Andrew Skilton > Quotes

“the goal of full Buddhahood came to be seen as superior to that of arhatship, so the layperson as a potential Bodhisattva also gained in importance. In this respect the impact of the Jātaka stories, always one of the most popular teaching media, in which the historical Buddha-to-be appears as ordinary people or even as various animals, must have been significant.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“Finally, some schools also compiled a Kṣudrakāgama (Pāli Khuddaka-Nikāya), the ‘smaller’ or ‘inferior’ collection. Clearly this division was adopted as an appropriate place for items that did not fit easily into the other four divisions, and it therefore has something of a miscellaneous character. The Pāli Sutta Piṭaka happens to be one that did contain such a division, which, in this case, is composed of fifteen different texts. They are very diverse in character, some very late, such as the Buddhavamsa and Cariyāpiṭaka, but others are very early and of great interest for giving a glimpse of the early character of the Buddha’s teaching and activity, at a stage before it had become extensively formulated. Among these early texts one can include the famous Dhammapada, the Sutta Nipāta, the Itivuttaka and the Udāna. The Khuddaka-Nikāya also contains the Thera- and Therī-gāthā, ‘Verses of the Elder Monks and Nuns’ – usually spontaneous verse utterances of the disciples of the Buddha. One of the most popular sections of this Āgama is that of the Jātaka, the stories of the previous lives of the Buddha.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“THE BOOKS OF THE SARVĀSTIVĀDIN ABHIDHARMA PIṬAKA (a) Jñānaprasthāna, the ‘setting forth of wisdom’, by Kātyāyanīputra – concerned with the definition of terms. (b) Prakaraṇapāda, the basis of exposition’, by Vasumitra – discusses elements under the skandha analysis and a revision of that analysis under the headings of rūpa, citta, and caitasika dharmas; also introduces a list of ten positive mental events. (c) Vijñānakāya, the ‘collection on consciousness’, by Devaśarman – concerned with substantiating the Sarvāstivādin doctrines on the past and future existence of dharmas, and anātman. (d) Dharmaskandha, the ‘heap of elements’, by Śāriputra – discussion of the kleśas, āyatanas, and skandhas, and the practices required to gain arhatship. (e) Prajñaptiśāstra, the ‘treatise on designations’, by Maudgalyāyana – the arising of mental events, and cosmology. (f) Dhātukāya, the ‘collection of elements’, by Pūrṇa – discussion of ever-present and negative mental events.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“In the Pāli version over 5,000 suttas are gathered together, representing the teaching activity of the Buddha over forty-five years. Even so it appears that much was thought to have been lost after only the first thousand years of the transmission. Supposedly recited by Ānanda at the First Council and so personally witnessed and authenticated by him, each sutta begins with the words ‘Thus have I heard. At one time ...’. However, as already suggested, many of them post-date this time, and some can be seen to be composite in character, with an early core surrounded by additions.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“In the Saṁyuktāgama (Pāli Saṁyutta-Nikāya) those sūtras with common themes, settings, interlocutors, etc. were collected together – saṁyukta meaning ‘grouped’. The Pāli version holds over 2,800 suttas.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“The first division was that of the Dīrghāgama (Pāli Dīgha-Nikāya) in which the longest of the discourses were gathered together – dīrgha meaning ‘long’.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“Only one complete version of a set of Vinaya, Sūtra, and Abhidharma Piṭakas has survived, that in the Pāli language, preserved by the Theravādin School. Consequently this has been regarded as the sole authoritative account of the Buddhavacana in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, the home of the Theravādin School.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“Whatever the origin of the term, the entire canon is known as the Tripiṭaka, the threefold collection. These three divisions are known respectively as: the Vinaya Piṭaka, this being the portion of the canon that is concerned with regulating the life of Buddhist monks and nuns; the Sūtra Piṭaka, the collection of sūtras, i.e. of discourses given by the Buddha; and thirdly, the Abhidharma Piṭaka, which is concerned with the systematic explanation and ordering of key teachings and analyses, i.e. teachings and analyses that are to be found in the Sūtra Piṭaka. It seems that the term piṭaka itself only came into use in the 2nd century BCE.87”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“Dharmas are not fixed, permanent objects, but momentary forces that are said to arise in a continual stream. They exist for a very short time, and during that time have a real existence. A mental dharma lasts for one-seventeenth of the time of a material dharma. For this reason we tend to identify the ‘self’ with the body, because it seems more permanent than our evanescent mental states.