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STUDY SEMINAR on the MAHAPARINIBBANA SUTTANTA from the 'DIGHA NIKAYA' of the PALI CANON Held at Padmaloka, 27 August

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STUDY SEMINAR on the MAHAPARINIBBANA SUTTANTA from the 'DIGHA NIKAYA' of the PALI CANON Held at Padmaloka, 27 August STUDY SEMINAR ON THE MAHAPARINIBBANA SUTTANTA from the 'DIGHA NIKAYA' of the PALI CANON Held at Padmaloka, 27 August - 6 September, 1982 Present: The Venerable Sangharakshita, Upasikas Anoma, Vidyasri, Sridevi, Sanghadevi, Bodhisri, Malini, Karola Adamscyk (now Ratnamegha), Viv Bartlett (now Punyamegha), Rachel Goody (now Vijayamala), Trish Manders (now Dayamegha), Carla Remyn (now Khemasiri), Diana MacEwan, Judy Child, Liz Pankhurst (now Jayaprabha), Anne, Andrée( Now Karunacitta), Trisha Robertson (now Rupachitta) Sangharakshita: So how far have you gone this morning? Who are the two study group leaders? Sanghadevi: Myself and Anoma. S: So have you sort of assembled questions? Sanghadevi: Yes. But in our group it wasn't just myself that's been writing down questions, it's other people as well, so when we discuss something and realise we haven't understood something we write it down. S: Good. Sanghadevi: We had both tried to actually do the same amount of material but it seems that our group actually went on a bit further. Well the first one is what does 'Suttanta' actually mean? S: Ah yes. There's no real difference between the term 'Sutta' and the term 'Suttanta' . The literal meaning of the word is connected with the word for 'thread'. A 'Sutta' is a thread. In modern Indian language, a 'Sutta' means 'a thread' in the ordinary sense. So the term 'sutta' implies a sort of thread of connection - it's a discourse in the sense that a number of topics are threaded together in a connected sort of way - you see what I mean? So 'Sutta' or 'Suttanta' comes to mean 'a connected discourse' in which quite a number of topics, a number of subjects, are strung together as though on a thread, one leading on to another. [Pause] 'Suttanta' literally means something like 'the end of a sutta' . 'End' in the sense of 'essence of a sutta'. If you like a sort of condensed version of a discourse, you could say. If sutta means 'discourse', suttanta means something like 'a condensed version of a discourse, the substance of a discourse', though again the two are used quite interchangeably. You could say that a sutta in its most general sense of 'a discourse delivered by the Buddha' is the standard form of Buddhist canonical literature. All the great Mahayana texts are sutras . That is to say, they re discourses purported to be given by the Buddha. So a 'sutta' , you could say, mens 'a Buddhist scripture', a Buddhist text in the very widest sense. [Pause] Is that clear? [Pause] So one speaks of the ' suttas ' of the Digha Nikaya , this Mahaparinibbana sutta or suttanta comes from the Digha Nikaya , the suttas of the Majjhima Nikaya . One doesn't usually speak of the suttas of say the Samyutta Nikaya because each section in the Samyutta Nikaya deals with one separate little topic; so usually the term ' sutta ' is not used for such short passages, such short texts, and one certainly speaks of the great Mahayana sutras , because they are quite long, quite connected, with very many topics strung together as it were, on one thread. The Pali ' Sutta ' of course in Sanskrit is 'Sutra' . And in Pali the term ' suttanta ' is used, but in Sanskrit they don't use, or don't usually use the term ' suttranta ' for some reason or other. They simply say 'Sutra'. Vidyasri: Is this 'parinibbana' , is that in Pali? S: In Sanskrit it would be 'parinirvana' . This is from the Digha Nikaya of the Pali Canon - 'the collection of long discourses', which contains some of the oldest and most important Buddhist material. Though it isn't of course all equally old. You'll have noticed in the little introduction to this sutta it says, 'this suttanta is a composite work, in the sense of loosely assembled material of various dates. Because of its length only the oldest and salient features are here reproduced.' Some of the material in this suttanta is very old indeed, no doubt going back to the time of the Buddha perhaps to his own words actually. Sanghadevi: So it's not that these sections are necessarily spoken in the last years of his life. I wondered why it was called 'Maha parinibbana'. ... S: Ah! Sanghadevi: ..... whether it did mean they were connected. S: Well if one looks at the Buddha's biography, if one looks at the traditional versions of the Buddha's biography, one sees that there are two events of outstanding importance - one is the Enlightenment itself, and the other is the parinirvana . So we tend, in the Buddhist scriptures and in the traditional biographies, to have more information about the Enlightenment and what immediately follows, and