Approaching Buddhist Texts: A Garland of Possibilities

To fully appreciate Buddhist Scripture, it is vital to explore the breadth of their activity as sacred objects and agents of change throughout history. The textual careers of Buddhist scriptures have both undergone and catalyzed continual transformation; they are more than just texts or products of particular historical conditions. As we begin to grapple with the complexity and depth of scriptures in the Buddhist universe, and see ourselves as a part of an infinite audience that has received these scriptures, engaged in dialogue with them, and come before their gaze, a few assumptions become exposed.

Though it is natural to see these texts as expressions of Buddhism, and use this category to manage their meaning and application, an honest immersion in the texts themselves problematizes this tendency. Many "Buddhist" texts seem oblivious to these modernist distinctions (Buddhist / non-Buddhist); moreover, their ability to produce multiple meanings, both befuddling us and often contradicting themselves, can overflow our capacity to easily assimilate them. This is especially true if we rely on our rote reflex of depositing them into a neatly ordered mental catalogue of “genres” or "schools".

Another prevalent assumption that often guides our reading is that a particularly flashy volume, let’s say the Lotus Sutra, has been bound and presented in a nice, clean, static form for us to read, scrutinize, consume, and ultimately do with it what we will. Barring what Buddhist scriptures have to say about the significance of your encounter with them (and they have a lot to say about this), a purely historical and sociological glimpse at the immensity of the processes these scriptures have participated in leading up to your reading is enough to deeply question an otherwise automated consumption of these texts. From the expansive purview of these scriptures socio-historical legacy, you can actually strike up a conversation with these texts that can reveal a great deal about your own location in this world, where you exist in a profound trajectory of human imaginative activity.

Before reading, it would definitely be worth while to become acquainted with the relationship between person and text that these scriptures have produced, inspired, and mediated over the centuries. Looking at the way these texts were approached and how they transformed people enables us to see them as agents that can generate experience, serve as vehicles for solace, in essence, do things to people. This function of Buddhist scripture goes far beyond their role as religious objects that are simply interpreted towards human ends. For one reader of Shoshinge, the first lines of the text “I rely upon the Tathāgata of Immeasurable Life; I will take refuge in the Inconceivable Light,” when recited, allowed him to “know the final destination of my life.” He goes on to say, “these words were Shinran’s own life and living and are my own life and living, too.” This passage speaks volumes on how these scriptures can inhabit our world. The practice of recitation with deep feeling makes possible a direct relationship to the master and founder of this text tradition: they are united in their gratitude for making the words of this scripture their own life. Shoshinge not only gives this individual a destiny, a coherent vision of the future, it transforms his condition of “floundering in the karmic sea... burnt by the flame of suffering” into a posture of dedication to a text that is itself a refuge. When he says “these words... are my own life,” he is describing just one layer of the latent potency within these texts to dissolve the barrier between themselves and their readers.

To better understand how the boundary between text and world blur in these Buddhist scriptures, it is fascinating to consider just how these texts captivate their readers into vivid worlds that bleed into life. When taken seriously these texts start to pull us into the inner workings of their world; we can actually let the text exercise us from within, discovering what the text has to say about us, and see how it goes about including us in its creation. This can be an aesthetic experience (like losing your self in a play) as much as a “religious” experience. Until we willingly enter inside the text, our safe reading, performed at a distance with ourselves carefully abstracted from the content, will limit our understanding of what these scriptures are, and, more importantly, how they are.

The Suvarna for example, through its battery of seemingly arbitrary narratives, presents us with a unique interpretive debacle: how do we get a handle on what is going on? Our inability to trace clear connections between stories, characters, and events is both unsettling and vaguely familiar – the Suvarna has reminded you just how untidy this universe is; more specifically, your life! Who are you in this situation? You are a being who has a “constitutional limit,” an inability to grasp all the meanings. When you can appreciate your finiteness amidst an infinity of possible readings that the Suvarna thrusts upon you, you can actually learn to smile at this situation as it arises outside of your quiet study, instead of settling for a pseudo confident reading that tends to flatten reality. One way the Suvarna frustrates its readers (including Buddhists) is by locating them in a world of suffering that they are responsible for and then imagining an impossibly beautiful reality that they are commanded to create.

This constant shifting of meanings in Buddhist Scriptures, which emerge in their recipients and the permeable margins of the texts themselves, are often in tension with a historical reading which pays close attention to these texts and the practices surrounding them as products of social and political human worlds. The cosmology of the Aganna Sutta which was likely both explanatory and symbolic of creation and the life process, suddenly appears as concealing a mechanism of power that undermines the priestly class, the Brahmans, by reordering caste hierarchy. The Pure Land Sutras, which appear as an integral and comprehensive text, when observed through the lens of reconstructed historical processes, is revealed as just one redaction among many that were included in different anthologies that changed their meaning. Broadening our gaze beyond the greater realm of Buddhist Scriptures, to the non-Buddhist texts that shared their languages and modes of discourse, can offer a much more accurate (in one sense) picture of how these texts came to be, and what human realities they intended to address. Behind these texts are actual worlds of human need, competition, and political ambition that need to be factored into our reading if we are interested in taken in the whole spectrum of forces and features that coalesce in Buddhist scripture.

What has become clear from this brief preview of Buddhist scriptures is that they tell you as much about yourself as a reader as they do about Buddhism in general. The challenge for us as readers of the complex, beautiful, and opaque facets of Buddhist scripture is to be able to account for a broader bandwidth of their existence, without reducing them to any one of their expressions. Like Buddhists, we may find ourselves designing a hierarchical scheme that preferences a focus on the text as an agent of change or one that emphasizes the text as object of study. Many of the composers of these texts, as well as those who canonized particular forms of reception, were deeply self reflective about their interpretations and uses of these texts. One of the illustrious compilers of the Buddhist texts collectively known as "the Pali," Buddhagosa, embodied this level of self reflection in his translation of evam me sutam as: “thus is my hearing.” For him these words, which preface any sections of the text that are attributed to the Buddha, are seen as light on the horizon – they grab your attention and suggest the rising of the sun. Being aware of our reading practice, our assumptions and interpretive choices, allows us to approach these scriptures with the anticipation and excitement that Buddhagosa invokes. Just because an encounter with the golden orb of knowledge is admitted to be “my reading” does not make the dawning of the text before our eyes any less surprising or magnificent.