Orality, writing and authority in South Asian Buddhism

·期刊原文
Orality, writing and authority in South Asian Buddhism:visionary literature
and the struggle for legitimacy in the Mahayana
David McMahan
History of Religions
Vol.37 No.3
Feb 1998
pp.249-274

COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Chicago

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Introduction
The doctrinal differences between the sutras of the Pali canon and
the Mahayana sutras composed in South Asia have been widely
commented on and debated by scholars, but seldom has attention been
given to what the strikingly contrasting literary styles of the Pali
and Mahayana sutras themselves might reveal about Buddhism in South
Asia. Scholars have had many productive debates on whether the
doctrine of emptiness is a radical departure from early Buddhism
whether the Mahayana introduces a subtle self (atman) that
contradicts the doctrine of anatman, and whether the Yogacara was
really "idealist" or not. But the literary styles in which these
doctrines emerge in the Mahayana sutras is so strikingly divergent
from that of the Pali sutras that an exploration of what might
contribute to this divergence might be as fruitful for the study of
the Indian Buddhist world as dud of their doctrinal differences.
Indeed, even attention to only the introductory passages of certain
sutras opens up a number of important issues in the study of
Buddhism.
Notice, for example, the introductory passages to two sutras. The
first is an early Pali text, the Salayatana-vibhanga Suttam, which
discusses the sense fields (ayatanas). It begins: "Thus have I
heard. At one time the Lord was staying at Savatthi, in Jeta Grove
at Anathapindika. The disciples greeted the Lord, and the Blessed
one said: `Disciples, I will now discuss the distinctions between
the six sense fields.'"(1) This, of course, is the standard
introduction that is common to virtually all of the Pali sutras. The
Buddha then goes on to give a straightforward presentation of the
doctrine of the six ayatanas in the typical repetitive style of the
Nikayas, with many formulary expressions repeated often throughout
the text for purposes of memorization. Compare this with the
introduction to the Gandavyuha Sutra, a Mahayana text from about the
second or third century C. E., which is set in the same location:
"Thus have I heard. At one time the Lord was staying in Sravasti, in
a magnificent pavilion in the garden of Anathapindika in Jeta Grove,
together with five thousand dhisattvas, led by Samantabhadra and
Manjusri."(2) So far, except for the mention of the bodhisattvas,
the two passages are almost identical--but the similarities dissolve
quite abruptly. After the names and good qualities of a number of
the bodhisattvas present are listed, the bodhisattvas observe that
most beings are incapable of comprehending the great merits and
abilities of the tathagata, and they ask the Buddha telepathically,
not to tell them, but to show them (samdarsayet) these things. In
response, the Buddha enters a state of profound concentration, and
suddenly,
the pavilion became boundlessly vast; the surface of the earth
appeared to be made of an indestructible diamond, and the ground
covered with a net of all the finest jewels, strewn with flowers of
many jewels, with enormous gems strewn all over; it was adorned with
sapphire pillars, with well-proportioned decorations of
world-illumining pearls from the finest water, with all kinds of
gems, combined in pairs, adorned with heaps of gold and jewels, and
a dazzling array of turrets, arches, chambers, windows, and
balconies made of all kinds of precious stones, arrayed in the forms
of all world-rulers, and embellished with oceans of worlds of
jewels, covered with flags, banners, and pennants flying in front of
all the portals, the adornments pervading the cosmos with a network
of lights.... The Jeta grove and buddha-fields as numerous as atoms
within untold buddha-fields all became co-extensive.(3)
The text goes on in this vein for quite a few pages, describing in
the most lavish terms the luxuriant scene that suddenly arises
before the group right there in Jeta Grove, the sight of so many of
the Buddha's talks. There are endlessly winding rivers of fragrant
water that murmur the teachings of the buddhas; palaces that float
by in the air; countless mountains arrayed all around; clouds laced
with webs of jewels and raining down diamond ornaments, garlands,
flowers, and even multicolored robes; celestial maidens fly through
the air with banners trailing behind them, while countless lotus
blossoms rustle in the incense-filled air. After the initial
description of the scene, bodhisattvas from distant world systems
begin to arrive, and with each of their appearances, more wonders
are revealed penetrating to the farthest reaches of the most remote
worlds, then zooming back to the body of the Buddha, to the tips of
his hairs of the pores of his skin, within which are revealed
countless more world systems.
What can account for the striking stylistic differences between
these two texts, and why would many Mahayana sutras make such a
radical departure from the accepted genre of sutra composition
established by the earlier sutras? The standard answer would be,
perhaps, that the Mahayana, being originally a lay movement, was
more disposed toward literary extravagance, mythical imagery, and
themes appealing to the Popular religious imagination. All of this
is true, but it is not the end of the story. For a fuller
understanding of the stylistic differences between "Hinayana" and
Mahayana sutras, at least two more factors must be addressed. One is
the fact that the Mahayana was a written tradition, while many
pre-Mahayana Buddhist works of literature are written versions of a
vast corpus of orally transmitted sayings. One of the important
changes in Indian culture at the time of the arising of the Mahayana
was the development of writing. The beginnings of the widespread use
of writing in India contributed to some of the transformations
Buddhism faced a few hundred years after the founder's death and was
crucial to some of its most significant cultural and religious
developments. Literacy disrupted the continuity of the oral
tradition and reoriented access to knowledge from the oral-and
aural-sense world to the visual world. The transition from
pre-Mahayana to Mahayana Buddhist literature, then, provides a
valuable case study of the changes that may occur during the
transition from oral to written culture.
But the transition from orality to literacy was part of a wider
concern for the Mahayana--the difficulty of establishing legitimacy
and authority as a fledgling heterodox reform movement facing a
well-established monastic orthodoxy. The orality of early Buddhism
was not only an instance of historical happenstance but also an
important means by which the early Sangha made its claim to
authority. Pre-Mahayana Buddhism was, in fact, quite
self-consciously an oral tradition, relying on the oral recitation
and hearing of the Buddha's discourses--talks that were maintained
in the memories and mouths of monks who were, according to
tradition, repeating, generation after generation, the very words
that the Buddha himself spoke. This tradition of recitation, then,
was the way by which the Sangha established its claim to the
Buddha-vacana--the words of the Buddha--which conferred authority
and legitimacy to the early Buddhist community.
Initially, the Mahayana sutras, composed hundreds of years after the
Buddha's death, enjoyed no such institutional maintenance and
legitimacy and, thus, had to look elsewhere for legitimation. That
"elsewhere" was the higher visionary worlds supposedly visible only
to those more advanced followers of the Great Vehicle, whose
visionary capacities revealed the bases for the unorthodox doctrinal
claims of this new form of Buddhism. The Mahayana sutras bear the
marks of the movements efforts to legitimate its novel doctrines and
practices in the face of orthodox monastic communities with implicit
authority, which by and large rejected its innovations. The
otherwordly imagery in the Gandavyuha and other Mahayana sutras has
roots not only in the vivid experiences and religious inspirations
of early Mahayanists but also in the challenges that this heterodox
minority movement faced in its struggle for legitimacy, patronage,
and membership.
