Once Upon a Future Time: Studies in the Buddhist Prophecy of Decline by Jan Nattier is a book that you just can't help be impressed by. Nattier has a huge understanding of what seems to be every language Buddhist have written in. Her work draws from sources in Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Pali, Japanese, Sogdian, Uighar and Mongolian! Her book looks at the death of the Dharma. The time prophesied when the Dharma will cease to be and Buddhism will disappear. Nattier finds a religion predicating its own end to be rather a fascinating concept and I agree with her.
The book looks at the earliest teachings and follows the how this was changed and interpreted and ended up with millenarian beliefs in China. The beginnings are interesting as they say the stage of the Dharma was originally supposed to have lasted a thousand years but due to the fact that women were allowed to become nuns this time was reduced by half. Nattier makes only a passing comment on this, which I thought was a pretty horrendous statement on the place of women in early Buddhism. She traces the changing belief in the length of the period of decline up to 10,000 years and beyond and the different traditions these different timetables represent. She then goes on to look at the three stages of the law in East Asian Buddhism.
The three stages of the law are the True Dharma, the Semblance Dharma, and the Final Dharma (mo fa). She looks at the different stages of meaning and how they related to Indian Buddhism and how these ideas were developed over time. She traces some very interesting assumptions about the uses of the terms and finds that instead of referring to three separate time periods initially the words were often used independently of each other, and seem to indicate incompatible or separate ideas. The idea of mo fa seems to be either Final age or Latter age. This latter age ended up lasting 10,000 years, a time considered to be an eternity. Nattier argues that this indicates "a profound sense of optimism" (p118) on the part of the Chinese, in that they were expressing the belief that the Buddha's teachings would last forever.
The next chapter looks at the causes of decline. It is interesting to see the progression in ideas here as well. The causes initially start as internal causes, laxity on behalf of the Buddhists themselves, and then become to be blamed on external causes, such as foreign invasions. Unfortunately while very interesting this chapter is by far the shortest in the book.
In Nattier's conclusion she challenges the idea that the Buddhists have merely a cyclic notion of history or time, and presents arguments for why this is not the case and a different interpretation on these beliefs based on her analysis of the prophecy of decline. She also traces the historical lineages that are a key part of the tradition of many East Asian Buddhist schools as pointing out the importance of history in Buddhism. She also has the interesting argument that Buddhist history stresses the importance of human action over that of supernatural action as the leading causes of events. She argues that by thinking of time as irrelevant to a Buddhist you risk the idea of misunderstanding a great deal and as her writing shows "what time it is" (p141) is of great importance to many Buddhists.
The second half of the book is a detailed translation of one of the prophecies of decline, The Kausambi prophecy. She analyses how this prophecy came about and it's historical context as well as giving a full translation of the actual prophecy. All in all a very interesting and incredibly well researched book.
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