Reinterpreting Dhammarāya in the Pali Canon : หน้า 33/141

Most of them refer only to the Aggañña-sutta passage, 4 missing out the three Apadāna references. 5 The reason could be either that the scholars concerned have taken the aforementioned text as representing ‘early Buddhism,’ 6 while the Apadāna is usually seen as a later compilation, 7 or that the Apadāna literature was not accessible at the time of those studies. The present paper concentrates on overlooked parts of the Pali canon on dhammarāya. It places the use of the term in a distinct context, in a way not presented previously. Rather than treating the Pali canonical references either as purely representing ‘early Buddhist ideas’ or simply sectarian ‘Theravāda thoughts,’ it understands the function of the Pali canon as something in between that reflects the understanding of the term in an early Theravāda community that sought to preserve and understand the Buddha’s teachings as they are. 8 By means of this more direct approach, the resulting interpretation, while dissimilar to most previous studies, will be interestingly more or less in correspondence with the majority of traditional understandings, which have been too downplayed by contemporary academics. The following will briefly explain how and why the present study differs from previous works with respect to their research approaches.