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发帖数: 7025 | 1 http://sujato.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/is-the-lotus-sutra-authe
One of our commenters asked about whether the Lotus Sutra was considered
authentic according to the Theravadin view.
To answer this from the traditional Theravadin point of view, all the
Mahayana Sutras are inauthentic in the sense that they were not spoken by
the Buddha. Historically, Theravada has tended to take a dim view of
Mahayana, regarding it as a mere degeneration of the pure teachings.
That the Lotus Sutra and other Mahayana Sutras were not spoken by the Buddha
is unanimously supported by modern scholarship. I don’t know of a single
academic in the last 150 years who has argued otherwise. The basic
historical background is given in Wikipedia. The upshot is that the Lotus
Sutra was composed over a period of time, or in a number of stages. The
oldest sources probably stem from a little before the common era, and it was
finalized around 200 CE. This makes it one of the earliest Mahayana Sutras
(and it is even argued that the earliest form of the sutra may not have even
been Mahayana).
So there is no doubt that the Lotus Suta and other Mahayana sutras are
historically late, dating from many centuries after the Buddha. When reading
them as historical documents, rather than seeing them as spoken by the
Buddha, we should see them as the response and articulation by Buddhists of
the past to the conditions that they were in. They were addressing matters
of concern for them, asking how the Dhamma is to be applied in these
situations. Of course the same is true of many Theravdin texts, although in
the case of the early Suttas and Vinaya there is still a core that probably
stems from the Buddha himself.
Why were the Mahayana Sutras phrased as if spoken literally by the Buddha?
This is a difficult question, and there is unlikely to be one answer. Partly
it was just how the literary form evolved. But I suspect, given the
visionary nature of many Mahayanist texts, that they often stemmed from
meditation experiences; visions of the Buddha, memories of ‘teachings’
received while in samadhi. Perhaps the authors of these texts believed that
the Buddha was really present to them in some sense – and this is indeed
the theme of many Mahayana sutras. Or perhaps they more humbly believed that
they had gained insight into the Dhamma in some direct way. |
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