Plants in Early Buddhism and the Far Eastern Idea of the Buddha-Nature of Grasses and Trees

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Preface The present study has grown out of a lecture held in the winter term 2003-04, in which my aim was to present my view on the prob lem of the sentience of plants in early Buddhism to the participants of a series of lectures on various aspects of Buddhism, past and present, which were arranged by the Department of Indian and Tibetan studies of the University of Hamburg over about a decade. In the materials distributed beforehand to the participants, I had included Ellison Banks FINDLY's paper on plants as borderline beings (FINDLY 2002). in which she suggests, taking my monograph on the problem (SCHMITHAUSEN 1991a) as a kind of stepping stone, that in early Bud dhism plants may have been borderline beings not, as I had proposed, on the lower margin, but rather on the upper one: She advances the idea that they are saintly beings close to nirvana. Naturally, I had to tell my audience why I found this suggestion fascinating but, alas, not really convincing from a historical and philological point of view. In the autumn of 2005, as a guest professor at Kyoto University, I had a chance to present revised versions of my lecture, now in English, before audiences at my host university as well as at Komazawa Univer sity in Tokyo, and a year later, when I was a guest professor at the International College for Buddhist Studies in Tokyo, at Taishō Uni versity. In all these places, I benefited greatly from the comments and suggestions of the audience, and I seize the opportunity to express my heartful thanks to the discussants as well as to the colleagues who organized the lectures. On the above-mentioned occasions, the focus of my lecture was on the status of plants in earliest Buddhism, and especially on defending.

"Zur Stellung der Pflanzen im Buddhismus", in: Buddhismus in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. X (winter term 2003/4). The lecture is accessible on the homepage of the Center for Buddhist Studies of the University of Hamburg (http://www.bud dhismuskunde.uni-hamburg.de).

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