Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Text as Father: Paternal Seductions in Early Mahayana Buddhist Literature
ISBN: 9780520931404
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of California Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Mahayana Buddhism -- Sacred books; Paternalism -- Religious aspects -- Mahayana Buddhism; Mahayana Buddhism -- Doctrines;

This beautifully written work sheds new light on the origins and nature of Mahayana Buddhism with close readings of four well-known texts-- the Lotus Sutra, Diamond Sutra, Tathagatagarbha Sutra, and Vimalakirtinirdesa. Treating these sutras as literary works rather than as straightforward philosophic or doctrinal treatises, Alan Cole argues that these writings were carefully sculpted to undermine traditional monastic Buddhism and to gain legitimacy and authority for Mahayana Buddhism as it was veering away from Buddhism's older oral and institutional forms. His sophisticated and sustained analysis of the narrative structures and seductive literary strategies used in these sutras suggests that they were specifically written to encourage devotion to the written word instead of other forms of authority, be they human, institutional, or iconic.

Alan Cole, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Lewis & Clark College, is author of Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism (1998).