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A Storied Sage
Canon and Creation in the Making of a Japanese Buddha
By Micah L. Auerback The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-28641-9
CHAPTER 1
The Buddha as Preceptor
Whether written, painted, or sculpted, surprisingly few Japanese portrayals of the life of Sakyamuni predate Japan's turbulent sixteenth century. This chapter focuses upon these early respresentations of the life of the Buddha. It argues that they were largely consonant with versions circulating elsewhere in East Asia; in other words, their authors generally aspired to retell what they perceived to be an "orthodox" version of the life tale, on the basis of teachings authorized by Buddhist or state institutions. Like the Buddha of those continental precedents, the Buddha of ancient and medieval Japan appears principally as a great teacher, and master of an authoritative teaching.
In both form and content, these early Japanese biographies shine as the products of eager and receptive students. Particularly in their early phases, Japanese retellings largely recapitulated the form of continental precedents: when written, they were typically composed in classical Chinese or a highly Siniziced form of Japanese; when painted, they tended to follow continental styles with little evident variation. There was no lack of exemplars to follow. By the seventh century, Buddhist intellectuals in China had already devoted considerable effort to distilling comprehensive accounts of the life of the Buddha from the many conflicting scriptural accounts.
Perhaps this is one reason that Japanese counterparts showed relatively little interest in crafting such long, comprehensive versions. Rather, Japanese Buddhist intellectuals produced narratives and images that drew upon specific, isolated episodes from the life story of Sakyamuni, and they embedded other narratives of the life of the Buddha within the edifices of larger textual or architectural frameworks. Despite the tectonic political shifts marking the advent of Japan's medieval world late in the twelfth century, these patterns of production, content, style, and context remained remarkably consistent until the sixteenth century.
The relative paucity of indigenous biographical narratives about the Buddha did not stem from any more general reluctance to produce hagiography in ancient and medieval Japan. The same period saw an upsurge of interest in the lives of indigenous Japanese Buddhist heroes, including the early prince regent Shotoku (574–622) and the renegade populist monk Gyoki (668–749). Shotoku was already the focus of a cult as early as the Heian period (conventionally, 794–1185), and he was later considered a reincarnation of Sakyamuni. Self-contained accounts of Gyoki began to circulate from the issuance of a compact but complete memorial biography of him, recorded by a disciple in 749. By Japan's medieval period, both Gyoki and Shotoku, among others, were venerated as bodhisattvas in their own right. Also following continental precedents, Japanese authors began to write biographies of Japan's own eminent monks by the late eighth century.
How to account for the relative lack of Japanese biographic interest in Sakyamuni? To be certain, the Buddhist traditions influential in Japan did tend to relegate the historical Sakyamuni to a conspicuously diminished role: the nirmanakaya (Jpn. ojin), the mere "emanation" or "magical transformation" body, a pale reflection of a much greater cosmic reality. Indeed, an insistence on the provisional and incomplete nature of the man Sakyamuni and of his teaching lies at the heart of the Lotus Sutra, which stands as arguably the single most influential text in Japanese Buddhist history. According to the Lotus Sutra, the figure who merely manifested as Sakyamuni is actually "a being of almost infinite extent and duration who appears in particular times and places through the expedient device of self-conjuring." This interpretation was taken up within "Heavenly Terrace" or Tiantai (Jpn. Tendai, Kor. Ch'ont'ae), a major movement in East Asian Buddhism that accepted this sutra as its key text for exegesis. In Japan, Tendai Buddhism was arguably the single dominant intellectual tradition through at least the end of the Heian period. Saicho, its Japanese founder, and his successors "redefined Sakyamuni of the Lotus Sutra, not as an individual person who had once cultivated bodhisattva practice and achieved Buddhahood, but as an originally inherent Buddha, without beginning or end." Given this particular standpoint, it is not surprising that so much early Buddhist art in Japan focuses not upon the Buddha Sakyamuni, but upon other, cosmic figures who are still available to help supplicants in this world.
The Biography of the Buddha in Imperial China: Elite Monastic Sources
Unlike their continental counterparts, Japanese Buddhist monastics and laity left no records of successful voyages to the medieval homelands of the Buddhist world in South and Southeast Asia; the Japanese archipelago produced no traveler comparable to the celebrated pilgrims Xuanzang (600/602–664), Yijing (635–713), or Hyech'o (c. 704–780). To be sure, some towering figures in Japanese Buddhist history aspired to travel to India, and some devout Japanese Buddhists actually did attempt to travel to India, but it seems that none of them returned safely. Further, virtually all the continental Buddhist masters to reach Japan before the modern period were Korean or Chinese in origin. Thus, until at least their first contact with Europeans in the sixteenth century, Japanese had to rely almost entirely upon sources written in Chinese to learn about India or the Buddha.
