Narrative Visions and Visual Narratives in Indian Buddhism; Appleton

Edited by

Naomi Appleton [+–]

University of Edinburgh

Naomi Appleton is Senior Lecturer in Asian Religions at the University of Edinburgh. Her primary research interest is the role of narrative in the construction, communication and challenge of religious ideas in early India, and she has published extensively on this area, including Jātaka Stories in Theravāda Buddhism (Ashgate 2010), Narrating Karma and Rebirth (CUP 2014), Shared Characters in Jain, Buddhist and Hindu Narrative (Routledge 2017), as well as translations of Buddhist narrative and numerous articles on related themes.

This volume explores the interaction between text and image in Indian Buddhist contexts, including not only the complex relationship between verbal stories and visual representations at Indian sites, but also the ways in which visual imagery is used within textual narratives. The chapters are authored by a mixture of textual scholars and art historians, bringing together different disciplinary perspectives in order to seek a richer understanding of how text and art relate, and of the role of narrative imagery in different media and contexts.

The book opens with an introduction that explores what narratives and visual narratives are, and why we might want to study narrative images alongside imagery-rich literary narratives. The volume is then divided into three parts. The chapters in “Part I: Visual Narratives” (Zaghet, Reddy, Zin) explore visual depictions of stories in their own right; those in “Part II: Narrative Networks” (Mace, Appleton & Clark, Strong) seek to understand the relationship between specific visual and verbal narratives; and those in “Part III: Narrative Visions” (Gummer, Fiordalis, Walters) primarily investigate how visual imagery and visualisation work in textual narratives.

The volume seeks to bridge the divide that traditionally exists between textual scholars and art historians, and to challenge the contributors to think beyond the usual boundaries of our work.

Front Matter

Abbreviations vii

Naomi Appleton FREE

University of Edinburgh

Preface ix

Naomi Appleton FREE

University of Edinburgh

Chapter 1

Setting the Scene: Verbal and Visual Narratives in Indian Buddhism [+–] 1-27

Naomi Appleton £17.50

University of Edinburgh

The Introduction will present an initial exploration of the theme of the volume, namely the importance of imagery in both visual and verbal narratives of Indian Buddhism. It will briefly outline the state of the field, and suggest key benefits to be gained from taking a new approach to the relationship between textual narratives and visual narratives in early Buddhism. It will also provide an overview of the volume as a whole, and link to the next chapter, which offers a complementary introduction to the role of narrative in early India.

Part I: Visual Narratives

2. Rethinking Chronology and Narrative Modes: The Case of Sancī Stūpa 2 [+–] 31-54

Flavia Zaghet £17.50

Sapienza University of Rome

Dr. Flavia Zaghet obtained her PhD in February 2020 in Sapienza University of Rome under the supervisor of Prof Ciro Lo Muzio with a dissertation titled Sanchi Stūpa 2: A Reassessment of its Context, Dating and Iconographic Repertoire. Her interests focus on early Indian art and archeology, Buddhist narratives and Buddhist studies in particular. She has also carried out research in India during two fieldwork trips at the archeological sites of early Buddhism such as Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh, Kanheri, Bhaja, Bedsa, Karle, Pithalkora and Nasik in Maharashtra, Udayagiri and Kandagiri in Orissa.

Different modes of visual narration were employed in early Buddhist art. As a result, visualizations of the same narrative are often both profoundly different and difficult to interpret (or even identify) in the absence of inscriptions or securely identified comparisons. The aim of this chapter is to illustrate the benefits of a reconsideration on the one hand of established chronologies (which have considerably influenced the history of iconographic studies) and on the other of visual narration modes in order to deepen our knowledge of the visual expressions of narrative in early Buddhist art. The case of Sanchi Stūpa 2 provides a prime example, where a chronological reassessment and the identification of a variant of the monoscenic mode of visual narration (the spotlight mode) lead to the identification of a narrative vein including (as yet) unknown narratives. The same kind of approach could be fruitfully applied to well-studied reliefs as well as more obscure ones, hopefully paving the way for the development of studies in the future.