ORALITY IN EARLY BUDDHISM
Early Buddhist culture was an oral culture. The earliest
archeological evidence of an Indian language being written in India,
with the exception of the Harappan seals, are the inscriptions of
Asoka dated circa 258 B.C.E. The early Buddhist sutras were not
written documents but verses committed to memory and recited by
monks who specialized in the memorization and recitation of what
were understood to be the words of the Buddha. The orally preserved
teachings were the substitute for the actual speaking presence of
the Buddha; they were not merely the words of the teacher, but,
after his death, they were the teacher itself. As the Buddha says in
the Mahaparinibbana Sutta: "It may be, Ananda, that some of you will
think `The word of the teacher is a thing of the past; we have now
no teacher.' But that, Ananda, is not the correct view. The doctrine
and discipline, Ananda, which I have taught and enjoined upon you is
to be your teacher when I am gone."(4) Hearing and the spoken word
were also inextricably tied to authority in early Buddhism. The
sravakas (hearers) claimed to have directly heard and reported the
words of the Buddha when he taught in India, and elaborate
institutional efforts were employed by the Sangha to keep these
words alive. The source of authority for the early teachings was the
fact that they were heard from the self-authenticating presence of
the Buddha. The repetition of these words was itself the Dharma and
was the link to the living presence of Gautama who was now gone
forever.
In an article on orality in Pali literature, Steven Collins shows
that the monastic Buddhist tradition was, even after the
introduction of writing, largely an oral and aural one.(5) The
traditional method of educating monks and nuns was for these
students to hear and commit to memory the words of their teacher,
and most of the words in the Pali literature referring to the
learning process are related to speaking and hearing.(6) The
monumental task of committing the received words of the founder to
memory and reciting them regularly was based on the need to maintain
the Dharma and protect it from corruption and innovation, as well as
on the mandate to train disciples and maintain mindfulness of the
teachings. Coffins maintains that the oral/aural aspects of Pali
literature are important "both as a means of preservation and as a
facet of the lived experience, the `sensual dimension; of Buddhist
`scriptures'"(7) From Collins's arguments, it is evident that this
"sensual dimension" was, in the first few centuries after the
Buddha's death, primarily oriented toward one particular sense--that
of hearing.
While Buddhist vocabulary was rife with visual metaphor, vision in a
literal sense and visual imagery were not emphasized as a way of
communicating the teachings, as the aniconic nature of early
Buddhism indicates. The earliest phases of Buddhism produced none of
the elaborate monuments and sculptures so characteristic of its
later developments. Making images of the Buddha was discouraged, and
the only early representations of the awakened one were aniconic
suggestions of his life and teachings such as the footprint
symbolizing both the Buddha's absence and the path that he left
behind. Hearing the words of the awakened one, either through being
in his presence during his lifetime or by hearing his teachings
recited, was the primary and perhaps only way of receiving and
engaging the teachings. Even after texts were being written down, it
was not for the purpose of their being read privately--the Vinaya
gives detailed lists of all the items of property a monk may have
but never includes books or writing utensils.(8) Rather, the
Buddha's words were committed to palm leaf so that they would be
preserved and read aloud in the context of instruction or public
recitations.
By current scholarly consensus, it is only after the Buddha had been
gone for some four hundred years that the Sangha wrote down his
words. In and of itself, writing seems to have been held in some
degree of suspicion, as indicated by the niti verse with which
Collins begins his study: "Knowledge in books [is like] money in
someone else's hands: when you need it, it's not there."(9) Writing
was dangerous in that it relinquished control over the distribution
of the Dharma and removed the words of the Buddha even further from
their original source in his living speech and presence. Lance
Cousins has argued that systematic oral transmission within
institutions such as the Sangha is more likely to preserve texts
intact than writing would, because in the former situation, it takes
the agreement of a large number of people to make changes to the
text. Manuscripts, on the other hand, can be changed by any
individual scribe.(10) For an orthodoxy trying to maintain the
authenticity of its founder's teachings, writing was probably seen
as a danger that eventually became a necessary evil. Pali
commentaries claim that the writing down of sutras began only after
there was merely one man left alive who had a particular text
committed to memory and that the text was written down for fear of
its being lost forever.(11) Donald Lopez suggests that the
reluctance of the Sangha to commit the sutras to writing may have to
do with an "ideology of the self-presence of speech," that is, the
notion that only the Buddha's speech could truly present the Dharma,
the uncreated truth, as he discovered it and that writing stands
further removed from this truth--derivative, displaced, and
dead.(12) The repetition of words that were heard from the Buddha by
a disciple, then transmitted to his disciple, and so on through a
lineage of hearers, not only had the effect of rendering the Dharma
in the manner that most closely approximated its original utterance
but also provided a source for genealogical legitimacy. The
introduction of writing could not help but rupture this sense of
authentic presence and continuity. In the early Buddhist tradition,
then, the written word had little inherent value; it was seen, at
best, as a merely instrumental vehicle for the spoken word.
WRITING THE EARLY MAHAYANA
In the Mayana, however, the written word took on quite a different
significance, especially with regard to Mahayana sutras. Writing was
crucial to the development and character of the Mahayana in at least
dime respects: first, written texts were essential to the survival
of this heterodox tradition; second, they provided a basis for one
of the most important aspects of early Mahayana practice, that is,
the worship of written sutras themselves; and third, writing
contributed to a restructuring of knowledge in such a way that
vision, rather than hearing, became a significant mode of access to
knowledge.
WRITING AND THE SURVIVAL OF THE MAHAYANA
The first point is offered by Richard Gombrich, who has suggested
that the rise and sustenance of the Mahayana was largely due to the
use of writing.(13) He notes that the task of preserving the immense
Pali canon orally was made feasible only through the considerable
efforts of the Sangha, which was organized enough to train monks in
the memorization and recitation of the oral teachings. The Sangha
had standards for determining whether or not an utterance was
authentic and should be considered the word of the Buddha; if it did
not meet these standards, it was not preserved.(14) Because the
preservation of extensive oral teachings required the institutional
organization and systematic efforts of the Sangha, teachings that
were not accepted and preserved by this collective effort most
likely withered away. Gombrich suggests that many monks and nuns may
have had unique visions or inspirations that led them to formulate
new doctrines and teachings, but if those teachings were not
preserved by the Sangha, they were lost forever. The Mahayana,
however, arose at about the same time writing was becoming prevalent
in India, and writing provided a means by which heterodox teachings
could be preserved without the institutional support of the Sangha.
Gombrich argues that this was a major factor in the ability of the
Mahayana to survive.
I would add to tins observation that the sacred status that many
Mahayana sutras ascribed to themselves, both as bearers of doctrine
and as material objects, encouraged their reproduction and
dissemination and thus contributed to their survival. In addition to
introducing the notion of sacred books to India, many Mahayana
sutras present the copying of these texts as a highly meritorious
act. A number of sutras devote a considerable amount of space to
extolling their own greatness and telling of the immense benefits to
be gained from reading, copying, memorizing, promoting, and
distributing them. The Saddharmapundarika Sutra (the Lotus Sutra),
for example, promises to those who promulgate even one of its verses
incalculable moral and spiritual benefits, including great wisdom
compassion, rebirth in luxurious heavenly realms, and
intensification of the sense capacities for receiving broad ranges
of stimuli; also included were more mundane benefits, such as an
abundance of food, drink, clothing, and bedding, and freedom from
disease, ugliness of countenance, bad teeth, crooked noses, and
imperfect genitals.(15) Even illiterate devotees of sutras copied
their script in hopes of gaining such benefits. Thus, writing,
combined with the promise of merit through reproduction of the
texts, gave many sutras a built-in promotional device and
distribution system. Evidently, what made the orthodox tradition
wary of writing--fear of losing control over teachings--was worth
the risk for Mahayanists, who were attempting to expand and spread
their movement.
SACRED TEXTS AND SACRED SITE
According to recent scholarship, the earliest forms of the Mahayana
were probably cults centered around the worship of the movement's
new sutras, and these cults played an important part in the growth
of the Mahayana Certain Mahayana sutra manuscripts were considered
sacred objects with the power to consecrate places, thereby
establishing sacred sites and Mahayana centers of worship that were
similar to, and modeled on, stupa cults that were already prevalent.
