Buddhist Scriptures Read online

  One year later, the Harvard Pali scholar Henry Clarke Warren published what was to be one of the most widely read anthologies of Buddhist texts, Buddhism in Translations. It was drawn entirely from Pali sources, and contained a much wider range of materials than had been previously available. He included jātaka tales (stories of the Buddha’s previous lives), selections from commentaries, and long extracts from Buddhaghosa’s massive compendium on practice, the Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga). From this point on, these works provided much of the material for future anthologies, which were often made up entirely of extracts (often no more than snippets) from translations available elsewhere, with the bulk of the materials drawn from the Pali. There were, however, some important exceptions.

  Dwight Goddard’s popular 1938 A Buddhist Bible was organized by language of origin and contained works that had not been translated into English before. These included the Awakening of Faith and the Surangama Sūtra (both Chinese works misidentified as being of Sanskrit origin by Goddard), and an important meditation text from the Tiantai school of Chinese Buddhism. Going against the trend to excerpt ‘key’ passages, Goddard included full translations of these texts. A Buddhist Bible is not, however, without its eccentricities. For example, Goddard rearranged the Diamond Sūtra into a more ‘sensible’ order, he included the Daoist classic, the Dao de jing, and he added a work derived from his own meditation experience, entitled ‘Practicing the Seventh Stage’. Another important exception to the recycling trend was Edward Conze’s Buddhist Texts Through the Ages (1954), which brought together some of the leading scholars of the day to translate works never before rendered into English. Especially important here were the translations of tantric materials by David Snellgrove.

  In 1959, Edward Conze published Buddhist Scriptures, which, unlike his earlier anthology, was dedicated largely to his own translations, with a handful of shorter texts from Snellgrove, D. T. Suzuki, E. M. Hare and Trevor Leggett. The book focused almost exclusively on Indian Buddhism (of 242 pages, 223 are from Indian works; there are 11 pages from Japan, 4 from China and 4 from Tibet). Reflecting Conze’s own scholarly interests, there was a strong emphasis on doctrine and philosophy. These works became mainstays of future anthologies and provided the basis for much of the knowledge about Buddhism provided in college and university classrooms.

  Mention should also be made of Stephan Beyer’s 1974 The Buddhist Experience: Sources and Interpretations, now sadly out of print, which included a rich range of works from Pali, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese and Japanese, all translated by Beyer. Beyer’s book has been replaced in the same series by John Strong’s anthology The Experience of Buddhism: Sources and Interpretations (1995), which combines new translations with previous translations that often had been difficult to find. Also in 1995, I published an anthology entitled Buddhism in Practice, which sought to represent types of discourse (including ritual manuals, folktales, prayers, sermons, pilgrimage songs and autobiographies) and voices (vernacular, esoteric, domestic and female) that had not been sufficiently represented in previous anthologies and standard accounts of Buddhism.

  The organization of the anthologies was often telling. Some were chronological, beginning with Pali texts (‘the earliest sources’) and moving then to Indian Mahāyāna, to Chinese, then Tibetan, and ending with some works of Japanese Zen (drawn often from the translations of Suzuki). Other volumes were organized geographically, focusing on the great Buddhist civilizations of India, China and Japan. Tibet suffered a strange fate in this schema: because of the paucity of Tibetan translations (due in part to the view of some that the religion of Tibet was not an authentic form of Buddhism), anthologizers inevitably drew from the four volumes edited by W. Y. Evans-Wentz, usually from The Tibetan Book of the Dead or Tibet’s Great Yogī, Milarepa. The president of the Buddhist Society of London, Christmas Humphreys, augmented the Tibetan materials in his The Wisdom of Buddhism (1960) with a selection from Madame Blavatsky’s The Voice of the Silence, a work which she claimed came from a manuscript in the secret Senzar language but which scholars regard as her own fabrication.

