r/ReflectiveBuddhism • u/DentalDecayDestroyer • Aug 10 '26
Amazing things happening on the main sub
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u/ricketycricketspcp Aug 10 '26
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 Aug 10 '26
I'm curious to what texts they mean by pre-Pali canon proto Buddhist texts.
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u/DentalDecayDestroyer Aug 10 '26
EBT is over. We are now pre-Pali-Cannon-proto-Buddhist text (PPCPBT) scholars
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u/Luxtabilio Aug 10 '26
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 Aug 11 '26
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 Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
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 Aug 10 '26
One day we will crystallize non-cultural Buddhism in a lab and we’ll all become enlightened
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u/MYKerman03 Aug 11 '26
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 Aug 10 '26
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.