[Buddha-l] Monk/nun or lay person

[Bruce Burrill]

 >>Is it your contention that the LS is the first extant source of 
the H word ?<<

Damdifino which text first used "garbage vehicle," but it is one of 
the very first. Nattier makes the point that the very earliest 
Mahayana bodhisattva texts did not use that word.

 >>Do you have any evidence of this ?  It would be useful know.<<

It would be of interest.

  >>And did the Theravadins, for example, not have a word of their 
own for Mahayanists ?<<

Not anything that they put into the mouth of the Buddha, trying to 
make it holy writ that would incur a curse of bad breath if you 
disagreed with it.

 >>I also think that the purported use of the H word in the LS is 
vastly exaggerated -- probably by those who have not actually 
bothered to read it. Doing a word count for the Tibetan equivalent 
"theg-pa dman-pa" in a convenient etext of the LS I have to hand, I 
was very surprised to find that it only occurs 5 times in 217 pages 
-- with 2 or 3<<

I don't think there was any exaggeration on my part given that I made 
no claim as to how often it was used. The point is that it is one of 
the very first texts to introduce "garbage vehicle" into the Buddhist lexicon.

 >>even if the LS people introduced the word, do we know enough about 
the social context to say how they actually intended the word to be taken ?<<

It seems fairly obvious that it was directed at those who did not 
accept the teachings of the LS, as we see with use of an idiom for 
trash referring to the monks who got up and left when the LS Buddha 
was going to speak on emptiness  How would you suggest that it was 
used? Was there a fluffy-bunny use of the word hinayana that was not 
meant as a put-down of those who did not accept the Mahayana? Was 
this a word directed at other Mahayanists, though that seems unlikely?

 >>An early stratum of the Mahayana Mahaparinirvana
Sutra points to non-monastic dharmakathikas <<

A fairly late text, even in the early stratum, if we are to believe 
the Japanese scholars, which I am inclined to do. As for the 
possibility of non-monastics that's nice, but that hardly changes the 
issue that the Mahayana was primarily a monastic endeavor.