Buddhist Studies

In this Seminar in Buddhism and Buddhist Texts we will be reading selected Buddhist literature―primarily Sūtra and Vinaya―as testimonies to the orally formed and orally transmitted texts and teachings of early Buddhist communities in India. The received early Buddhist corpus is inherently multivocal, in the sense that its primary source is intrinsically constituted by multiple, parallel versions, which are the end result of the activity of multiple lineages of oral transmission spread geographically spread out across and beyond India.

Our textual work will foreground the received texts of one of these lineage of oral transmission, those stemming from the Pali transmission. This approach allows us to engage with one particular witness of this multivocal transmission on its own terms, approaching it with the synchronic integrity it requires—as a lived text within its broader religio-historical container of textual transmission. Occasionally, we will also take into account relevant exegetical material, whose existence was contiguous with the textual transmission of the canonical tradition. Concurrently, we will be keeping an eye on the parallel versions preserved in other Indic languages such as Sanskrit and Gandhari as well as in Chinese and Tibetan translation in order to identify patterns of textual and doctrinal development, thus addressing the diachronic dimension of these texts.

This integrated approach aims to facilitate a first-hand appreciation of the textual fabric of the early Buddhist corpus, as well as of both the potentials and the limitations of early Buddhist philology.

Repeat rules: Course may be repeated for credit without restriction.

Also listed as: EALANG C220, S,SEASN C220