Text as Father: Paternal Seductions in Early Mahayana Buddhist Literature

1. Text as Father

1 Text as Father Tradition is just the illusion of permanence. woody allen, Deconstructing Harry 25 TEXTUAL PATERNITY Though Buddhism was constructed around the act of “leaving the family,” the motif of paternity is actually quite prominent in Buddhist discourse. In the early literature of the Mahayana, the so-called Great Vehicle of Buddhism that arose several hundred years after Buddhism was founded, fathers of various sorts, familial, monastic, and ontological, are arguably even more in evidence . What this book seeks to do is give close readings of four of these early Mahayana texts to point out how these patriarchal rhetorics work, especially vis-à-vis the textuality that housed them, and then to begin to sketch a kind of literary culture that appears to have supported and encouraged the writing of just these kinds of texts. My choice of the four works covered in this book certainly privileges my interpretive agenda, and I do not want to give the impression that they are necessarily a well-balanced sampling of early Mahayana writing. One could easily point to a large number of early Mahayana sutras that do not present sophisticated narratives and do not rely on these complex techniques for generating authority for themselves. In fact, it would be very useful, and interesting, to begin to build something like a lexicon for these early sutras in which their formal rhetorical and narrative strategies are identiWed. A thumbnail sketch of such a lexicon would include sutras that are largely about new forms of Buddhist ethics and function basically as lists of good and bad behavior with little rhetoric in place to seduce the reader into these practices . Another category might include texts that present, not themselves as the solution to getting at the totality of tradition, but another item—be it the name of a buddha or a particular samadhi.1 These texts often can be shown 1. Two good examples of this kind of rhetoric are the Pratyutpanna Samadhisutra and the smaller Sukhavativyuhasutra. For a translation of the former, see Paul Harrison, trans., The to work in a manner parallel to the sutras considered here, but they also show divergent strategies in rewriting and condensing tradition. A third category could be those sutras that seem to come a bit later, such as the Samdhinirmocana Sutra, and seek to harmonize and solidify a range of positions apparently already on the Weld of Mahayana polemics. Beyond these basic groupings, which could be signiWcantly expanded, we should also leave room for a potpourri class, as it is quite clear that many Mahayana sutras evince writing styles that move between various strategies and likely were written by more than one author and then reedited several times with different goals in mind. However involved such a lexicon of early Mahayana writing might end up, by focusing on these four texts, I hope to draw out a number of thematics and literary strategies that seem crucial to at least one wing of Mahayana writing, and likely will be of use in approaching other Mahayana texts, even those much less reliant on explicit patriarchal Wgures. Hence, by investigating the symbolic machinery at work in these narratives, I believe we will gain signiWcant advantages for understanding the desires and fears of at least a sector of Mahayana authors and their intended readers, and it is precisely on this Weld of desire and fear that the paternal Wgures appear so prominently. For instance, in the Lotus Sutra, conversion to the Lotus Sutra is deWned as the sole means for being legitimately Buddhist and reclaiming one’s true sonship to the Buddha. The efWcacy of this contorted reading gesture is guaranteed by a Buddha-Wgure in the narrative who claims to know all beings as his sons and who is prepared to legitimize them as such, once they convert to just this narrative about fathers and sons. Obviously, this elaborate “reinduction” into the Buddhist family is set up to serve as the grounds for replacing traditional Buddhist identity with a new Mahayana identity, a process that follows from aggressively replotting the narratives that traditional Buddhists had relied on to explain their identities and destinies. Moreover, this renarratization of Buddhist identity is largely based on a complex process of negating and sublating traditional forms of Buddhist sonship, a procedure that naturally also requires faith in a new kind of paternal master-signiWer in order to work properly. As I show in chapters 2 and 3, convincing the reader of the veracity and...