Because ancient and medieval Japanese retellings of the life of the Buddha relied so heavily on precedents originating in China, here it will be useful to survey two sets of Chinese biographical texts used extensively in premodern Japan: first, the canonical (translated) accounts of the life of the Buddha, and second, the original Chinese anthologies built from them. Of course, the difference here is not so much between texts that reflect Indian sources and those that were built from such accounts; instead, the difference is between sources that claimed a foreign provenance (typically known in Chinese as a jing, "scripture") and those that did not. Biographical accounts of the Buddha began to reach China by the end of the latter Han dynasty (25–220). Most of the biographical accounts ultimately influential in imperial China were established by the Tang period (618–907); needless to say, some are more closely related to extant South Asian sources than others.
Independently circulating accounts of part or all of the life of the Buddha, translated into Chinese by the early Tang period, include the following: the Avadana i.e., Taleof the Practice of the Bodhisattva] (Xiuxing benqi jing, T 184, date of translation controversial); the Avadana of the Auspicious [Deeds] of the Prince [Siddhartha (Taizi ruiying benqi jing, T 185, translated between 222 and 229); two texts related to the Exhaustive Narrative of the Play of the Buddha] (Skt. Lalitavistara), the Sutra of the Display [of the Deeds of the Buddha] (Puyao jing, T 186, translated between 265 and 313) and the Extended Garland of the Deeds of the Buddha Fangguang dazhuangyan jing, T 187, translated between 680 and 688); Asvaghosa's Acts of the Buddha (Buddhacarita), translated into Chinese as Praise of the Deeds of the Buddha (Fo suo xing zan, T 192, translated between 414 and 421); the Sutra of Past and Present Cause and Effect (translated between 435 and 443); and the compilation Sutra of the Collection of Authentic Deeds of the Buddha (Fo benxing ji jing, T 190, translated between 560 and 600).
It would be a mistake to regard these texts as uniform efforts to establish faithful correspondence between various Indic "originals" and target texts in Chinese. Like much other Buddhist scriptural literature, the biographies of the Buddha came to zones of Chinese culture haphazardly, and not always intact. For instance, while they are cataloged as distinct scriptures, an early version of the Avadana of the Practice and the Middle Scripture of the Authentic Deeds (Zhong benqi jing, T 196, translated between 196 and 200) actually seem to be related texts; they may have originally formed two parts of a single continuous text. In other cases, Chinese translators dynamically reorganized materials from various scriptures into larger edited textual compendia, employing a process labeled by Funayama Toru, with a playful nod to the manufacture of electronics, as "sutras made in India, [but] assembled in China." The Sutra of the Collection of Authentic Deeds of the Buddha, which demonstrably draws on multiple other scriptures, is emblematic of this tendency. Nor would such recombination necessarily have seemed to represent the imposition of a framework alien to the texts in question. The later catalogers of Chinese Buddhist scriptures sometimes treated various biographical scriptures as though they were extracts from a single large text.
Elements of the biography of the Buddha also entered the Chinese language within other vast textual assemblages, including the Chinese versions of the Agama literature, and a key text of the vinaya, or monastic discipline, the enormous Minor Section of the Monastic Code of the Root Group That Teaches That All Exists (Skt. Mulasarvastivada vinayaksudrakavastu, Ch. Genben shuo yiqie youbu pinaiye zashi, T 1451, translated into Chinese in the early 700s). The final wave of texts with biographical accounts of Sakyamuni arrived in China at the start of the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127). With texts came the Gupta-era Indian cult of the eight sacred sites (astamahapratiharya), pilgrimage destinations associated with specific scenes in the Buddha's life, each symbolized by a stupa, or reliquary mound. Such texts in this final wave of premodern textual translation included the Sutra of the Great Sammata King(Zhongxu mohedi jing, T 191) and the Sutra of the Titles of the Eight Great Numinous Stupas(Bada lingta minghao jing, T 1685). These newly translated Buddhist texts attracted relatively little attention and interest from the Chinese monastic community, who were at the time actively attempting to distinguish Buddhism in China from its Indian origins.
Therefore, it was the long first wave of translation activities that generally provided Chinese writers with the basic materials that they used in building up their own biographical records. A monk named Sengyou (445–518) is credited with the first extant Chinese effort to narrate a self-contained biography of the Buddha, the Genealogy of Sakyamuni (Ch. Shijia pu, T 2040, first issued in 502). The Genealogy synthesized the various conflicting scriptural descriptions of the life of Sakyamuni as they had been translated in China. Sengyou selected and arranged passages from the sutra and vinaya texts available to him — each a fragmentary account from the Buddha's biography in its own right — into an original anthology, so as to tell the complete story of the Buddha's life.
Sengyou aimed for comprehensiveness: he began with the origins of the present world and the Sakya clan, proceeded to narrate the career of Sakyamuni through his awakening and cremation, continued to retell the enshrinement and adoration of his relics, and concluded with the Buddha Sakyamuni's prediction of the demise of his dharma and of the advent of Maitreya, the Buddha of the future. The decision to couch the biography in such broad terms was innovative because at that early date, Sengyou would not have had access to any single canonical source recounting the Buddha's life in its entirety, particularly one that continued beyond his awakening and through his final extinction, or parinirvana. His work was critically innovative, too, because it resulted from his conscious decisions to adjudicate between competing accounts of the same events, decisions that Sengyou sometimes explained with his own commentary.