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“tradition has it that these Piṭakas were created at the First Council from the recitations of Upāli and Ānanda, each of whom held in their memory the entire corpus of Vinaya rules and discourses that now constitute the first two Piṭakas,”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“There are also numerous rules governing etiquette – such as how food should be placed in the mouth, what sort of noises should not be made while eating, and how the robes of the monk or nun should be worn.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“A practical example of the application of this method might be as follows: An ordinary, unenlightened person says T am pleased with this apple.’ The Abhidharmic analysis would restate this by saying ‘In association with this momentary series of material dharmas (rūpa) which constitute an apple, there is a concurrent series of feeling dharmas (vedanā) of a pleasant kind, of perception dharmas (saṁjñā) recognizing the object of happiness as an apple, of volitional dharmas (samskāra) both reflecting my past pleasure in apples and affirming a future predisposition to do so, and of consciousness dharmas (vijñāna), whereby there is awareness.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“The Mahāyāna regards the aspirations and goal of the non-Mahāyāna schools, i.e. individual liberation and arhatship, as selfish and inadequate, and replaces them with a radical emphasis upon total altruism and fullest Awakening, embodied in the Bodhisattva Path, and full and perfect Buddhahood attained for the sake of alleviating the suffering of all beings.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“It should be stressed that the Sūtra Piṭaka was theoretically defined and closed to further addition at the First Council. However, in response to new materials that continued to appear during the first few centuries (perhaps stray sūtras preserved by a Purāṇa or his like), the community developed criteria to assess them for acceptance into the canon. The Sanskrit version of the Mahāpadeśa Sūtra explains that such material had to be ‘collated’ with the sūtras, ‘compared’ with the Vinaya, and inspected to see if it ‘contradicted the nature of the Dharma’. Only then could it be accepted, and then only by either the Buddha, a legally formed Saṅgha, a group of Elders, or a particularly knowledgeable Elder, and in that order of authority.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“It is in the Abhidharma section of the Tripiṭaka that the greatest divergence between the schools became apparent, since different schools had their own unique Abhidharma collection.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“The Perfection of Wisdom sūtras, among the earliest Mahāyāna sūtras, attack the view, attributed to followers of the Abhidharma (and probably a direct reference to the sarvam asti doctrine of the Sarvāstivāda109), that the dharmas identified by the Abhidharma had some sort of ultimate existence, in that they represented the irreducible and permanent elements from which the experienced world was derived.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“Supposedly recited by Ānanda at the First Council and so personally witnessed and authenticated by him, each sutta begins with the words ‘Thus have I heard. At one time ...’. However, as already suggested, many of them post-date this time, and some can be seen to be composite in character, with an early core surrounded by additions.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“However, these were clearly monks who had a vision of spiritual development that transcended monastic formalism, and perhaps this should be linked with the trend apparent in some early schools that questioned the status of the arhat.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“For example, the ubiquitous list of 37 bodhipakṣika-dharmas, or ‘teachings that are requisite for Awakening’100 may have been an early example, given by the Buddha himself. We have another early example of this tendency in the Sāṅgīti Sutta101 where Sāriputta, who is traditionally associated with the origin of the Abhidharma, recites lists of teachings arranged according to number. Overall, the Abhidharma represents the attempt to extract from the Buddha’s discourses a coherent and comprehensive statement of teaching.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“Whilst in later centuries the monks tended to reduce the recitation of the Prātimokṣa to the chanting of a liturgy, in origin it was an opportunity to search their hearts for any failings in their practice of the precepts, and to accept admonishment from others if that was due.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“DURING THE CENTURIES EITHER SIDE OF THE BEGINNING of the common era, teachings criticizing aspects of the Buddhism of the early schools, and introducing their own new religious preoccupations, began to make an appearance. From the modem perspective it is impossible to know the exact context for these developments, other than that they were embodied in new sūtras not belonging to the Tripiṭaka of the early schools. The new movement came, in the long term, to identify itself as the Mahāyāna, the ‘Great Way’, by way of a conscious contrast with, and criticism of, the non-Mahāyāna schools, which it dubbed the Hīnayāna, the ‘Lesser or Inferior Way’.