Text as Father: Paternal Seductions in Early Mahayana Buddhist Literature

2. Who’s Your Daddy Now? Reissued Paternity in the Lotus Sutra

2 Who’s Your Daddy Now? Reissued Paternity in the Lotus Sutra Once you’ve determined the right plot, plot is over. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot 48 SETTING THE STAGE One of the most striking things about the Lotus Sutra is its sophisticated use of father-son motifs to explain its own identity and then to insert itself as the deWning element in creating a new identity for the reader and his relationship to the Buddhist tradition.1 The brilliance of the text lies in the way that it is designed as a pivot that achieves its own legitimation by offering legitimacy to the reader. Thus there is a formal mimesis between the text and the reader, both of whom are given their fathers in the reading event, and it is precisely by arranging that double fathering that the text effects its most basic seduction. That is, the text is designed to enact an amazing exchange: give me the paternal right to give you, the reader, your proper paternity. More exactly, the Lotus Sutra attempts to draw the reader into accepting its redeWnition of Buddhism by claiming that it, as text, was the Wnal product of a perfect patriline of twenty thousand buddhas and that this heritage allows the text to then offer the reader entrance into that patriline, once the reader assents to the Lotus Sutra’s genealogical claim to be of that lineage. In addition to this impressive narrative architecture, and its likely influence on other early sutras, the Lotus Sutra warrants special attention for displaying a complex relationship to earlier forms of Buddhism. Of particular interest is the way the Lotus Sutra deWned this newly created Mahayana sonship as a kind of rebirth out of a previously established father-son identity that had already explained Buddhist identity as a kind of sonship to the 1. I’ve chosen this campy title for this chapter to echo the Lotus Sutra’s arrogance in calling all readers sons. An early version of this chapter was presented at Leiden University in May 1999. Buddha.2 Standing back from this play of paternity, it seems that the Lotus Sutra created the image of a hyper-Buddhist family that is formed by explicitly renouncing a previously established paternal Buddhist family, even as it borrowed many of its deWning elements and logics. Thus, throughout these narratives of conversion there is something like a ritual structure for dying to one identity in order to adopt a new one, though there is no ritual format or institutional setting provided to support this shift in Buddhist identity. Hence the text attempts to effect what Pierre Bourdieu would call “rites of institution,” even though there is no institution mentioned other than the reading moment itself and no external props, save for the physical presence of the text as book.3 This lack of external or institutional support explains many of the narrative’s contortions as it attempts to legitimize itself from within itself in order to place itself at the center of a newly deWned form of Buddhism that offered itself as the gateway to gaining a revamped form of Buddhist identity.4 In organizing such a reading of the Lotus Sutra, I need to emphasize that I am assuming that the text, or at least the chapters that I analyze closely here, were composed as an integrated plot with a governing set of principles dedicated to achieving goals that remain fairly constant over the arc of the narrative. In other words, I am assuming that at least a part of the Lotus Sutra has a plot and that we can, with care and attention, begin to understand its construction and the deeper set of authorial strategies that were relied on in creating a reading experience. If we do not adopt this kind of “reading for the plot” approach, then we have to fall back on one of three options. The Wrst is that we could simply consider that the text emerged as an unwished-for grab bag of unrelated narrative snippets, pasted together without a governing intent or a steady editorial notion of the work to be accomplished by the very act of compilation. This option is altogether unsatisfying Who’s Your Daddy Now? 49 2. For an overview of sources that employ the term “son of the Buddha,” see the article “Busshi” in Hobogirin: Dictionaire encyclopédique du bouddhisme d’après les sources chinoises et japonaises , vol. 1 (Paris: Adrien Maisonneuve, 1927...