Dominus Paradoxum

Not quite sure where the right place to put this is, but has there been any critical scholarship done on Buddhism, i.e., of the same calibre as old/new testament scholarship? If so, what would some good books/web resources be?

Intelligitimate

I've asked this question here before, but no one seems to know.

Toto

There is a great deal of scholarship on Buddhism, but I do not know of a tradition of Buddhist apologetics, or any attempt by Buddhists to treat their sacred documents as literal history or science. So there is less to debunk.

You might get more of an answer in the Non-Abrahamic Religion & Philosophy Forum, which is where I am going to send this thread.

Toto

lenrek

Well, I did a few google search, did not come out result that seems to be related.

Why not just get a collection of discourses and read it yourself, let us know if you found something that we can get critical about it.

The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha

The Long Discourses of the Buddha

The Connected Discourses of the Buddha

Alternatively, you can read some of the suttas on line:
http://www4.bayarea.net/~mtlee/
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/

lenrek

Not sure about Buddhist apologetics, but I am definitely sure there are Buddhists, of the more conservative monastic circle, treat many aspect of the teachings literally.

bagong

There's a daunting amount of text critical scholarship on Buddhist scriptures. The problem is that there's so many sacred Buddhist texts (many HUNDREDS of times the total size of Old + New Testament) over roughly 1500 years of development that there's no one handy book to turn to. The closest thing (that I know of) is Hajime Nakamura's Indian Buddhism : a survey with bibliographical notes (basically a list of every major suutra from the earliest Aagamic period to the latest tantric texts, with the then current (1987)scholarly consensus on dates & likely place of origin)

For more elaborate textual criticism, you should look at the introductions of scholarly translations of individual suutras (or collections of suutras). Unfortunately you will not find these in the average bookstore or public library, & they are very expensive to order. Basically unless you have access to a university library, you're stuck with the various "dharma" publishers that focus more on practical application of texts and nice, poetical readings than a scholarly text critical translation.

So while Buddhist textual criticism is at least as rich a field as Biblical textual criticism, it can be harder to get access to the info if you're just an amateur.

bagong

To add to yesterday's post, here's a fairly typical example of some Buddhist text critical scholarship: A comparative study of the 'Pancavimsatisahasrika Prajnaparamita'

This gives a good idea of what Buddhist text criticism usually involves: comparing Sanskrit (or Pali or some other Indic language), Tibetan, & Chinese manuscripts, and their classical commentaries. It also shows that these types of articles hold little appeal for a wider audience!

The article is taken from http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/cf_eng.htm, the full text journal article archive of the "Buddhist Digital Library". Lots of intersting articles here, unfortunately most of them like the above example in a tears-inducingly bad format.

lenrek

Here is another site that contain quite a lot of document and discussion regarding Buddhism.

http://www.budsas.org/ebud/ebidx.htm

Many of the articles were written by scholarly monks. I think the presentation there is much better.

Chris Weimer

I really liked Melford E. Shapiro's work "Buddhism and Society" - it's so difficult to find these days, I suspect out of print.

Manitoumulegirl

D.T. Suzuki's commentaries on Zen Buddhism are excellant, scholarly works on that aspect of Buddhism. Try Selected Writings of D.T. Suzuki , edited by William Barrett if your interest extends toward Zen.