Power, Wealth and Women in Indian Mahayana Buddhism

The Gandavyuha-sutra

Douglas Osto, D.E. Osto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134018796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

This book examines the concepts of power, wealth and women in the important Mahayana Buddhist scripture known as the Gandavyuha-sutra, and relates these to the text's social context in ancient Indian during the Buddhist Middle Period (0–500 CE).

Employing contemporary textual theory, worldview analysis and structural narrative theory, the author puts forward a new approach to the study of Mahayana Buddhist sources, the 'systems approach', by which literature is viewed as embedded in a social system. Consequently, he analyses the Gandavyuha in the contexts of reality, society and the individual, and applies these notions to the key themes of power, wealth and women. The study reveals that the spiritual hierarchy represented within the Gandavyuha replicates the political hierarchies in India during Buddhism's Middle Period, that the role of wealth mirrors its significance as a sign of spiritual status in Indian Buddhist society, and that the substantial number of female spiritual guides in the narrative reflects the importance of royal women patrons of Indian Buddhism at the time.

This book will appeal to higher-level undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars of religious studies, Buddhist studies, Asian studies, South Asian studies and Indology.

1 Introduction

Although modern scholars have been investigating Mahāyāna Buddhism for over a century, much remains unknown about the origins and early development of this movement within India. This situation is due in large part to two main factors: the general lack of reliable historical evidence, and the large volume of Mahāyāna sūtras. While pioneers in the field have added greatly to our knowledge through detailed philological investigation of a number of important Mahāyāna sūtras, conclusions thus far about ‘early Mahāyāna’ have been made based on an extremely limited data set and some rather suspect assumptions. A primary objective of the current study is to redirect our approach to the subject field.

Rather than attempting to stratify the Mahāyāna in India into some chronological periodization (an approach that I feel is premature at best and most likely impossible based on the evidence), I will in the following pages focus on three themes – power, wealth and women¹ – in one prominent Mahāyāna scripture, the Gaṇḍavyūha-sūtra, and relate these to its social context in ancient India. Through this approach, I not only hope to illuminate important features of this sūtra, but also to demonstrate how the text’s conceptions of power, wealth and women reflect a target audience consisting of royal, wealthy and female elites of ancient Indian society. This project rests on two important assumptions: that literature exists within a social system, and that the production of texts as material objects requires patronage. Approaching the Mahāyāna as a literary movement in this manner has the distinct advantage of placing us on solid historical and sociological ground. Although much remains unclear about the social basis of early Indian Mahāyāna, one thing that we know for certain is that the Mahāyāna was a literary movement – the hundreds of sūtras surviving in the Chinese and Tibetan canons attest to this fact. Moreover, the early Chinese translations of many of these texts predate our earliest epigraphical evidence of the Mahāyāna in India. Thus we know that regardless of what else they were doing, early Mahāyāna Buddhists were composing texts, and doing so in quite large numbers.

Obviously a broad application of a ‘systems approach’ to the vast body of Mahāyāna literature lies beyond the scope of any one study. Therefore, the Gaṇḍavyūha-sūtra will function as our ‘test case’ for this method. The benefit of using this particular sūtra is twofold. Since previous scholars have largely overlooked this text in their accounts of Indian Mahāyāna, this present study is a valuable addition to the curtain body of research. Moreover, as will be quickly obvious to the reader, the Gaṇḍavyūha does not fit neatly into the two most popular models for the development of the Mahāyāna as either a popular lay-inspired movement, or a reactionary forest-ascetic movement. In fact, the sūtra has its own distinctive vision of reality and the religious path. Thus it is my hope that the following detailed investigation of the text will provide much needed nuance to our understanding of Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism.

The Gaṇḍavyūha-sūtra was composed somewhere in the Indian sub-continent probably during the first few centuries of the Common Era,² and came to be highly regarded by Indian commentators. Translated four times into Chinese, the sūtra was one of the foundational texts of the Chinese philosophical school, Huayan, and was chanted by numerous Chinese lay Buddhist societies. The scripture was translated into Tibetan in the early ninth century, and an inscriptional text of it accompanied by paintings can still be found today on the temple walls of Tabo dating to the tenth century. In the late eighth or early ninth century, scenes depicting the complete narrative of the Gaṇḍavyūha were carved into the gallery walls of Barabuḍur in Java, the largest Buddhist monument ever built. Thus the impact of the Gaṇḍavyūha upon Asian religious art and thought is undeniable.

The sūtra’s continued appeal throughout the centuries may be due in part to its presentation of the Buddhist path in the form of a heroic quest narrative. The story told is of a young man’s search for enlightenment in ancient India during the time of the Buddha. Like the Buddha, this young man named Sudhana (‘Good Wealth’), the son of a merchant-banker (śreṣṭhidāraka), leaves home in search of spiritual counsel. But Sudhana does not renounce the world and take up ascetic practices; rather on the advice of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī he sets out to visit ‘good friends’ (kalyāṇamitra) in order to learn how to carry out the course of conduct of a bodhisattva. After travelling far and wide across India visiting numerous good friends of various occupations (the Gaṇḍavyūha narrates 52 of these encounters), Sudhana has his final visionary experience of the supreme bodhisattva Samantabhadra and merges with him.

The narrative of the Gaṇḍavyūha-sūtra reflects its own ‘imagined universe’ complete with its vision of reality, society and the individual. This image or ‘worldview’ did not arise out of a vacuum, but emerged from an ancient Indian context. Unfortunately, our understanding of this context has been dimmed by the process of time. However, I propose to read the Gaṇḍavyūha as a lens with which to learn something about this context; and conversely, examine what we know about ancient India as a way towards understanding the text. Thus, the Gaṇḍavyūha will be our ‘looking-glass’ to see reflected aspects of ancient Indian society. But before we can further investigate the dynamics of the sūtra and its social context, I will review what we know of its historical development and our current understanding of it.

Textual Ontology

As a useful point of departure, I feel I should clarify what exactly I mean by a ‘text’. Although ‘text’ is often used in academic discourse in a manner that assumes a common-sense referent, its meaning becomes problematized when one asks such questions as, ‘If the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, where is Hamlet?’³ The answer is hardly straightforward, and the various attempts to answer such questions define what is known as ‘textual ontology’ – or what it means for a ‘text’ to ‘exist’.

Jerome McGann, one of the leading American textual theorists, defines ‘text’ in terms of a finite set of linguistic and bibliographical codes.⁴ As a critique of and response to the concept of ‘authorial intentions’ developed by modern text criticism,⁵ McGann stresses these two codes in order to high-light texts as material objects with social histories (McGann 1991, 1992). Because texts are socially produced objects inscribed with both linguistic and bibliographical codes, their position within societies and cultures is constantly transforming. The transformations of a text throughout time and in various places not only constitute what that text is, but also what that text means. In other words, a text’s significance depends on how its linguistic and bibliographical codes are read at any given place and time, which may or may not be related to the intentions of the author(s) who produced it.

If we accept that a text’s meaning is not an inherent property of it inscribed for all time by authorial intentions, but em...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Worldview
• 3. Narrative
• 4. Power
• 5. Wealth
• 6. Women
• 7. The Indian context
• 8. Conclusion
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index