Tags
Adhyāśayasaṃcodana Sūtra, Augustine, authenticity, chastened intellectualism, Gary Snyder, Jesus, Marcion of Sinope, New Testament, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Sigmund Freud, Xunzi
In my introductory religion class at Stonehill I was teaching about the Marcionite Christians, followers of the second-century Christian Marcion of Sinope, who wished to see a Christianity without any Jewish influence. This posed rather a tricky problem for Marcion, seeing as Jesus was born Jewish and seemed to claim the lineage of the Jewish prophets. That Jesus viewed himself as Jewish is not only the conclusion of modern biblical scholarship; it seems to have been the view present in the scriptures that Marcion himself encountered. Marcion, it seems, took the Gospel of Luke as known to him and edited out everything that looked Jewish.
Why did he do this? I suppose it could have been merely a cynical move to gain followers, but Marcionism had an appeal that lasted long after Marcion’s death; I don’t see much reason to believe that Marcion didn’t believe what he was writing. But this is still puzzling. To our eyes it seems like an awful sort of arrogance to edit historical writings according to one’s own theology. One might ask: how could he have believed any of this?
In trying to understand Marcion I can only think of the popular view expressed in the Mahāyāna Adhyāśayasaṃcodana Sūtra, that “whatever is well spoken is the word of the Buddha.” This was a justification used for the newly emerging Mahāyāna s?tras. It’s pretty clear from any historical standpoint that no such texts existed during the Buddha’s lifetime; the Mahāyāna was a new phenomenon, and many of its creators seemed to know it. They justified the composition of new s?tras by arguing: the Buddha knows everything, so anything that is correct is therefore effectively spoken by the Buddha. Surely this is what Marcion was up to: because Jesus was God, he could only have spoken the truth. So since the content of the revised Marcionite Gospels were true, as we could presumably ascertain on scripture-independent grounds, it must therefore have been what Jesus really said.
Which brings us back to the previous post‘s discussion of authenticity. It’s strange to me that today we put such a high value on things being what they have always been, unchosen by contemporary people. But the premodern view of authenticity is curious in its own way. If you are already so convinced that your new scripture is true, why do you need to attribute it to the Buddha or to Jesus? Why not just admit that you found the truth yourself?
I guess I can start to see an answer when I look at what people do try to come up with from scratch, without connection to the past. Modernist attempts to rebuild society from the ground up didn’t work very well. And individually, when we avoid submitting to the guidance of a tradition, we run the risk of merely believing what we want to believe, being guided by our persistent and troublesome unconscious desires rather than by the truth. That’s why I have myself argued that in some cases it is important to argue that some people and practices are not really Buddhist. The example that comes to my mind here is Gary Snyder’s horrifying Smokey the Bear Sutra: a “Buddhist” text advocating ecologically motivated violence and wrath. I try to avoid feelings of offence, but that text felt like a slap in the face toward Buddhist critiques of anger.
Here there seems to be a justified continuity between premodern and modern authenticity: our individual choice leads us too easily to the wrong places. This idea is at the heart of a chastened intellectualist view of human nature, a view shared by thinkers as diverse as Augustine, Xunzi and Freud. If we just do what we choose and believe what we discover for ourselves, we will be led astray: to sin (Augustine), to chaos and disharmony (Xunzi), to repression, neurosis and pathology (Freud). Rather, we need to be humble, to submit ourselves to others with greater vision than ours. I wonder if the contemporary search for authenticity is an aestheticization of this view: there’s something objectively better that happens when a North American discovers the pleasures of Chinese food developed over generations in China, as opposed to the Chinese food designed to conform to his North American sweet tooth at the Panda Hut around the corner. Rather than having one’s existing tastes pandered to, one educates one’s palate, becomes a connoisseur.
Then again, I’m not sure this answers the question of why people write or edit new scriptures and claim their authenticity. One might rightly want to aim at humility, seeking to prevent the arrogance of believing oneself in charge of the whole truth. But isn’t it just as arrogant to believe that one’s own discovery is not only the truth, but the word of the Buddha or Jesus himself?
unfortunately, I think the problem isn’t a lack of those with “greater vision than ours,” nor of authentic sources of anything–the tricky part is the submission. We’ll eagerly consume, but really submit? Be humble? That’s when they reach for the remote, or some other ideology.
I agree, submission is the hard part – but as Skholiast notes below, it’s hard for a reason.
Amod,
I have often puzzled over the question of innovation in tradition. You have put the paradox quite succinctly:
“It’s strange to me that today we put such a high value on things being what they have always been, unchosen by contemporary people. But the premodern view of authenticity is curious in its own way. If you are already so convinced that your new scripture is true, why do you need to attribute it to the Buddha or to Jesus? Why not just admit that you found the truth yourself?”
Some of this is doubtless to be explained in cultural or sociological terms. It’s striking the ways that traditions navigate this. Talmudic rationale, for instance, has several categories for different degrees of reliability-of-link to the textual tradition, and of course there is the implicit claim that the whole of the oral Torah was implicit in the revelation at Sinai. The Christian church has had its councils which have periodically validated developments and shucked off interpretations or practices deemed out of harmony (not that this made the latter go away). In Tibet, gterma (“treasure”) traditions enable certain developments to be legitimated. On the other hand, there is also always to a greater or lesser extent an emphasis on immediate experience which has little to do with the culture and the “apparatus,” to use a word I just confessed (in a separate comment) to be problematic.
While I agree with Andrew that “We’ll eagerly consume, but really submit?”, submission brings problems of its own, since abuse is real and needs to be recognized. This is also paradoxical, because refusing to be abused requires a degree of non-submission. I don’t really know how to navigate this difficulty, just wanted to acknowledge it.
I guess to me the question of reliable transmission (huge in Islamic hadith literature) is secondary to a bigger question. I think back to Plato asking in the Euthyphro whether the good is good because the gods love it or vice versa, and coming to the conclusion that in fact it must be that the gods only love it because it’s good. Similarly it seems to me that the Buddha would have said the dhamma is true because it is true; it is not true because he said so. In which case, if you believe something is the truth, why not just say so rather than attributing it to him? I suppose the Abrahamic traditions complicate this a lot more, in that Christians or Muslims have some theological grounds to say that the truth really is the truth only because Jesus or the Qur’an said so.
Marcion is an interesting figure. Like many another he picked and mixed in the theological sweetie shop. In a curious way his version was less counter-intuitive than the mainstream, there was a logic to it, the madman’s logic of Chesterton in Orthodoxy. His gift was to focus minds on central doctrine and the formulation of a creedal formula called the Roman Symbol which is new to me.
I think you’re right that in many ways it is less counter-intuitive; Marcion’s view is more straightforward and less full of apparent contradictions than the eventually accepted view turned out to be. But it did a lot less to accommodate everyday experience – more Platonic than even Augustine in its attempt to transcend the world – which is probably a good reason Marcion lost.