Mahāyāna sūtras regularly depict their own language and material forms as possessing supreme, transformative power, promising devotees extraordinary worldly and soteriological benefits. However, scholarship has often focused on these claims in isolation, less frequently examining how historical practitioners engaged with and enacted such transformative potentials. Contributing to emerging discourse on the aesthetic and affective dimensions of Mahāyāna Buddhism, this panel explores how Buddhists have activated these powers, enhancing the sensible range of what sūtras can do. Through four case studies spanning premodern Asia, we demonstrate that Buddhists were highly inventive in integrating sūtras into affectively charged ritual, artistic, and literary productions, putting scripture to work. These mediations—ranging from miracle tales to illustrated manuscripts to poetic contemplations to demon-summoning rites—enlivened and made more tangible the sūtras' promised abilities to transform reality, thus establishing their palpable agency in the world. Mahāyāna sūtras transform us when we make their worlds come—sensibly—alive.
This paper examines how medieval Chinese esoteric manuals create transformative experiences through the harnessing of emotions and the enactment of ritual procedures. I use the Sādhana of the Great Yakṣiṇī Mother Joy and Priyaṅkara, a manual centered on Hārītī, as a case study to demonstrate the importance of controlling emotions and the centrality of physical actions in esoteric rituals. Specifically, I analyze one warning and one technique that encapsulate two strong feelings: lust and fear. The text warns the practitioner against developing lustful thoughts towards Hārītī, or the ritual will fail. While repressing sexual desire is necessary for the ritual to succeed, the text allows the practitioner to unleash other intense emotions, like fear and revenge, by empowering a human skull that can frighten one’s enemies. These instructions offer a window into how Buddhist texts bring about transformative experiences, which are often dictated by strong sentiments, whether wholesome or not.
This paper explores the relationship between text and image in the Buddhist context, focusing on illuminated versions of the Avalokiteśvara-sūtra in Tangut, Chinese, and Uyghur languages, excavated from Khara-khoto, Dunhuang, and Turfan. Created between the 9th and 12th centuries, these manuscripts reveal striking visual coherence and suggest a well-established tradition of illuminated Buddhist texts in Eastern Central Asia during the middle period. The paper examines how the sutra integrates imagery with scripture to enhance the ritual experience, highlighting the role of visual elements in the transmission of religious teachings. Additionally, it expands the analysis to include other examples of text-image relationships, such as the pilgrim drawings found on the walls of the Mogao caves in Dunhuang. By drawing connections between these diverse materials, this research contributes to a broader understanding of the interplay between visual and textual forms in Buddhist practices and offers new insights into understudied materials.
This paper considers what the overt depictions of emotion and invitations of readerly affect in medieval Chinese Buddhist miracle tales can tell us about how early Chinese audiences received Buddhist sacred texts. While much scholarship has focused on the tales’ didactic dimensions, as informative testimonies to the power of devotion to sūtras and the mechanics of karma, less has been said about how these texts “work” toward their explicit goal of transforming its audiences into devotees. I argue here that by staging melodramatic encounters with sūtras, depicting characters’ experiences of fear, grief, illness and so on being changed into “tears of joy” by the wonderworking of Buddhist sacra, miracle tales understand the transformative power of sacred text to be chiefly affective, and attempt to induce such dispositional transformations in their readers and hearers. No mere lessons in metaphysics, these narratives propagate dharma through hair-raising and tear-jerking; by galvanizing emotional bodies.
How do Buddhist sūtras employ metaphoricity to transcend linguistic limitations and actualize non-conceptual realization? Focusing on the metaphor of water, waves, and ocean (Skt. udadhi, Chi, 大海; Skt. taraṃga, Chi. 波浪) as conceptual mappings for mind, consciousness, and conceptual thoughts, the paper examines the embodied dimension of metaphors in Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra and their role in shaping religious realities. Two key conceptual metaphors—mental activity as fluid movement and psychological peace as physical stillness—illustrate how Buddhist transmission relies on sensory engagement and transformation of experience to mediate teachings. With examinations of Chinese commentaries and associated cultural productions, the study argues that the reception and transformation of water-mind imagery highlights the cognitive and experiential mechanisms of metaphors that actualize Buddhist knowledge transmission, demonstrating how embodied metaphors extend Buddhist soteriological ideals beyond the textual realm into empirical practice. This approach reframes knowledge transfer by emphasizing embodied metaphors as integrative mechanisms bridging literature, philosophy and practice.