Tagged: Mahāvagga
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Fiordalis - Miracles in Indian Buddhist narratives and doctrine (2010)
1The narrative of the Kāśyapa brothers' conversion, a cornerstone of early Buddhist texts like the Mahāvagga, illustrates a "thaumaturgical impasse" where the Buddha initially fails to convert rival ascetics through numerous displays of superhuman power, such as taming a fire-breathing serpent, but fails to convert the ascetic Kāśyapa, who remains convinced of his own spiritual superiority. The impasse is only broken when the Buddha employs telepathy to read Kāśyapa's prideful thoughts and confronts him directly, which finally leads to his conversion and is followed by the Buddha's "Fire Sermon." By comparing alternate versions of this story from different Buddhist schools, the author demonstrates that while some accounts suggest a hierarchy in which telepathy and teaching are superior to physical miracles, other versions blend these categories, indicating that early Buddhists did not hold a single, unified view on the relationship and effectiveness of the three types of miracles—superhuman power, mind-reading, and teaching the Dharma.
Vetter - Explanations of dukkha (1984)
2In a philological analysis of the First Noble Truth, Tilmann Vetter argues that the concluding statement on the five aggregates (*upādānakkhandhā*) is not a summary of suffering (*dukkha*), but rather another example of it. He bases this on the presence of the coordinating particle *pi* ("also") in this final statement in older Pāli manuscripts, such as those used in Hermann Oldenberg's edition of the Mahāvagga. Vetter contends that later editors and commentators, notably Buddhaghosa, worked from texts where this *pi* was missing, leading them to develop an anachronistic interpretation of the aggregates as a summary or foundation for all other forms of suffering. He asserts that the original reading with *pi* is more historically sound, presenting the five aggregates as a distinct, added item in the list of things that are *dukkha*, with the term *sankhittena* ("in brief") indicating it is a concise point requiring further explanation, not a summation of what precedes it.