  Whether the works were organized by chronology or by country of origin, the great anthologies of Buddhist texts produced over the last century were dominated by works that came from India and from the Pali language and, regardless of their source, placed a heavy emphasis on doctrine and philosophy.

  The Present Volume

  Why another volume of Buddhist scriptures? One answer is the sheer size of the literature of Buddhism. The Taishō edition of the Chinese Buddhist canon contains 2184 texts in 55 volumes, with a supplement of 45 volumes. One edition of the Tibetan canon contains 1108 works that are traditionally regarded as spoken by the Buddha, or spoken with his sanction, and an additional 3461 treatises by Indian Buddhist masters. These are only the so-called ‘canonical’ works; they do not include the thousands upon thousands of other texts in Chinese and Tibetan that were never included in a canon, texts that may have been more widely read, recited and revered than those in the canon. Nor do the various canons include all the Buddhist texts written in languages other than Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, or Tibetan: works in languages such as Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Thai, Burmese and Vietnamese, or in forgotten languages like Tangut and Tokharian B. A tiny portion of this ocean of texts has been translated into a European language. A book the size of the present volume, entitled Buddhist Scriptures, could be published every year for centuries, indeed over many lifetimes, without completing the task of the translator, each volume representing the wealth of the tradition without duplicating a single text.

  The size of the literature, then, provides one reason for the ongoing project of digesting the dharma. But were this the only reason to continue, one might simply begin with the first volume of the Chinese canon and begin translating. Yet this has not occurred; other principles have shaped the project of translation. Over the history of Buddhism, the works that have been translated from one language into another have been, first of all, the works that were preserved; many texts have been lost over the centuries, known to us only from a title mentioned elsewhere or from a brief quotation in another text. The possibility of preservation is enhanced by producing multiple copies of the text, a time-consuming process in the ages prior to printing. It is noteworthy that Buddhist texts (or at least their authors) sought to promote their preservation by including in them exhortations from the Buddha himself of the marvellous stores of merit awaiting anyone who would copy the text.

  Woodblock printing was invented in China, and it is again noteworthy that the oldest extant printed book in the world is a Chinese translation of the Diamond Sūtra, dated 868 CE. This version of the sūtra contains a notation from the person who commissioned the carving, stating that he had had copies printed for free distribution in memory of his parents. This suggests that the texts that tended to survive were those that were somehow used, and the study of a text was just one of many uses. The Diamond Sūtra is one of the most difficult of Mahāyāna sūtras; its meaning remains vexing to scholars, yet it is also a text in which the Buddha states, ‘But again, Subhūti, on whatever piece of ground one will proclaim this sūtra, that piece of ground will become an object of worship.’

  Some texts survived because they set forth a new doctrine that sparked controversy and commentary, some survived because they set forth a new ritual that was considered particularly efficacious, some because they were the works of a monk who gathered a large number of disciples, who founded an important monastery, or who advised an emperor. Some texts survived because the text itself served as a talisman. Some texts survived simply because they were texts; one of the ways that pious Buddhist kings made merit for themselves and their kingdoms was by sponsoring the copying of the entire canon. And once texts had been copied, it was also considered a pious act to preserve them. Over 40,000 manuscripts and documents, the great majority Buddhist texts, were discovered in a cave library at Dunhuang in western China in 1900.

  This br
ief account of the survival of Buddhist texts still leaves us at a certain remove from the contents of the present volume. Thus, beyond the principle of preservation is the principle of representation. This volume, despite its small size, seeks somehow to be ‘representative’ of Buddhist scriptures. Such representation might be achieved using any number of criteria, either individually or in combination. One might seek chronological representation, attempting to demonstrate the sweep of Buddhism across the millennia from the first teachings of the Buddha himself (to the extent that they can be identified) to the most recent words of a contemporary Buddhist teacher, such as the Dalai Lama. One might seek geographical representation. Over the course of many centuries after the death of the Buddha, his words and his image made their way from India to the nations now named Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, Tibet, Mongolia, Korea and Japan, and later to Europe, the Americas and Australia. One might seek representation by genre. Traditional genres include sūtra (discourses attributed to the Buddha), vinaya (works on monastic discipline), abhidharma (analyses of mental and physical processes), tantra (a word impossible to translate, rendered inadequately as ‘ritual texts’), śāstra (’treatises’ by named authors on a wide variety of topics) and jātaka (accounts by the Buddha of his former lives). To this can be added works that might be described as history, diary, biography, autobiography, hagiography, iconography, architecture, astrology, choreography, pharmacology, music, logic, cosmology, pilgrimage guide, travelogue, miracle tale, morality ledger and prayer.