about the parinirvana than about any other events in the Buddha's life; so it does seem that there were a number of disconnected teachings in circulation in the Buddhist community in the early days, and that when the scriptures were compiled, usually as oral traditions, the compiler then tried to place different sayings and discourses in particular contexts, so there was a tendency to try to fit them into either the events just following the Enlightenment, or the events just preceding the parinirvana. So in this way quite a lot of important teachings and traditions got incorporated into this constantly expanding 'Mahaparinibbana Sutta ', even quite late material, which later people, later monks, wanted to sort of tack onto the Buddha's teaching - they all found their place there, to give them a sort of authority and especially if it was about what the Buddha had said immediately before passing away, as part of his last message, it was of special importance. In this way, as the translator says, "this suttanta is a composite work containing loosely assembled material of various dates." Some of the material in this sutta is very old, no doubt going back to the Buddha himself. Other material may be a hundred, two hundred years later. So that later material the translator has just sort of dropped. We can tell very often from the language, that is to say from the Pali language, and we can also tell from the degree of doctrinal development involved whether it's early or late. So in this particular shortened version one has got something nearer what might have been the original Mahaparinibbana sutta , though we can't be absolutely sure in that respect. Is that reasonably clear? There are a number of different versions: this is the Pali version; there are Sanskrit versions; there are Sanskrit Mahayana versions, which differ totally from this, they are completely different works. But they all purport to be accounts, records, of the Buddha's last days and his final teaching. There is a certain amount of material in common - the material that they all have in common - all these different versions - is probably part at least of the oldest strata. [Pause] Is that reasonably clear? It's not such a straightforward a matter studying Buddhist texts as one might have thought! [Pause] It's like studying Shakespeare's plays and sort of puzzling between whether the quarto or the first folio version of a particular play, except it's more complicated, because there are many 'quartos' and many 'folios', some of them with lots of rescindings. Sridevi: I was just looking at these three volumes of Mahayana Mahaparinirvana, and they are completely different. S: It contains lots of stories and it's very badly translated. It's hardly readable. Sanghadevi: We wondered about the incident with the Vajjians; the original context in which the Buddha gave them conditions for the stability of their society, like who approached the Buddha - was it some of their chief leaders was one question. S: It was Ananda, as far as I remember. Ananda was standing behind the Buddha when messengers from Ajatasatru, the King of Magadha, came to the Buddha and asked him about the Vajjians. Sanghadevi: Now what I meant was the original.... The Buddha had prior to that situation given the Vajjians instructions. It was that context we were wondering about. S: Ah. As far as I know there is no record of a previous occasion in the scriptures. No. No. That seems to have dropped out, as far as I remember. We know of it only from this particular passage, which would suggest, if we take it literally, that the Buddha did take very seriously this question of the stability of societies, even in the quite mundane and quite secular sense, and subsequently extended it and applied it, on another level, to the Sangha itself as a spiritual society, a spiritual community. Sanghadevi: Were the Vajjians a tribe or was there anything particular.... S: Well we say 'tribe', but we have to be careful of the connotations of that word. They were a Republican people like the Sakyans, and you probably know, at least you ought to know, that in the Buddha's day there were a number of different states in India. Some of them were monarchies and others were republics, as we would say. There were two - mainly two - large monarchies, those of Magadha and those of Kosala. The republics tended to be smaller, and the principal political act of the Buddha's lifetime was that of the expansion of the monarchies at the expense of the republics, and towards the end of his life it became a question whether Magadha would swallow up Kosala or Kosala would swallow up Magadha. Magadha eventually swallowed up Kosala and Magadha became not just the king of the Empire; Magadha which became, so to speak, the Empire of India, and all the republics were swallowed up, including the Sakya republic.
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