To understand the importance of this phenomenon, it is first
necessary to consider briefly these sutra cults and their
socioreligious significance.
The primary sacred places that existed within the early Buddhist
tradition were designated by stupas--reliquaries containing remain
of the Buddha and, later, disciples or revered monks. Stupa building
and stupa reverence most likely started among the laity and was an
important part of lay practice. The eight stupas within which the
Buddha's relics were supposedly housed after his death became places
of pilgrimage and thriving centers of both religious and commercial
activity, populated by lay religious specialists as well as by
merchants who would all gather for religious services and festivals.
These centers may have been more popular among laypersons than the
monastic community, who were not permitted to participate in
commercial activities, pluck living flowers for offerings, listen to
worldly stories and music, or watch dancing, all of which were part
of the festivities at the strupas.(16) According to Akira Hirakawa,
the congregations that developed around these centers of worship
gradually developed into lay orders that were stupa cults not
directly tied to monastic Buddhism.(17) As iconic art began to
develop, the stupas often contained illustrated scenes from the
Jataka stories, detailing the amazing and selfless deeds of Gautama
in his past lives as a bodhisattva. Hirakawa speculates dud the
repeated telling and interpreting of these scenes to pilgrims by the
religious specialists gave rise to forms of Buddhism that emphasized
the salvific power of the Buddha and promoted worship and devotion
toward him. The stupas, therefore, were important factors in the
development of the devotional elements that would constitute certain
aspects of the Mahayana. Hirakawa also suggests that this was the
origin of groups that considered themselves to be bodhisattvas,
distinct from the Sravakas and Arbats, and who would be presented as
the most advanced disciples in most Mahayana texts.(18)
As much as stupa culture may have directly contributed to the
Mahayana, it also served as a complex arena of tension and conflict
between these cults and the wisdom schools. While Hirakawa makes a
good for the contributions of stupa cults to the development of the
Mahayana, he admits that the origins of some of the most important
Mahayana literature, the Prajanaparamita (Perfection of Wisdom)
texts, must be sought for elsewhere.(19) This body of literature,
along with a number of Mahayana wisdom texts, downplays the value of
stupa/relic worship in comparison to devotion to the text itself,
that is, the written manuscript of a Perfection of Wisdom Sutra. The
reason for the devaluing of stupas in Mahayana literature is both
doctrinal and pragmatic. One of the earliest Perfection of Wisdom
texts, the Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita (henceforth, Asta), contains
an interesting discussion indicating the ambivalence and tension
between stupa cults and the emerging groups devoted to Mahayana
wisdom texts. In one passage, the Buddha questions Sakra about the
value of the relics contained in stupas compared to the Perfection
of Wisdom, asking which he would prefer if he had the choice between
an enormous number of relics of all the tathagatas and one written
copy of the text. He, of course, chooses the Perfection of Wisdom,
arguing for its primacy over relics, since the Perfection of Wisdom
is the cause of the wisdom of the tathagatas, rather than its
depository.(20) The value of relics is derivative in that they,
being identified with the enlightened buddhas, are the results of,
and are pervaded by, the Perfection of Wisdom. Furthermore, he
claims, the Perfection of Wisdom supersedes relics (sarira) insofar
as it is itself the "true body of the Buddha," which is the body of
the Dharma (dharmakaya).(21) This passage illustrates the effort by
the followers of the Perfection of Wisdom to replace, or at least
augment, devotion to the physical remains of the Buddha enshrined in
stupas with both the message and physical presence of the written
text of the Prajnaparamita; invoking the traditional notion of the
functional equivalence of the Dharma body, as the collected
teachings of the Buddha, with the Buddha himself.(22)
In addition to the doctrinal disagreements between the emerging
textual traditions of the Mahayana and the stupa cults, more
concrete concerns regarding the establishment of places of worship
may have been operative. During the earliest developments of the
Mahayana, sacred places associated with the life of the Buddha were
controlled by the stupa cults connected to the orthodox traditions.
Evidence exists in the Perfection of Wisdom texts that the Mahayana
polemics against the Hinayana stupa cults were not only about
doctrine but were also about the struggle of the Mahayana to
establish its own sacred places. Gregory Schopen deals with this
issue in his study of the early Mahayana as a loose federation of
different "cults of the book" in which sutras themselves become
objects of worship and the cults who worshipped them were structured
similarly to stupa cults.(23) Schopen argues that the tradition of
the cult of the book drew from the idea that the presence of the
Buddha in a particular place during a significant episode of his
life rendered that place sacred. This was also the rationale behind
early stupa cults. The idea was combined with the notion expressed
in the stock phrase "Whoever sees the Dharma, sees the Buddha,"
which indicated that wherever the teachings were set forth, the
Buddha was effectively present. From this idea, "it followed
naturally that if the presence of the Bhagavat at a particular place
had the effect of sacralizing that spot, then by extension, the
presence (in some form) of the dharmaparyaya [setting forth of the
Dharma, i.e., a sutra] must have the same effect"(24) Reciting a
text purporting to be the words of the Buddha over a particular
place, then, would render it sacred in the same sense in which a
stupa is a sacred place, that is, in that the Dharma was taught
there, and even in that it contained "part" of the Buddha himself,
in this case his Dharma body rather than merely his physical remain.
Schopen argues that this was one way in which early Mahayanists
dealt with the problem of "localization of the cult of the book" by
way of "authoritatively legitimating that spot as a cultic
center"(25) Tins was a way of establishing new sacred places that
probably served as permanent teaching centers that were not tied to
those sacred sites associated with the Buddha's life, which were
under the control of more orthodox groups.
Furthermore, the recitation of a sutra or formula at a particular
place was not the only way to consecrate the site; the presence of a
written copy of a sutra was understood to have the same effect.
Schopen argues that the shift from a primarily oral to a primarily
written tradition was important to the establishment of these
Mahayana cultic centers, because the presence of the written sutra
eliminated the need for oral consecrations by the monks who
specialized in reciting sutras (bhanakas). The written sutra could
serve as a focal point of the cult and as a permanent source of the
power and presence of the Dharma, independent of the need for
recitation.(26) This, in turn, fired Mahayanists from the need to
have the institutional sanction and support of the Sangha.
The transposition of the Dharma into physical form to be worshiped,
combined with the promises of great benefits gained from copying and
promoting the sutra, ensured that devotees would reproduce and
distribute the texts widely, expanding the influence and power of
the Mahayana cults and contributing to its devotional flavor. The
Asta presents a compelling picture of some of its cult's practices
in passages suggesting what activities are most meritorious with
regard to the sutra:
If a son or daughter of good family has genuine confidence and trust
in this Perfection of Wisdom [i.e., the Asta], is intent on it, has
a clear mind, has thoughts raised to awakening, has earnest
resolution, and bears it, grasps [its meaning], speaks it, studies
it, spreads it, demonstrates it, explains it, expounds it, repeats
it, makes it manifest in full detail to others, makes its meaning
clear, investigates it with the mind, and with superior wisdom
examines it thoroughly; then copies it in the form of a book, bears
it in mind and preserves it so that the good Dharma will last long,
so that the guide of the buddhas will not disappear, and so that the
bodhisattvas may incur benefits by means of this flawless guide;
indeed, that son or daughter of good family who makes this
Perfection of Wisdom his or her teacher, honors and respects with
flowers, incense, perfume, garlands, ointments, powders, raiment,
parasols, emblems, bells, banners, with lamps and garlands all
around it; whoever pays obeisance to it in these various ways will
generate great Merit.(27)
In addition to its emphasis on promotion and distribution, this
passage shows how a text like the Asta, usually known for its early
enunciation of the most abstract philosophical concepts of the
Mahayana, had more uses than just the development of the movements
theoretical foundations. In fact, it and other early sutras were the
object of perhaps some of the earliest forms of Buddhist bhakti or
worship, which suggests how inseparable the traditions of high
philosophy were from devotional practices. The passage also shows
another facet of the importance of the physicality of the Dharma in
the form of the written book in the early Mahayana.
