As historians, archaeologists, and database analysts affiliated with the Database of Religious History (DRH; religiondatabase.org), we share with the Seshat: Global History Databank team, authors of a recent study published in Nature, an excitement about the potential for deep and sustained collaborations between historians and analysts to answer big questions about human history. We have serious concerns, however, by the approach to the quantitative coding of historical data taken by the Seshat team, as revealed in the backing data (seshatdatabank.info/nature), as well as by a lack of clarity concerning the degree of involvement of expert historians in the coding process. The apparent lack of appreciation for historical scholarship that this coding strategy displays runs the risk of permanently alienating the community of academic historians, who are essential future collaborators in any project devoted to large-scale historical data analysis. In the present commentary, we present a preliminary critical review of their latest article, “Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods Throughout World History” (2019).
Different media have been used to spread the teachings of Buddhism, and they have exerted a significant influence upon the development of Buddhist ideas and institutions over time. An oral tradition was first used in ancient India to record and spread the Buddhist Dharma, and later the Pali canon was written down in the 1st century bce. Writing was also conspicuously used to transmit Mahāyāna texts starting in the first centuries of the first millennium. Printing was developed in medieval China probably in connection with the Buddhist desire to create merit through copying the texts. Efforts to print Buddhist texts in Western languages and scripts began in earnest in the late 19th century, and Western printing methods were later adopted by Asian Buddhists to publish the texts in modern times. It is important to appreciate the intricate relationship between the medium that is used to transmit a text and the form of the text itself, as well as the commensurate effects of the texts and their ideas on the medium and its uses in society. The oral medium has many constraints that forced the early texts to assume certain forms that were amenable to oral transmission, and institutions arose to assist in the preservation of these texts as well. Even once writing came to be used, the common people generally did not read but rather heard the text recited by learned monks. Private reading is for the most part a modern invention and it, too, had a distinct influence on the development of Buddhism, leading to modern reformist movements that demanded less superstition, more meditation, and a closer adherence to the teachings found in the canonical texts. The Internet is also shaping the popular reception of Buddhism, as Buddhist teachings and texts proliferate on thousands of websites in a dizzying array of languages.
There are a number of canonical collections in Buddhism rather than a single fixed corpus of texts that all Buddhists regard as “the canon.” The term Tripiṭaka (Sanskrit)/Tipiṭaka (Pāli) refers to the Three Baskets or groups of texts that ideally constitute a canon, which are the Vinaya, Sutta (Pāli)/Sūtra (Sanskrit), and Abhidhamma (Pāli)/Abhidharma (Sanskrit). These are, respectively, the monastic code, the discourses of the Buddha or his disciples, and the psychologically oriented approaches to ontology. Canonical texts are in theory traceable to the words of the Buddha (buddhavacana) or his immediate disciples. Mahayana Buddhist groups were able to add later texts to their canons by allowing for a variety of inspired (pratibhāna) utterances to be viewed as authoritative if they taught the true dharma. The earliest extant complete canon is the Pāli Tipiṭaka of the Theravada school, which tradition holds was compiled during a series of councils held by learned monks after the death of the Buddha. This canon was originally transmitted orally and probably written down in the mid-1st century bce in Sri Lanka, achieving its current state by the time Buddhaghosa wrote his commentaries in the 5th-century. There were a number of other early Buddhist groups that maintained canons in various dialects of Middle Indo-Aryan and Sanskrit. The Vinaya texts diverged among the various groups, and the Abhidharma texts, when they were included at all, were quite different as well. Some of these texts are preserved in the Chinese or Tibetan canonical collections, and others have been found in fragmentary manuscript form in caches from the Gandhāran region. Sanskrit and Prakrit texts were brought from India to China starting in the 2nd century and to Tibet in the 7th century, and both regions engendered comprehensive translation projects. In 374 ce the Chinese scholar-monk Daoan compiled the first comprehensive catalog of the several hundred Buddhist texts that had been brought to China. The catalog that set the standard on which Tang-era manuscript editions of the canon were made was the Kaiyuan Shijiao Lu compiled by Zhisheng in 730 ce, listing 1,076 works, including Āgamas (that are similar to the Pāli Nikāyas), Vinaya texts, Abhidharma texts, and Mahayana Sutras. Texts continued to be brought from India and translated even after this period, but the canon was effectively closed once it began to be printed in the 10th century. In Tibet, scholars were faced with a similarly bewildering plethora of texts and perhaps under the inspiration of the Chinese approach, monks at the Narthang (sNar Thaṅ) Monastery organized the texts into two divisions: the Kanjur (Bka’ ’gyur), regarded as the word of the Buddha, and the Tanjur (Bstan ’gyur) that includes commentaries, associated treatises, and ancillary literature. These were printed on woodblocks and therefore essentially fixed in the 14th century.
This article argues that Buddhist attitudes towards the written word in major Therav®da regions of Southeast Asia were strongly influenced by Mah®y®na Buddhism. Writing is not mentioned in the P®li canon of the Therav®da Buddhists, and no emphasis was put on the idea of worshipping books in authoritative Therav®da literature, save a few words in an eleventh-century sub-commentarial text. The early generations of Therav®da Buddhists, not surprisingly, had an ambivalent relationship to writing and there is little evidence to suggest that they revered it. On the other hand, from the earliest times, seminal Mah®y®na texts have reserved their highest praise for the Dharma-bearing written word, and archeological and iconographic evidence as well as accounts of Chinese travelers suggest that st‚pas were indeed made to enshrine texts and that books were the subject of votive cults. From the end of the first millennium CE, however, some Therav®da communities in Southeast Asia did begin to revere the written word in a Buddhist context by constructing beautiful libraries to house the texts, making texts out of gold, enshrining them in st‚pas, and even worshipping them outright. In places such as Burma, Sri Lanka and central Thailand, this change of attitude coincided with the height of Mah®y®na influence. Moreover, in the northern Thai kingdom of Lan Na, there does not appear ever to have been any significant Mah®y®na presence and consequently, the more reverential Mah®y®na attitudes towards writing do not seem to have been imbibed by the culture, even though writing was well-known and fairly widely utilized.
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