Fw: re: Dhammasattha literature

Christian Lammerts was unable to log on to his Cornell account and
asked me to forward his response below to the group. Note that he uses
the Harvard-Kyoto convention for rendering the Skt. Dharma"saastra
i.e. z stands for "s, A for aa. The use of either Velthuis or HK in
this group is fine with me. -- Jim

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Hi,
Thank you for these comments on the dhammasattha literature. As a
further clarification of aspects of the genre I would like to respond
to several of Eisel Mazard's points below.

>
> I have read a few books and articles that dealt with the phenomenon
of
> "Pali Dharmashastras" in Burma --and, as with so much of Burmese
> Buddhism, the precedent seems to have been Mon.

There is much less evidence of Mon influence than was once supposed,
with respect to both dhammasattha literature and Burmese Buddhism and
literature more generally. The most recent critique along these lines
can be found in Michael Aung-Thwin's "Mists of Raama~n~na". Currently
there is no evidence that Mon dhammasatthas were transmitted to the
Burmese, rather than vice versa. There are far fewer known Mon texts,
and the distribution of these texts is not well established (most
texts seem to be extant only in Thailand, with very few Mon
dhammasattha in Burma proper -- but of course this may be due to
relatively recent causes). Complicating matters is the fact that there
are virtually no external sources (outside the extant mss themselves)
for tracing this line of transmission, and there have been no proper
comparative philological studies of  Mon and Burmese versions of
certain texts to date. I have compared the 7 Burmese/Pali and 1
Mon/Pali versions of the Dhammavilaasa, and it is clear that they
represent different traditions but impossible to date which is
earlier. A related question is why the genre seems to appear in only
certain areas of the region. Why don't we find any of these texts in
the Eastern Shan States, in Chiang Tung, in Lan Na? I just spent a
couple weeks looking for mss in Tai Khun monasteries around Chiang
Tung and almost all the monks I spoke with had never heard of the
genre. Though there are northern and western Shan and even Chin
dhammasatthas. I understand that the Burmese "control" (for lack of a
better term) of certain Tai areas may have had relatively little
effect on local literature. But if dhammasattha are to be understood
as (among other things) practical legal texts, it is significant that
we do not find any traces of them in these areas (the Lan Na
dhammasat/dhammazAstr literature may be relevant, but from what I have
seen there is not much of a relationship). Transmission in this case
may be more tied to lineage or doctrinal affiliations than politics
...

>
> What struck me as interesting about the genre is its complex
relation
> to the earlier Hindu material --i.e., appropriating from it, but
also
> adapting it to a Buddhist sentimentality & ethic.
[cut]
> So much of the Sk. Dharmashastra tradition is either primarily or
> exclusively devoted to the valourization of the caste system, that
it
> would be interesting to compare how similar themes are reflected in
> the Burmese Pali idiom (or if they are excluded).

The Sanskrit exemplars are probably medieval dharmazAstras and
nibandha texts, which have less to do with "ritual" and caste than
with vyavahAra. Dhammasatthas are closer to the nAradasmRti than the
manusmRti. Again there is little evidence for transmission. We do have
some mid-18th century records of Skt. dharmazAstras that were brought
from Varanasi to Ava and then translated into Pali in what may have
been a practice dating back several centuries. There are also many
verse (ala"nkaara) dhammasattha commentaries that may have some
relationship to Skt dhz commentaries formally. This commentarial
tradition exists only in Burmese areas. In general there is very
little besides the structure of the genre that is borrowed from the
Skt texts: the laws are different, and the narrative material is
adapted from Pali literature. But about as much research has been done
on medieval dharmazAstra as on dhammasattha (i.e., almost none) so we
cannot be sure at present how close some texts may have been. Exordia
sometimes contain a version of the story of the mythic lawgiver Manu
in the context of the Mahaasammata tale (a conjunction discussed by
Collins and Huxley, Journal of Indian Philosophy, 199?), and this is
the only feature that explicitly recalls the classical smRtis. The
amount of borrowing from and proximity to canonical literature varies
greatly. Some texts cite extensively from the vinaya and discuss
monastic law, for example, whereas others may be entirely free of
narrative and canonical reference. The rule is that if there are
narrative features these typically have a canonical source. There is
no evidence to support the argument, common among early colonial
scholars, that the amount of a text's "Buddhist" content (i.e.,
content traceable to the canon) reveals something about its date of
composition.

>
> In any case, I had thought that the language used in the Burmese
> Dharmashastras was "just barely Pali" --i.e., significantly
different
> from canonical Pali-- but it could be that this observation was
based
> on a single example (or was simply wrong).

The character of the Pali will depend upon the text and ms version.
Some texts are written in correct Pali whereas others have serious
problems. In some cases problems are simply scribal mistakes, in
others they may result from phonological issues between Pali and
vernacular or even the mapping of vernacular grammar onto Pali. But I
do not think that any of these irregularities became systematized in
any way (at least not outside the ms genealogy of a single text).


Christian
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