Closely connected to this issue is another implication of the uses
of writing in the Mahayana--and particularly in its written
sutras--namely, that it challenged the traditional notions of sacred
space. As a heterodox minority movement the early Mahayana was
enabled through writing to expand and develop by granting to the
book the sacrality of the Buddha himself, thus providing lay
followers with forms of devotion and, through the consecrational
power of these manuscripts, creating new sacred sites under its
control. Cults of the book also attempted to establish a new
relation to sacred space that was not tied inevitably to those
traditional sacred sites associated with the life of the founder and
that were controlled by orthodox monks or stupa cults. The fact that
anywhere the text was placed could now become a sacred place
equivalent to those associated with the life of the Buddha had the
effect of de-emphasizing the significance of the specific,
localized, and temporal presence of Sakyamuni. Sacred space was now
mobile. This is perhaps the beginning of a marked tendency in the
Mahayana, which I will discuss later, toward a more general
dislocation of the sacred from the locus of the "historical" life of
Sakyamuni in favor of more abstract and unlocalizable understandings
of the sacred and of the Buddha.
WRITING AND THE VISUAL
A further way in which writing was significant to the Mahayana in
particular, and to all of Buddhism and South Asian thought,
practice, and literature in general, was that it shifted access to
and organization of knowledge from a primarily oral and auditory
mode to a primarily visual mode. In order to explore some of the
implications of this shift, it is necessary to make a digression
into some general theoretical observations about these two
cognitive-perceptual orientations and the effect that they may have
on consciousness and culture. While these general observations about
hearing, vision, and writing may be useful to a greater or lesser
extent depending on the specific cultures to which they are applied,
I outline them here because they seem relevant and applicable to the
case of South Asian Buddhism.
A number of scholars have attempted to elucidate the ways in which
vision and hearing each orient consciousness to the world in
distinctive ways. Drawing mainly from the work of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty and Hans Jonas, David Chidester notes that hearing is
associated with time and sequence, while seeing is associated with
space; that is, the eye sees objects in space while the ear hears
sounds arising and passing away in time.(28) The "dimension," as it
were, of sound is time, while the three dimensions of space are the
medium in which objects of vision subsist. Auditory experience is
inherently related to flux and discontinuity in that it structures
and presents things in a temporal sequence. The kind of sound that
is most important to this inquiry, the spoken word, is paradigmatic
of this sequentiality, being what Merleau-Ponty calls "an indefinite
series of discontinuous acts."(29) A word, like any sound, is an
event that is always passing away, always mobile. Because words are
always disappearing as they are pronounced, Walter Ong suggests that
orality is essentially dialogical and that, in oral cultures,
thought must be "shaped into mnemetic patterns ordered for oral
recurrence" and consist of rhythmic and repetitious patterns and
formulary expressions."(30) This, of course, is precisely the
constitution of the early Buddhist sutras, such as our example, the
Salayatana-vibanga.
Vision, on the other hand, suggests a different orientation toward
knowledge and its organization. The visual system is capable of
apprehending a variety of things simultaneously and is less tied to
temporal sequence. It apprehends a number of copresent things and
unifies them in the moment, making them more susceptible to
analysis. Chidester suggests that visual perception is more
conducive to the discernment of patterns and to detached
contemplation, while hearing, particularly hearing a voice, may be
more apt to induce action, since it informs the hearer of an event
or a change in the situation that calls for response.(31) These
observations apply not only to visually apprehended objects but also
to the written, as opposed to the spoken, word. Ong asserts that
writing "restructures consciousness" and dud the literate mind is
forever changed in its thinking and orientation to the world, not
only when engaged in reading or writing, but even when speaking,
hearing, and composing thoughts orally: "More than any other
invention, writing has transformed consciousness" because, among
other things, it "moves speech from the oral-aural to a new sensory
world, that of vision [and therefore] transforms speech and thought
as well."(32)
The implications of these suggestions on ways in which oral-aural
and literate-visual modalities structure consciousness and culture
cannot be fully drawn out in the limited space of this inquiry, but
some points about South Asian Buddhism in this regard can be noted.
The difference between accessing the teachings of the Dharma through
hearing and through reading undoubtedly had significant effects on
the ways in which Buddhists appropriated the sutras. Writing was a
medium that was uniquely appropriate to the Mahayana and its
creative reinterpretations of doctrine in that it fired access to
texts from being dependent on the collective activities of chanting
and recitation and thus from the need for the institutional sanction
of the monastic Sangha. Further, because the written manuscript
frees the reader from being locked into the temporal flow of the
recitation and to the particular place where the recitation is
performed, it lends itself to appropriation in ways very different
from those that are possible in either the performing or hearing of
oral recitation. Since the manuscript is present in its entirety,
rather than constantly passing away in time, as is the case with
oral utterance, a greater degree of analysis and reflection on the
material is possible. A reader can move back and forth through a
text at will, drawing correlations between different passages,
analyzing and comparing statements, and cross-referencing with other
texts. These activities allowed more individual reflection,
interpretation, and analysis, which may have predisposed readers to
novel interpretation, individual insight, and embellishment.
The analytic and interpretive activities to which writing lent
itself were not confined to the Mahayana but had an impact on all of
the Buddhist schools. It is around the time of the emergence of
writing that systematic philosophy and analysis of doctrine, such as
that found in the Abhidharma, begins to take shape. Ong has
suggested that analysis and philosophy are only possible in a
literate culture." If the early Pali sutras that we possess today
are anything like their oral antecedents (which they most likely
are), this is obviously not true in the case of Indian Buddhism.
Considerable theoretical reflection and analysis is present in these
texts. However, it seems clear that extensive analysis of the sutras
themselves arose in conjunction with the development of writing. The
attempt to systematize the teachings of the sutras into a consistent
order came about from the relative freedom from temporal sequence
that writing afforded. Abhidharma thought, with its extensive lists,
categories, correlations, headings, and subheadings, bears the marks
of literate composition in that it culls teachings from a number of
different sources and attempts to systematize, synthesize, and
categorize them. Such activities would be extremely difficult if one
were limited to the sequentiality that structures oral recitation of
memorized utterances. The simultaneous presence of written texts in
visual space is necessary for such work. The multiple categories and
subcategories in the Abhidharma and other commentarial literature
are, in part, the products of the ability to represent complex
classificatory schemas spatially. In contemporary books dealing with
the Abhidharma, one can scarcely come across a discussion of this
literature that does not contain at least one chart in which the
various elements of existence (dharmas) are laid out spatially,
allowing all the complex classifications and their relationships to
present themselves spatially.
The fixed, static nature of the book, and its passive
unresponsiveness, may also give it a sense of implicit authority and
unchallengeability on an intuitive level, particularly to those for
whom writing is a new phenomenon. Ong suggests that writing
establishes a "context free" or "autonomous" discourse that is more
detached from its authors than oral discourse and, therefore, cannot
be questioned directly.(34) These points are helpful when thinking
about the Mahayana and heterodox movements in general. Writing helps
in establishing an unorthodox movement because written words may
have their own implicit authority; they do not call for
justification, response, and argumentation as easily and immediately
as spoken words. Their soundless presence is perhaps mom likely to
evoke a sense of implicit legitimacy than is a human voice, whose
authority depends on the social position of the speaker in a given
context. The impassivity of the written word may evoke a sense of
authority that gives the appearance of being free from or floating
above social context, since the conditions of its production (at
least in the case of Mahayana sutras) are obscure. Its very
unresponsiveness may seem to elevate it above the spoken word, which
tends to call for an immediate response. In many cultures in the
early stages of literacy, writings confer on themselves a self
authenticating and sacred quality perhaps because of the mute,
unresponsive authority that they present or because sacred words are
among the things most likely to be written down.(35) Furthermore, by
providing a technology by which any literate person could access and
interpret the Dharma outside the context of the Sangha, writing
encouraged unorthodox insight, creativity, and dissent. The writer
could compose his or her own ideas, which would be present before
the eye, laid out with the same seeming permanence and
unassailability as the Buddha-vacana. The physical presence of the
written manuscript, in turn, contributed to the likelihood that
these ideas would not die the moment the author's voice fell silent.
