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4 “Be All You Can’t Be” and Other Gainful Losses in the Diamond Sutra 160 OVERVIEW Just as the seductive literary strategies of the Lotus Sutra became clearer through a sustained narrative analysis, I hope to show that the Diamond Sutra is a suitable text for a similar kind of close reading that takes into account the basic plotline of the work, the various kinds of self-imposed “needs” of the discourse , and the multiple subject-sites that it creates for the reader to desire, inhabit, and reproduce.1 Like the Lotus Sutra, it is suffused with alarming negations of “normal” Buddhism in which the dismissal of traditional Buddhism appears as part of a larger arc designed to convince the reader to convert to a vastly improved form of Buddhist truth and value. The end point of this arc of conversion is, again like the Lotus Sutra, to take the text-as-object as the totality of tradition and to embrace its rhetoric as the sole avenue for gaining authenticity. However, in lieu of the Lotus Sutra’s clever, multilayered parables and the sophisticated narratives within narratives, the Diamond Sutra develops this conversion process with straightforward negative dialectics. In fact, all in all, the Diamond Sutra seems rather primitive. In addition to being fairly short (roughly twenty pages in English), it has a minimum of plot structure, a near-absence of action, and few overt metaphors or similes. Actually, aside from some important framing at the beginning and at the two endings, the text is essentially a haphazard list of negations since each new topic brought up for negation appears with no introduction and bears little or no relationship to the preceding topic.2 In fact, it is hard to avoid the 1. An early version of this chapter was Wrst given at the University of Oregon in July 1998; a revised version was given to Harvard University’s Buddhist Studies Forum in November 1998. 2. It seems likely that the Diamond Sutra’s various topics, which seem so unconnected, can be found throughout the Wrst three chapters of the Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Lines, where they have a bit more coherency. introductory comment that as a piece of literature, the Diamond Sutra is, despite its name, a rather poor text that relies almost exclusively on rabbitpunch declarations that disrupt and reorganize Buddhist authority and value. The challenge, then, is to understand how by deploying these brief but bewildering negations of prior forms of Buddhism the author manages to convince the reader that the essence of Buddhism is within its own textual borders. The overall simplicity of the Diamond Sutra has led scholars to locate it early in the history of Mahayana literature, and there is general agreement that it was probably written shortly before or after the beginning of the common era. This is quite reasonable, though the text seems to have two clearly discernible sections.3 Roughly halfway through the discourse, the narrative turns to close as Subhuti asks the Buddha by what name this discourse is to be known, a gesture used throughout Mahayana literature to mark the close of a teaching.4 Though the Buddha answers Subhuti’s question regarding the title of the work, thereby effectively sealing the teaching, the text runs on to develop an extensive second section. In this second section much is repeated from the Wrst section but with small twists and embellishments, giving the impression that the second half of the text is in a vague manner trying to write commentary on the Wrst half. Furthermore, the second half includes Subhuti’s tearful conversion to the text, as well as the speciWc distinction between Mahayana and Hinayana versions of the Law, polemics absent in the Wrst half, suggesting a more advanced self-aware Mahayana position.5 The absence of this more divisive vocabulary in the Wrst half might mean several things, but at the very least the Wrst half of text, as far as its own categories are concerned, does not represent a clear sectarian break from earlier forms of Buddhism, though it negates and reconstitutes several choice items from the Buddhist tradition and produces a deWnition of bodhisattvaidentity that upsets pre-Mahayana notions of bodhisattvahood.6 Thus, “Be All You Can’t Be” 161 3. Edward Conze laments that the second half is so much more jumbled than the Wrst, but in fact the Wrst half is quite jumbled as well. Also, he does not clearly state...

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