On Buddhism, Divination and the Worldly Arts: Textual Evidence from the Theravāda Tradition

This essay attends to the sticky web of indigenous terminology concerning divination and other so-called “mundane” or “worldly” arts, focusing primarily upon Buddhist canonical texts preserved in Pāli, augmented by references to commentarial and exegetical literature. It asks: How have some Buddhists, as evinced in this canonical and exegetical literature, understood the broader category of “worldly arts,” which includes techniques we call divinatory? Are Buddhists discouraged from engaging with such practices, as has been commonly asserted? If so, then for whom, specifically, are such words of discouragement primarily meant? And why, specifically, are such practices discouraged? Are the penalties for practicing them severe or lenient? Are there any exceptions or instances when practicing worldly arts is tolerated or encouraged? And what might we conclude, more broadly, from the textual evidence? These tricky questions bear particularly upon the complex, legalistic body of Buddhist monastic rules and their interpretation, as well as the interpretation of a few passages from Buddhist canonical literature that are arguably less straightforward than has sometimes been assumed or asserted

The Buddha’s Great Miracle at Śrāvastī: A Translation from the Tibetan \u3cem\u3eMūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya\u3c/em\u3e

This article offers an annotated translation of the story of the Buddha’s great miracle at Śrāvastī, as found in the Tibetan translation of the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya. While miracles of the Buddha are many and various, the great miracle of Śrāvastī, one of the Buddha’s principal miracles, is almost the prototypical Buddhist miracle story, and the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya contains a significant version of it. Yet of the many versions preserved in a variety of languages, this is one of the last to garner much scholarly attention. This article makes it more widely accessible to an interested audience, thereby contributing to the further study of Buddhist miracle literature

The Blind Arhat and the Old Baby: Liberation by Wisdom, the Dry-Insight Practitioner, and the Pairing of Calm and Insight

The distinction between “calm” (Pāli: samatha; Sanskrit: śamatha) and “insight” (P: vipassanā; Skt: vipaśyanā) is one of several ostensibly related dichotomies that have exerted a significant influence on classical and contemporary understandings of Buddhist practices, institutions, and history, as well as of the Buddhist path(s) to and conception(s) of awakening. However, scholars continue to debate whether Buddhists ever conceptualized two (or more) different paths or conceptions of this goal. Much of the debate has been based on the interpretation of doctrinal and theoretical materials. This essay takes as its starting point the concept of “liberation by wisdom” (P: paññāvimutti; Skt: prajñāvimukti) and the figure of the “dry-insight practitioner” (P: sukkhavipassaka), and asks how Buddhist narratives, in particular, characterize these key ideas, as well as the relationship between calm and insight. It focuses primarily on two narratives: the story of Cakkhupāla, the first story of the Pāli Dhammapada commentary, and the story of Sthavira in the Sanskrit Avadānaśataka. It argues that these stories do not support a clear opposition between calm and insight as competing forms of life, but rather point to their combination on the path to awakening, or to the possibility that insight meditation can sometimes stand for the notion of intense practice. Both stories reflect an overarching “ascetic” ethos or lifestyle, but as stories they also project narrative worlds and invite us, the audience, to consider what it would mean to take such worlds seriously as our real world of lived human experience. In this way, the essay tries to bridge a divide that has often been maintained between doctrine and narrative, and thereby offers a fresh look at an influential distinction (or set of distinctions) in the history and theory of Buddhist practice

One or None? Truth and Self-Transformation for Śaṅkara and Kamalaśīla

This article explores how two influential 8th-century Indian philosophers, Śaṅkara and Kamalaśīla, treat the threefold scheme of learning, reasoning, and meditation in their spiritual path philosophies. They have differing institutional and ontological commitments: the former, who helped establish Advaita Vedānta as the religious philosophy of an elite Hindu monastic tradition, affirms an unchanging “self” (ātman) identical to the “world-essence” (brahman); the latter, who played a significant role in the development of Buddhist monasticism in Tibet, denies both self and essence. Yet, they share a concern with questions of truth and the means by which someone could gain access to it, such as what, if anything, meditation contributes to knowledge and its acquisition. By exploring their answers to this and related questions, including how discursive and conceptual practices like learning, reasoning, and meditation could generate nonconceptual knowledge or knowledge of the nonconceptual, this essay shows the difficulty of separating “philosophical” problems of truth from those related to self-transformation or “spirituality,” as Michel Foucault defines the terms. It also reassesses, as a framework for comparison, the well-known contrast between “gradual” and “sudden” approaches to the achievement of liberating knowledge and highlights them as tensions we still struggle to resolve today

Buddhas and Body Language: The Literary Trope of the Buddha\u27s Smile

This essay explores how classical Buddhist literature, across a variety of traditional genres, portrays the wondrous smile of the Buddha. Despite its literary register, the Buddha’s smile is first and foremost a nonverbal gesture, and if we are to understand its significance, then we must employ a theoretical approach that treats it as such. Multimodality provides such an approach. While an emergent body of psychological research has argued that the smile is a universal human gesture connected to a rather limited set of emotional states like happiness, the recognition that smiles can be voluntary acts highlights the importance of situational context. Since the Buddha’s smile comes from an historical and cultural context quite foreign to the body of evidence that has informed modern physiological science, we must read carefully for incongruency and allow difference to guide our thinking. The essay argues that, while the figurative trope of the Buddha’s smile remains enigmatic and rich in possible meanings due to its inherently nonverbal character, it nonetheless gestures toward his status as a figure of sovereign power and superhuman knowledge. Although this interpretation has largely eluded modern commentators, it finds support in classical Buddhist understandings and points to the power and flexibility of language itself, particularly gesture, body language, and figurative behavior. For evidence, the article also includes, as an appendix, an English translation of a short story from the Hundred Buddhist Tales (Avadānaśataka) featuring the luminous and powerful smile of the Buddha

