Bhante and friends,

Pardon me for digressing. Reading about practice (satipatthana) reminds me also of
non-practice.

Seneviratne (The Work of Kings) and other thinking Buddhists have voiced their
concern over the worldliness and spiritual materialism of some Sinhalese monks.

I have often noticed some younger (and not so young) Sinhalese monks keep their hair
unshaven so that they look like laymen.

Could Bhante or anyone  please refresh my memory regarding a monk's shaving their
head. Is this once a month or when the hair is two fingers' breadth. Also it would be
good if you could let me have the citation.

Namakkara.m & sukhi,

Piya

Bhante Sujato wrote:

> Hi Paul,
>
> Because of this Dmytro would be correct
> > in proposing that evidence of other word use from the Diigha and
> > Majjhima carried the most weight.
>
> Although it is not an easy matter to argue, i have come to disgree
> with the idea that the Digha and Majjhima constitute the oldest
> strata of texts. It is, on the face of it, a slightly odd claim, for
> the usual trend of Buddhist literature is to get longer, so we might
> be inclined to seek in the shorter discourses. I think the claim of
> the primacy of the Digha originates with Rhys-Davies, and i suspect,
> with all due respect to that great savant, that his agenda had more
> than a little to do with the fact that the Digha attacks the pride
> of the Brahmans with such skill, at a time when Rhys-Davies was
> trying to rescue Buddhist studies from the shadow of Hinduism.
>
> Although i think it is obvious that we can't say 'this one is old,
> this one is late', my personal belief, following Yin Shun, is that
> the Samyutta constitutes the earliest strata of canonized texts.
>
> Leaving this difficult issue aside, however, i still would not
> prefer to give precednce to the Majjhima occurence of 'ekaayana'
> over the Samyutta. The Samyutta references occur straightforwardly
> in the context of satipatthana and obviously mean exactly the same
> as 'the' Satipatthana Sutta. Furthermore, there are far more of
> them. Since we know from the Sanskrit, Jataka, etc., references that
> ekaayana can have different meanings in different contexts, we
> should look for the closest context to see what the implications
> are.
>
> The reason why the Samyutta reference has been relatively neglected
> is part of a general tendency to sideline the Samyutta in
> discussions of satipatthana, in the assumption that 'the'
> Satipatthana Sutta is the last word on the subject. But the samyutta
> comes right out and tells us that this phrase was at least echoed
> and amplified by Brahma, and this must surely be taken as
> an 'olaarika nimitta' that we are to look in the Brahmanical context
> for an explanation.
>  
>
> > This leads in to the proposal by Bhante Sujato that the text
> should
> > be seen as a clear allusion to Sanskrit texts of Buddha's time.
> > This is intriguing but perhaps the connection hasn't been fully
> made.
>
> Alas, sadly true. I have tried to do the issues justice in a short
> space, but really it requires a full-scale study (which i've been
> doing for the last three years!). Certainly, Gethin's work should be
> consulted. He mentions the Upanishadic context i quoted earlier, but
> did not give it full justice.
>
>  Perhaps if we
> > studied Pali at the same university we would be thinking more
> > alike :)
>
> O how dull! Then we'd have nothing to learn from each other.
>
> in Dhamma
>
> Bhante Sujato
>
>
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