The Creativity of Early Buddhist Scripture and the Practice of Philology
5. Mai 2021
Dr. Eviatar Shulman, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
05. Mai 2021, 17:15 - 18:45 Uhr
This talk will introduce a new theory for the composition of the early Buddhist Discourses attributed to the Buddha, which I call “The play of formulas.” Based on the identification of a rich array of creative processes that contributed to the shaping of Buddhist scripture, this theory suggests that discourses result not so much from an attempt to preserve the Buddha’s words and ideas – emphasized ubiquitously in scholarship – but rather from a diversity of motivations, including aesthetic, folkloric, and devotional ones. Within this broad spectrum of creativity, authors, reciters, editors and other textual practitioners could shape and re-shape Buddha-vacana by fitting pre-made formulaic units of textual speech within set literary designs and narrative trajectories, or by creating new such combinations. The attempt is to produce a compelling image of the Buddha, perhaps to sense his presence and aura, rather than to introduce biographical, historical, or even philosophical materials. Today we can identify a diversity of techniques for elaborating and expanding the word of the Buddha in way that can help us understand the great proliferation of early Buddhist texts and their development into parallel versions, and, most importantly, tell us much about the phenomenology of early Buddhist textuality. The identification of these creative processes calls us to revisit deeply entrenched philological practices, and to ask why and to what end we compare different versions of discourses and other texts.
Eviatar Shulman teaches Buddhist and Indian religion and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in the Departments of Asian Studies and Comparative Religion. He is author of Rethinking the Buddha: Early Buddhist Philosophy as Meditative Perception (Cambridge 2014), and his new monograph Visions of the Buddha: Creative Dimensions of Early Buddhist Scripture is forthcoming (2021) with Oxford University Press. Much of his earlier published work focuses on Mahāyāna, mainly Madhyamaka, philosophy.