Therefore, the inherently conservative tendencies of the oral
tradition, which strove to maintain the integrity of the words of
the founder through its various institutional practices and rules,
were subverted in part by the introduction of writing.
Finally, in looking at the introductory passages of the sample
sutras, the most obvious difference is that they are unmistakably
structured around different sense modalities, the sutra on the sense
fields being composed in mnemonic patterns for oral memorization and
recitation and the Gandavyuha being written as a visual extravaganza
not only in its barrage of vivid imagery, but in its frequent use of
visually oriented language and metaphor. The emphasis throughout the
text is on what is seen rather than what is heard. The emergence of
visionary literature is not confined to Mahayana Buddhism but is a
pan-Indic phenomenon beginning around the first or second century
B.C.E.--the same time as the emergence of writing. Parts of the
Bhagavadgita and the Pure Land texts are the most ready examples of
such visually oriented literature emerging around this period. It is
also noteworthy that visualization practices became more elaborate
and important in both Buddhism and Hinduism at this time. I would
not want to attribute all of this exclusively to the emergence of
writing, but the coincidence of a wave of visionary literature and
practice sweeping India at about the same time as literacy was
becoming widespread does suggest that writing and the attendant
shift to the visual sense modality played a significant part in the
development of visionary literature in India.
THE BUDDHA-VACANA AND STRATEGIES OF LEGITIMATION IN THE MAHAYANA
Of course, the implicit advantages of writing and written sutras
were not the only factors in the relative success of the Mahayana
movement(s) in South Asia. Aside from being composed in the
propitious medium of written language, the content of Mahayana
sutras written in South Asia went to great lengths to attempt to
establish the movement's authority and legitimacy--something that
would have been quite difficult for what was probably a minority
reform movement facing well-established and powerful monastic
institutions with their own claims to authority and legitimacy. The
contention of this article is that at least one factor in the
evocative imagery and rhetorical style of many Mahayana sutras
involved its use as such a strategy of legitimation. Before
examining a specific instance of such a use, though, it would be
helpful to place this claim in context by discussing some of the
ways in which the early Mahayana struggled against the more orthodox
schools' claims to exclusive authority based on possession of the
Buddha-vacana, the words of the Buddha. As we have seen, the early
Buddhist community's identity involved its role as the keepers of
the Buddha-vacana given by Gautama and, according to tradition,
memorized by his disciples and passed orally from generation to
generation. This community considered itself to be those who heard,
either directly or through others, the words of the Buddha. Thus,
the hearers of the Buddha-vacana were not only those who were
actually present at the talks of the Buddha, but also disciples who
received the teachings through hearing oral recitation. Although not
the only criterion for legitimacy, the most important and
unambiguous way in which a teaching was understood to be authentic
was that it was considered to be the very words that the Buddha
spoke.(36) Thus the Buddha-vacana was the primary seal of
authenticity.
Concern for the word of the Buddha continued in the Mahayana but
became a more complex issue. A sutra is a composition containing a
talk given by the Buddha and is therefore by definition
Buddha-vacana. Whether from the Pali canon or the Mahayana, all
sutras start out with the narrator uttering the same words: "Thus
have I heard . . ." (evam maya srutam). Following this is a
description of the particular place the sermon was heard,
individuals and groups dud were present, and so forth--all reports
that would seem to provide verification that the original hearer was
in fact in the specified place at the time of the talk. Yet it is
clear to modern scholars, as it probably was to most Buddhists in
ancient India, that the Mahayana sutras were composed quite a long
time after the death of Gautama and that it is highly unlikely that
the "historical" Buddha ever spoke any of them. Thus, the need to
explain the existence of these sutras and the attendant novel
doctrines was of great concern to the Mahayana and is an issue
addressed, directly or indirectly, in many sutras and commentaries.
It is impossible to reconstruct precisely the attitudes and
motivations of these early Mahayana, sutra writers--to imagine what
they conceived of themselves as doing when, hundreds of years after
the Buddha's death, they wrote the words "evam maya srutam." Perhaps
they had powerful insights that they were convinced were inspired by
the Buddha or perhaps stories and ideas generated in the
environments of the stupa cults eventually were considered to be
part of the Buddha's dialogues. These late sutra writers may have
simply had a far more liberal interpretation of what counts as the
word of the Buddha than did their orthodox contemporaries. It is
conceivable that many doctrines and practices that we now consider
uniquely Mahayana were in existence from very early but were simply
marginalized by those who determined the legitimacy of teachings;
thus we know nothing about them until the Mahayana became more
organized and began writing its own texts.
Despite the inevitable obscurity to historical investigation of the
intentions of these late sutra writers, many indications do exist as
to how Mahayanists construed their creative reformulations of the
Dharma and justified them to themselves and to outsiders once they
were written. A number of explanations were offered for the
emergence of these new sutras. According to one ancient
reconstruction of the Mahayana, the sravakas did not have the
capacity to understand the advanced teachings of the Great Vehicle,
so they were taught to otherworldly beings and hidden until teachers
emerged who could understand them.(37) Another explanation was that
the original hearers did not understand the content of these talks
but transmitted them anyway for later generations better equipped to
comprehend them.(38) The claim was prevalent that certain teachings
were revealed only to a select few. Many Mahayana commentators went
to great lengths to reconcile the teachings of the Hinayana with
those of the Mahayana by a careful reworking of the story of the
Buddha's life in which every teaching ever attributed to him was
understood to be given to particular disciples on various levels of
spiritual attainment. In these scenarios, less spiritually developed
people were given teachings of the Hinayana, while bodhisattvas and
other nearly enlightened being received the higher teachings of the
Mahayana.
The text that is perhaps the most replete with explanations of novel
Mahayana doctrines and practices is the Lotus Sutra. The rhetoric of
the Lotus is suggestive of the polemical context in which these
doctrines and practices developed. It directly addresses the
contradictions between its Mahayana teachings and those of the
Nikayas, much like the Christian Church explained its relationship
to Judaism, by claiming supersession. It presents three specific
types of people on the Buddhist path--the sravaka, who hears the
words of the Buddha; the pratyekabuddha who attains salvation
through his own efforts and without a teacher; and the bodhisattva,
who renounces his own entry into nirvana until all sentient beings
are saved. After warning that this teaching would be quite
disturbing to both human beings and gods, the Buddha explains that
all of the teachings held by those on these three paths are merely
skillful means (upaya) that he employed to lead them all to the one
true vehicle to Buddhahood, the Mahayana. The teachings held by the
three archetypal figures on the path were given because the sravakas
and pratyekabuddhas were capable of understanding only limited
truths, such as the doctrine of causes and conditions, and of
attaining freedom from rebirth and suffering in the quiescence of
nirvana. In the most famous parable of the Lotus, these doctrines
were likened to promises told to children in order to lure them out
of a burning house.(39) At one time, says the Buddha, these inferior
teachings may have been necessary, but now the time has come to
reveal the full extent of the Dharma in the teachings of the Lotus.
