Event date: 8:00 (Taiwan Time) Friday, March 31, 2022
Organizer: Columbia University
Shortly after the Buddha passed into nirvana, a group of five hundred arhats gathered in a cave to compile and memorize his teachings, both his discourses (dharma) and the monastic code (vinaya). This event is known to Buddhist history as the First Council. At the conclusion of the council, Ananda, the Buddha’s cousin and personal attendant, was placed on trial. The charges included encouraging the Buddha to ordain women and failing to encourage the Buddha to live for an aeon. This lecture will describe the circumstances that led to these charges and will consider the significance of Ananda’s crimes for modern Buddhist communities.
Lecture Report:
The Trial of Ānanda: Some Thoughts for Modern Times
Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series by Dr. Donald S. Lopez Jr. (University of Michigan), March 30, 2022
Report by Alexander Sogo (Columbia University)
With the support of the Tzu Chi Foundation 慈濟基金會, the final lecture of the 2021/2022 season of the Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series on Buddhism was hosted by Columbia University on March 30, 2022. The virtual event featured a talk by Professor Donald S. Lopez Jr. (the University of Michigan) entitled “The Trial of Ānanda: Some Thoughts for Modern Times.” The lecture was held via Zoom and streamed live via Youtube, where a recording of the event is still available for viewing on the Tzu Chi Studies (慈濟論述) Youtube channel. The lecture was delivered in English with live translation into Chinese.
Following greetings and acknowledgements by representatives of both the Tzu Chi Foundation and Columbia University, Prof. Lopez delivered his forty-minute lecture. The event’s two discussants, Professor Bernard Faure (Columbia University) and Professor Chien-Te Lin (Tzu Chi University 慈濟大學), then gave their comments on the content of the lecture, adding details and providing questions for discussion. Finally, Professor Zhaohua Yang (Columbia University) led a short question-and-answer session by collecting the audience’s questions from the Zoom chat function.
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From left to right: Dr. Rey-Sheng Her (Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation, Tzu Chi University), Professor Donald S. Lopez Jr. (the University of Michigan), Professor Zhaohua Yang (Columbia University), and Professor Bernard Faure (Columbia University). Screenshots by Ngoc Le (UBC Frogbear). Republished with permission.
The event began with an address by Dr. Rey-Sheng Her, Deputy CEO of Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation 佛教慈濟基金會and Associate Professor at Tzu Chi University, in which Dr. Her thanked the organizers at Columbia University and the speaker. Prof. Yang, the Sheng Yen Assistant Professor of Chinese Buddhism at Columbia University, briefly introduced Prof. Lopez, who then began his lecture.
Prof. Lopez is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan. His numerous publications focus on Indian and Tibetan Buddhism. He has written on Indian
Buddhist scholastic philosophy,[1] the history of the European encounter with Buddhism,[2] transformations in Western perceptions of the Buddha,[3] and the Tibetan author Gendün Chöpel (1903–1951).[4] Prof. Lopez has also been particularly active in bringing Buddhist scholarship to a larger audience, producing numerous translations, anthologies, and reference works that are now frequently used in college classrooms and beyond.
Prof. Lopez began his talk, “The Trial of Ānanda: Some Thoughts for Modern Times” with a brief summary of his work on anthologizing Buddhist sources for English readers. He expressed his gratitude to the Tzu Chi Foundation, explaining that he included works by the organization’s founder, Dharma Master Cheng Yen 證嚴 (1937–), in his 2002 edited sourcebook.[5] He suggested that although his talk focused on the ancient past, there is much that is worth contemplating for a contemporary Buddhist audience, and distinctions between classical and modern Buddhism need not always be rigorously applied.
Prof. Lopez then explained the position of Ānanda, a cousin of the Buddha and his personal attendant, during the famous first Buddhist council. The council is thought to have been held soon after the Buddha’s passing into nirvāṇa in order to collect, recite, and record the Buddha’s teachings before they were lost as his followers themselves passed away. Ānanda was selected to recite the sermons of the Buddha because he had personally attended to the Buddha for the last twenty-five years of his life and supposedly had perfect powers of memorization. At the council, held in a cave near Vulture Peak, Ānanda is said to have flawlessly recited every sermon of the Buddha. This recitation became the basis for later sūtra literature.
However, Ānanda is then said to have been put on trial for five failures in his duty as attendant to the Buddha. Of these five, Prof. Lopez focused on three. The first is the charge that Ānanda had not asked the Buddha to clarify which rules of the monastic code were “minor” and therefore could be discarded after the Buddha’s passing. Although the Buddha is said to have excused all minor infractions after his passing into nirvāṇa, the definition of “minor” remained unclear. Prof. Lopez explained that the prominence of this problem in the Questions of Milinda (P. Milinda Pañha), a text thought to be from the second century CE, shows that the identification of minor rules continued to be a source of consternation for monastic communities for many centuries after the Buddha’s death.
Prof. Lopez then discussed Ānanda’s next supposed crime: asking the Buddha to allow women to join the monastic community as nuns. Ānanda is said to have requested the foundation of an order of nuns on behalf of Mahāpajāpatī—the Buddha’s aunt and foster mother. Although he initially refused, the Buddha eventually relented after being reminded that Mahāpajāpatī raised him and cared for him in his youth. The Buddha reluctantly allowed for the formation of an order of nuns but also issued a dire prophecy, warning that the entry of women into the saṅgha will cause his teachings to die out in a mere five hundred years.