3. The Power of Image and Imagery: Visualising the Divine and the Human in Painted Narratives of Ajaṇṭā [+–] 55-87

Madhulika Reddy £17.50

University of Mumbai

Madhulika Reddy holds a PhD from the University of Mumbai. Her dissertation probes the narrative paintings of Ajanta for their aesthetic visualization of Buddhist values and concepts. Her research interests focus on the aesthetics of early Buddhist art in India and the visual culture that informs it; the interface between aesthetics and ethics in the conceptualization of the early image; and the complex relationship between the early saṅgha and the lay community as reflected in the art of the early Buddhist sites of India. She is currently revising her PhD dissertation for publication.

This chapter looks more closely at a key narrative motif or character type as a way to explore similar questions about the relationship between visual and verbal narratives. Early Buddhist narratives use striking imagery to distinguish the divine from the human. This is particularly so where the divine is surrounded by beings that are human in more ways than one. The techniques of contrast used in early Buddhist paintings to define that which is divine and distinguish it from the human appear to be grounded in pictorial conventions shaped both by oral and textual traditions, with the oral probably contributing in significant measure. This human-divine distinction – be it in the visual image or in the text – does not stop with form and metaphor; rather, it goes well beyond to visualise complex philosophical concepts. This chapter draws upon examples from the 5th century paintings of Ajaṇṭā to illustrate this point. In doing so, it juxtaposes the visual image with the ‘visual text’ to probe an aesthetic that is philosophical and hence edifying. The chapter also explores the painted image as a distinct mode of communication to better understand how powerful visuals impact the images of the mind, through that transformative phenomenon we know as darśana. As such, it also serves as a bridge to the final part of the volume.

4. Visualizing a Teaching: Sermon Scenes in Kucha [+–] 88-125

Monika Zin £17.50

Leipzig University

Monika Zin studied Art History, Indology and Dramatics in Krakow and Munich. Between 1994 and 2016 she taught Indian Art History in Munich at the Institute of Indology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. Since April 2016 Professor Zin is team leader of the Research Centre “Buddhist Murals of Kucha on the Northern Silk Road” at the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig. Her scholarly contributions include numerous articles on the identification of narratives in early Indian Art and several monographs: Ajanta – Handbuch der Malereien, 2: Devotionale und ornamentale Malereien (2003, English version to be published by IGNCA), Mitleid und Wunderkraft. Schwierige Bekehrungen und ihre Ikonographie im indischen Buddhismus (2006), Saṃsāracakra (2007, with Dieter Schlingloff), The Kanaganahalli Stūpa (2018) and Representations of the Parinirvāṇa Story Cycle in Kucha (2020).

Moving from text to art, this chapter seeks to explore the role of images and imagery through a study of one of the most interesting early Buddhist artistic sites. Nowhere else in the Buddhist world are so many narratives illustrated as in the cave temples in Kucha. Jātakas, conversion stories, venerations of the Buddha(s), praṇidhis, scenes from the Buddha’s life, particularly from the parinirvāṇa cycle, and Maitreya preaching in Tuṣita heaven – we find as many as 100 narrative representations in a single cave. The settings of depictions located indoors are preset, and they reoccur in the settled iconography. The jātakas are usually reduced to the single most dramatic moment of action. This is often also the case for scenes including the Buddha, but not for all. The sophisticated pictorial conventions make it possible to represent complex contents, even when the manner of depiction is very minimalistic. One pictorial unit can incorporate portrayals of the same person in different rebirths, or an illustration of the very narrative about which the Buddha, depicted in the same scene, is preaching. These considerations shed light on how images of narratives were being used at this key site, with wider implications for our study of Buddhist narrative art.

Part II: Narrative Networks

5. Localizing Narrative through Image: The Nun Utpalavarṇā in a Stone Relief from Kaushambi [+–] 129-159

Sonya Rhie Mace £17.50

Cleveland Museum of Art

Sonya Rhie Mace, Ph.D. is the George P. Bickford Curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art and Adjunct Professor of Art History at Case Western Reserve University. Her publications include History of Early Stone Sculpture at Mathura, ca. 150 BCE to 100 CE (Brill 2007), “Transformations of Identity and the Buddha’s Infancy Narratives at Kanaganahalli” Archives of Asian Art 67:1 (2017), and “Clearing the Course: Folio 348 of the Nepalese Gaṇḍavyūha-sūtra in the Cleveland Museum of Art” Religions 11 (2020). She is currently working on a major exhibition with accompanying publication on the art and site of Phnom Da, Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia’s Sacred Mountain to open in October 2021.

