The Many Lives of Ajātaśatru: From Ancient Indian Buddhism to Modern Japanese Psychoanalysis

In this slender volume Michael Radich aims, and by and large succeeds, to have his cake and eat it too. He has, first of all, produced a detailed history, across two thousand years and several languages and cultures, of the important yet hitherto little studied Buddhist legend of the parricidal king Ajātaśatru (Chin. A she shi 阿闍世; Jpn. Ajase). But he has also framed his topic in such a way that it will prove of interest beyond the confines of Buddhology or even Asian studies. This book will also be appreciated by anthropologists and psychologists interested in non-Western Oedipal myths, those curious about the global spread of Freudian psychology in the twentieth century, and more generally by anyone interested in the diverse encounters between Buddhism and modernity.

To a certain extent, How Ajātaśatru Was Reformed thus resembles Jonathan Silk’s Riven by Lust,¹ another recent book that explores a different Buddhist legend rife with Oedipal themes. In Radich’s case, however, the connections between the traditional stories in question and Freudian theories were first drawn by the “natives” themselves, in particular by Kosawa Heisaku (古澤平作, 1897–1968) and his student Okonogi Keigo (小此木啓吾, 1930–2003). By examining the historical evolution of the Ajātaśatru legend in conjunction with its further evolution in the hands of Kosawa and Okonogi, Radich manages to skillfully combine the study of traditional Buddhist literature and doctrine with questions concerning the appropriation of Buddhism in the modern world.

Kosawa, a devout Jōdo Shinshū Buddhist, was a founding figure of Japanese psychoanalysis. Supposedly on the basis of the Buddhist legend of Ajātaśatru, Kosawa proposed the “Ajase complex,” first as an alternative to Freud’s theory of the origins of religion in Oedipal guilt, and eventually as a rival theory of human psychology. This was, as Radich observes, one of the first explicit attempts to argue that Freudian theories needed to be modified to account for the distinctive characteristics of non-Western civilizations, and unlike the Oedipal one, the “Ajase complex” was said to stem from a mutual aggression between child and mother. In Kosawa and Okonogi’s telling, Ajātaśatru’s story revolved around his mistreatment of his mother, the lady Vaidehī (Jpn. Idaike), who, fearing that she would lose the affection of her husband upon becoming a mother, had tried to abort Ajātaśatru and then later to kill him as a child. Kosawa then took the eventual resolution of the story—Ajātaśatru’s confession of his crimes against his mother and Vaidehī’s reconciliation to her role as parent—as a potential basis for therapy.

Yet as Japanese academic Buddhologists began to note in the 1970s and 1980s, the Kosawa-Okonogi presentation of the Ajātaśatru legend differs greatly from the canonical Buddhist versions. Indeed the more traditional tale is, like that of Oedipus, one of aggression against the father—Ajātaśatru is the prince of a small kingdom who secures the throne by imprisoning his father, King Bimbisāra, who eventually dies as a result. However, the story Radich wants to tell here is not one of academic “gotcha”—in other words, he does not simply argue that Kosawa and Okonogi misinterpreted a traditional understanding in their attempt to make Buddhism relevant in light of one or more species of modern “scientific” thought (in this case, the newly emerging discipline of psychology). Indeed, his aim is rather the reverse, namely to consider as a single story what modern scholars have more usually seen as radically different beasts—“traditional” Buddhism on the one hand, and the distinctive forms of Buddhism that have emerged from the encounter with modernity on the other.

In order to demonstrate this for the case at...