Buddha And Jainas Reconsidered

Author(s): Johannes Bronkhorst
Publisher: Johannes Bronkhorst

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334
JOHANNES BRONKHORST
and practices concerned, the other religious movements criticised - be it implicitly in the Buddhist canon are frequently only known to us through their depictions in the Buddhist texts.
Let me now give three examples of such religious practices that are criticised at one place, and accepted at another place of the Buddhist texts:2 The Mahāparinirvāņa Sūtra, in its various recensions, records a discussion of the Buddha with someone called Putkasa (in Sanskrit) or Pukkusa (in Pāli). The Buddha here boasts that once, in a violent thunderstorm when lightning killed two farmers and four oxen nearby him, he did not notice it. Abilities of this kind were claimed by certain non-Buddhists, according to the testimony of the Buddhist texts. Another Buddhist Sūtra (the Indriyabhavana Sutta of the Pali canon and its parallel in Chinese translation), however, ridicules such 'cultivation of the senses' which leads to their nonfunctioning; the Buddha is here reported to say that if this is cultivation of the senses, the blind and deaf would be cultivators of the senses.
A second example is the following:3 The Vitakkasanthāna Sutta of the Majjhima Nikaya and its parallels in Chinese translation recommend the practising monk to 'restrain his thought with his mind, to coerce and torment it'. Exactly the same words are used elsewhere in the Pāli canon (in the Mahāsaccaka Sutta, Bodhirajakumāra Sutta and Sangārava Sutta) in order to describe the futile attempts of the Buddha before his enlightenment to reach liberation after the manner of the Jainas. It is tempting to conclude that these Jaina practices had come to be accepted by at least some Buddhists. This second example concerns a detail of certain Jaina practices, it would seem. I do not, however, know of passages in the Jaina canon which prescribe this detail.
Our third example is clearer in this respect. It concerns practices which certain Buddhist texts explicitly ascribe to Jainas and criticise, and which are confirmed by the Jaina canon. In spite of this, they are a number of times attributed to the Buddha himself.4 A Sūtra of the Majjhima Nikaya (the Culadukkhakkhandha Sutta) and its parallels in Chinese translation
2 Cp. BRONKHORST, 1993: x.
3 Cp. BRONKHORST, 1993: xii.
4 Cp. BRONKHORST, 1993: x f.