  Given the extent of the tradition, whether measured in time, in space, or in genre, no single book could be considered truly representative. The present volume thus attempts representation in a more modest way, by offering a range of works from a variety of historical periods, geographical origins and literary styles. But this would seem to be the most minimal and self-evident of principles. Any principle of inclusion is also a principle of exclusion. Such principles are not formulated in a vacuum, but are the result of a particular history.

  As discussed briefly above, anthologies of Buddhist texts in the West have reflected the state of the scholarship of their day, and the assumptions of that scholarship about Buddhism. In the last decades of the eighteenth century the conclusion began to be drawn that the traditions observed in Burma, Siam, Ceylon, Tartary, Japan and China were somehow the same, that the Sagamoni Borcan mentioned by Marco Polo in his description of Ceylon, the Godama mentioned by Father Sangermano of the Roman Catholic mission to Rangoon, the Fo of China, the Khodom of Bali and the Booddhu of India were somehow the same person, and that the peoples of those nations were adherents of the same religion, called Buddhism.

  The history of the study of Buddhism in Europe and America is intimately connected to the history of philology and the history of colonialism. By the time that India became part of the British empire, Buddhism was long dead in the land of its origin, present only in the form of palm-leaf manuscripts, stone inscriptions, statues and monuments. What was called ‘original Buddhism’ or ‘primitive Buddhism’ was thus invented, largely by scholars in Europe, based on their reading of these manuscripts, inscriptions, statues and monuments, all written in Sanskrit or Sanskritic languages. The great figures in the science of philology were particularly interested in Sanskrit because it had been recently identified as belonging to the same language family as Greek, Latin and many European languages, including English, French and German. There was much interest in the origins of Buddhism in India and in the person of the Buddha.

  The nearby island of Sri Lanka was also a British colony at the time, with a largely Buddhist population and a substantial literature of Buddhist texts in Pali, a language related to Sanskrit. Many of the early translations of Buddhist texts were therefore from Sanskrit and Pali, and scholars generally accepted the claims of Sinhalese monks that their Buddhism was the Buddhism of the Buddha. The nineteenth century also saw some translations of Buddhist texts from the Chinese, often by French scholars.

  The primary focus in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, remained the Buddhist traditions of India and Sri Lanka. After the Second World War, there was increased interest in Japanese Buddhism, especially Zen. Interest in Southeast Asian Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism grew in the wake of the Vietnam War and the flight of the Dalai Lama into exile after the Chinese invasion of Tibet.

  The anthologies of Buddhist scriptures produced over the past century are very much products of this cultural history, with the early texts focusing, sometimes exclusively, on Pali and Sanskrit texts, with works in other languages (usually limited to Chinese, Japanese and, sometimes, Tibetan) provided as addenda to what was regarded as the core tradition. Even within that tradition, the texts selected tended to be those of the high monastic tradition, focusing especially on doctrine and philosophy, and on the practice of meditation.

  Considerable developments have taken place in the field of Buddhist Studies even since Edward Conze published his Buddhist Scriptures in 1959. Scholars no longer regard Pali Buddhism as ‘original Buddhism’, and there has been extensive research into Buddhist texts in languages other than Pali and Sanskrit. Scholars have also moved away from an exclusive interest in doctrine to work on rituals, institutions and other forms of ‘practice’. In an attempt to represent this new work, in my 1995 Buddhism in Practice, I tried to avoid works on doctrine and texts that were already famous in the West, while including many works from Buddhist traditions beyond India and China. Although perhaps a necessary corrective, this resulted in a somewhat unbalanced approach.

