Misunderstood origins: how Buddhism fooled modern scholarship and itself
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The way in which modern scholarship used to date early Buddhism in relation to late-Vedic literature has fascinated me for long.Strictly speaking, it did not date early Buddhism in relation to late-Vedic literature, but the other way round: it dated late-Vedic literature in relation to early Buddhism.Scholarship barely needed to date early Buddhism in this manner, for it had independent indications to go by.The Buddha could be dated in relation to certain inscriptions of Emperor Aoka, and Aoka could be dated in relation to certain Hellenistic rulers whom he mentions in his inscriptions.Add to this that the Buddhist traditions provided useful information, and it was clear that the Buddha had to be dated somewhere between the sixth and the fourth centuries BCE.A detailed inspection of all this evidence convinced most scholars that the date of the Buddha's death was as precisely known as one could ever hope to get.Late-Vedic literature was a much harder nut to crack.Here there were virtually no independent indications that might help.No wonder that the comfortable chronological situation of Buddhism was invoked for help.One of the crucial arguments ran as follows:Vedic literature is for the most part ignorant of rebirth and karmic retribution; these notions pop up in its most recent portions, viz., the early Upaniads; Buddhism knows and accepts these notions; conclusion: Buddhism arose after the notions of rebirth and karmic retribution had been invented in late-Vedic literature.The logical force of this conclusion is far from compelling.In spite of this, it has had a remarkable appeal.Additional reasons were found to support the claim that Buddhism is more recent than late-Vedic literature, but these additional reasons were no more compelling.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it