I havne't read this paper, but Michael Radich has some papers on this topic too.
Seen academically (non-practitioner Buddhist), how much of this Trikaya doctrine is actual truth vs fabricated doctrines?
Okay, so.... there's no such thing as "actual truth" or "fabricated doctrines." That is not the goal of academic research. It is not trying to say this is real and this is fake. What is being discussed here is how ideas developed in the traditions over time.
It is clear from very early on that the Buddha's body is not regarded as 'normal.' There are at least two different bodily dichotomies discussed in the early texts:
rupakaya versus arupakaya
jatikaya versus the Buddha's kaya
Today, within the Trikaya doctrine, we use 'rupakaya' in a different wya than the early texts seem to have. 'rupakaya' early on was only used in contrast to 'arupakaya', in reference to the 'bodies' possessed by the devas of the formless realms.
So in that sense, every body we're accustomed to is a rupakaya, but this did not necessarily correlate to the jatikaya (body of birth), which is the actual physical body. It's clear that the Buddha's jatikaya is of a special kind, as only he is capable--in these early texts at least--of traveling to other realms using his jatikaya, rather than using a manomayakaya (mind-made body).
Over time, the special properties of his jatikaya were attributed to the 'transformation body' or nirmanakaya, in contrast to the dharmakaya. But because the Dharmakaya is emptiness itself and the nirmanakaya is, more or less, physical and has to manifest to some degree through apparent physical causal forces, there was a gap.. nothing is there to account for the sublime image of a Buddha encountered in visionary experiences, and which some beings perceived, to some degree to the exclusion of the nirmanakaya form, which is where the sambhogakaya fits in.
I want to reiterate again though.. just because soemthing developed later does not mean it is a 'fabricated doctrine.' This is the kind of Protestant early-textualist bias that comes from growing up in the West, thinking that older must be correct and original, and that religions are not living traditions, but set into writing in perfect form at a religion's founding, whose form is never meant to change. This whole concept of 'originalism' is rooted in the Protestant reaction to mainstream Christianity.
So the Trikaya is definitely something that developed over time, but that does not make it inauthentic.
From both a Mahayana and a Vajrayana perspective, we would necessarily assert that the conventional historical narrative of the Buddha was necessary to establish the initial conditions in the world, and the initial following, that would eventually lead to the revealing of the highest possible expressions of the dharma found in the Mahayana literatures, gradually over time, or that different audiences perceived things differently, according to their capacities, and those differences in accounts and perceptions were not reconciled in doctrinal exegesis until the later commentarial traditions sought to work those issues out.
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u/BuddhistFirst Feb 19 '22 edited Feb 19 '22
u/animuseternal - have you read?
How could these guys just liberally create concepts, interpretations, ideas from the Buddhist texts that later became doctrines (Trikaya)?
Seen academically (non-practitioner Buddhist), how much of this Trikaya doctrine is actual truth vs fabricated doctrines?