From the time of his first sermon, the Buddha was a preacher. Ever since then, preachers have served as one of the most important nexuses in the network of meaning-making in Buddhism. They opened channels and created new territories by making Buddhism meaningful for communities where it previously didn’t matter. The successful repetition of this process also kept Buddhism “alive” in places where traditions were established. In the meantime, this effort of preservation and expansion also shaped what Buddhism looks like. However, what are the specific modalities of operation for preaching in the making of Buddhism? And what are the factors that contributed to the formation of these modalities? By exploring the ideals, figures, and practices of Buddhist preaching in various traditions, including early Indian Mahāyāna, medieval China, medieval Japan, and early modern Southeast Asia, it reexamines conventional dichotomies and stimulates new reflections regarding the transmission of Buddhism.
This paper examines the figure of the dharmabhāṇaka (“preacher of the dharma”) and their audience as depicted in the Sukha-vihāra-parivarta (“Chapter on Dwelling in Ease”) of the Saddharma-puṇḍarīka-sūtra (hereafter, Lotus Sūtra), through a close reading of select stanzas from the verse portions of the chapter. Through this study, we will see that these verses have much to say about some aspects of the preacher and their listeners, such as the rhetoric the preacher employs, the subject-matter of their sermons, their style of exegesis, and the circumstances of the dharmabhāṇaka’s delivery. At the same time, we will see that verses leave other aspects implicit, such as questions of the dharmabhāṇaka’s identity, the genres of their preaching, and the specifics of how they interact with audiences. This study thus underscores the ways that some Mahāyāna Buddhist sūtras envisioned their own bearers, transmitters, preachers, and auditeurs.
In early medieval China, the composition of Buddhist exegetical works was intricately connected to scholastic preaching performed by the Chinese Buddhist monastics. The content of these exegetical works, although expressing their religious views shaped by general soteriological and philosophical concerns, inevitably engages audiences at social occasions and is thus subjected to public assessment. This paper thus proposes to divert attention away from the philosophical intricacies of exegesis. Instead, it explores the following question: what were the criteria of social evaluation for “good” exegesis in early medieval China? Through the analysis of praise and critiques recorded in three consecutive hagiographical collections, the study identifies a major continuity and a major transformation in the evaluation of Buddhist scholastic preaching. It analyzes several pairs of dichotomies at stake in the analysis of Buddhist preaching and assesses their relevance in response to this question.
This paper discusses the performance of “popular sūtra lecture” (sujiang) in medieval China by examining the codicological, paleographical, and textual features of “sūtra lecture texts” (jiangjingwen) from Dunhuang. Normative depictions of preaching and the preachers are found in transmitted sources such as Biographies of Eminent Monks and the Sūtra of Golden Light, but these scriptural and hagiographical works offer scant details about actual performance. The rich trove of Dunhuang manuscripts provides unprecedented information about how performers, redactors, and scribes drafted, assembled, and revised scripts, as well as about the afterlife of scripts as post-performance reading texts embellished with literary devices. Closely reading the textual and material features of actual scripts, this paper provides a nuanced understanding of the collaborative and social world of popular preaching and shows the essential role of preaching in spreading Buddhism.
This paper examines Eison’s (1201-90) linked preaching, ritual, and performative activities. Eison’s Shingon Ritsu movement spread broadly in medieval Japan, as he and his disciples restored temples across the islands and conferred the precepts on male and female monastics, lay elites, and commoners alike. Venues for Eison’s activities ranged from small gatherings in temples and convents; to material offering ceremonies at prisons, marketplaces, and outcast communities; to mass assemblies of monastics and laypeople and more private precept conferrals for court and warrior rulers. The paper thus uses the diversity of venues and audiences for Eison’s activities to argue for the value of understanding both “preaching as performance” (Deegalle 2006) and performance as preaching across Buddhist traditions. In so doing, I highlight how greater attention to the performative dimensions of official religious leaders can nuance still common portrayals of doctrine versus practice, elite versus popular, and institutional versus “everyday” religion.
Chanted performances of bilingual sermons were the centerpiece of most Buddhist rituals in the Theravada world from the fifteenth to early twentieth centuries, and their prestige still holds power for many Buddhist communities today. Most are structured as interphrasal Pali-vernacular bitexts, where classical Indic phrases are followed by their translation into a local South or Southeast Asian language. Bitextual sermon manuscripts function as scripts or scores for chanted performance, not books for private study, and thus invite us to imagine their composition, reception, and performance over time. To unpack the many layers of chanted bitextual sermons, I engage a tripartite model for the semiotics of music as developed by Molino and Nattiez. By analyzing selected passages from seventeenth-century Pali-Khmer and Pali-Lanna sermons on monastic ordination, I chart new possibilities for the study of Buddhist genres of performance through the semiotics of poiesis, esthesis, and materiality.