Tagged: Mahānidāna Sutta
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Bucknell - Conditioned Arising Evolves (1999)
1Roderick S. Bucknell's article argues that the well-known twelve-link chain of Conditioned Arising (paṭicca-samuppāda) is a simplified and structurally distorted version of a more complex, branching ancestral doctrine that was altered during early oral transmission. He posits that different textual versions, such as the "looped," "branched," and "Sutta-nipāta" accounts, represent fragments or derivatives of this original form, in which consciousness (viññāṇa) arose from two distinct causal sources - one from ignorance and activities, and another from the interaction of sense organs (saḷāyatana) and sense objects, for which `nāma-rūpa` was the original collective term. The process of memorization and recitation, particularly in reverse, likely flattened this branching structure into a linear sequence, which in turn necessitated a scholastic reinterpretation of key terms like `nāma-rūpa` (as mind-body) and `viññāṇa` (as rebirth consciousness) to make the new, simplified chain coherent.
Wynne - The ātman and its negation (2010)
2The famous Buddhist "No Self" (anātman) doctrine is largely absent from the earliest texts because the original teachings were founded on a different and more subtle philosophy than the later, standard interpretation. Early critiques, such as the "Not-Self" (anattā) teaching, are grounded in a principle of "epistemological conditioning," where fundamental concepts including "self," "existence," and even space-time are not ultimate realities but are dependently originated through cognitive processes. This is why the early texts pragmatically avoid direct ontological statements like "the self does not exist," instead guiding practitioners to see that identifying with conditioned phenomena is "unsuitable" and thereby transcend the very conceptual framework that creates a sense of self. The explicit "No Self" doctrine developed later, as seen in texts like the *Vajirā Sutta* and the Abhidharma, when this subtle philosophy gave way to a "reductionistic realism" that analyzes the person as a collection of essenceless components within an objectively real world, thus shifting the focus from a radical critique of conceptuality to the denial of a specific entity.