Later independent Chinese biographies of the Buddha largely followed Sengyou's model. The monk Daoxuan (596–667) abridged Sengyou's anthology — which Sengyou had issued in both five- and ten-fascicle editions — into the much shorter, one-volume Genealogy of the Sakya Clan (Ch. Shijia shi pu, T 2014) of 665. Around the same time, the lay literatus Wang Bo (ca. 649–ca. 676) composed his own Record of the Attainment of the Way by the Tathagata Sakyamuni (Ch. Shijia rulai chengdao ji, T 1508). Centuries later, the monk Daocheng (fl. 1019) of the Northern Song dynasty reissued Wang's text with his own detailed commentary, as the Annotated Record of the Attainment of the Way by the Tathagata Sakyamuni(Shijia rulai chengdao ji zhu, T 1509), which began to function very much like a scripture in its own right. It eventually circulated widely throughout the region: to Korea, the Ryukyu kingdom, the Japanese archipelago, and Vietnam, where it could still be dedicated in memorial ritual, just like a conventional sutra, as late as the early twentieth century.
Wang's work also exerted a strong influence on the final great biographical compendium concerning the Buddha to be produced in late imperial China: the Origins and Transmission of the Sakya Clan (Shishi yuanliu, ca. 1425). First assembled by the monk Baocheng (fl. 1425), early in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the text was reissued at imperial behest in 1486, graced with a preface by the reigning emperor himself. In this, its first imperially sponsored edition, the illustrations for the text were substantially elaborated. Late in the eighteenth century, a prince of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) commissioned another edition, whose illustrations he ordered to be rendered not in an Indian manner, but in the style of contemporary Chinese life, to allow readers to feel more familiarity with the material. As this pocket publication history suggests, the Origins and Transmission of the Sakya Clan achieved no little success as a text. Appearing in various editions under various titles, its illustrated editions circulated widely, inspiring wall murals at Buddhist temples in both China and Korea. The Origins and Transmission reached Japan as well, though it exerted a much slighter impact there.
The life of the Buddha also reappeared in biographical compendia of Buddhist lineages produced within China, typically to answer a need for the legitimization of particular groups. The biography of the Buddha Sakyamuni features prominently in the Chronicle of the Bejeweled Forest (Baolin zhuan, compiled in 801), the Anthology from the Patriarchal Hall (Zutang ji, compiled in 952), the Record of the Transmission of the Light of the Lamp of the Jingde Era (Jingde chuandeng lu, T 2076, compiled in 1004), the Orthodox Transmission of the Sakya Clan (Shimen zhengtong, compiled in 1237), and the Chronicle of the Buddhas and Patriarchs (Fozu tongji, T 2035, compiled in 1269), among others. Produced by rival groups within Chan and Tiantai Buddhism, these compendia naturally differ in many senses, including their presentations of the historical Buddha. Nonetheless, they uniformly express deference to texts recognized as scriptural, whether cited directly or through the medium of preceding anthologies like Sengyou's.
Taken together, these Chinese accounts evince a generally conservative stance toward the biography of the Buddha. To make such an evaluation is not to deny that, as centuries passed, Chinese accounts of the life of Sakyamuni did change in certain ways. They drew on a growing base of sources, increasingly appealing to more specifically Mahayana texts and traditions, to more compendia of scriptural material assembled within China, and to more non-Buddhist texts. Ideas about the canonicity of specific events associated with the career of the Buddha developed as well. For instance, Sengyou's pioneering anthology deliberately excluded an avadana that is sometimes considered the tale of the commencement of the bodhisattva's path to eventual Buddhahood as Sakyamuni (the story of the ascetic Sumedha [Ch. Chanhui] and his encounter with the ancient Buddha Dipamkara); yet it was incorporated into one descendant of Baocheng's work. The temporal span covered by these biographic anthologies grew as well. The narrative of Sengyou's work ends with the transmission of dharma after the Buddha's parinirvana, and Sengyou expressed little interest in the passage of Buddhism to China. By contrast, Baocheng devoted the second half of his Origins and and Transmission of the Sakya Clan to the transplantation to China and flourishing of the Buddha's teaching there.
Nonetheless, throughout all these developments, the underlying commitment to the authority of the scriptures survived. Even Baocheng's late imperial compilation relies heavily on scriptures attributed to the Buddha for its first half. Each of its hundreds of short chapters is structured around citation from a particular text, whose title appears in the formulaic first words of each chapter: "The Sutra of the Collection of Authentic Deeds of the Buddha says," "The Sutra of Past and Present Cause and Effect says," and so on. Indeed, these two sources — both translated before the Tang — together account for the bulk of the chapters describing the life of Sakyamuni in the Origins and Transmission of the Sakya Clan.
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Excerpted from A Storied Sage by Micah L. Auerback. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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