Text as Father: Paternal Seductions in Early Mahayana Buddhist Literature

Introduction

Introduction 1 In the curious space of arguments before the arguments, let me introduce this book by acknowledging that some readers might at Wrst Wnd it strange: What could “text as father” mean, and what do fathers have to do with Buddhism in the Wrst place? The suitability of this topic will become clearer in the course of these chapters, but let me promise here at the outset that sifting through early Mahayana Buddhist sutras leaves little doubt about how important textually produced paternal Wgures were for organizing authority and legitimacy, in at least a portion of these texts. What is crucial in organizing my reading is that I take these Mahayana sutras to be knowingly fabricated by wily authors intent on creating images of authority that come to fruition in the reading experience. That is, I do not read the voices of authority—the Buddha’s and others’—that Wll out these texts as reflections of prior oral articulations or similarly innocent statements about truth and reality. Instead, I see them as carefully wrought literary constructions that assume their speciWc forms precisely because they were designed to inhabit and function in the literary space where one encounters them. Hence the title Text as Father was chosen to represent the dialectic in which texts created and presented images of “truth-fathers” who, among other things, speak to the legitimacy of the textual medium that contains them and, within this circle of self-conWrmation, draw the reader into complex realignments with the Buddhist tradition and prior representation of truth and authority. To explore the form and content of these textual truth-fathers, and the narratives that support them, I have selected four interesting and diverse Mahayana texts: the Lotus Sutra, the Diamond Sutra, the Tathagatagarbha Sutra, and the Vimalakirtinirdeýa (a work that isn’t technically a sutra but nonetheless comes to refer to itself that way by its Wnal chapters). In close 2 Introduction readings of each of these texts, I show how their narratives Wrst gather up authority, legitimacy, and sanctity, as they would have been previously constituted in the Buddhist tradition and then relocate those items within their own textual perimeters. Hence, in all four texts, the narrative offers a new Wgure of the Buddha who, once established in the flow of the narrative, explains to the reader that the sum of tradition is exclusively available in the reading experience and in the sheer physical presence of the book. In a brilliant maneuver that fully exploits the physicality of textuality, the narratives pretend to represent the living and supposedly oral aspect of the Buddha, while that “orality” explains that the sheer physicality of the text—on palm leaves, presumably—represents the presence of the Buddha. Thus, by creating plots that delicately balance the Buddha’s presence on either side of the textualized form of the narrative—in its genesis and in its reception— these sutras were designed to serve as the singular vehicle for Buddhist authenticity, promising to actualize truth and legitimacy for any reader, in any time or place. More exactly, in condensing and displacing the totality of tradition in this manner, each of these sutras offers a quid pro quo exchange in which it is said that if the reader accepts the encapsulation of tradition within the text as a legitimate fait accompli, then the reader can expect to receive from the text the totality of tradition. Thus the reader’s gift of legitimacy to the text results in the reader acquiring direct access to just that legitimacy from the text. Exaggerating only slightly, each text promises that one becomes a legitimate Buddhist by reading and believing narratives that explain, Wrst, how the “real” Buddhist tradition is not in the monasteries, or in the recognized body of rituals, codes, and practices that shaped Buddhism since its inception , and, second, that tradition is fully installed in the text that is accomplishing this rhetorical overcoming of tradition. Consequently, salvation in these four texts is no longer deWned as the straightforward Buddhist task of overcoming desire and ignorance by seeing the true nature of reality. Instead, salvation is predicated on the reader’s devotion to these new textual narratives that, among other things, completely redeWne tradition. Putting aside the standard assumptions about Mahayana Buddhism—its supposed emphasis on emptiness and compassion —I think a careful and balanced reading of these texts leaves little doubt that salvation, more often than not, was deWned not as the function of a view...