Towards a Theory of Oral Criticism for Early Buddhist Scripture

Abstract

Because they were originally composed and passed down in oral form, the early Buddhist texts are not amenable to analysis through the tools of standard textual criticism. Taking Milman Parry’s oral theory as a starting point, this article suggests the possibility of an “oral criticism” that can be used with early Buddhist texts and proposes three basic principles to be used therein: (1) applying source criticism to themes rather than texts, (2) comparative analysis of formulas to determine how they changed over time, and (3) the principle of antiquity in diversity. Developing a system of oral criticism will allow for a more robust understanding of the early Buddhist oral tradition and avoid the pitfall of treating isolated examples of that tradition naively as a “received text” for use as historical evidence.