And who is the bearer of the burden [of the five aggregates]? The individual (puggalo), it should be said;

This infamous passage became a point of contention centuries after the Buddha, as the “Pudgalavādins” argued that the “puggalo” here was an ultimately real being “neither identical with nor separate from the aggregates” — a position which earned them much ridicule from the Theravādins.

But, if we don’t read this passage as metaphysical, how should we read it?

Bhante Sujato, in his notes on this translation, proposes that we read this sutta instead as a reformulation of the Four Noble Truths, with “bearing the burden” here meaning not “what metaphysical entity owns the aggregates” but rather, “who is responsible for them?”

Probably, the Abhisamācārikā Dharmāḥ originally formed a part of the Vinaya of the Mahāsāṃghika-Lokottaravādins.

What the above-cited reports and the colophons indicate is, rather, a symbiosis of the Mahāsāṃghikas and the followers of Mahāyāna Buddhism (at least) in Pāṭaliputra. This symbiosis is illustrated clearly in the case of the aforementioned Master Mañjuśrī, who dwelt in the Devarāja Monastery, whose monks were Mahāsāṃghikas, and was revered by all the Mahāyāna monks in the country.

Taking seriously Faxian’s report of the monasteries in the Magadha capital circa 406 C.E.

… wearing only a saṃkakṣikā, because the latter appears not to cover the breasts completely, but only providing some support

A Gandharan stucco figurine of a female Buddhist monk in the Civico Museo Archeologico in Milan, likely from Hadda around the second century AD, providing rare evidence of female monastics in Gandhāra and their attire.

The article describes a set of seven silver objects – three goblets, two ladles, a bowl and a cup – bearing short dedicatory inscriptions in Kharoṣṭhī script datable to around the first century CE. The inscriptions record in the usual Gandharan fashion the donation of the utensils by a group of nuns and lay-persons, perhaps constituting a family, to a Sarvāstivādin monastery called Utarode(v)a located at an otherwise unknown place, ‘Koṇaśili.’

At the third council, the Canon was closed. The one, very important, addition that was made was the Kathāvatthu: the final book of the Abhidhamma as a summary of the positions of the various schools that were deemed heretical.

The whole history of these schools, as obscure as it is, illustrates the very human tendency of religions to split and divide on points of doctrine, but it also highlights a particularly Indian love of philosophic speculation and love of debate.

A history of the “Hīnayāna” sects from the Theravāda perspective.

By a misperception of emptiness
A person of little intelligence is destroyed.

A translation of a select seventy verses from Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā.

While there is a growing recognition of the importance of asceticism in Buddhism among scholars, the view that Indian Buddhist monastic communities, on the whole, should be considered non-ascetic remains largely intact. It is the goal of this chapter to challenge this heavily ingrained attitude toward asceticism in the Indian Buddhist context.

In the early centuries AD the Sinhalese commentators and chroniclers assembled the data available to them and constructed a consistent chronology of the early history of Buddhism and of the kings of Magadha. The absolute chronology which they created has not proven acceptable

This article offers further support for Lance Cousins’ thesis that the Pāli canon, written down in the first century BCE in Sri Lanka, was based largely on a Theriya manuscript tradition from South India.

Attention is also given to some of Cousins’ related arguments, in particular, that this textual transmission occurred within a Vibhajjavādin framework; that it occurred in a form of ‘proto-Pali’ close to the Standard Epigraphical Prakrit of the first century BCE; and that the distinct Sinhalese nikāyas emerged perhaps as late as the third century CE.

… a third century CE inscription [is dedicated] ‘to the Theriya teachers, followers of the Vibhajjavāda, bringers of the faith to the Kashmiri, Gandhāran, Bactrian and Vanavāsan peoples and to the island of Ceylon, dwellers in the Mahāvihāra’

A reevaluation of the Indian lineage behind the Theravāda.

This article proposes a new reading of the mirror analogy presented in the doctrine of Chinese Yogācāra Buddhism.

In contrast with existing interpretations of this analogy as a figurative way of expressing ideas of projecting and reproducing, I argue that this mirroring experience should be understood as revealing, whereby we perceive other minds through the second-person

Although I did not have anything with which to practice generosity, I encouraged others.

A deva explains how worshiping the relics of a Buddha can bring much happiness.

I offered eight fallen flowers to the stupa…

Gregory Schopen (among others) has pondered the lack of stupa-related rules in the Theravāda Vinaya and wondered if this might reflect a sectarian difference in stupa worship. This sutta from the Theravādan Vimāna Vatthu shows that they not only knew of this common practice, they celebrated it.

Literacy disrupted the continuity of the oral tradition and reoriented access to knowledge from the oral- and aural-sense world to the visual world.

How the emerging Mahāyāna movement in India capitalized on new technology (writing) to legitimate and spread their teachings, and how the new medium shaped them in turn.

… partisans of Mahāyāna did not reject the Śrāvaka scriptures, or even their philosophies. Mahāyānists practiced the Vinaya, often quite earnestly, and studied the Sūtras and the Abhidharma.

The way I read it, the article largely agrees with Bhante Sujato’s conclusion that there was harmony by the end of the second (and third) councils and that the real sectarian splits occurred much later due to distance rather than schism.

For some informed criticism of his main thesis, see Charles Patton’s reaction to this article on SuttaCentral—and feel free to leave your own comments on the thread too!

The literature of the Pudgalavādins is almost entirely lost. Pudgalavādin communities eventually were assimilated by others, and we can learn of their position almost exclusively through the writings of their adversaries. Fortunately, we do have, in Chinese translations, four authentic works

… while Indians like Mahinda, Buddhaghosa, Dhammapala and Ramachandra Bharati, were able to have a profound influence on Sri Lankan Buddhism, Sri Lankans were able to have equally profound effects on Indian Buddhism

… texts achieve authority through use

An exploration of the canons of the “18” schools, and how they may have thought about textual “authenticity.”

I’m gripped by a somewhat peculiar trepidation as I tiptoe into the hallowed portals of the abhidhamma, my feet echoing too loudly in the cavernous austerity.

The Buddha was not a butterfly collector.

Three sūtras in the SA which deal with emptiness especially attracted the attention of the author of the Mahāprajñāpāramitopadeśa

When examined closely, the doctrines of the schools cannot be explained away as simplistic errors or alien infiltrations or deliberate corruptions. It would then follow that more sympathetic and gentle perspectives on the schools are likely to be more objective.

… different solutions to the Sarvāstivādin / Mūlasarvāstivādin problem: that they were two entirely separate sects, or that one was the source from which the other emerged, or that the two were different groupings within an individual sect, or even that there was only one sect known by two different terms

We are thus spared the problem of guessing why all references to the stupa have gone missing from the text of the khandhaka

… it is improbable

Theravāda, Zen and Lamaism, for all their superficial differences, share common ground in the practice of meditation, which is the ground of original Buddhism and qualifies them to take the name

The authoritative history of early Buddhism.

The Buddha’s bad karma refers to ten problematic incidents that happened in the life of the historical Buddha. […] The texts related to the bad karma of the Buddha can be divided into two groups: those texts accepting the bad karma and those rejecting the whole matter.

For a more detailed, structural analysis, see “Some Remarks on the Textual History of the Śrāvakabhūmi” by the same author.

… the term Mūla-sarvāstivāda can serve a purpose as a designation for a specific, identifiable Āgama lineage of textual transmission

… the EĀ contains numerous salient features of Mahāsāṃghika doctrine, particularly the transcendence of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. This study also argues that the seeming affinity between several legends in the EĀ and those in the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya is likely to have resulted from Mahāsāṃghika influence on the Mūlasarvāstivādins.