[Y-Indology] samkara tradition and temple worship

[Guest guest]

> It seems that one of the things that Buddhists found most troubling

>about the pudgalavaadins was that there were really too many of them

>to shun.

 

On what evidence are you saying this Philip?

 

I would think that if one were to compare in terms of literature, the

number of works of the Satyasiddhi school is miniscule comparison to

the works of the other schools.

 

That you're saying that they were popular is surprising to me.

 

BTW it is to be noted that none of the philosophical opponents of the

Buddhists seem to be even aware of the Satyasiddhi. They are mainly

only aware of the Sarvaastivaada, Maadhyamika and Yogaacaara.

[Guest guest]

-

"vpcnk" <vpcnk

<INDOLOGY>

Saturday, March 15, 2003 7:32 AM

[Y-Indology] Re: samkara tradition and temple worship

 

 

 

> On what evidence are you saying this Philip?

 

> I would think that if one were to compare in terms of literature, the

> number of works of the Satyasiddhi school is miniscule comparison to

> the works of the other schools.

 

I think that there is evidence that there was a lot more Personalist

literature than has survived. The school seems in its heyday to have been

one of the most popular in Indian Buddhism. Perhaps Pudgalavada was more

popular than scholarly, and produced fewer works than other schools. I will

hunt up the passages that I am remembering.

 

 

 

>

> That you're saying that they were popular is surprising to me.

>

> BTW it is to be noted that none of the philosophical opponents of the

> Buddhists seem to be even aware of the Satyasiddhi. They are mainly

> only aware of the Sarvaastivaada, Maadhyamika and Yogaacaara.

>

>

>

>

>

> indology

>

>

>

> Your use of is subject to

>

>

>

[Guest guest]

Quoting vpcnk <vpcnk:

 

> > It seems that one of the things that Buddhists found most troubling

> >about the pudgalavaadins was that there were really too many of them

> >to shun.

>

> On what evidence are you saying this Philip?

 

Here are some quotes from Priestley's book (obviously my principal source):

 

--begin quote--

 

.... the Pudgalavada did not seem to be very important in the history of

Buddhism. The meagreness of its surviving documents, the strangeness of its

doctrines, at least from the standpoint of what we now think of as orthodox

Buddhism, and the fact that it never had any great following outside of India

may have created the impression that it was no more than a small movement on

the fringe of Buddhism. If so, it was a mistaken impression; we know from

Xuanzang's record of his travels in India that in the seventh century CE one of

the Pudgalavadin schools, the Sammitiya, was second only to the Mahayana in the

number of its adherents. The Pudgalavada was in fact a major strand in the

Buddhist tradition. But its importance is certainly not apparent without some

investigation, and until its importance can be recognized, there is of course

no obvious reason to undertake the investigation.

 

....

 

At least two of the Pudgalavadin schools, the Vatsiputriyas and the Kaurukulaka

branch of the Sammitiyas, survived into the tenth century CE. The Pudgalavada

lasted, then, from about two centuries after the death of the Buddha until the

time when Buddhism finally disappeared in India, a period of well over a

millennium. The Sammitiyas became the largest of the non-Mahayana schools.

When the great Chinese monk Xuanzang travelled through India in the seventh

century CE, he found 66,000 monks of the Sammitiya in over a thousand

monasteries, distributed throughout the Indus and Ganges basins and in the land

between, but concentrated especially in the west; this represented about half

of the monks in the Early Schools and (since there were roughly as many monks

in the Early Schools taken together as in the Mahayana) a quarter of the total

population of Buddhist monks in India. Later in the same century, Yijing

reported that there were many Sammitiyas also in Champa (South Vietnam) and

come in Java and Sumatra. But as the main strength of the Pudgalavada remained

within the Indian subcontinent, the extinction of Buddhism in India also marked

the end of the Pudgalavada.

 

-end quotes--

 

 

>

> I would think that if one were to compare in terms of literature, the

> number of works of the Satyasiddhi school is miniscule comparison to

> the works of the other schools.

>

> That you're saying that they were popular is surprising to me.

 

--begin quotes--

 

Almost all of the literature of the Pudgalavada has been lost. What has

survived is for the most part available only in Chinese translations of

daunting opacity. Some extensive passages from Pudgalavadin texts are quoted

in the Tibetan translation of a Mahayana work on the doctrines of some of the

Buddhist schools. There are a few critiques of the Pudgalavada which have

survived in Sanskrit or Pali, and some others in Chinese or Tibetan

translations. Finally, there are a few summaries of the doctrines of the

Pudgalavada in early accounts of the development of the schools. It is only

natural that scholars should have directed most of their efforts toward schools

such as the Theravada, Sarvastivada and Mahayana, of whose literature a

significant portion has survived, and especially, of course, toward those

schools which continue even today as living traditions. The few remains of the

Pudgalavada must have seemed relatively unpromising material for inquiry.

 

....

 

The Pudgalavadins must have produced a large literature, including their own

version of the Tripitaka. They are said to have had an Abhidharma in nine

parts called the Sariputrabhidharma or Dharmalaksanabhidharma... According to

his biography, Xuanzang brought fifteen works of the Sammitiya school back with

him to China; unfortunately none of them has survived... As far as we know at

present, only three works have survived more or less intact out of the entire

corpus of Pudgalavadin literature.

 

--end quotes--

 

>

> BTW it is to be noted that none of the philosophical opponents of the

> Buddhists seem to be even aware of the Satyasiddhi. They are mainly

> only aware of the Sarvaastivaada, Maadhyamika and Yogaacaara.

 

It seems that even the Buddhists were not quite sure just who the Pudgalavadins

were. Priestley writes: '... we need to note that certain other schools have

occasionally been identified as pudgalavadin, affirming the reality of the

person... There is a good deal of evidence... that at least some of the

Sautrantikas were in some sense pudgalavadins.' We all tend not to see the

finer differences between members of groups and categories that are unfamiliar

to us. So seeing that the Buddhists themselves found the distinctions with

which they had to deal, when trying to make sense of the Pudgalavada, extremely

subtle and elusive, it is possible that not many of the tirthikas even noticed

that there was such a school. They would for the most part have noticed what

was different and offensive to them in Buddhism, and the quasi-Brahmanism of

the Pudgalavadins may have struck them as no more than occasional and

insignificant lapses into common sense.

 

Phillip