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263 Chapter 20 The Act of Naming Avalokiteśvara in Ancient Southeast Asia Robert L. Brown Abstract This article proposes that the act of naming the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara is a Mahāyāna strategy based on the close connection among texts, words or signs, and visual images. In contrast, there is an indifference to naming the bodhisattvas in Theravāda Sri Lanka, and the early Buddhist cultures of the Mon, Pyu, and Khmer in mainland Southeast Asia. In these contexts the bodhisattvas appear to represent categories of meaning, to be symbols or types, rather than to be named. When Donald McCallum gave me as a gift his copy of Franklin Edgerton’s Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Grammar and Dictionary (published in 1953), which he had since his graduate student days at the Art Institute at NYU, I found inside a typed two-page and now very yellowed carbon copy of a letter written by Alexander Soper to Prof. Edgerton in 1955. Don was unaware of the letter, but the books (there are two volumes) once belonged to Soper, Don’s teacher. Soper was writing to Edgerton while doing research on his book Literary Evidence for Early Buddhist Art in China (ultimately to be published in 1959) asking him a series of questions about ‘the problem of the name [of Avalokiteśvara] and its variants and their meanings’. Luckily, Soper had stuck Edgerton’s handwritten reply inside as well. Writing from, of all places, Laramie, Wyoming, where he had retired as Professor Emeritus at Yale, Edgerton begins by saying: ‘I certainly have no idea what it [that is Avalokiteśvara] means’, after which he writes over three pages on what it could mean. What strikes me is that Soper thought the Sanskrit etymology will, apparently, tell us something about what the deity means, that the name is tied directly to the god’s character and significance.1 And that, whatever the etymology, it is pertinent to the early Buddhists in faraway China. Let me mention a second instance of the urge and need to name the bodhisattva. In the Buddhist caves of Ellora and Aurangabad in Maharashtra, scholars have begun to identify a Mahāyāna or protoTantric system of iconography that is based on the naming and arranging of Buddha and bodhisattva images (Huntington 1981, 2000; Malandra 1993). These caves date roughly from the sixth to eighth centuries (a crucial time for us as it is when the bodhisattva was introduced into the early Indian-related Southeast Asian cultures I will be discussing) — and their meanings are apparently tied directly to the placement and identification of the many images of Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and Tārās that are carved directly into the rock. These create mandalas, the quintessential patterning of named forms both in terms of the images themselves and the cave layouts. Such efforts by contemporary scholars to explicate the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara by naming him, as through an etymology of his Sanskrit name or the identification of his visual iconography (both of which rely ultimately almost entirely on written texts), is, I assume, justified because it is an attempt to reproduce the way in which the makers and users also conceive of him. What if, however, as is most often with Theravāda images of bodhisattvas, there does not appear to be any way to identify by name which bodhisattva it is? Or, while there may be iconographical 20 ISEA.indd 263 6/6/08 10:31:13 AM 264 ROBERT L. BROWN indications, they do not appear to form any system when considering several images, or they are contradictory? We, the scholars, engage in detailed discussions trying to name these Theravāda bodhisattvas (for example, Chutiwongs 1984). It may, in fact, even be the case that for early images (before the eleventh to thirteenth centuries), if they can be identified, they must be in some significant way Mahāyāna images, even if found within a predominant Theravāda context. But was the quandary we feel in identifying the bodhisattvas shared by the worshippers? This seems unlikely. Surely they did not sit before an image and wonder, ‘What deity is this?’ Or start to address an image of Avalokiteśvara and then reconsider saying ‘I guess this must be Maitreya; I thought that was a little Buddha in his crown, but now it looks more like a little stūpa?’ Indeed, even as to the makers of the images, did they...

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