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“Finally, some schools also compiled a Kṣudrakāgama (Pāli Khuddaka-Nikāya), the ‘smaller’ or ‘inferior’ collection. Clearly this division was adopted as an appropriate place for items that did not fit easily into the other four divisions, and it therefore has something of a miscellaneous character. The Pāli Sutta Piṭaka happens to be one that did contain such a division, which, in this case, is composed of fifteen different texts.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“These three divisions are known respectively as: the Vinaya Piṭaka, this being the portion of the canon that is concerned with regulating the life of Buddhist monks and nuns; the Sūtra Piṭaka, the collection of sūtras, i.e. of discourses given by the Buddha; and thirdly, the Abhidharma Piṭaka, which is concerned with the systematic explanation and ordering of key teachings and analyses, i.e. teachings and analyses that are to be found in the Sūtra Piṭaka.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“Abhidharma gives the impression that the mere intellectual grasp of the enumeration of elements was equated with spiritual wisdom.111 The Mahāyāna therefore emphasized the ‘perfection’ of wisdom, the attainment of a wisdom that altogether transcends that of the Abhidharma wisdom.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“A practical example of the application of this method might be as follows: An ordinary, unenlightened person says T am pleased with this apple.’ The Abhidharmic analysis would restate this by saying ‘In association with this momentary series of material dharmas (rūpa) which constitute an apple, there is a concurrent series of feeling dharmas (vedanā) of a pleasant kind, of perception dharmas (saṁjñā) recognizing the object of happiness as an apple, of volitional dharmas (samskāra) both reflecting my past pleasure in apples and affirming a future predisposition to do so, and of consciousness dharmas (vijñāna), whereby there is awareness.’ Clearly, the effect of such an analysis, if applied and sustained over a long period, is to reduce the tendency to identify with a fixed sense of selfhood, and instead to emphasize that experience is made up of a constantly changing flux of conditions.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“In addition to the worship of new Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, it also seems that the early Mahāyāna involved the worship of the new sūtras themselves. Many early sūtras contain passages where the hearer is encouraged to worship the sūtra, using incense, flags, and bells, much as one would a stūpa – and where stūpa worship itself is denigrated, or at least held to be inferior to praise of the sūtra and of the dharmabhāṇaka, the preacher of the sūtra.115 On an organizational level it seems likely that, in origin, the Mahāyāna was an informal coalition of mutually sympathetic sūtra cults, in which groups of followers recited, studied, and worshipped their own sūtra.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“THE MOST CHARACTERISTIC FEATURE KNOWN of the emergence of the Mahāyāna, and of its later development, was the compilation of numerous sūtras teaching new Mahāyāna doctrines, and praising the new Mahāyāna religious ideal, the Bodhisattva. Unlike the sūtras of the Tripiṭaka, which are mostly historical in character, the Mahāyāna sūtras tend either to offer a lengthy and abstract discourse, or to portray a magical world of archetypal figures divorced from historical time and place, and make their greatest appeal to the spiritual Imagination, which they expand and transform through the means of visionary drama.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“The Vinayas are of great importance for the history of Buddhism, for they were not restricted just to the use of the non-Mahāyāna schools, but were adopted and used by the later Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna schools, both inside and outside India.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“It is the Skandhaka that shows how the punishments for infringements of the rules decreed in the Prātimokṣa are to be administered, for such punishment was the responsibility of the Saṅgha as a whole, and not of individuals. It is important to note that the most severe punishment possible was the exclusion of a person from the dealings and activities of the Saṅgha. This reveals that the nature and dealings of the life of the Saṅgha are essentially concerned with functioning in what one might call the ‘love mode’.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism

“In their turn, these Buddhas became the focus for devotional cults. This practice was present from the earliest period of the Mahāyāna, and is witnessed and exemplified by those sūtras dedicated to the exposition of the Pure Land of Amitābha (see below). The nature of these ‘visionary’ Buddhas was later systematized in the Trikāya doctrine of the Yogācārin School. Most important among the archetypal Buddhas were Amitābha and Aksobhya, who formed a triad with Śākyamuni, and to whom were attributed three attendant Bodhisattvas, Avalokiteśvara, Vajrapāṇi, and Mañjuśrī respectively.”
― Andrew Skilton, Concise History of Buddhism