"Sympathetic Joy" as Affective Regime: How the _Lotus Sūtra_ Makes Joy of Itself

As the most enduringly popular Buddhist text in East Asia, the details of the _Lotus Sūtra_’s historical reception and far-reaching cultural influence have long preoccupied modern scholars of Buddhism. Beyond its histories of translation and doctrinal elaboration by monastic elites, researchers have investigated the _Lotus Sūtra_’s propagation among a wider public via popular miracle literature (Dykstra, 1984; Kanno, 2016; Campany, 2018), visual and material culture (Davidson, 1954; Tanabe, 1988; Wang, 2005), and other literary and performance arts (Shōzen, 1989; Abé, 2015). Overall, this scholarship has established a working map to the ways that the _Lotus Sūtra_ has claimed, engaged, and expanded its audiences throughout its history. The flamboyance of its propagation suggests the text’s considerable ability to generate enthusiasm, yet scholarship has remained relatively quiet concerning this excitement itself.

The proposed paper, accordingly, considers the possible textual origins of the _Lotus Sūtra_’s apparent affective power. Responding to scholars such as Alan Cole (2005), whose work on the _Lotus Sūtra_ has suggested the persuasive, even transformative consequences of its literary strategies, my paper investigates how the text anticipates and seeks to take agency in own reception, specifically by inviting and disciplining joyful feelings in its readers. Focusing on Kumārajīva’s popular Chinese translation, it argues that the _Lotus Sūtra_’s frequent, vivid, and emotionally charged depictions of its own, in-text audience, along with its explicit descriptions of the spiritual value of such rejoicing, intend to provoke similar experiences in its readers or hearers. As my paper demonstrates, this “affective regime” for receiving the _Lotus Sūtra_ was elaborated in both discursive and practical terms by its burgeoning cult in medieval China.

Like all Buddhist _sūtras_, the _Lotus_ recounts an oral teaching by the Buddha for an audience of exemplary disciples, in this case including the future-Buddha Maitreya, bodhisattvas such as Mañjuśrī, and various luminaries of mainstream Buddhism. It thus has two “audiences:” one in-text, and one outside, in the reading present. As we read or hear the (written) _Lotus Sūtra_ in the reading present, our own responses to its surprising revelations and sensational performance style are prefigured and played out in ideal form by those “hearing” it in-text, for instance by Maitreya, who passes at critical moments in the sermon from initial confusion to awed delight in and stated, joyous acceptance of the Buddha’s teachings: all this, too, is couched in characteristically sensational, spectacular language. Such outbursts are particularly condensed around the _Lotus Sūtra_’s many predictions of its disciples’ future Buddhahood and—unsurprisingly—around the related trope of universal salvation, where it takes on the title “sympathetic joy” (隨喜). If we, the audience outside the text, aren’t already swayed to such feelings by the events of the _sūtra_, its salvific message, or the depicted joys of its in-text audience, the Buddha explicitly enjoins us to respond like Maitreya, dedicating passages such as the “Chapter on the Merits of Sympathetic Joy” to praising the spiritual advantages of receiving his teachings with enthusiasm. According to this “affective regime,” to be a pious Buddhist is, first and foremost, to rejoice at the _Lotus Sūtra_, just like the Buddha’s disciples do. And, as this paper proposes, the confluence of the _Lotus Sūtra_’s soteriological universalism, its extravagant, affectively potent storytelling, and its persistent foregrounding of joyful beings makes this relatively easy to accede to. 

My paper first offers a description of this metatextual strategy, drawing key examples of both the in-text audience’s joyful reception of the _Lotus Sūtra_ sermon and the Buddha’s descriptions of such feelings and their spiritual value. Among these are the in-text audience’s collective expressions of delight at prophecies of Buddhahood; Maitreya’s transition from near-disbelief to rapturous praise at learning of the Buddha’s boundless lifespan; and the inset narrative of the perennially joyous Bodhisattva Never-Disparaging, who turns out to be none other than Maitreya himself in an earlier birth. Here, especially, joyfulness is configured as a fundamental component of the path to Buddhahood.

To show how this affective regime was elaborated “on the ground” in premodern East Asia, my paper then turns to a selection of important medieval Chinese writings related to the _Lotus Sūtra_ which evidence in different ways the importance of joyful affect in Buddhist practice. These include Huisi’s _The Meaning of the Lotus Sūtra’s Course of Ease and Bliss_, in which properly delighting in the “wondrousness” of the _Lotus Sūtra_ is a key component in all subsequent practices, as well as works by Tiantai Zhiyi such as the _Lotus Samādhi Repentance_ and _Words and Phrases of the Lotus Sūtra_, in which Zhiyi constructs responding to the _Lotus_ with joy as the foundational stage of all Tiantai practice, and asserts that the entire Buddhist path can be achieved in a single moment of joy. Finally, I refer to a selection of medieval miraculous tales regarding lay _Lotus Sūtra_ devotees, which demonstrate for a popular audience the spiritual efficacy of joyful reception.

While it would be stepping too far to suggest that these findings fully explain the enthusiastic historical reception of the _Lotus Sūtra_ in East Asia, by showing that enthusiastic affect _was_ both solicited by the scripture’s metatextual strategies and explicitly developed into by its early devotees, the proposed paper argues that affect does have a significant yet underappreciated place in our “map” of the _Lotus Sūtra_’s reception. My attention to the _Lotus Sūtra_’s audience-shaping tactics therefore contributes not only to literary studies of this important work, but also to the study of premodern Chinese Buddhism, in which the roles of affect or emotion have been strangely neglected. In doing so, it fills in an important blind spot in the still evolving interdisciplinary discussion of affect’s importance to religion broadly speaking. Finally, by foregrounding the intended relationship of text to audience(s), this paper helps to develop ongoing critical conversations that frame Buddhist and/or religious texts not merely as mines of doctrinal content or historical information, but as conduits of affect that orient human life in a primary sense, shaping emotional and intellectual investments, practices, and thus communities.