In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

6 Vimalakirti, or Why Bad Boys Finish First In a sense, language is always about itself: in interior monologues, just as in dialogue, there are no “thoughts”: there is only the speech that speech elicits. Merleau-Ponty, La prose du monde 236 OVERVIEW AND THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE Of the texts selected in this survey of early Mahayana literature, the Vimalakirti presents the brashest example of textual patriarchy overcoming prior forms of Buddhism. In an unusually hard-hitting narrative, the action produces the image of perfect tradition condensed in the Wgure of Vimalakirti who, in a series of set pieces, humiliates old-style Buddhists and their uncomplicated beliefs and practices. In the wake of this moral and philosophic devastation, the narrative resolves with the Buddha explaining that the book form of this narrative of humiliation and overcoming should be revered as the font and totality of real Buddhism. In an equally conservative moment in the closing section, the Buddha reestablishes the flow of authority by conferring the text on Maitreya, thereby fully regathering tradition and setting it within its most familiar conduits, despite the havoc that the text wrought on tradition throughout the earlier phases of the narrative. Of course, this narrative sequence has much in common with the three texts considered in the preceding chapters, and in fact the author seems particularly influenced by several elements and episodes from the Lotus Sutra. At the end of this chapter and in the Wnal chapter, I offer some reflections on what is implied by Mahayana authors rewriting each other’s attempts to make texts into tradition. For now, sufWce it to say that this kind of literary borrowing suggests a complex literary culture in which writers were reading each other in just the way that these texts hoped not to be read, that is, as literature. Thus, instead of seeking in these works the pristine orality of the historical Buddha and the totality of tradition that these texts proffered, writers read against the grain looking to understand how these works formulated seductive reading experiences, and all in order to write new seductive narratives and develop alternative motifs that implicitly negated the value of the texts they had worked from. Thus when we try to conceptualize the origins of Mahayana literature, we need to imagine a complex ongoing reinvention of tradition that, in part, was authored by Wgures who not only read, for instance, the Lotus Sutra and dodged its centripetal pull, but then turned on it to cannibalize it for new writing projects. In short, each of these narratives, insofar as they repeat and deny their antecedents, represent a history of writing in which authors sought to do to readers exactly what other texts had at best only partially done to them—seduce them into accepting a Mahayana sutra as the totality of tradition. Presumably, then, even within the Mahayana effort to overcome traditional Buddhism there is another track of competition in which each text is silently, yet undeniably, attempting to overcome its textual precedents. Perhaps even more interesting is the possibility that the very gesture that predominates in these Mahayana sutras—that movement “up” to overcome a prior meaning system by creating a new master signiWer—allowed for all sorts of flexibility in how these authors participated in meaning systems. That is, if the fundamental gesture in the sutras considered so far is one of sublation in which the standard form of tradition still stands even as it is turbocharged via rhetorics of negation, then isn’t that sublation structure also visible in the space between reading a Mahayana sutra and trying to write an improved one? In both cases, the deWning structures of the prior form—be it the standard contours of traditional Buddhism or the narrative arc of an antecedent sutra—are replicated, consumed, and, after a fashion, abused, even though it is just through such a process of consumption that tradition moves forward. Of course, here we again have reason to speak of the metastasis of patriarchy since we cannot avoid the likelihood that these patriarchal systems were replicated by those who maintained a rather ambivalent attitude toward paternal Wgures, be they lodged in tradition or in prior narratives. Or more precisely, in the case of these sutras, “better,” or at least, more accessible versions of the father were written by rather ironic and complicated sons who had learned where fathers come from—from narratives of seduction whose linguistic matrixes disappear into truth and the patriarchal essences...

Share