davidmartin wrote: ↑Fri Mar 31, 2023 1:07 pm
Not exactly what you were after but the gospel of philip contains an eyewitness statement
Philip the apostle said, "Joseph the carpenter planted a garden because he needed wood for his trade. It was he who made the cross from the trees which he planted. His own offspring hung on that which he planted. His offspring was Jesus, and the planting was the cross."
what's curious is it names Joseph in the role of Jesus as founder. typically 'wood' stands for people and the 'paradise' (in the MS, not garden) would then stand for a church. but instead of talking about the cross literally he says it was made out of the members of the church (the trees). it talks of Jesus more like as a spirit. it's not nonsense but if this were typical of the 'eye-witness' accounts available in 2nd century they just are too esoteric to be used as any kind of proof. i'm suggesting something historical could be read into this and i think it carries more weight than the likes of 1 Peter. Is this the case in Buddhism?!
What you quote is a strange eyewitness statement, being in third person and not claiming to recount what Philip saw.
Buddhism and eyewitness accounts is a complicated thing. All Buddhist Suttas and sutras open with the phrase in Pali "Evaṃ me sutaṃ" or in Sanskrit "Evaṃ mayā śrūtaṃ", which in English means "Thus have I heard"; traditionally, this is supposed to indicate that the narrative's events were being recited from memorey by Shakyamuni Buddha's close disciple Ananda, and certainly the Pali Suttas often seem to be oral in terms of their structure and length. In contrast, Mahayana Sutras can be much longer - the Flower Garland Sutra is longer than the scriptures of the Jews and the Christians and the Muslims together - and are less obviously oral. They are also much more prone to recounting visionary experiences - the Sutra of Golden Light includes a chapter in which a character has a dream about a drum being beaten which is given an alleghorical interpretation by a voice. I also understand that some Mahayana sutras abandon the pretense that they were recited by Ananda and claim to have been recited by Bodhisattvas, such as Manjushri, who have no role in the Pali canon.
But there are portions of some Mahayana Sutras which are regarded as indirect eyewitness accounts, albeit in a less flattering way.
Jan Nattier's book about Mahayana Buddhism "A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva Path according to The Inquiry of Ugra (Ugraparipṛcchā)" [University of Hawaii Press; New edition (May 31 2005), uses the term "principle of embarrassment" and refers to the term as "commonly used in New Testament studies" on page 65. She claims that she was introduced to the term by David Brakke. Nattier describes the "principle of embarrassment" as useful in Buddhist studies for assessing the reactions of non-Mahayana Buddhists to the claims made in Mahayana Buddhist scriptures. Thus, Nattier takes the admission in the Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Lines that many Buddhists asserted that the Perfection of Wisdom literature was not authentic Buddhist Scripture and the claim in the Lotus Sutra that some Buddhists stood up and walked away when the Lotus Sutra's teaching was first preached as reflecting genuine skeptical reactions by Buddhists to Mahayana Buddhist scriptures.
"Bodhisattvas Of The Forest And The Formation Of The Mahayana: A Study And Translation Of The Rastrapalapariprccha-sutra", by Daniel Boucher, claims that the author of the Rastrapalapariprccha-sutra all but admitted in the Rastrapalapariprccha-sutra that his master and his master's master both refused to believe that the work which he presented as the authentic words of the Buddha was anything other than a forgery.