Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan

Conclusion: On Circumambulatory Reading

1 7 3 Conclusion On Circumambulatory Reading I began this book with the figure of Myōe (1173–1232), the monk who cut off his own ear, believing wholeheartedly in the material connection between the sacred words he read from the sutras’ pages and the physical matter of his own body. To mark one was to mark the other. And I ended the last chapter with the complementary image of the sutra-reading noblewoman (painted in 1164), whose figure provides a metacommentary on the ways in which medieval Japanese Buddhists conceived of the text-flesh continuum. The reading voice allows reality to pulse between the word (buddha) and the thing (Buddha). One-eared Myōe, the noblewoman with her finger in the scroll, and the many others figures I have examined in the intervening chapters tell us that Buddhism takes language very seriously. Language is not an abstract concept, not an idea that is floating, unanchored, and amorphous— somewhere“outthere”—butisaphysicalsubstancethattricklesintoourears like medicine, chisels itself into our minds, fuses with our life force. We hold it in the tips of our fingers; we wear it like a robe on the skin; we roll it over our red and flashing tongues. As human beings, language is who we are when we are at our best; it is what keeps us alive, how we connect to the divine. To return to the issue of Buddhist textual culture, then, at the outset I proposed three inter-related vectors for approaching the question of how Buddhist language works in the material realm of written pages and human bodies . The first of these vectors has to do with ontology: where does text exist? 1 7 4 conclusion The second has do to with sociology: how can we understand text not (only) as a material “thing,” but (also) as a material “event”? And the third concerns history: what do Buddhist books look like? When, where, how, why, by and for whom were they created? Chapters 1 and 2 focused on the first question, of ontology. Exploring the “modeofexistence”ofsutrasandsetsuwa,Ipointedtothewaysinwhichthese generic forms move beyond the edge of the page. In the case of sutras, there is a crucial distinction to be made between “text” and “work.” Simply speaking, the text is the thing we can hold in our hands. Perhaps this is a scroll, stained yellow with insecticide, hand-printed with neat columns of Chinese characters , covered with a stiff silk wrapper, and bound with a cord. Perhaps it is a recent English translation by Burton Watson or Leon Hurvitz, cut into pages and bound up one side, with highlighting and marginalia courtesy of previous readers. According to the sutras, we can court some truly horrendous karma by destroying many, most, or even all of these texts, and still we will not have destroyed the “work.” The sutras will continue to exist in the universe, safely sealedawayinthememoriesofbodhisattvas,stillpenetrabletotheeyesofbuddhas , simply awaiting an opportunity to be reborn into the world as language. Thoughtheyworkinadifferentway,setsuwalikewiseclaimtoexceedthelimits of the written page, acting on the human body as food, medicine, or sound, pullingreadersalonglikeaforcefulpreacheroramatchmaker.Asspecifickinds of language, sutras and setsuwa permeate their reader-listeners, altering their internal landscapes, fusing with their lifeblood, shaping their lived reality. Chapters 3 and 4 move to the sociological question. Focusing on setsuwa that describe the reading, chanting, memorizing, carrying, copying, and expoundingofsutras ,IsketchthecontoursofamedievalJapaneseBuddhisttextualculture .Inthisculturewrittensutrasaremostcertainlythings(mostoften, handwritten scrolls), but they are also events. Sutras make themselves legible in the rotting of a corpse. You can taste them in your sour breath, see them in wrinkles and bruises, touch them in your sagging skin. Carve away at yourselflongenough ,pastmuscleandsinew,andyoumayfindtheirwordsarewhat stand between you and death. Sutra texts advocate for you in hell, they meet you in the market, they save you from monsters, and they dance on the tip of your tongue, each one of their written characters a shining golden buddha streaming forth from the mouth in a beam of light. Setsuwa literature attests to the various methods, practices, and meditations that establish a material continuum between flesh and text such that the human body can be seen to dissolve into fragments of sacred writing, and sacred writing can be understood to incorporate miraculously into human forms. 1 7 5 conclusion Having thus explored the ways in which Buddhist language, as communicated through the written page, works on human bodies, I now want to turn the question around in order to concentrate on the...