In texts, through thoughts, with pleasure

This is a: article, written by Birgit Kellner 930 days ago.
Keywords: Buddhism and canonicity

“... and thanks to the combined efforts of the University of the West and the Nāgārjuna Institute, the extant Sanskrit canon is now becoming available to us.”

(Source)

There are these moments when you read a sentence, a phrase catches your attention and just sends you off into a black hole of confusion, where you lose sense of time for a while. The mention of “the Sanskrit canon” in Charles Muller’s short report from the 2008 meeting of the Electronic Buddhist Text Initiative sent me off into one of these; happily I was able to escape the pangs of cognitive paralysis and overall disbelief after not too long a time.

The notion of “the” Sanskrit Canon may be a convenient fiction that suggests itself especially when one juxtaposes Sanskrit Buddhist writings with those in other languages of Buddhist transmission – Chinese, Pali, Tibetan and Korean, as the homepage of the Digital Buddhist Sanskrit Canon at the University of the West visibly does.

However, I’m wondering how useful this particular convenient fiction actually is. I’ve spent some time over the past weeks explaining to undergraduate students how problematic and peculiar the notion of a “canon” in Buddhism is in general, pointing out the diversity of the transmission of scriptures in the various languages, problems of orality and writing in connection with the emergence of the Pali Canon (not to mention religio-political considerations involved in its closure), the emergence of the different sects and schools and the resultant production of school-specific collections of scriptures, the arising of Mahāyānasūtras and the special problems of authentication that it creates … you get the picture.

When one is immersed in a particular subject, any general statement about that subject may suddenly seem preposterous, utterly unjustifiable, and patently absurd. But even for someone who is not currently thinking that much about canonization as yours truly, the phrase “the Sanskrit Canon” would have to seem problematic at least.

It could be understood to refer to one Sanskrit Canon in the singular, implying that there is an authoritative and closed collection of Sanskrit texts that all Buddhists in India regarded as such. In this strong sense of the phrase, the notion of the Sanskrit Canon is patently absurd.

Moving to the other end of the spectrum, one could take “the Sanskrit Canon” to refer to a collection of texts that are recognized as authoritative, in one way or another, by one or another group of Indian Buddhists. But would one really refer to such a heterogenous collection of texts as a “canon”, on a par with other collections that are historically more coherent and more “closed”? I doubt it.

It therefore appears to me that the website of the “Digital Sanskrit Buddhist Canon”, as admirable and welcome it is in making accessible a large number of electronic texts, perpetuates through its whole arrangement and organization conceptions of Sanskrit Buddhist literature that are historically inacurrate and conceptually problematic. Why not just offer a collection of “Sanskrit Buddhist texts”, which could be subdivided into sūtras and śāstras, or draw upon further distinctions in textual genre, or even link school affiliations of individual texts where these are well attested? Why does there have to be “the Sanskrit Canon”? Is this not a fiction that is, unfortunately, ultimately not convenient at all?

(There’s a further aspect to this. As probably every teacher at a university notices, students do take to “the internet” to look for information, and also for confirmation of information, and they are not always particularly good at evaluating the sources and quality of the information they get. If even a website that offers original Buddhist texts speaks of “the Sanskrit canon” of Buddhism, how can we expect our students to not come to the conclusion that such a thing existed?)