This well-known story has been enormously influential throughout the history of Buddhism, but Prof. Lopez discussed some historical details that may change how modern readers should interpret the story. He argued that the account of Ānanda and Mahāpajāpatī likely dates from long after the Buddha’s death and therefore reflects not the Buddha’s own teachings but rather the priorities of later male monastic writers. In this view, prophecies placed in the mouth of the Buddha should not be taken as predictions of the future but as commentary on the then present. In the story of Ānanda and Mahāpajāpatī, an author, probably around the turn of the Common Era, sought to problematize and lament the burgeoning of a female monastic order in his own time.
Ānanda’s third crime was failing to ask the Buddha to live longer. Prof. Lopez explained that when the Buddha had become old and frail, he told Ānanda that a Buddha can in fact live for an eon (kalpa). To this statement, Ānanda said nothing, and the Buddha passed into nirvāṇa three months later. Ānanda was then charged with the crime of silence, failing to request that the Buddha stay on earth for an eon.
Having discussed these ancient Buddhist stories, Prof. Lopez then spoke on how we can learn from them as present-day scholars and followers of Buddhism. These three accusations levelled at Ānanda, Prof. Lopez argued, are laments by Buddhist writers living in various times and places. Many monks and nuns throughout the centuries have struggled to keep the precepts and wished that Ānanda had asked the Buddha to clarify which rules could be ignored. Similarly, many monks from ancient times up to our present day have wished that the Buddha did not allow women to enter the saṅgha. Finally, many followers of the Buddhist path have desperately wished that they themselves could have lived when the Buddha was alive and hear his teaching first-hand. Had Ānanda asked the Buddha to live for an eon, the never-ending struggle of interpretation could have been eased.
As a conclusion, Prof. Lopez reminded us that Buddhism was and still is not as egalitarian as many believe. He enumerated historical and present grounds for exclusion from the saṅgha, including illness, gender, deviation from sexual norms, and even particular occupations. He explained that these and other discriminatory barriers within the Buddhist tradition are not the words of the enlightened Buddha, but rather those of not-yet-enlightened monks, responding to the prejudices of both their monastic circles and the lay communities that supported them. These prejudices, therefore, have no place in our current day.
After Prof. Lopez brought his lecture to a close, Prof. Faure (Columbia University) offered his comments and remarks on the topic. After briefly suggesting that the discardable “minor” rules mentioned by the Buddha should certainly include the one hundred extra rules placed on female monastics due to their focus on mere etiquette, Prof. Faure argued that by blaming Ānanda for failing to ask the Buddha to extend his existence, the early tradition turns Ānanda into a scapegoat. The Buddha, after all, had by that time already promised Māra that he would extinguish himself. The trial of Ānanda should therefore not be taken at face value, but instead should be read as a clash between two distinct early traditions of interpretation. After diving into the details of Ānanda’s other crimes not discussed by Prof. Lopez, Prof. Faure concluded by explaining that what a crime is for one person could be a pious act for another. In Japan, for example, a rite performed by women to express thanks to Ānanda is recorded as early as the tenth century.
Prof. Lin (Tzu Chi University) then gave his comments on the lecture. Prof. Lin argued that the conflicts seen in the trial of Ānanda can be resolved by analysing them from the perspective of the Dharma. The heart of the Dharma was not invented by the Buddha but rather is an indisputable truth belonging to all beings. Because the Vinaya must not contradict the Dharma, the Buddha’s decision to allow women to be ordained and his choice to enter nirvāṇa were in fact completely independent from Ānanda’s encouragement. Next, Prof. Lin argued that equality is a basic value of Buddhism. Equality is logically deducible from the theory of interdependence, and therefore the restoration of full ordination of Buddhist nuns across the world is crucial. Finally, Prof. Lin explained the important role that women and nuns play in current Taiwanese Buddhism, reminding us that lack of gender equality is a net loss for Buddhism as a whole.
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Professor Chien-Te Lin (Tzu Chi University) giving comments. Screenshot by Ngoc Le (UBC Frogbear). Republished with permission.
The host of the event, Prof. Yang (Columbia University), then presented Prof. Lopez with questions submitted from the live audience. These questions dealt with the contradiction between the Buddha’s wisdom and the apparent misogyny found in many early texts, as well as the ever-vexing question of the historicity of the Buddha himself. Prof. Yang then gave concluding remarks and thanked the speakers, the participants, and the Tzu Chi Foundation, bringing the 2021/2022 season of the Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series on Buddhism to a close.
Bibliography
Lopez Jr., Donald S., ed. A Modern Buddhist Bible: Essential Readings from East and West.
Boston: Beacon Press, 2002.
———. A Study of Svātantrika. Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications, 1987.
———. Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2008.
———. Elaborations on Emptiness: Uses of the Heart Sūtra. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1996.
———. From Stone to Flesh: A Short History of the Buddha. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2013.
———. Gendun Chopel: Tibet’s First Modern Artist. Chicago: Trace Foundation and Serindia,
———, ed, trans. In the Forest of Faded Wisdom: 104 Poems by Gendun Chopel. A bilingual ed.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
———. Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2018.
———. The Heart Sūtra Explained: Indian and Tibetan Commentaries. Albany: SUNY Press,
1987.
———. The Madman’s Middle Way: Reflections on Reality of the Tibetan Monk Gendun Chopel.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
[1] Lopez, A Study of Svātantrika; idem, The Heart Sūtra Explained; idem, Elaborations on Emptiness.
[2] Idem, Prisoners of Shangri-La; idem, Buddhism and Science.
[3] Idem, From Stone to Flesh.
[4] Idem, The Madman’s Middle Way; idem, In the Forest of Faded Wisdom; idem, Gendun Chopel.
[5] Idem, A Modern Buddhist Bible.