This chapter explores similar questions through a study of a key narrative in visual and textual forms. The Buddha’s descent from the Trāyastriṃśa Heaven at Sāṃkāśya is one among many scenes from the life of Śākyamuni at the copiously embellished stupa sites of Bharhut, Kanaganahalli and Sanchi. At these grand establishments, the scene is readily recognizable by the graphic image of the vertical staircase, surrounded by celestial jubilants and assemblies of idyllic lay people. One example from this early period of art in peninsular India, includes the nun Utpalavarṇā venerating Śākyamuni upon his arrival. The relief is carved on an upright of a small section of a monolithic railing found at Ghoṣitārāma Monastery at Kauśāmbī. This chapter argues that the Descent episode on the large-scale public monuments was intended to impress visitors with the miracle of the staircase and Buddha’s ability to move magically between earth and heaven. In reliefs carved on a small scale in a monastic context, on the other hand, the same scene appears to point instead to concerns of the clergy that are fleshed out in the vinaya version of the story, an unpublished new translation of which forms the basis of this analysis.

6. Beyond Textual and Visual “Versions”: The Story Cluster of the Six-tusked Elephant Bodhisattva [+–] 160-185

Naomi Appleton,Chris Clark £17.50

University of Edinburgh

University of Sydney

Chris Clark is an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney and has also held positions at the University of Edinburgh, Australian National University and Deakin University. To date, the majority of his research has focused on the Apadāna, a Theravāda Buddhist text in the Pali language. His broader research interests include Pali language and literature, Sanskrit language and literature, Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia (particularly Myanmar), and textual criticism.

This chapter offers a model for how we might study the relationships between visual and textual narratives that moves beyond the idea that an image is a depiction of a text. It uses the many textual and visual “versions” of the story of Chaddanta, a six-tusked elephant king who offers his tusks to an evil hunter. Through exploring the various manifestations of this narrative, the chapter challenges the notion of “version” as a way to understand clusters of stories either within texts or across verbal and visual forms. It offers some new suggestions about how we can best understand the choices that were made in Indian Buddhist textual and visual composition, especially when dealing with stories that already had a life of their own in the popular imagination.

7. Interpretations and (Mis)understandings: Three Case Studies of Illustrations of the Buddha’s Lifestory [+–] 186-209

John S. Strong £17.50

Bates College, Lewiston, Maine

John Strong is Charles A. Dana Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies and Asian Studies at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine (USA), where he taught for forty years. He has also had visiting appointments at the University of Peradeniya (Sri Lanka), at the University of Chicago, and at Stanford, Princeton, and Harvard Universities. His research has focused on Buddhist legendary and biographical traditions mostly in South Asia. His book publications include: The Legend of King Aśoka (1983), The Legend and Cult of Upagupta (1992), The Buddha: A Beginner’s Guide (2001), Relics of the Buddha (2004), and Buddhisms: An Introduction (2015). He now lives, happily retired, in a house on a lake in woods in Maine.

This chapter expands the theme of visualising the Buddha, by exploring the literary and visual endeavour of biography. We know that Buddhist narrative art often required (and still requires) oral or written explanations by monks or others tasked with interpreting the visual depictions. These explanations could, of course, greatly influence a person’s understanding of the images. This chapter looks at three instances featuring explications of illustrations of the Buddha’s lifestory, taken from three very different milieux. The first example comes from the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya: Strong reexamines the story of Mahākāśyapa’s ordering the depiction of selected scenes from the Buddha’s life and then using them to help King Ajātaśatru cope with the news of the Buddha’s death. Second, Strong explores what is possibly the earliest comprehensive account of the legend of the Buddha by a Westerner: Tomás Pereira’s 1685 Portuguese summary of a 190-chapter Ming Dynasty life of the Buddha, in which each page of text is illustrated by a facing woodblock print. He focuses on the effect this systematic illustration of the original may have had on Portuguese understanding of the narrative. Finally, Strong looks at early 18th century Dutch misexplications (as depictions of Adam and Eve) of various Buddha images they saw at Mulkirigala in Southern Sri Lanka—a site they further misperceived as being Adam’s Peak. A conclusion will relate these three case studies and return to the wider themes of the volume, around how visual and verbal images can help us to understand the history of Buddhism.

