Creating Social Consensus: Karmic Storytelling, Karmic Reasoning, and Merit Transfer

This panel examines noncanonical and paracanonical genres to highlight the ways karmic thinking is embedded in three different social contexts.  The first two presentations analyze how karmic thinking became rooted in local cultural traditions. The first presentation analyzes a Yuan dynasty drama  (zaju 雜劇) written by a Confucian dramatist for the entertainment of local audiences. This drama Kanqiannu mai yuanjia zhaizhu看錢奴買冤家債主 (A Slave to MoneyBuys a Creditor as His Enemy) illustrates how Yuan drama became a vehicle for playwrights to promote the Confucian family value of collective responsibility through the lens of individual and collective karma. Plots, such as that portrayed in A Slave to Money wherein the family patriarch commits the evil act of dismantling a Buddhist temple so that he can repurpose the materials to construct a family house offers ample opportunity for the audience to think with and through karmic logics as they follow the fortunes of this patriarch and his family. By blurring the lines between exegetical traditions Confucian and Buddhist, this play not only allows the Confucian playwright to circumvent any censoring from the Yuan Mongol court which demoted Confucian literati and elevated Buddhist monks, but also offers its audience a permission structure whereby they, too, can synthesize moral systems of ideas to better appreciate how and why a deity might intervene in what was, in effect, a ‘transfer of merit’ from one family to another, thus choosing who would be wealthy and who would become impoverished.

   The second presentation highlights how social consensus was created around a Buddhist artifact cherished by the Suzhou literati and others in the Wu region. Late Ming literati employed either consciously or unconsciously various Buddhist methods of historical proof, assessments of reincarnation, karmic connections, dream encounters, and personal realization to argue that the monk Shanji’s blood-copy of the Huayan Sutra was indeed created through the efforts of two monks, Yongming and Shanji, and finished by the Confucian official Song Lian, himself, a lay Buddhist. A number of late Ming literati postfaces and prefaces written for other blood-writing projects even privilege Song Lian’s contribution over that of the two monks when they refer to this work by the shorthand moniker ‘Song Lian three generations (宋濂三世),’ a reference only comprehensible to those who knew the backstory. Yet despite the literati acceptance of this intergenerational effort, the historical work of determining who was a reincarnation of whom continued on through the Republican Era wherein new criteria was brought to bear on the question of whether this blood-copy, now housed in the Xiyuan Monastery in Suzhou, was indeed Shanji’s singular production or produced through an intergenerational effort of successive reincarnations.

  The third case study for this panel reveals the powerful desire of the Wanli court to generate merit through the sponsorship of the Yongle Northern Canon and its consequent distribution to various monasteries throughout China. One byproduct of this distribution was to standardize monastic access to Buddhist scripture, though this was not a goal articulated in the prefaces, postfaces, and colophons analyzed here. By paying close attention to sponsorship, it becomes clear that empresses and court ladies were major sponsors of this endeavor and that they aspired to be reborn in the Pure Land of Amitabha Buddha. Eunuchs, too, played a decisive role in the sponsorship and distribution of the Yongle Northern Canon. One inscription clearly indicates the purpose of carving, printing and distributing the Buddhist canon with sixteen words: “May the Emperor’s image be eternal, may the emperor’s path be forever prosperous, may the Buddha sun shine ever brighter, and may the Dharma wheel continue to turn.”  In this instance, we see that the imperial court united their own governing interests with Buddhist interests in how they understood the potential karmic outcome from their sponsorship. This and many other dedicatory inscriptions will be analyzed to demonstrate how karmic outcomes and the generation of merit influenced the printing and distribution of this multi-volume work.

    The discussant for our panel will further draw out how each of these particular cases illustrates how various historical actors understood individual and collective karma and its consequent results in good reincarnations or rebirths. The discussant with further draw on canonical exegesis and scripture, especially Yogacara, to raise questions concerning how we as researchers balance our evaluation of normative prescriptions against the backdrop of actual instantiations as local actors attempted to use karma as a way to think through their own historical quandaries to achieve a social consensus.