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Reaching the Audience: Buddhist Literary Strategies for Audience Engagement

Submitted to Program Units
1: Buddhism Unit
2: Religion, Affect, and Emotion Unit

Ralph Craig, Whitman College, Presiding

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

This panel considers how Buddhist texts display an awareness of their audiences and—relatedly—seek to take agency in their own reception. A common trope in Buddha-biographies, emphasized in discourses on "skillful means," is the Buddha's ability to anticipate the needs of his audiences and adapt his profound teaching to their terms. Working from a range of perspectives, our panelists demonstrate how Buddhist texts themselves incorporate subtle techniques for engaging their audiences, often at the level of affect, from depicting idealized audiences in-text to providing explicit rubrics for preachers. Others, meanwhile, use powerful affective cues to create certain kinds of audiences, distinguished by their feelings on certain matters. While recent literary scholarship has begun to consider the strategic roles Buddhist texts take in their reception, this panel reveals an awareness and creative engagement with the concept of audience to be the fundamental yet neglected element underlying these diverse pedagogical operations.

Papers

  • Adam Miller, University of Chicago

    Flipping the Script: Fetters, Prophecies, and Audience Engagement in the _Concentration of Heroic Progress_ and the _Precious Banner_

    Abstract

    This paper presents an intertextual reading of the _Concentration of Heroic Progress_ and the _Precious Banner Sūtra_ toward uncovering how these Mahāyāna sūtras invite their audiences to receive them. I argue that whereas the _Concentration_ presents itself as possessing unmediated soteriological power, the _Precious Banner_ exchanges such power for status as a normative authority to which response is necessary. To make this argument, I focus on the stories of Māra told in these sūtras. As Lamotte noted in his translation of the _Concentration_, pointing to the “conversion of Māra,” these sūtras share thematic features. What Lamotte seems not to have noticed, however, is that these stories of Māra are mirror images of one another. This paper, then, follows up on Lamotte’s note to show that these sūtra share a discernible intertextual relationship and that the shared inverted narratives of Māra reveal how these texts want to be received. 

  • Julian Butterfield, Stanford University

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

    Abstract

    This paper considers what the _Lotus Sūtra_’s emotional depictions of its own, in-text audience tells us about how it intends to be received and ritually embodied by its readers. As a _sūtra_, the _Lotus_ recounts a sermon delivered by the Buddha to an audience of disciples, frequently shown responding to him with intense expressions of joyous assent. The Buddha, meanwhile, explicitly encourages such affective responses in passages such as the “Chapter on the Merits of Responding with Joy.” This metatextual feedback loop, I argue, both influences reader response, aiming to provoke similar feelings in the reading present, and foregrounds expressions of joyful affect as crucial to Buddhist soteriology: a perspective corroborated and practically elaborated by medieval Chinese ritual texts such as Zhiyi’s _Lotus Samādhi Repentance_. Overall, this paper suggests how the _Lotus Sūtra_’s metatextual strategies—and their ritual elaborations—contributed crucial yet overlooked affective dimensions to East Asian Buddhism.

  • Marielle Harrison, University of Chicago

    Animal and Cannibal: Cannibalism and Identity in Early Buddhist Vegetarian Texts

    Abstract

    Guided by Susanne Mrozik’s exploration of virtue as an embodied phenomenon in South Asian Buddhist traditions, this paper attends to the corporeal specificity of human beings in Buddhist literature. However, rather than focus on the relationship between virtue and living bodies, I would like to direct our attention instead to the corporeal specificity of dead bodies—and how the idea of consuming those bodies signifies a threat to the consumer’s humanity. In this paper, I argue that early Buddhist texts promoting vegetarianism mobilize the shocking image of the cannibal in order to make arguments to their audiences about the permeability of one’s identity. I hope to show that attention to the themes of cannibalism invoked in some of the most influential early vegetarian _sūtras_ can help us better understand how the acts of consumption—both consuming and being consumed—signify a fundamental loss of humanity within these texts.

  • Xi He, Appalachian State University

    Touching Heart and Transforming Mind: Huijiao's Comments on "Scripture Chanters" and "Recitation Guides"

    Abstract

    This paper explores how Buddhists and Buddhist texts envision the relationship between themselves and their audiences by examining the comments Shi Huijiao 釋慧皎 (497-554CE) made in the last two sections of his _Biographies of Eminent Monks_ compilation. It looks closely at the role of the scripture chanters and recitation guides in teaching and the qualities they should possess, as discussed by Huijiao in his comments. It argues that for Huijiao, touching the hearts of the audiences is at the core of the relationship between texts/teachings and audiences. His emphasis on touching the heart as the scripture chanters' and recitation guides' most effective pedagogical means to reach the soteriological transformation of the audiences, with both their voice and their content, highlights the Buddhist deep understanding of human emotions and resonates with the teaching tradition of the Buddha and those who speak for the Buddha in India and beyond.

Responding
Natalie Gummer, Beloit College
Audiovisual Requirements

Resources

LCD Projector and Screen
Podium microphone

Full Papers Available

No
Program Unit Options

Session Length

90 Minutes

Schedule Preference

Tuesday, 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM
Schedule Info

Tuesday, 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM

Tags

#Buddhism #literature #audience #affect
#Buddhism #literature #Mahāyana #sūtra #intertextuality #audience
#Buddhism #literature #Mahāyana #sūtra #audience #metatextuality
#Buddhism #literature #sūtra #audience #affect #disgust #cannibal #vegetarianism
#Buddhism #literature #affect #performance #preaching

Session Identifier

A26-100