Dirgha-agama Studies

The present book collects research papers by Bhikkhu Analayo containing translations of Dirgha-agama discourses and comparative studies of their Pali parallels (as well as relevant Sanskrit fragments), together with three appendices. Several chapters and the appendices are devoted to examining aspects of the early Buddhist oral transmission. In addition, topics taken up in the course of this book are the analysis of views in the Brahmajala, healing in early Buddhism, the Buddha's last meditation, his display of fire miracles, levitation, debating strategies, and the future Buddha Maitreya.

Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts (DILA) Series

In 1994, Master Sheng Yen (1930-2009), the founder of Dharma Drum Buddhist College, began publishing the series of the Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies. The purposes of publishing this series were to provide a venue for academic research in Buddhist studies supported by scholarships from the Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies, to encourage top-quality Buddhist research, and to cultivate an interest in Buddhist research among the readership of the series. Moreover, by encouraging cooperation with international research institutions, Master Sheng Yen hoped to foster the academic study of Buddhism in Taiwan.

In keeping with this vision, in order to promote different aspects of exchange in academic research, we at Dharma Drum Buddhist College began to publish three educational series in 2007:
- Dharma Drum Buddhist College Research Series (DDBCRS)
- Dharma Drum Buddhist College Translation Series (DDBCTS)
- Dharma Drum Buddhist College Special Series (DDBCSS)

In July 2014, the Taiwanese Ministry of Education deliberated on the merging of the Dharma Drum College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Dharma Drum Buddhist College into the newly formed Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts (DILA).

The new DILA incarnations of the former three series are now:
- Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts Research Series (DILA-RS)
- Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts Translation Series (DILA-TS)
- Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts Special Series (DILA-SS)

Among our goals is the extensive development of digital publishing and information to adapt to the interactive and hyperconnective environment of the Web 2.0 age. This will allow research outcomes to be quickly shared and evaluated through the participation of individual users, through such media as blogs, shared tagging, wikis, social networks and so on. Our hope is to work towards developing an open environment for academic studies (perhaps called Science 2.0) on digital humanities that will be more collaborative and efficient than traditional academic studies. In this way, the Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts will continue to help foster the availability of digital resources for Buddhist studies, the humanities, and the social sciences.

Bhiksu Huimin

President, Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts

15 August, 2014

Foreword

The last decade has seen an impressive increase in comparative Agama studies. Such a development is not monocausal; quite the contrary, there are a number of reasons that contribute to this renewed interest. The most important one appears to be the ongoing digitization of the source material. We owe it to the digital age that texts in very different languages and equally different scripts appear rather effortlessly on the very same screen in front of the scholar. Reassuringly, the scholar is still necessary, and in fact he or she is as indispensable a prerequisite as the source material. It is still the scholar who has to make sense of the texts and to arrange them in a way that allows meaningful comparison, and in fact it is difficult to imagine that this kind of work could ever be coped with by a machine. Yet, looking back on the digital development of the last twenty years, nothing seems inconceivable. At present, however, comparison still requires a distinct competence in the languages and the scripts referred to above, and, despite the general upsurge Buddhist Studies has witnessed over the last decades, this requirement naturally narrows down the number of scholars who are in a position to carry out such comparative research.

During the last years Bhikkhu Analayo has established himself as one of the leading academics within this field of research, and he has probably become its most prolific author. Usually starting from the Pali version of a canonical discourse, he compares it with its counterpart(s) preserved as translations in the Chinese Tripi-taka, but he also draws freely on translations into Tibetan and, especially, on Sanskrit parallels whenever available. His studies have led him to engage with questions that go far beyond the mere comparison of related versions of a text, most notably the questions of orality, historicity, and structure.

His publications on texts of the Majjhima-nikaya/Madhyama-agama, the Samyutta-nikaya/Samyukta-agama, and the Anguttaranikaya/Ekottarika-agama have already been collected into impressive volumes; the purpose of the present volume is to do the same with regard to the discourses contained in the "Long Collection" or, perhaps better, the "Collection of the Long (Discourses of the Buddha)", the Digha-nikaya/Dirgha-agama. This part of the Sutrapitaka offers an exceptional case to scholarship in that there are at least three different versions preserved, and not only two, as is normally the case. Two of these three, or even four, versions, the Pali Digha-nikaya and the 長阿含 Chang ahan, the "Long Collection" contained in the Chinese Tripitaka, are complete. The third, the Dirgha-agama in Sanskrit, belongs to the literature of the (Mula-)Sarvastivadins; only about fifty per cent is available, mostly represented by the remains of a single manuscript that probably stems from the area of Gilgit in Northern Pakistan, and, to a much lesser degree, by its counterpart preserved in manuscript fragments from Central Asia. Despite the rather unsatisfactory state of preservation, the contents and structure of this Dirgha-agama are fully known and therefore available to comparative research.