The claim, then, that the Hinayana teachings were merely skillful
means to prepare disciples to receive the higher truth of the
Mahayana explained the discrepancies between the two, while at the
same time asserting the superiority of the new teachings.
The theme of secrecy was also an important factor in explaining
novel texts and contradictory doctrines. The arising of additions to
the Dharma and the discrepancies between sutras were sometimes
explained by the claim that the Buddha communicated secret Mahayana
teachings to certain people, at times even in the midst of giving a
Hinayana teaching. The most complex examples of this claim occurred
outside India, for example, in the Chinese systems of doctrinal
classification (plan chaio). Perhaps the most elaborate of such
systems was that of the great Chinese thinker Chih-i. According to
Chih-i, the Buddha taught different sutras to people with different
levels understanding and spiritual development, intuiting who was
ready to hear advanced teachings and who could only appreciate
limited teachings. After teaching the Avitamsaka Sutra immediately
preceding his enlightenment, he then moderated his approach,
proceeding from the more digestible Hinayana teachings through to
the Vimalakirtinirdesa, the Sunyavada teachings, and others, until
finally he revealed the perfect expression of the Dharma, the Lotus
Sutra. Most interesting is Chih-i's notion of the secret methods by
which the Buddha communicated all these divergent doctrines to
different people, according to their level of understanding. The
"secret indeterminate" teachings were those in which the Buddha said
the same thing in such a manner that different listeners, each
unaware of the other, heard the teachings in a different way and
thus came away remembering completely different discourses. In other
cases, the Buddha spoke secretly to separate individuals, each of
whom thought that he alone was the exclusive recipient of the
message; but, in fact, others were present, magically concealed from
each other so that, again, they came away with contradictory
teachings. In the "express indeterminate" teachings, Chih-i asserts
that the Buddha said the same thing, but different people--this time
all present and aware of each other--heard distinctly different
sermons; thus, again, each came away with different doctrines. All
of these explanations served, first, to explain the wide variety of
seemingly conflicting doctrines all claiming to be the words of the
Buddha, second, to impose a hierarchical structure on the various
doctrines with the teachings of one's own school on top; and third,
to try to determine the highest teaching, namely, that which was
closest to representing the Buddha's own enlightenment.
What is important about Chih-i's attempt to understand the great
diversity of teachings all claiming to be the words of the Buddha is
that it epitomizes the way in which, even after the Mahayana
attained dominance in China, the Great Vehicle struggled both to
subvert and reconcile itself to most orthodox Buddhist doctrine and
practice. Although it reached its most elaborate forms in China,
this effort began with the early MahAyAna in India. Virtually every
schools of Buddhism in India had its own version of which doctrines
had definitive meaning (nitartha) and which had merely provisional
meaning (neyartha), and since there were no univocally accepted
standards for deciding such matters, each school drew this
distinction on the basis of its own doctrinal suppositions. The
organization of doctrines based on the notion that some were merely
skillful means indicates the strong need felt by Mahayanists to
legitimate their novel teachings, while maintaining a connection of
lineage with Sakyamuni. It is noteworthy that, while the orthodox
schools often criticized the Mahayana as being inauthentic, the
Mahayanists never questioned the legitimacy of the Hinayana sutras,
that is, that they were records of talks that the Buddha actually
gave. The effort to authenticate the Mahayana sutras was aimed at
explaining how the Buddha actually gave doctrines that contradicted
each other--how a unity of thought and intention could be understood
to lie beneath the apparent discrepancies between the large and
small vehicles. The rhetorical devices used to establish legitimacy
in the MahAyAna were always a hermeneutic of inclusion--albeit an
inclusion that was also a subversion, for while the Hinayana sutras
were considered authentic, they were relegated to being merely
provisional.
VISIONARY LITERATURE AND GROUNDS FOR LEGITIMACY
Having suggested the significance of writing and various strategies
of legitimation for the emerging Mahayana movement in South Asia, I
now return to the introductory passage from the Gandavyuha and to
the question of the pronounced difference in literary style between
the Hinayana sutras and many of the Mahayana sutras. Recall the
stark contrast between the sparse style of the Pali sutras and the
lush visionary images of the Gandavyuha. While the Gandavyuha is
probably the most effusive example of such literary style in
Buddhist writings, it is not alone among Mahayana sutras in
presenting dazzling scenes attendant on the Buddha's preparing to
deliver a discourse. Many such sutras begin in similar, albeit
toned-down ways. It is tempting to attribute the "magical" elements
in Mahayana literature to the fact that the movement began among the
laity and that these features were products of the popular religious
imagination. But, while the laicizing tendencies of the Mahayana
were certainly important to the development of many novel features
of these texts, the works themselves were obviously written by an
educated elite who were thoroughly familiar with all facets of
Buddhist doctrine and practice. Furthermore, in addition to the
nourishing of the popular need for salvific figures, and of the new
religious specialists' predilection for visionary experience, there
is embedded in these lavish presentations highly polemical rhetoric
designed both to explain the emergence of previously unknown sutras
and to establish them as superior to the Hinayana. Thus, the
visionary elements of Mahayana sutras, in addition to weaving an
aesthetically rich and fascinating fabric of symbolic imagery that
would nourish the Buddhist imagination up to the present day, made a
unique contribution to the aforementioned strategies of
legitimation. The Gandavyuha makes these polemical strategies quite
clear. Continuing with the passage presented at the beginning of
this study, we find that after the extensive description of the
transfigured Jeta Grove and the wonders attending the arrival of the
otherworldy bodhisattvas, the narrator points out that the sravakas
who were present, such as Sariputra, Mahakasyapa, Subhuti, and
others who are the frequent interlocutors of the Buddha in the
sutras, were completely oblivious to the entire miraculous scene.
The reason they did not see it is because, among other defects, they
"lacked the roots of goodness conducive to the vision of the
transfiguration of all buddhas ... and did not have the purity of
the eye of knowledge."(40) Furthermore, they did not have the "power
of vision" to see these things because they were of the vehicle of
the sravakas, who had neither the "developed bodhisattva's range of
vision" nor the "eyes of the bodhisattvas."(41)
Part of the significance of these elaborate visionary depictions,
then, is to establish a kind of spiritual hierarchy with those who
merely heard the words of the Buddha, the sravakas, on the bottom,
and those bodhisattvas who saw the true transfigured state of the
Buddha and his surroundings on top. The fact that the bodhisattvas
are depicted as seeing the vision, while the sravakas remain
oblivious, is at once an assertion of the value of seeing over
hearing and of the Mahayana over the "Hinayana."
