Organizer: Julie A. Gifford, University of Chicago
Chair: Matthew Kapstein, Columbia University
Discussant: Robert L. Brown, University of California, Los Angeles
Constructing a Buddhist world consists, at least in part, of imagining various sorts of maps-maps of the cosmos, maps of sites where important religious events have occurred, and maps of ideal and real polities. Monuments embody and/or construct one or more of these maps. Those who plan and build these monuments may employ either or both of two general strategies: the strategy of dispersion and/or the strategy of concentration. In the strategy of dispersion, a particular monument is constructed as one landmark among the many that constitute the larger unity of a single map. For example, this strategy can be seen in the pillars of Asoka, each of which is one landmark on a then-newly-constructed map of Buddhist India. In the strategy of concentration, a large map including many sites is condensed into a single monument or artifact. For example, a map of a pilgrimage circuit spread out over a whole kingdom may be concentrated into a single statue. Using the categories of dispersion and concentration as a heuristic device, the panel will discuss selected Buddhist monuments in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Java.
The panelists presenting papers are all young scholars contributing to the development of new perspectives in Buddhist studies. Our various methods reflect a common interest in helping to bring textual scholarship into a clearer relationship with investigations of art, architecture, ritual, and social and political history.
World Map, World Order: Imagining and Commanding Space in Buddhist South Asia
Jonathan S. Walters, Whitman College
Would-be imperial dynasties in premodern South Asia mapped space in order to command it. But unlike the cartographic products/producers of Muslim and Christian imperialisms, South Asian "world maps" (both Buddhist and Theist) tended to be "religiographic," they mapped space by imagining its unity in religious myth and history, and they marked key geographic sites with religious images, temples and festivals as concrete embodiments of these imagined maps. Imperial inscriptions devoted as much attention to the articulation of these "world maps" as they devoted to more obvious imperial strategies such as military conquest and diplomacy. Archaeological remains evidence imperial attempts to actualize these maps in the architectural and artistic landscapes of the empire. Because these practices were complexly textualized within all the religious communities to which particular maps corresponded, classical Indian empire-building involved sophisticated adjudication of various contentious claims about how the world should be mapped and, by extension, constructed.
This paper provides a specific example of world mapping in South Asian empire-building, namely a Buddhist world map mobilized by early post-Asokan (2nd-1st c., B.C.) emperors, which was centered on Sanchi, and important archaeological site near Bhopal. I analyze the logistics of this world map, then describe subsequent transformations of it within subsequent imperial formations which similarly tried to command space by mapping and marking it. I conclude with general comments about world-mapping in the pan-Asian Buddhist world.
Urban Space and Social Place: Buddhists in a Medieval City of the Kathmandu
Valley
Bronwen Bledsoe, University of Chicago
Where major religions live side by side, their relations are articulated in topographical space, societal place and ritual action. In the Kathmandu Valley in late medieval times, Newar Mahayana/Vajrayana Buddhism and its practitioners were formally encompassed by a complex form of theistic state religion. Hindu rulers recentered the ancient cities around new monumental palace squares, but-contrary to the suppositions of most scholarship-Buddhists seem not to have found themselves overly constrained by the encompassing order. Rather, flourishing on the international trade ensured by the king's 'protection,' they remade their world at home, elaborating spaces already defined as Buddhist (viharas), and reworking rituals performed in these spaces to make real their own comprehensive ordering of society.
For example, the distinctively Newar samyak dana, ('giving in the proper manner' such as that performed at Hiranyavarna Mahavihara in 1659 C.E.) significantly reworked the traditional flow of largesse. It condensed the worlds of the Buddhas into the space of a single courtyard, and it encompassed the entire social order-including the royal-cum-divine Mala king-in a 'proper' Buddhist action. Buddhist and theist maps of urban space and social place were not congruent, but they were regularly made to converge to constitute a single Newar world.
A Pilgrim's Guide to the Galaxy: Jina Mandalas as Maps of Indian Buddhist
Pilgrimage Activity
Elizabeth Wilson, Miami University
For those who cannot visit celebrated Indian sites where events in the life of Gotama Sakyamuni took place, visualization of those life-events through structured meditations and circumnambulations of stupas can serve some of the same devotional aims satisfied by pilgrimage. Jina mandalas (and the stupas that incorporate them) can conveniently serve as supports for such devotional activity since they allow the devotee to move progressively from one locus to another within the structure of the mandala. Taking each of the Jinas of the panca-jina mandala as a personification of an event that occurred at a specific Indian pilgrimage site, the mandala as a whole can be seen as a condensed representation of the Buddha's life and travels in which the topography of India is transposed on a cosmic scale. Previous attempts to link pilgrimage with the cosmic locales of the five Jina (such as that of Paul Mus) have focused mainly on early events that took place in Bodhgaya and Sarnath. This paper maps out a pilgrimage progression that includes sites associated with the later life of Shakyamuni. One advantage of including later events is that the progression of sites thus constituted has a mandala-like spatial configuration that bears a greater resemblance to the spatial configurations of mandalas and stupas than the progression of sites suggested by scholars like Mus.
What's a Bodhisattva to do in the Pure Land?: The Samantabhadra Vow and its
Representation on Barabudur
Julie A. Gifford, University of Chicago
By the first century, Mahayana Buddhists had developed visualization techniques which allowed them to see a variety of Buddhas residing in purified Buddha fields, including Sukhavati, the Pure Land of the Buddha Amitabha. As Gregory Schopen has shown, Sukhavati was the paradigmatic Buddha field, and seeing it was a generalized Mahayana goal. In the Samantabhadra vow, this goal is integrated into the bodhisattva's extended career of compassionate beneficence, and the bodhisattva's activities in Sukhavati and other Buddha fields are described. The relevant texts present a map of the cosmos which is saturated with Buddhas and their purified fields. Using the ultimate visualization technique, the bodhisattva Samantabhadra is able to make a pilgrimage circuit through the entire cosmos, making offerings to each Buddha, all in a single meditation session. In this way, he concentrates a huge amount of merit-making activity into a very short period of time. He then compassionately transfers that merit to all sentient beings.
By the middle of the ninth century, a version of the Samantabhadra vow had been carved into stone on the uppermost gallery of Barabudur in Central Java. In the reliefs which illustrate Samantabhadra's devotions, the content of a visualization practice modeled on pilgrimage is rendered into a visual medium on a major pilgrimage site. Like the bodhisattva's meditation, the monument concentrates the cosmos so that pilgrims can multiply their merit.