Narrative Visions and Visual Narratives in Indian Buddhism - Naomi Appleton

Narrative Visions and Visual Narratives in Indian Buddhism - Naomi Appleton

6. Beyond Textual and Visual “Versions”: The Story Cluster of the Six-tusked Elephant Bodhisattva

Narrative Visions and Visual Narratives in Indian Buddhism - Naomi Appleton

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.
Chris Clark [+-]
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.

Description

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.

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Citation

Appleton, Naomi; Clark, Chris. 6. Beyond Textual and Visual “Versions”: The Story Cluster of the Six-tusked Elephant Bodhisattva. Narrative Visions and Visual Narratives in Indian Buddhism. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 160-185 Apr 2022. ISBN 9781800501317. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=39995. Date accessed: 16 Jul 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.39995. Apr 2022

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