Reaching the Audience: Buddhist Literary Strategies for Audience Engagement

Although recounted slightly differently across individual texts, the Buddha's hagiographical tradition consistently remarks on his hesitation to teach the content of his awakening to others. At the root of his wavering is a serious, searching consideration of the "fit" between his would-be teaching and his potential audiences. His ultimate decision to teach therefore implies an acceptance of audiences as both necessary to his path and as a kind of perennial challenge—that of anticipating their needs, capacities, and shortcomings, and teaching accordingly. This trope is elaborated in Buddhist discourse on "skillful means," yet even where _upāya_ is not literally at stake, Buddhist texts engage the problematic of audience in myriad, critically significant ways.

For one, Buddhist _sūtra_ literature by nature involves the whole "theatre" of teaching, where the vicissitudes of the Buddha's audience help determine what is taught, and how, as well as how we, the reader or hearer, are drawn into the scene. As the Buddhist literary tradition transitioned into writing, strategies for anticipating, engaging, and manipulating audience responses became more subtle and diverse. Meanwhile, preachers and missionaries of these texts needed to devise performative techniques for engaging their audiences. The papers presented at this panel each approach a different body of Buddhist text, from early Mahāyāna _sūtras_ to medieval Chinese exegeses and hagiographies, but each discover how critically important an awareness of audience is to their pedagogical aims. Sometimes imagined and implicit, sometimes clearly foregrounded, audience is a pivotal presence in Buddhist literature; one that helps to determine and shape and given text's aesthetic, rhetorical, and pedagogical approaches.

Paper one investigates the intertextual relationship between two Mahāyāna _sūtras_, the _Concentration of Heroic Progress_ and the _Precious Banner_. Focusing on a shared but inverted inset narrative centering on 1) the binding of Māra by a fivefold getter and 2) the (non)reception of an (un)wanted prophecy to awakening, this paper argues that these two stories of Māra reveal differences in how these two _sūtras_ aim to be received by audiences in the reading present. Whereas the _Concentration_ presents itself as a source of unmediated soteriological power, the _Precious Banner_ opts to exchange some of its power for status as a normative authority to which audiences must respond appropriately.

Paper two turns to the _Lotus Sūtra_ to demonstrate first how its frequent depictions of its in-text audience's emotional responses responses to the Buddha's sermon are reinforced by the Buddha's explicit encouragement to "respond with joy" to his teaching. This metatextual feedback loop, it argues, seeks to discipline the emotional responses of the _Lotus'_ audiences in the reading present, and establish a general "affective regime" for receiving the scripture. It then turns to ritual programs for practicing the _Lotus_ developed by medieval Chinese exegetes, which clearly seek to realize the imperative to "respond with joy."

Paper three investigates the shocking image of the cannibal deployed in _sūtras_ promoting vegetarianism, to show how engaging the audience's experience of disgust opens onto more elaborate pedagogical goals concerning Buddhist ontology. Both the _Laṅkāvatārasūtra_ and the _Aṅgulimāliyasūtra_ anticipate and play upon their audiences fears around flesh-eating: first, that the physical difference between animal and human flesh may be imperceptible, leading to inadvertent cannibalism and its karmic effects, and second that animal meat may be karmically identified with one's deceased human relatives. Conversely, they celebrate the affectively charged image of bodhisattvas giving their own flesh. All these sensational devices point to the unstable relation of flesh to human identity, and its soteriological ramifications.

Paper four turns to the medieval Chinese _Records of Eminent Monks_, demonstrating how this text constructs ideal images of "scripture chanters" and "recitation guides," the two categories of monk most directly involved in propagating Buddhist scriptures amongst live audiences. Commentary from compiler Huijiao, along with the hagiographical entries themselves, reveal both the intended effects of scripture chanting and recitation instruction upon the audience (basically, to stimulate their emotions) and the performance techniques for doing so. It thus provides invaluable perspective on the creation of Buddhist audiences as a practical concern for historical monastics.

This panel, composed of scholars at various institutions and career-stages, is poised to generate discussion both within Buddhist Studies and across a range of disciplines within Religious Studies and beyond. Whereas our own field has seen increasingly sensitive, constructive approaches to Buddhism's literary dimensions in recent years, the primary texts' own, often very clear preoccupations with their audiences are regularly glossed over in favor of the textual strategies they inspire. This panel's approachees to "audience" as its own, potent trope in Buddhist literature thus contributes to emergent discussion of literary technique in Buddhist texts by pointing directly to the concern over reception from which such strategies develop. We therefore intend to stake out the horizons of an emerging zone of inquiry in Buddhist Studies and flesh out directions for future individual and collaborative work. One general insight which we collaboratively gesture toward is that Buddhist texts are deeply aware of and oriented by certain attributes of their audiences, for instance desires for pleasurable affect, sensitivity to others' displays of emotion, and the productive relationship of feelings such as suspicion to complex ideation and further discourse.

The exploration of such an insight may be of interest to colleagues engaged with literary texts of all kinds, as well as theater, cinema, and performance studies, and affect and reception theories more generally. Individual papers meanwhile join in discussions of South and East Asian religious history, religion and vegetarianism, ritual and affect, and religious performance traditions. Ultimately, in a broader view, this panel involves questions of relevance across Religious Studies: namely, how do religious authors mediate between the truths of their tradition, which may be difficult to express, or to accept, and the human orientations, capabilities, and needs of their audiences? How have religious thinkers approached this compromise? Despite our work's basis in Buddhist text and philological methods, then, we intend to invite a range of interdisciplinary discussions with potential impact across the Humanities.