Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens: Reportage (The Hungarian List) by László Krasznahorkai

Author:László Krasznahorkai
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780857423122
Publisher: Seagull Books
Published: 2016-03-15T04:30:00+00:00

Stein says that this is indeed very praiseworthy, but what kind of effect does it have on what goes on in the monastery courtyards? And on the soul of a monk?

PINGHUI. The goal of classical culture—and within it, Buddhism—is to help people avoid the three evils. These three evils are in a person, and they remain, no matter how much development there is. Only with the help of tradition can we vanquish them.

Venerable Abbot—Stein lowers his voice, and leans towards him across the table as much as he can—he sees that there is a serious obstacle to their discussion. He knows he should get up, he knows it is time to go but he tries one last time, so he says: Yes, he will try one more time, one last time, to say why fate brought him here . . . A long time ago, many years ago, he was drawn more and more to everything the historical Buddha could have uttered. This unequalled perspective became ever-more important to him from one year to the next. He would have liked to have studied it, he says to the abbot, almost whispering now, to get closer to it, to turn over the pages of the Tripitaka,[129] but he began to ask people about it and he never got closer to the original thoughts of the Buddha but to the original teachings of Buddhism. And here, he felt was a dramatic tension. As is well known, the Buddha never wrote down his teachings. Despite all the refined, and unparalleled, techniques of oral transmission, what emerged later on were actually translations—into Pali and Sanskrit, respectively, later on into Chinese and Tibetan, then into Korean and finally into Japanese. The question concerns him very deeply—he looks at the abbot with those two sincere eyes—and he asks for help: Where can someone find the right approach to lead him to the Buddha’s original train of thought?

PINGHUI. It’s true that the Buddha never wrote down his teachings but after his death, at the time of the First Council, his most loyal disciple, Ananda,[130] faithfully quoted the words of the Buddha at the council’s request. The council asked Ananda to say them again, word by word. And then they were noted down, and from that came the Buddhist canon. This cannot be doubted.

In Stein, however, the doubts are huge. As far as he knows, the story about Ananda’s words being written down is of far later vintage than the period immediately following Buddha’s death; and the Buddha’s words were not written down for the first time then, actually not until the first century before the Common Era. And it wasn’t in Magadhi, the language in which these words had sounded from the Buddha’s mouth, but a translation, into Pali and Sanskrit. It is unimaginable that everything that the Buddha said would not have been damaged, perhaps fundamentally! If one thinks of Mahayana Buddhism, Stein explains, innumerable elements differ radically from the material registered in the Tripitaka—which Stein particularly reveres as well.

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