by Tang Huyen

The parts that can be allocated to the sober personality
come to slim pickings, and that's what makes them authentic.

The Buddha, as he is preserved in the early canon, is a good
case of Expedient Means. He has two sides. One is sober and
straightforward — telling it like it is. The other is flamboyant,
dramatic, Thespian — dressing it up for effects, be they
salutary — and eager to blow everything all out of proportion
to drive a point home.

As I have mentioned before, in one place he says that all the
compositions are suffering and that Nirvana is peaceful — so
there is one state that is not suffering, Nirvana, because it
has no compositions. In another place he says flatly that all
is suffering, without exception. Such contradictions are replete
in the early canon, and they clearly reflect different aspects of
one and the same man, not a quarrelsome committee.

Reading the early canon — and this applies even more to the
Great Vehicle — is a delicate balancing act. One has to look
at the whole, and then balance one part against another part,
and it is so much easier to locate the first personality — the
sober and straightforward one — and ignore the latter. The
former says to focus on cultivation and ignore irrelevant issues,
like past lives and future lives. The latter expands volubly on
just what the former says to ignore, namely past lives and
future lives, deed and its return, and so on.

The parts that can be allocated to the sober personality come
to slim pickings, and that's what makes them authentic. The
parts that fit the flamboyant personality tend to cater to
proliferation and profusion, in exact opposition to the sober
personality. I am not saying that the flamboyant personality
is less authentic than the sober one, but only that the teachings
of the former form a core that really makes Buddhism Buddhism,
whilst the teachings of the latter form the generous excretions
that feed popular Buddhism — the religious surface that a
visitor will immediately be confronted with when he tries to
broach Buddhism.

In practical terms, the flamboyant personality is what keeps
Buddhism alive, whilst the sober personality is what helps
liberate those who want to get liberated — and the tautology
is wanted.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on January 25, 2005, in response to a discussion about Expedient Means and whether the Buddha's contradictory statements might reflect deliberate rhetorical strategy. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

Tang Huyen's hermeneutical observation here is pragmatic rather than source-critical: he is not proposing a two-source documentary theory, but noting that the same man can teach in two registers for two different purposes. The sober personality produces "slim pickings" — the small core of teachings about cultivation, cessation, and what actually liberates — and this scarcity is itself evidence of authenticity. The flamboyant personality generates the vast popular literature about cosmology, rebirth, and merit, which keeps Buddhism alive as a religion but is categorically different from what actually ends suffering. The practical upshot is a reading strategy: hold both in view, balance them against each other, and let the slim pickings of the sober core do the actual work.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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