While the Gandavyuha is the text that makes this strategy most
obvious, other Mahayana sutras employ similar devices, often
involving visions of the higher bodies of the Buddha. The Lotus
sutra, is one of the early Mahayana texts that lays the groundwork
for the importance of having visions of the Buddha, insofar as it
explicitly claims that the Buddha is actually a transcendent
being.(42) This theme is taken up in the sutra when the Buddha
discusses the countless numbers of beings that he has led to
Buddhahood in his past lives. In a rare moment of doubt and
confusion, Maitreya broaches the subject of how the Buddha could
have led to enlightenment these many beings in countless ages past
if Gautama had himself only attained enlightenment in this lifetime
and only relatively recently. The answer is a bombshell. The stories
of the Buddha's life, his leaving the household, his achieving
awakening under the bodhisattvas tree, and his warning that he would
soon be gone, were themselves all merely upaya, skillful means to
lead less developed beings toward the higher teachings of the Great
Vehicle. In fact, he reports he attained enlightenment innumerable
eons ago and has been teaching the Dharma in this and countless
other world systems for incalculable ages. The reason he teaches
certain beings that the appearance of a Buddha in a world is rare
and that he will soon be gone forever is so that they will practice
the Dharma with vigor and be diligent in striving for awakening. But
in reality, he says, he is always present and never perishes, is
unlimited by time and space, and is able to manifest in the world
whenever he is needed.(43)
The notions of the transcendence of the Buddha and the
fictitiousness of the received stories of his life were powerful
tools in the struggle of the Mahayana for legitimacy. First, these
ideas de-emphasized the "historical" Sakyamuni and presented many of
the core elements of orthodox Buddhism as irrelevant. Second, they
gave an additional rationale for the emergence of new sutras and
doctrines. The idea that the Buddha had not, in fact, passed into
nirvana but continued to teach on an as-needed basis could serve, in
combination with the doctrine of upaya, as an explanation for the
introduction of new teachings. Pauls Williams points out a tradition
in some Mahayana literature in which the origins of certain Mahayana
sutras were associated not with the historical Buddha per se but
with the visionary experience and inspiration by the supermundane
buddha or buddhas who exist in Pure Lands or buddha fields. He
offers a passage from the Pratyutpanna Sutra that gives instructions
for visualizing the buddha Amitayus in his Pure Land teaching the
Dharma and in which the meditator is actually given teachings by
this Buddha: "While remaining in this very world-system that
bodhisattva sees the Lord, the Tathagata Amitayus; and conceiving
himself to be in that world-system he also hears the Dharma. Having
heard their exposition he accepts, masters and retains those
Dharmas. He worships, venerates, honours and reveres the Lord ...
Amitayus. After he has emerged from that samadhi [meditative
absorption) that bodhisattva also expounds widely to others those
Dharmas as he has heard, retained and mastered them."(44) It is
possible, then, that some Mahayana sutras were the result of what
the author considered a direct visionary revelation of the Dharma
from a transcendent source, one that at once augmented and surpassed
the teachings in the Pali canon.
Another idea that comes into play here is the importance in Buddhist
literature of seeing a buddha. Even in the early literature the
sight of a buddha is considered to be auspicious, but nowhere are
the benefits extolled so much as in the Gandavyuha Sutra:
The word of a Buddha is hard to come by even in a billion eons;
How much more so the sight of a Buddha, which ends all craving.(45)
Those who have seen the Buddha, the supreme man, are certain of
[their own] enlightenment.(46)
All obstructions are removed when a Buddha is seen,
Increasing the immeasurable virtue whereby enlightenment will be
attained.
The sight of a Buddha severs all the doubts of sentient beings
And fulfills all purposes, mundane and transcendent.(47)
While in earlier texts, seeing the ordinary form of a buddha was
enough, the Mahayana increasingly emphasized the resplendent
enjoyment body (sambhoga-kaya), the body formed as a result of the
meritorious karmic accumulations of the buddha.
The idea of supermundane buddhas and the significance of seeing
their transcendent form deflected the importance of having heard the
words of Sakyamuni when he was in Jeta Grove. While hearing the
words of the Buddha was the basis for authenticity and legitimacy in
the orthodox traditions, it became less important, if not associated
with a handicap, according to certain Mahayana sutras: according to
the Gandavyuha, having heard a discourse from the finite form of the
Sakyamuni in an ordinary park merely showed the hearer's
limitations, that is, his inability to see the higher form of the
Buddha and his Pure Land, which is coextensive with the ordinary
world.
Thus, in contradistinction to the ordinary settings of early sutras,
in which a group of simple monks gather in a park to hear the Buddha
give a talk, many Mahayana sutras begin by depicting the Buddha
revealing himself in his enjoyment body. In another Perfection of
Wisdom text, the Pancavimsatisahasrika, for example, before giving
his talk, the Buddha's body suddenly becomes radiant, and rays of
light emit from his "divine eye," his toes, legs, ankles, thighs,
hips, navel, arms, fingers, ears, nostrils, teeth, eyes, and hair
pores. This light illumines all the multiple world systems in the
triple cosmos. Only after an extensive description of the
resplendence of the Buddha's form and the attendant miraculous
events does he actually begin his sermon.(48) This preliminary
visual display is one of the primary means of attempting to
establish the legitimacy of the Mahayana sutra--perhaps more so than
the dubious claim of the narrator to have heard the sutra from
Sakyamuni. The idea of the transcendent Buddha allowed a reversal of
value with regard to the spoken word. The fact that the monks who
committed the Pali sutras to memory claimed to have heard the
teachings of the Buddha as a man in a specific place and time was
the seal of authenticity in the Pali sutras but is presented as a
sign of limitation in the Lotus and other Mahayana sutras. If the
Buddha were actually a transcendent being, and the ability to see
his higher form was contingent on ones spiritual development, then
hearing him preach in the voice of a man, in an ordinary body, at a
typical place and time, as depicted in the Hinayana sutras, was
simply an indication of the limited capacities of the hearer.
These elaborate introductions are intended to establish the
transcendent source of the teachings contained in the sutras and
serve to relativize the comparatively prosaic Pali accounts. While
Mahayana sutras continued invariably to begin according to standard
form--with the narrator claiming to have heard the dialogue in a
particular historical place and time, thus preserving the legitimacy
and connection to received tradition and lineage conferred by the
phrase "evam maya srutam"--the presentation of the transcendent form
of the Buddha in his Pure Land served to mitigate the importance of
any particular time or place. The tendency of the Mahayana sutras,
then, was to disembed the teachings from Deer Park and re-embed them
in a transcendent realm. The Mahayana attempted to transfer the
basis of legitimacy from the spoken word of Sakyamuni to the vision
of the transcendent Buddha, which rendered the specificity of the
places that the Buddha spoke during his lifetime less relevant. The
transfiguration of Jeta Grove shows that the locale in which the
Gandavyuha was given was not really Jeta Grove at all but a kind of
placeless place in which the wonders of the Buddha and his world
were revealed. The displacement of the Buddha's teaching parallels
the displacement of sacred spaces occasioned by the cults of the
book. Both tended to deemphasize the particularities of time and
place associated with the Buddha's life in favor of creating the
ideal of a universal sacred space that was at once everywhere and
yet nowhere in particular. The image of the ground turning into a
transparent diamond in our passage from the Gandavyuha is a most
powerful symbol of this displacement--rather than the hills, trees,
and other landmarks of Jeta Grove that must have been familiar to
the disciples who lived in the vicinity or had visited the place on
pilgrimage, the land becomes a uniform crystalline diamond extending
in all directions. Such a landscape allows for no distinction or
particularity and thus symbolizes the universality and
undifferentiation of all spaces--a condition that many Mahayana
sutras claim is true from a higher point of view. It reflects, thus,
the Perfection of Wisdom texts' assertion that all elements of
existence (dharmas) are undifferentiated, placeless (adesa), and
without locality (apradesa), like space itself.(49)
CONCLUSION
The foregoing consideration of the literary style of different
sutras opens up a number of issues involving the development,
sustenance, and establishment of the Mahayana. Writing allowed its
heterodox teachings to survive and instituted forms of sutra worship
that would serve to expand the movement, not only through spreading
its doctrines but by consecration of places. The development of
writing also shifted access to and organization of knowledge from an
exclusively oral/aural mode to one that included visuality, and this
allowed for greater analysis and commentary, as well as for dissent.
The Mahayana's embracing of the shift from oral/ aural to
literate/visual also challenged the authority of the orthodox
traditions in a number of ways, the most vivid example being the use
of visionary literature to establish authority and supersession.
Examining what was at stake in the conflicting claims between the
Mahayana and the more orthodox schools helps to elucidate the
concrete concerns that constituted the conditions under which these
Mahayana sutras were produced. All of this suggests some of the
social and historical factors that contributed to the intense visual
imagery of some Mahayana sutras and that made a highly visual
orientation well-suited to the Mahayana.