Part III: Narrative Visions

8. The Buddha as Spiritual Sovereign: Narrative Figurations of Knowledge and Power [+–] 213-237

David Fiordalis £17.50

Linfield University, Oregon

David Fiordalis is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion at Linfield University in Oregon, USA. His recent publications include an edited volume on Buddhist philosophy as practice, Buddhist Spiritual Practices: Thinking with Pierre Hadot on Buddhism, Philosophy, and the Path (Mangalam, 2018), an essay on the Buddha’s smile published in both Spanish and English in volumes honoring his doctoral supervisor, Luis O. Gómez, and various other scholarly articles and translations related to classical Buddhist narratives, poetry, and scholastic literature, particularly concerning the literary traditions around Buddhist notions of wonders and superhuman powers. He has been engaged in academic work on the religions and cultures of South Asia and the Himalayan region for more than twenty-five years.

Do narratives make arguments? We may respond intuitively that they do. What else do we call the moral of the story? Yet, scholars have also pointed out some basic differences between narratives and arguments. Narratives create storyworlds complete with characters performing actions and experiencing events in worlds of spatial and temporal extension; arguments give series of inter-related propositions. The differences suggest that, while narratives may make arguments, they do so differently from systematic forms of discourse. How then do narratives make arguments? This chapter will explore this broader question by looking more specifically at how certain Buddhist narratives enact the Buddha as a “spiritual sovereign,” a figure of extraordinary knowledge and power. It will argue that narrative figuration and metaphor – the way narratives create figurative representations and use visual imagery – play active roles in this process. In this way, not only can we understand better how narratives make arguments, particularly in this case by giving concrete shape to abstract conceptions of ideal beings and states of flourishing; we can also propose a stronger (and potentially more comprehensive) interpretation of certain historical developments in the Buddhist tradition, especially in regard to the relationship therein between the so-called “spiritual” and “temporal” domains.

9. Seeing the Dharma: Narrative Darśan in the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa [+–] 238-262

Natalie Gummer £17.50

Beloit College, Wisconsin

Natalie Gummer is professor of religious studies at Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin, where she has taught since 2001. She graduated with a PhD from Harvard University in Buddhist Studies in 2000. Her research, published in several journal articles and book chapters, examines textual practices in premodern Mahāyāna Buddhist literary cultures, especially ritual uses of texts, oral performance, and translation. She also explores how Mahāyāna literature might offer us critical purchase on a range of contemporary ethical and philosophical debates. She is currently completing a monograph on performativity and embodiment in Mahāyāna sūtras.

This chapter follows on from the previous one by arguing that some Mahāyāna sūtras offer ritual and verbal means for transformative visual encounters with buddhas and their perfect fields. It takes as a particularly instructive instance the penultimate chapter of the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa, “The Visual Encounter (darśana) with the Tathāgata Akṣobhya and the Fetching of the Abhirati World,” (abhiratilokadhātv-ānayanākṣobhyatathāgatadarśana). The chapter begins with a question posed by the Buddha to Vimalakīrti: when he is “desirous of darśana,” of seeing and being seen by the Tathāgata, how does he see him? Vimalakīrti replies with a lengthy apophatic description of the Tathāgata, making it clear that he is, as Vimalakīrti concludes, “inexpressible” (avacanīya). Yet almost immediately thereafter, Vimalakīrti provides an actual opportunity for seeing a Tathāgata: the Tathāgata Akṣobhya, whose entire vast world sphere Abhirati, its glittering features amassed in fairly vivid detail in the sūtra, the bodhisattva gathers up into his hand and brings into this Saha world in order to give darśana to Śākyamuni’s assembly. Through this encounter, all present are transformed. While the reality of the Tathāgata is ostensibly “inexpressible,” then, he and his world can nonetheless be seen and brought into our own, even when both seem far, far away—and precisely through the verbal and ritual technologies of the sūtra, which make him imaginatively present to audiences and allow darśana of him. These technologies have significant implications for our interpretation of Buddhist “literature,” which often defies any comfortable distinction between textual and visual experience.

