10.5 The Diffusion of Buddhist Dogmas, Rules and Conceptual Schemes by Narratives and Motifs

10.5 The Diffusion of Buddhist Dogmas, Rules and Conceptual Schemes by Narratives and Motifs

Another conceptual framework for maintaining the historical continuity of Buddhism was expressed in the literature of the Jātakas, (the life stories). 

These depicted the life, but most of all the previous lives of the Buddha, and featured moral stories for educating the lay communities. This class of Buddhist scriptures most of all illustrates the workings of karma: how any action done since “beginningless time,” may “mature” into any situation at a much later time. 

The consequence of this dogma is that what we are and what we experience is always determined by our earlier actions. Thus, the individual has complete responsibility for whatever he may encounter in life, this being the favorite “most logical” theodicy of Max Weber. The Buddha remembers all of his lives and recognizes everyone he has encountered in previous lives, so as to help him free himself and others from the burden of earlier sins and actions. Thus, any monastic rule to protect against a particular sin or any rule on how to behave as monk would be supported by such a story. In this way, a sizable and flowery collection of tales and motifs, generated from the general stock of Indian and even global motifs, formed part of the body of monastic rules, the Vinaya. 

However, throughout the history of Buddhism the Jātakas were always a great source of Buddhist poetry and storytelling: entertainment as education for the lay and even the monastic communities. 

Beside the philosophical and learned tradition of Buddhism, creating and spreading learned communities, these collections of stories provided another strand of transfer of knowledge in Buddhism. This popularized form of the Buddhist teachings were set in a field of knowledge accessible not only to the learned, and were widely diffused by means of tales and motifs. They were, however, still based on a formalized literature which was dealt with in the monastic institutions where these edifying stories were organized, written, translated, printed, illustrated and finally propagated.

That diffusion took place between the Mediterranean world and India, and vice versa, in a long perspective of time, along the Silk Road as well as along the sea routes, is definitely the case, even though the evidence to support this communication is rather scant. During the Persian empires, however, there was a developed multilingualism that must have facilitated communication between the areas in question. 

Such circumstances were also prevalent after Alexander’s conquests, which enabled and even facilitated cultural communication between the West and the East, as is amply exemplified in the Greek-influenced Gandhāra art. Greek kingdoms in the East influenced culture in the North East, thus Bactrian documents were written using the Greek alphabet, and ample coin evidence demonstrates the practice of homage to Greek gods as well as to Buddhist and Hindu religious figures. Motifs, however, are traceable as impressions on coins and in the form of arts and other religious artifacts. 

Astrology, however, is so far the only example of a complex system of knowledge that was translated from the medium of Greek to Sanskrit—the systems are fairly similar and one finds Greek loanwords in Indian astrology. 

The Hellenistic Seleucid king Antiochus II (286–246 BCE) is mentioned in two of Aśoka’s edicts: one describes Aśoka’s missionary activities, the other also communicates the spread of medicine as a pious act. 

The Greek envoy of Seleucus Nicator to Candragupta’s and Bindusāra’s courts between 302 and 291 BCE, Megasthenes, wrote a work in Greek with the name Indica. 

We know this work only from fragments, but it did not express a too profound understanding of Indian life. It seems that Megasthenes received most of his information from interpreters, though he seems to have stayed in India for a prolonged period. But, much quoted, his description had a great impact on the perception of India in antiquity. Antiochus I was also in contact with Bindusāra, as diplomatic correspondence between the Indian imperial court and the Greeks demonstrates, also giving evidence to the fact that the Indians were not only interested in trade and war with their neighbors in the west, but also in Greek philosophy.8

Rather than a vague collection of motifs, however, Buddhism was a fairly well-defined conceptual system generated from the Sanskrit language and its dialect Pāli, as well as from other Indic dialects as mentioned above, and as such connected to the general Indian learning in the centuries before and after the beginning of the Christian era. Buddhist literature can be seen as a series of attempts to create a consistent system of thinking, reflected in the several attempts by a number of sects to create a literature to be the canon of “true” Buddhism. One of these attempts was the formalization of a voluminous literature of Mahāyāna Buddhism, which originated in the first two centuries CE. This form of Buddhism seems most of all to be a literary expression rather than a cultic movement, and the attempts to place it geographically and institutionally have so far not been very successful, though its cultural context seems to be the fairly affluent city-cultures in India of the period. However, this literature, characterized as a forgery by earlier mainstream Buddhism, still came to be the basis of Buddhism in its “northern” form. Its concepts were in several respects different from mainstream Buddhism: it represented a philosophical, religious, social and probably political reaction against earlier Buddhism by putting even more emphasis on the doctrines of relativity, emptiness, deconstruction and selflessness, and the endlessness of innumerable universes, many of them with residing Buddhas, like those of “Endless Light” and “Endless Life,” whose figures would gain great influence in the northern and eastern spread of Buddhism. Further, this literature emphasized a radical altruistic morality with arguments, or rather sophisms, like the following: “it is absurd to try to liberate oneself when there is no self.” 

Thus, Mahāyāna literature promoted the lay life on the model of the earlier lives of the Buddha as depicted in the Jātakas, being highly critical of what they styled the corrupt and escapist monastic life.

However, the Mahāyāna literature did not really change the vocabulary of traditional Buddhism; it rather reinterpreted the old words to suit their purposes. So, notwithstanding the change of ideology, the terminology of Buddhism retained its basic structure with a fairly stable lexicon, an important fact in our attempt to understand the continuities and discontinuities of this conceptual system as undergoing translations to other linguistic environments and its ensuing transformations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jataka_tales