Los Budas y el Lenguaje Corporal: El Tropo Literario de la Sonrisa del Buda

Este ensayo explora cómo retrata la literatura budista clásica la sonrisa del Buda. La sonrisa del Buda es un gesto no verbal, y para entender su significado debemos emplear un enfoque teórico que la trate como tal. La multimodalidad puede proporcionar tal enfoque. Un conjunto emergente de investigación psicológica ha argumentado que la sonrisa es un gesto humano universal conectado a un grupo limitado de estados emocionales, pero reconocer que las sonrisas pueden ser actos voluntarios destaca la importancia del contexto situacional. Dado que la sonrisa del Buda nos llega desde un contexto histórico y cultural ajeno a la evidencia que ha informado a la ciencia fisiológica moderna, debemos leer con atención las incongruencias y permitir que la diferencia guíe nuestro pensamiento. El ensayo argumenta que, si bien el tropo de la sonrisa del Buda sigue siendo enigmático y rico en posibles significados, aun así señala su estatus como figura de poder soberano y conocimiento sobrehumano

Miracles and Superhuman Powers in South Asian Buddhist Literature.

Scholars have long been aware of the presence of marvelous events in Buddhist literature. While it is now more fashionable to speak about them, some still hesitate to use the word miracle in reference to Buddhism. Paying attention to how Buddhists defined their own terms, this dissertation argues that the concept of the miracle is appropriate to use in translating specific Buddhist terminology. The present study examines the narrative and scholastic language Buddhists used to denote and classify various types of miracles and superhuman powers. Texts selected for analysis (preserved in Pāli and Sanskrit, but also in Tibetan and Chinese) span the history of South Asian Buddhist literature from the earliest extant canonical collections to narratives, commentaries, and scholastic treatises composed centuries later, covering a period from roughly the 2nd century B.C.E. to the 5th century C.E. Buddhist typologies of miracles and superhuman powers distinguish between miracles and magic in order to argue for the unique authority and supreme holiness of the Buddha, and by extension, the superiority of his most exalted disciples, teachings and institutions. Though Buddhists debated the efficacy and meaning of displaying superhuman powers, they agreed that more than mere marvels or magic shows, miraculous displays of superhuman knowledge and power have religious significance. They generate faith among those who witness or hear accounts of them and lead people to achieve freedom from suffering. Despite the theological intent behind the traditional Buddhist separation of magic and miracles, some South Asian Buddhist scriptures and treatises suggest that Buddhist miracles are ultimately neither: they are not simply techniques of power, nor are they the manifestation of a transcendent power beyond the natural order of things. Collapsing the dichotomy between miracles and magic, these scriptures invoke the metaphor of the Buddha as the greatest magician, who manipulates reality because magical illusion is itself a metaphor for the nature of reality. Thus, Buddhist miracles are exhibitions of techniques connected to the spiritual accomplishments of Buddhas, Arhats and Bodhisattvas, but at the same time, they become expressions of a truth that is not merely technical or mundane, but ultimately beyond ordinary conception.Ph.D.Asian Languages & CulturesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61721/1/dvf_1.pd

Buddhist Spiritual Practices: Thinking with Pierre Hadot on Buddhism, Philosophy, and the Path

Buddhist Spiritual Practices is a collection of integrated essays that applies Pierre Hadot’s well-known approach to philosophy to Buddhist thought. Hadot maintained that philosophy in the Hellenistic period was understood as a form of spiritual practice—a guide to a way of life. These essays, written by prominent Buddhist scholars, demonstrate that Buddhist philosophy can fruitfully be analyzed in line with Hadot’s insights, and that doing so can contribute to contemporary discussions of the purpose of education and the role of spirituality in philosophical discourse. A must read for anyone interested in the current state of philosophy and Buddhism’s place within the academic curriculum. It will also appeal to historians, students of religion, and anyone interested in the deeper aims of education. An extensive bibliography of works by and on Hadot, Buddhist sources, and other secondary literature complete the book.https://digitalcommons.linfield.edu/linfauth/1089/thumbnail.jp

Sabbatical Leave Report

I began my sabbatical by presenting papers at two international conferences, one in Toronto in late August and the other in Shanghai in late September. Afterwards, I spent most of the fall completing an edited volume, Buddhist Spiritual Practices: Thinking with Pierre Hadot on Buddhism, Philosophy, and the Path, which was published in March 2018. After finishing the edited volume, I began to work again on my monograph on Buddhist miracle stories. I made some significant progress, writing about 45,000 words. In the early part of 2018, I also submitted two successful paper proposals for the upcoming AAR (American Academy of Religion) conference this fall, both connected to aspects of the monograph. I also created and taught an online Buddhism class for Linfield in the spring. The final two months of the sabbatical were primarily spent expanding the conference paper from Shanghai for publication next year and writing essays for two more international conferences, which I attended this past summer, one in Munich in June and the other in Vancouver in early July. The latter paper has already been accepted for publication in 2019

Miracles in Indian Buddhist narratives and doctrine

Despite the fact that scholars have recognized for a long time that Buddhist literature contains numerous marvelous and fantastic events, there have been reservations about the use of the word “miracle” in the context of Buddhism. This article addresses the notion of wonder and wonderment, and specifically miracles, in South and Southeast Asian Buddhist literature and traditions