Tagged: Early Buddhist texts
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Anālayo - The Buddha's Awakening (2021)
1A comparative study of early Buddhist texts suggests that differing accounts of the Buddha's awakening do not represent competing theories of realization, but rather evolving methods of describing a single, non-conceptual event. The author argues that the awakening was a direct, non-conceptual breakthrough to the experience of Nirvana, which is fundamentally beyond words.
Drewes - A Historical Buddha After All? (2023)
2In this paper, David Drewes refutes Oskar von Hinüber's arguments for the historicity of the Buddha, reaffirming his position that there is no reliable evidence to establish the Buddha as a historical figure. Drewes systematically dismantles von Hinüber's reasoning, arguing that the earliness of a text does not guarantee its historicity, as the early Buddhist texts are fundamentally concerned with supernatural events rather than historical records. He deconstructs specific claims, such as the interpretation of the Upaka story through the "criterion of embarrassment" and the early dating of the *Mahāparinibbānasutta*, by providing alternative explanations rooted in literary tropes, polemics, or philological analysis. Drewes concludes that scholarship on the historical Buddha has relied on fallacious arguments from authority and subjective interpretations rather than scientific evidence, and that without such evidence, the Buddha's existence remains a matter of faith rather than a demonstrable historical fact.
Hinūber - Hoary Past And Hazy Memory - On The History Of Early Buddhist Texts (2006)
3Oskar V. Hinūber argues that early Buddhist texts contain "historical memory" which can be used for dating and cautious historical analysis, challenging the notion that ancient India lacked a sense of history. By examining the evolution of sutta opening formulas, he identifies an archaic syntactical structure, traceable to Indo-Iranian, that refers to obscure market towns (*nigamas*) and Brahmin villages (*brāhmaṇagāmas*), representing an older textual layer than the more common references to major cities and monasteries. Applying this critical method to the *Mahāparinibbānasuttanta*, he posits a pre-Mauryan composition date (c. 350-320 BC) based on its description of Pātaliputta as a future commercial hub rather than a political capital and its downplaying of the Moriyas, which contrasts with later Buddhist texts that actively incorporated contemporary rulers like Aśoka and Kaniṣka. This early dating suggests that while the text is primarily hagiography replete with mythology, it may preserve genuine historical details from the decades immediately following the Buddha's death.