Collaborative Buddhist Preaching: Assemblage, Revision, and Embellishment in Medieval Chinese Sūtra Lecture Texts

This paper discusses the performance of “popular sūtra lecture” (sujiang) in medieval China by examining the codicological, paleographical, and textual features of “sūtra lecture texts” (jiangjingwen) from Dunhuang. Normative depictions of preaching and the preachers are found in transmitted sources such as Biographies of Eminent Monks and the Sūtra of Golden Light, but these scriptural and hagiographical works offer scant details about actual performance. The rich trove of Dunhuang manuscripts provides unprecedented information about how performers, redactors, and scribes drafted, assembled, and revised scripts, as well as about the afterlife of scripts as post-performance reading texts embellished with literary devices. Closely reading the textual and material features of actual scripts, this paper provides a nuanced understanding of the collaborative and social world of popular preaching and shows the essential role of preaching in spreading Buddhism.