  In an effort to be more representative of the spectrum of the tradition, the present volume includes a considerable number of works from the Pali (including some very famous ones), but also works from Southeast Asia. Also included here are what might be called philosophical texts and doctrinal expositions, recognizing that doctrine and doctrinal controversy have played important roles in the history of Buddhism, but that the history of Buddhism cannot be subsumed in a history of Buddhist doctrine.

  In selecting works that appear here, the principle of length also played a role. The longer each selection, the fewer the selections that can be included. Shorter extracts allow for more chapters, but run the risk of sacrificing content and texture, and hence appreciation. The approach taken here is to err in favour of length (relatively speaking), seeking to avoid a book that is a collection of snippets. There are sixty selections of approximately five printed pages in length, with an additional page of introduction for each selection to provide historical background and context and to alert the reader to the themes and issues to be encountered. In order to provide chapters that can be appreciated with only a single page of introduction, there must also be a principle of accessibility. Because the volume cannot include all of the notes and commentaries that are often required to illuminate a Buddhist text, works have been chosen that, it is hoped, will be of unmediated interest to a non-specialist reader.

  The final, and perhaps most fundamental, principle for a book of translations is the availability of translators. Some early anthologizers, like Paul Carus, relied entirely on the previously published work of others. Others, like Henry Clarke Warren, not only provided entirely new translations, but made those translations themselves. Still others, like Edward Conze, did many of the translations themselves, but relied on other scholars to provide works from other languages.

  Although some of the great figures in the history of Buddhist Studies read Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, Japanese and Tibetan, during the present degenerate age such scholars are increasingly rare. The editor of this volume is certainly not a member of this august company. Thus, the success of any anthology that seeks to represent something of the linguistic range of the Buddhist tradition depends very much on the expertise and generosity of others. I have relied heavily on both the learned advice of my colleagues in the field of Buddhist Studies for suggestions of which
works ought to be included, as well as on their scholarship to then provide translations of those works. I am fortunate to have undertaken this project at a time when there are so many excellent scholars of Buddhism, with such a high level of expertise in so many Buddhist texts and languages. A project like this would have been much more difficult fifty years ago. Approximately a fifth of the translations come from previously published works. Among those translations published here for the first time, approximately half are of works that have not been translated into English before, with the remainder being new translations of previously translated works.

  Since Buddhist Scriptures is published in the Penguin Classics series, it seemed inappropriate to devote the entire volume to previously unknown (or at least untranslated) works. At the same time, it is important to distinguish between those texts that may be deemed classic because of their long tradition of use and influence and those texts that have become classics because of their repeated inclusion in anthologies. I have attempted to include the former and avoid the latter.

  The enumeration of the various principles that provide the rationale for this volume is not intended to suggest that this book is not, unlike its predecessors, a product of its times. Indeed, the brief historical survey above is meant to place this work within a long lineage. Nor is there the slightest assumption that the present volume is in any sense the last word. We should all hope that, sometime soon, someone will have the audacity to undertake a new anthology of Buddhist texts, another futile, but not unrewarding, attempt to digest the dharma.

  An Overview of the Chapters

  My purpose, then, is to present something of the chronological and geographical sweep of the tradition, while representing the continuities that run through Buddhist history and the Buddhist world. Buddhist Scriptures therefore eschews the chronological, geographical and ‘vehicular’ organizational schemes used in previous anthologies. Instead, the volume is organized thematically in five sections, juxtaposing texts from different regions and different chronological periods to demonstrate some of the consistencies of concern across the Buddhist world. In an effort to highlight these connections and consistencies, I provide a brief introduction to each chapter. Let me survey each of the sections very briefly here.