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character. Even if this is always true—and it is a dubious a priori assumption that all religious literature be strictly normative6—prescriptive discourse still tells much about the ideals and concerns that the tradition held most highly, and in my work here, I am largely interested in ideal religious types or figures.
Furthermore, I would tend to say about the tipiṭaka what Charles Hallisey said about the Vinaya, in response to Schopen’s position:
Reconstructing the general historical context of early Buddhist monasticism may ultimately depend on the extent to which we can penetrate the thought-world of the larger texts…An important historical value of the canonical Vinaya lies in its being a coherent representation of a particular Buddhist mentalité.7
I am also aware of scholarship that argues that the principles and precepts of the community were subject to elaboration during the first few centuries of its existence. Though allowing for this, I still assert that one should see the tipiṭaka as reflective of Theravāda Buddhism’s—to use Hallisey’s word—mentalité. Other leading scholars agree with Hallisey. J. W. de Jong said that “the most important task for the study of Buddhism is the study of Buddhist mentality.”8
Still, the question of why polemically neutral material cannot be historical, or even why recorded conflicts cannot be historically true accounts, remains to be answered by Schopen and his supporters. It must be acknowledged, as Rupert Gethin observed, that the Pāli materials are not primarily concerned with recording straight history; their contents are mostly there to illustrate and further the literature’s own “truth.” At the same time, Gethin continued, they may bear some relation to what a historian might judge as historical truth.9 But the main concern here, at least in part 1 of this book, is not so much history as it is Theravāda’s soteriological concerns, and so one must follow de Jong’s advice to go beyond seeing the texts purely as philological materials and remember that for Buddhists they are sacred texts that proclaim a message of spiritual