10. Making Senses of the Story: Narrative, Art and Affect in Ancient India [+–] 263-286

Jonathan Walters £17.50

Whitman College, Washington

Jonathan S. Walters is Professor of Religion and George Hudson Ball Endowed Chair of Humanities at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, USA. His research interests in Indian and Sri Lankan Buddhist history include popularization and expansion of the religion, its role in local, regional and imperial political formations, and Pali and Sinhala literature. He is the author of The History of Kelaniya and Finding Buddhists in Global History; co-author (with Ronald Inden and Daud Ali) of Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia; co-editor (with John Holt and Jacob Kinnard) of Constituting Communities: Theravāda Buddhism and the Religious Cultures of South and Southeast Asia; most recently, he has published an on-line translation of the Pāli Apadāna as Legends of the Buddhist Saints (apadanatranslation.org). His historical and textual studies are informed by longterm fieldwork in a rural Sri Lankan Buddhist village.

In this chapter Walters returns to influential earlier work in which he pointed to apparent correspondences between late canonical Pāli texts of the Khuddaka Nikāya (especially Apadāna, Buddhavaṃsa and Cariyāpiṭaka, the “ABCs”) and archaeological and epigraphic evidence from the monumental stupa sites of early post-Aśokan South Asia (2nd – 1st c., BCE). Walters’ concern in that work was to reconstruct the overlap of Buddhist narrative with monumental art and epigraphs as a context in which to understand the elite, royal, and sometimes imperial sponsorship of the sites in question. He suggested that the affective experience of participants created in that conjuncture of story with stupa might help make sense of the imperial and other elite sponsorship of the latter, both because individual elite donors could imagine their own participation as progress in traversing the soteriological maps drawn by the ABCs, and because the congregation of wider populaces to participate in stupa festivals could serve more mundane ends including political mobilization, economic or intellectual exchange, and the enhancement of social prestige through public displays of piety. In this new chapter, Walters enlarges those considerations in two ways. On one hand, he moves beyond the cataloguing of individual narrative details (such as technical terminology for architectural features or liturgical practices, or narrative segments) which emerge simultaneously in both the textual and the archaeological record to explore how collectively those “details” situate stupa-cult participants within the textual narrative as a whole. In particular, he suggests that such an experience is facilitated through homology of the whole site to “big picture” images narrated in these texts (in particular, the ratanacankama of Buddhavaṃsa and the buddha-pāsāda of Buddhāpadāna). He makes this argument in part through considering the visual within a larger range of senses simultaneously engaged by the texts and the monuments, which he suggests might have contributed to the persistence and enlargement of such embodied imagination of whole “Buddhaverses” or pure lands in subsequent Buddhist traditions. On the other hand, he enlarges this work by including consideration of a parallel Sri Lankan site, Mihintale, during the same period, an example of the adaptability of the narrative-and-monument conjuncture as the religion was adopted beyond its original home. As such, this chapter bridges the general Introduction and the rest of the volume by painting a compelling picture of the role of narrative in physical sites of devotional and political activity in early South Asia.

End Matter

Index 287-292

Naomi Appleton FREE

University of Edinburgh

Reviews

This entire volume is a noteworthy contribution, remarkable in its thoughtful approach to the diverse relationships between textual/oral storytelling practices and visual narratives (both material in the form of art and mentally generated as visions). To varying degrees, all of the essays explore fascinating aspects of these relationships. I anticipate that this book will be of great interest to all scholars of Buddhism (in India and beyond), which is a real contribution, as often art historical and textual specialists publish in different venues.
Catherine Becker, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Art History, University of Illinois at Chicago

This volume explores the intersection of Buddhist art and literature, and the complex ways that verbal and visual narratives engage one another. The result is a brilliant synthesis that is sure to appeal to a wide cross-section of scholars and will no doubt be cited many times in the years to come.
Andy Rotman, Sydenham Clark Parsons Professor and Professor of Religion, Buddhist Studies, and South Asian Studies, Smith College

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Narrative Visions and Visual Narratives in Indian Buddhism

Naomi Appleton [+–]

University of Edinburgh

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