Canonical Belief Narratives of the Buddha

Canonical Belief Narratives of the BuddhaFolklore and Religion in the Early Buddhist Discourses Eviatar Shulman (bio) Folklore and religion are concepts that represent central domains of human life, even if their shapes and boundaries vary considerably and they are notoriously difficult to define. Naturally, they intersect at many points and share much of their substance—indeed, a key point of this article is that folklore and religion are related to each other so intensely that they constitute continuous and in many ways overlapping realms of human action and experience. Although there is a widespread tendency, in both scholarship and popular perception, to distinguish between the “lore” of the “folk” and the ideologies and practices of religion, here I develop the argument that what we call religion—in this particular case, Buddhist canonical scripture—is in many respects a regularization and institutionalization, as well as a shaping and channeling, of a society’s or a culture’s world of belief, which emerges through folklore. Although some may prefer to relegate religion to the realms of texts and elite scholarship, institutions and clergy, and ritual, the idea here is that these very texts as well as the words on the lips of the clergy and the rituals performed are generated through and offer a conscious or semi-conscious reworking of a world of belief that expresses a culture’s organic take on life and reality. Religious texts and their study are structured [End Page 187] actions and perceptions of a tradition’s (indeed, of human) encounters with and within cosmos,1 which include at key moments attitudes toward reality that (for lack of a better way to say this) transcend the empirical. Or, better, they interpret and thus see the empirical in terms of what we may call—again, for lack of a better alternative—the supernatural, that is, what exceeds the epistemology of the physical. My argument is based on observing the life of belief narratives in a selective number of texts from the Buddhist canonical scriptures of the Pāli canon.2 Generally speaking, I find the concept of belief narratives immensely helpful in trying to analyze and penetrate human phenomenology. Part of its appeal lies in its flexibility, which allows it to address large spectrums of human thought and action in a way that crosses boundaries between and within disciplines, such as the ones between folklore and religion, between different genres of human creativity (especially between myth, legend, and fable), as well as that between text and context. As Ülo Valk (“Quest” esp. 27–28, 34–35) suggests, the usefulness of the concept of belief narratives is in its freshness, which cuts across accepted classificatory boundaries, while in the introduction he confidently asserts that the idea “aims to break the limits of existing classification systems.” Notice that such an assault on accepted classifications does not deny their applicability to many realms of discourse. Rather than taking genre and other disciplinary categories as self-evident realities, I adopt an instrumental approach that takes analytical classifications as helpful tools that can uncover different dimensions of text-in-context, while accepting that theoretical schemes have no self-evident boundaries to begin with and overlap in real life.3 The attempt to speak about religion and folklore in one breath is risky, as these are two of the most heavily theorized scholarly disciplines. They are both spurred by an intense impulse for defining clear conceptual categories, in which there is little agreement on these same definitions. Both are disciplines that the modern mind has an impulse to look down upon, and are thus hypersensitive. Yet in assessing human life, their significance can never be doubted, and they converge at one of the more generative points of the human psyche. Among the concepts most relevant for the present context that I do not discuss here are included the intricate conceptual definitions of folklore, religion, or belief, the distinction between the empirical and the supernatural, or any of the genres that would help us interpret the Buddhist canonical texts under discussion. I find it rather impossible to define the Pāṭika-sutta, the key text in the following discussion, or even the [End

Aesthetics · Art · Buddhism · Epistemology · Folklore · Gautama Buddha · Ideology · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Anthropology · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Philosophy · Study and Philosophy of Religion

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