[ Panels by World Area Main Menu ]
[ View the Timetable of Panels ]
Buddhisms Beyond Buddhism
Organizer: Charles Hallisey, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Chair: Malcolm David Eckel, Boston University
Discussant: Malcolm David Eckel, Boston University
Since the publication of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, students of modern Asia have been well aware of the importance of print capitalism in the generation of new forms of collective imagination, and in particular, the role of literature in the imagination of national identities. The papers on this panel look at an associated phenomenon: the role of modern literary forms in the imagination of alternative ways of being a person. Specifically, the panel explores how modern South Asian authors used Buddhist themes to look at how persons might live in tension with the cultural worlds around them.
The papers focus on examples selected from Bangla, Hindi, Sinhala, and Telugu. Some works were written by authors who had no personal commitments to Buddhism, others were written by authors who lived in or moved through communities that were self-consciously Buddhist. All of the authors, however, turned to Buddhism to create a vantage point from which they could explore what it means to be a modern person, They perceived Buddhism as providing key resources for personal formation, resources that were quite distinct from what they found in the immediate cultural worlds around them.
Together, the papers present a case study of the importance of Buddhism in the literary cultures in modern South Asia, but they also keep in question just what Buddhism is. While the papers focus on the place of Buddhism in modern South Asian literary cultures, the discussant will consider the significance of such literature for our understanding of modern Buddhism.
From Buddhism to Communism: Hindi Intellectuals in the Early 20th Century
Francesca Orsini, University of Cambridge
Modern writers in Hindi, as in other Indian languages, took up myths and figures from the Indian past, the Buddha included, in new and personal ways. One way they did so is represented by Maithili Sharan Gupta’s (1886-1965) poem Yashodhara about the Buddha’s wife. Another curious phenomenon, however, is represented by important intellectuals like Kedarnath Pande--alias Baba Damodar Das alias Rahul Sankrityayan-- (1893-1963) and Vaidyanath Misra “Nagarjun,” who made Buddhism part of their path of personal and political self-discovery. They both travelled from Bihar to Sri Lanka, took Buddhist vows, changed their names, and then chose a life of political work as well as writing. Both Rahul Sankritiyayan and Nagarjun became peasant activists and eventually active Communists. The paper will examine the motivations behind this tortuous life-path, and how Buddhism inflected their writing, their thinking and their Communism.
The Aesthetics of Suffering in Rabindranath Tagore
Sudipta Kaviraj, Columbia University
The paper will argue that Rabindranath Tagore was not merely influenced by ideas coming from the Buddhist tradition about non-violence and kindness, but that there is a subtler and deeper influence that is apparent in his aesthetic thinking about suffering. The paper distinguishes between two rhetorics in the representation of suffering in the ancient Indic tradition - which I shall tentatively call the maximalist and the minimalist. A maximalist rhetoric can be seen in the Mahabharata which in its artistic representation of suffering constantly seeks a magnification of the suffering involved - for instance, in Draupadi's humiliation or the sheer number of lives lost in the war. A minimalist rhetoric can be found in some of the Buddhist Jataka stories about the previous lives of the Buddha, especially those which deal in subtle forms of violation of human beings. These subtle forms of violation often happen when indignity is thrust on a person by patterns of social conduct. The paper argues that Tagore's fascination with stories from the Jataka collection indicates a deeper affinity on his part to this second type of a rhetoric of suffering. The paper will show this by analysing Tagore's cycle of narrative poems, Katha O Kahini.
In Search of a Secular Religion: Buddhist Themes in Modern Telugu Literature
Velcheru Narayana Rao, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Beginning from the 1940’s Buddhist themes became popular in Telugu literature. Dozens of poets, and playwrights, both modernists and traditionalists, wrote on Buddhist themes.
Why choose Budddhist themes at this time, when Buddhism survived only in museums and archeological remains?
The new found interest in Buddhist themes among Telugu poets and playwrights was clearly not due to the appeal of Buddhism as a religion. The authors showed little interest in its doctrine, philosophy, rituals or other religious practices. Their interest was primarily on the ideals of peace and non violence associated with Buddhism, but which were secularized in the way they were treated, and the human drama of love and desire in the story of the Buddha’s life and the lives of people around the Buddha.
The intriguing question, then, is -- why go all the way to the Buddhist legends in search of these non-Buddhist themes.
I attempt to answer this question by focusing on three areas:
1. The role played by nationalism in the revival of India’s historical past and the romantic message of peace and non-violence spread by Gandhi.
2. The search by the newly emerging English-educated middle class for secular themes that are still authentically and gloriously Indian.
and
3. The influence of European Buddhism as it made its way to the Indian intellectuals during the early decades of the twentieth century, especially through Sir Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia, which enjoyed a tremendous popularity among the new intellectuals in Andhra.
In A “Buddhist” World, But Not Of It: Martin Wickramasinghe and the Sinhala Novel
Charles Hallisey, University of Wisconsin, Madison
The Sinhala community of modern Sri Lanka imagines itself self-consciously as Buddhist, with a special place in the world as a unique heir to the Buddhist past. As is well known, this sense of Buddhist identity has been a prominent feature and tension in the Sri Lankan nationalism, but it is not all that there is to modern Buddhist life in Sri Lanka.
My paper looks at the novel, Viragaya (“Detachment”) by Martin Wickramasinghe, one of the greatest literary figures of twentieth century Sri Lanka, Viragaya is one of the most experimental novels of Wickramasinghe in the way that he adopts an autobiographical voice for the novel’s protagonist. Apart from its interest on purely literary terms, however, Viragaya is striking for the way in which Wickramasinghe uses the genre of the modern novel as a vehicle to present an image of a personal Buddhist sensibility that is morally authentic but at odds with the culture of Buddhism in which individuals in modern Sri Lanka find themselves. This personal Buddhist sensibility is presented by Wickramasinghe as being highly individualistic, experimental and socially ineffective, so much so that it appears unintelligible to anyone who views it with the values of an ordinary Buddhist world. Wickramasinghe, however, portrays those who do come to appreciate this personal religious sensibility as recognizing it as a way of being both authentically Buddhist and authentically human.
Wickramasinghe also clearly sees the subjectivity of viragaya as representing a space where one is both personally free and able to criticize the social values of the world around one.