Rethinking Literature through Buddhist Worldbuilding

In this presentation, I explore the potential of some Mahāyāna sūtras to illuminate and challenge our own conceptions of literature and “reading” practices, broadly construed. The normative vision of such sūtras places them squarely in a ritual-ethical arena where poetic language makes perfect worlds and immortal bodies. They take for granted what modern scholars so often overlook: the production of language and world is both a bodily act and a linguistic act that makes bodies legible as such. In this way, these sūtras offer a powerful challenge to contemporary assumptions both about the nature of language and narrative and about the kinds of practices deemed to be “ritual.” And given the relevance of the sūtras to contemporary conversations about performative language, normative practices, and their role in making lifeways and persons, they problematize the too often uncritical exclusion of religious texts from serious consideration in contemporary debates.