Studies in the Origins of Buddhism c8.18

c8.18

The order of the Pali sutta-groups seems to show roughly the historical phenomenon of later writings being added to earlier ones since the third and second books of the Pali DN are on the whole recognizably later than the first one.⁹ Now, in the Chinese collection apart from the fourth varga which contains a single long cosmological sūtra in twelve sub-chapters and appears apocryphal, the first two vargas seem to have, on the whole, later material than the third. And the reason is that the first vagga of the Pali DN corresponds strongly to the 3rd Vagga of the Chinese. All the ten sūtras of the latter are found in the former, the three extra suttas of which are absent from the whole of the Chinese DĀ. The order of the sūtras within the varga is, however, very different in the two. The Chinese order is much less intelligible than the Pali one. It breaks, for instance, the obvious sequence of the Ambaṭṭha, Soṇadaṇḍa and Kūṭadanta-suttas by the arbitrary interpolation of the Brahmajāla. The first and second vargas of the Chinese, on the other hand, show much less community with the 2nd and 3rd vargas of Pali, if taken separately. Chinese I contains only four suttas, whereas Pali II has ten, though it is noticeable that all the four of the former collection are out of the ten of the latter. One other interesting feature is that there are in these two vargas four groups of adjacent suttas such that they are adjacent in Pali also. These are Chinese 3-4; Pali 19-18: Chinese 5-6. Pali 27-26: Chinese 17-18; Pali 29-28: Chinese 9-10; Pali 33-34. The reversal in order in the case of the first three groups may be noted.