 2 (April 2000) pp. 297-299

Copyright 2000 by University of Hawaii Press

Hawaii, USA

p. 297 How Buddhism Began: The Conditioned Genesis of the Early Teachings Philosophy East and West, Vol. 50, No. 2 (April 2000)

While the number of books on Buddhism has grown rapidly in the past decade, both popular and scholarly interest in the earliest Buddhist traditions has lagged far behind. The scant attention scholars have given to early Buddhism -- by which I mean the Pāli Canon and the developments of early Buddhist scholasticism -- has produced several useful historical and anthropological studies, but few indeed have attempted a critical study of the philosophical and religious ideas proffered by the earliest Buddhists. How Buddhism Began, authored by Richard Gombrich (Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford and President of the Pali Text Society), is an excellent small book that begins to fill this lamentable void in Buddhist studies. The five chapters of the book were adapted from a lecture and four seminar papers given by Gombrich in 1994 as the Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion. As Gombrich himself notes in the introduction, chapter 1 is a slightly revised version of the public lecture meant to be accessible to a wider audience, whereas the four seminar papers (chapters 2-5) were intended for those who have a scholarly interest in early Buddhism.

As much as addressing some important issues in the development of early doctrines, How Buddhism Began sets a research agenda for further scholarship. Gombrich not only poses many important questions about early Buddhism that need the attention of scholars, but he also demonstrates in two important ways the critical methodology that scholars should use in addressing such questions.

First, Gombrich rejects the view fashionable with many historians and anthropologists of religion that the late date of the oldest manuscript evidence (fifth century C.E.) permits no extrapolation about the earliest Buddhist traditions. He holds a middle way regarding the attribution of ideas to the Buddha and his early followers: while avoiding the oversimplified view that the Pāli Canon is an exact record of the teachings of the Buddha and the other extreme (the aforementioned skepticism of deconstructionists), he traces the likely origins and development of key ideas and doctrines based on careful readings of the texts. As Gombrich properly notes, such methods can only yield tentative conclusions, but where preponderance of evidence warrants, he does not shy away from asserting that a doctrine or idea is likely to be traceable back to the Buddha himself.

A second point regarding method is arguably the greatest virtue of the book. Gombrich demonstrates a detective's skill in sifting through textual clues to the development of such key issues as the Buddhist conception of kamma and the shift in emphasis from meditation to insight in the canonical texts. His mastery of Pāli and

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Sanskrit is everywhere evident, as is his detailed knowledge of Brahmanical texts and traditions. Except for the fifth chapter, Gombrich's investigations seem to be sketches, rather than full treatments, of the arguments he would offer to support the conclusions he cautiously draws -- a more protracted study would investigate the numerous follow-up questions raised. (Clearly this was a limitation imposed on Gombrich by the format of the lecture series.) The fifth and final chapter of the book gives the reader a full account of the kind of scholarship Gombrich has in mind for the critical study of early Buddhism. In this chapter, Gombrich carefully unpacks the development of the canonical story of the conversion of Aṅgulimāla (the mass murderer who wore a garland of his victims' fingers). Gombrich not only retranslates key passages of the text (Aṅgulimāla Sutta, Majjhima Nikāya II.97-105), but, based on a piece of brilliant scholarly detective work shows how the versions of a Pāli passage in the recensions known to us and the great commentators must be wrong. In this light he reconstructs the Pāli passage itself to show that Aṅgulimāla was probably a follower of Śiva and was committed to a form of tantra. This sheds substantially new light on the way early Buddhist texts developed in large part as reactions to the doctrines of other traditions extant in ancient India.

In the opening passages of the first chapter, Gombrich relates the underlying assumption of his study: the Buddha's teachings were formulated in response to social and intellectual conditions. How Buddhism Began offers numerous instances where the Pāli Canon must be read as a response to Brahmanical traditions, in particular the Upanishads. In the second chapter, "How, Not What: Kamma as Reaction to Brahminism," Gombrich offers a careful analysis of the Buddha's anti-essentialism, his rejection of the metaphysics of "being" central to Brahmanism. Ethical action (kamma), not ontology, is the heart of the Buddha's soteriology. Insofar as the Buddha held an ontology at all, his was the famous doctrine of "conditioned genesis" (paṭicca-samuppāda). As Gombrich correctly emphasizes, the Buddha turned Brahmanical ontology on its head -- ethicizing all of the most crucial religious terms. Gombrich gives this point some emphasis: "I do not see how one could exaggerate the importance of the Buddha's ethicisation of the world, which I regard as a turning point in the history of civilisation" (p. 51).

Another major theme that threads through the five chapters of the book is that the early disciples of the Buddha, the compilers of the canonical texts, were unintentionally guilty of changing the meaning of key texts because of their literal interpretations of what was originally intended as allegory. Gombrich takes a controversial stand when he suggests that such unintended literalism accounts for much of Buddhist cosmology. In his view, the Buddha never meant to offer a cosmology, and such discourses as the Aggaññā Sutta were the Buddha's way of making fun of the very need for a cosmology as a foundation for religious development. While there is certainly much merit in Gombrich's claim, it has the unfortunate side effect of opening the doors to endless debate about which parts of the canon are allegory and which are to be taken literally. Sadly, few scholars aside from Gombrich have sufficient mastery of Pāli and the canonical literature to distinguish properly the literal from the allegorical.

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The fourth chapter, "Retracing an Ancient Debate: How Insight Worsted Meditation in the Pali Canon," makes the case that the emphasis placed on certain key doctrines in the Pāli Canon is the direct result of a convoluted series of debates among those early disciples who preserved the canonical texts. Gombrich applies this approach to explain why current recensions of the Pāli Canon give precedence to insight (paññā) over meditation (samādhi) and faith (saddhā) as the most effective means for achieving religious liberation (nibbāna). The argument is extremely intricate and sometimes difficult to follow, but the general point seems to be that whereas the Buddha himself and the earliest formulations within the canon do not privilege insight, later scholiasts read finer distinctions into the canonical sources to justify their own conclusions.

While Gombrich's book does not really tell us "how Buddhism began," it does give us valuable insights into early Buddhism and how the early doctrines developed into the institutionalized forms we find in the writings of Theravāda Buddhism. More than this, the book is a call for further scholarship that emulates its sound methods. How Buddhism Began is highly recommended reading for both the expert and novice in the field of Buddhist studies.