We should be careful not to oversimplify or overstate the point
here. It is not that Mahayana sutras were exclusively focused on
vision, and Pali sutras on hearing and recitation. In fact, some of
the resources for the visionary material in the Mahayana are found
in the Pali texts in a more subtle form, and these early texts also
contain many ocular metaphors, such as the frequent pairing of
knowledge and vision. Conversely, traditions of recitation and
mnemonic devices are not absent from Mahayana sutras, and some of
these sutras extol the virtues of those who are able to recite long
texts from memory. The point is, first, that the Mahayana tended to
emphasize vision to a greater extent than the orthodox traditions,
who emphasized hearing, and second, that these respective
orientations were specifically involved with each tradition's claims
to authority and legitimacy.
It would also be inadequate to claim that the sole function of and
reason for visionary literature in the Mahayana was to serve as a
strategy of legitimation. As was mentioned, much non-Buddhist Indian
literature at the time of the composition of these sutras was of a
similar visionary style, and in many ways these sutras reflect a
pan-Indic visionary trend in literature in the first couple
centuries before and after the beginning of the common era. However,
the polemical uses of such literature should not be overlooked, for
they shed light on the historical and social context in which the
Mahayana, emerged. Nor do these considerations necessarily mitigate
the impact and religious significance of this extraordinary
visionary literature and the visionary experiences they depict--they
do suggest, however, that even the most otherworldly visions are
often intertwined with this-worldly concerns.
(1) Salayatana-vibhanga suttam, in Majjhima-Nikaya, ed. Robert
Charles (London: Luzac, for the Pali Text Society, 1960), pp.
215-22.
(2) Gandavyuha Sutra, ed. P. L. Vaidya, Buddhist Sanskrit Texts no.
5 (Darbhanga: Mithila Institute, 1960), p. 1 (hereafter cited as
Gandavyuha).
(3) Ibid., pp. 4-5.
(4) H. C. Warren, trans., Mahaparinibbana Sutta, in Buddhism in
Translation (New York: Atheneum 1984), p. 107.
(5) Steven Collins, "Notes on Some Oral Aspects of Pali Literature,"
Indo-Iranian Journal 35 (1992): 121-35.
(6) For example, Collins (p. 124) notes the following: vaceti, "to
make (the pupil) recite"; uddisati, "teaches, recites"; ugganhati,
grasps in memory"; adhiyati and pariyapunati, "learns (by
reciting)"; sajjhayati, "recites"; and dhareti, "retains (what he
has learnt in memory)."
(7) Collins, p. 129.
(8) Ibid., p. 128.
(9) Ibid., p. 121.
(10) Lance Cousins, Internet communication, Buddha-L discussion
group, February 7, 1996.
(11) Richard Gombrich, "How the Mahayana Began," in The Buddhist
Forum, vol. 1, ed. Tadeusz Skorupski (London: School of Oriental and
African Studies), p. 28.
(12) Donald Lopez, "Authority and Orality in the Mahayana," Numen
(1995): 20-47, quote on 39.
(13) Gombrich, pp. 21-30.
(14) For a discussion of rules for determining textual authenticity,
see Etienne Lamotte, "The Assessment of Textual Interpretation in
Buddhism trans. Sara Boin-Webb, in Buddhist Hermeneutics, ed. Donald
Lopez (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 1988), pp. 11-28.
(15) Saddharmapundarikasutra, ed. P. L. Vaidya, Buddhist Sanskrit
Texts no. 6 (Darbhanga: Mithila Institute, 1960), pp. 265-67; see
chaps. 17-19 for discussions of merit.
(16) Kajiyana Yuichi, "Prajnaparamita and the Rise of Mahayana in
Buddhist Spirituality, ed. Takeuchi Yoshinori (New York: Crossroad,
1993), pp. 143-44.
(17) Akira Hirakawa, A History of Indian Buddhism: From Sakyamuni to
Early Mahayana, trans. Paul Groner (Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 1990), pp. 270-74.
(18) While Hirakawa associates the birth of the Mahayana directly
with the laity and the stupa cults, which be claims were almost
exclusively the domain of the laity, Paul Williams argues that the
laity did not themselves bring about Mahayana Buddhism. Rather, the
Mahayana, or at least its literature, was the product of monks
within the established traditions whose understanding of the Dharma
was more inclusive of the laity and their practices and
perspectives. See Paul Williams Mahayana Buddhism: the Doctrinal
Foundations (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 20-23.
(19) Hirakawa, p. 274.
(20) "Perfection of Wisdom" is used in this sense as the state of
enlightenment or that which leads to such a state, as well as the
text itself.
(21) Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita, ed. P. L. Vaidya, Buddhist
Sanskrit Texts no. 4 (Darbhanga: Mithila Institute, 1960), p. 49.
(22) Ibid., p. 96. The reference to dharmakaya is likely a later
interpolation; nevertheless, it shows one way in which the cult of
the Prajnaparamita attempted to supersede devotion to relics by
playing the terms sarira and kaya off of each other.
(23) Gregory Schopen, "The phrase `sa prthivipradesa caityabhuto
bhavet' in the Vajracchedika: Notes on the Cult of the Book in the
Mahayana," Indo-Iranian Journal 17 (November-December 1975):147-81.
(24) Ibid., p. 179.
(25) Ibid., pp. 178-79.
(26) Ibid.
(27) Asta, pp. 46-47.
(28) David Chidester, Word and Light: Seeing, Hearing, and Religious
Discourse (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992),
p. 9.
(29) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans.
Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), p. 193, quoted in
Chidester, p. 9.
(30) Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the
Word (New York: Methuen, 1982), p. 34. While some of Oafs other
generalizations about oral cultures seem disproved by the case of
early Buddhism, such as the requirement that they are "agonistically
toned" (p. 43) and would never contain "a vehicle so neutral as a
list" (p. 42), the observation regarding mnemetic patterns certainly
applies to the early sutras.
(31) Chidester, p. 11.
(32) Ong, pp. 78, 85. See also, on the shift from ear to eye,
Marshall MacLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1962).
(33) Ong, p. 15.
(34) Ibid., p. 78.
(35) For examples, see Jack Goody, ed., Literacy in Traditional
Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).
(36) The other three criteria were that it be the words of a
formally constituted Sangha, of a small group of elders, or of a
single learned monk. It should also be in harmony with the other
sutras and the Vinaya.
(37) Taranatha, Taranatha's Geschichte des Buddhismus in Indien
trans. Anton Schiefner (Tokyo: Suzuki Gakujutsu Zaidan, 1965), pp.
61 ff., cited in A. K. Warder, Indian Buddhism (Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass, 1970), p. 6.
(38) Lopez (n. 12 above), p. 39.
(39) Saddharmapundarikasutra (n. 15 above), pp. 44-50.
(40) Gandavyuha (n. 2 above), p. 14.
(41) Ibid., p. 15.
(42) The notion of the Buddha as a transcendent, godlike being,
however, is not unknown in pre-Mahayana Buddhism. The Mahasamghikas
taught the notion of a supermundane buddha, e.g., in the Mahavastu.
See Williams (n. 18 above), p. 18.
(43) Saddharmapundarikasutra, p. 16.
(44) Williams, p. 30, citing the translation by P. M. Harrison in
"Buddhanusmrti in the
Pratyutpanna-buddha-sammukuvasthita-samadhi-sutra," Journal of
Indian Philosophy 9 (1978): 35-57, quote on 43.
(45) Gandavyuha, p. 23.
(46) Ibid.
(47) Ibid., p. 24.
(48) Edward Conze, trans., The Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom
(Pancavimsatishasrika) (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1975), pp. 38-39.
(49) See, e.g., Asta (n. 21 above), pp. 196, 476.