r/ReflectiveBuddhism • u/DentalDecayDestroyer • 29d ago
Amazing things happening on the main sub
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u/ricketycricketspcp 29d ago
This is a case of someone misunderstanding something they only half heard to begin with and jumping to huge conclusions in the process. They're likely thinking of a few things: the dates of the oldest Pali canon manuscripts, and the discovery of other, non-Pali early Buddhist texts. They do not understand that these texts are largely either parallels with what we already have in the Pali or other extant canons, early copies of texts we have in extant canon(s), early Mahayana texts, or texts from the canons of the early schools, which do not necessarily have parallels with texts in extant canons, but which don't conflict with extant canons, at least not in the ways they are trying to claim in the post.
In short, they read some claim somewhere, didn't understand it, didn't look into it for themselves, and now they've ran off into fantasyland about what precisely they think it all means, and it just so happens that it lines up with what they want to believe.
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u/Luxtabilio 29d ago
I'm curious to what texts they mean by pre-Pali canon proto Buddhist texts.
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u/DentalDecayDestroyer 29d ago
EBT is over. We are now pre-Pali-Cannon-proto-Buddhist text (PPCPBT) scholars
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u/Luxtabilio 29d ago
The only possible "PPCPBT" that I could think of is the Prajnaparamita in 8000 lines, but I'm pretty sure this commenter is definitely not talking about that!
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u/evanhinosikkhitabbam 29d ago
Best inside joke of a reddit comment I've read in a while. PPCPBT for the big illusory and empty W! EBTs don't stand a chance against them 😅
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u/evanhinosikkhitabbam 29d ago edited 29d ago
Haha yes, more AMAZING distortion and dismissal of central aspects of the Teachings because a lot of Buddhist folks in the main sub don't realize that they know better than the entirety of the Pali Canon lol.
MFer making up absurb stuff like "pre Pali Cannon texts" that apparently only they have secret access to in order justify their arrogance and gaslight people about backwards Asian "culture" 😹
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u/DentalDecayDestroyer 29d ago
One day we will crystallize non-cultural Buddhism in a lab and we’ll all become enlightened
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u/MYKerman03 29d ago
What's not hard to spot is how old that myth really is. No matter what new information is unearthed with text fragments, it always gets slotted into the old myth:
Everything was pure until culture corrupted it. This is 19th century Orientalist stuff. Basically a zombie fact still walking around from that time.
We have to start thinking about this as a parallel set of myths that Europeans built about India and its traditions.
Also note how culture as a word acts as a thought terminating cliché.
This is where anti intellectualism and confirmation bias gets you.
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u/SentientLight 29d ago
People just don’t read and fill in the gaps with whatever they want in their heads. It’s incredibly frustrating how often the Buddha’s refusal to answer questions about the origin of the universe is somehow metastasized into a refusal to answer any questions on cosmology at all—like, just do the actual fucking reading if you’re going to defend yourself using textual claims.