Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions of South and Southeast Asiaby Juliane Schober

American Academy of Religion

Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions of South and Southeast Asia by Juliane SchoberReview by: Serinity YoungJournal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 68, No. 2 (Jun., 2000), pp. 442-445Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1465952 .

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442 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

intriguing thesis but not enough room to construct a convincing argument. As a result, her critique of postmodernism reads like a straw person attack: after a brief slap at Barthes, no other postmodern thinker or art work is named. Still, she suggests an interesting line of thought when she offers that in its "total renuncia- tion of the physical, tactile, experienced world, conceptual art, which requires knowledge of highly intellectual theory, exists essentially as an abstract concept, paralleling a god which exists exclusively as an abstract concept" (147).

Given the emphasis on the contemporary debasement of the spiritual, and the chapters on popular culture, there could have been more critiques of social and economic ideologies. In his description of Jean Tinguely's Altar of Occidental Abundance (1990), Andrew Doerr comes close, interpreting the work as a dis- senting voice from the hoped for "medieval unity of faith" created by the tri- umph of "Western-style capitalism and consumer culture" simultaneous with the discrediting of "the Church and Marxism" (84). Koppman makes a similar point near the end of the book, when she says that "any potential powers to embody the sacred are effectively relinquished as art enters the world of commodities and sta- tus" (154). Unfortunately, these moments are fleeting and underdeveloped.

Reclaiming the Spiritual in Art is itself a conundrum: neither groundbreaking nor stuffy, neither predictable nor tremendously surprising. In its hybrid contents students of religion and visual art will find a stimulating array of ideas and examples but little in the way of focus, elaboration, and trajectory.

Jennifer Rycenga San Jose State University

Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions of South and Southeast Asia. Edited by Juliane Schober. University of Hawai'i Press, 1997. 366 pages. $49.00.

This excellent collection of essays explores South and Southeast Asian Bud- dhist biographies drawn from several media, mainly the iconographic and textual, but there are also references to the performative. Individual essays provide cultural contexts for the biographies while exploring questions such as who read or heard these stories, or who saw representations or performances of them, and what people actually understood, saw, and did in relation to them.

Jonathan Walters's essay is a good example of the complex correspondences that can exist between textual, iconographic, and performative modes of religion. He focuses on the post-Adokan period (after Emperor Adoka, second century B. C. E.), which saw the compilation of a variety of Buddhist biographical texts and the development of the stipa cult-solid structures that contain Buddhist relics, either bodily or textual-that were a focus of devotion and pilgrimage. These two modes of production, the textual and the architectural, were deeply interrelated. Their relationship is stressed by Walters, who argues for the importance of three particular biographical texts from this period that have been some- what ignored by scholars, especially in their relation to the epigraphic evidence



Book Reviews 443

found at stOpa sites: the Apadana, Buddhavamrsa, and Cariydpitaka. These three texts deal extensively with past lives, mostly those of the Buddha, but also those of the first generation of Buddhist nuns and monks, all of whom are believed to have more or less transmigrated together from life to life. This is Buddhist biography on a cosmic scale, a scale that involves everyone in the universe, from emperor to simple peasant, from humans to divinities. These texts emphasize specific actions in past lives that led to enlightenment, most relevantly making donations, and scenes of these historical gifts were sculpted on the stOpas and on surrounding structures. An additional feature of the texts was the activity of a cakkavattin (Skt. cakravartin), a ruler who was also a pious Buddhist. Since the construction of stOpas required the formidable organizational skills of the AMokan empire, by supporting these endeavors the post-AMokan emperors were able to insert themselves into the cosmic Buddhist biography, as did all other donors, who recorded their contributions by carving their names into various parts of the sites. Thus stOpas became centers for and records of such giving. One could see iconographic representations of past giving as described in the texts as well as the ongoing living tradition of giving, and Walters further argues that these three texts were recited, perhaps even performed, at the stupas.

As Walters's essay suggests, from a very early period Buddhist biography depicted a broad range of activities and subjects, and this volume emphasizes that breadth through essays on different biographical traditions of the Buddha, as well as those of Buddhist kings and saints from various parts of South and Southeast Asia. Frank Reynolds opens the volume by describing three biographical traditions, or lineages, about the Buddha and their cultural function. First, there are the various jdtaka traditions, different collections of stories about the previous lives of the Buddha, which in their popularity have inculcated Buddhist ethical teachings such as the merit of giving. A second lineage describes previous Bud- dhas and Gautama Buddha's meetings with them in past lives. This lineage provides Buddhist communities "with an important sense of their cosmic-historical past," and because this lineage includes the future Buddha Metteya, it provides the community "with a highly relevant perspective on the cosmic-historical future as well" (33). A third lineage traces a line of kings that both preceded the historical Buddha and continued after his lifetime, which was used to legitimate different Buddhist dynasties. By delineating these complex dynamics that sur- rounded and informed the Buddhist biographical process from its beginnings, Reynolds's article sets the stage for later essays that explore various cultural uses of the Buddha's biography and that explore Buddhist biography as part of a historical continuum and as a means of legitimizing kingship.

In addition to Reynolds's and Walters's articles examples of cultural uses of the Buddha's biography are bought out in the essays by Robert L. Brown, John S. Strong, and Forest McGill. Brown's essay focuses on iconographic representations of the jatakas at the great Indian sites of Bhdrhut, Safici, and Ajanta, and chal- lenges Vidya Dehejia's reading of these as narrations. His point is that many of these carvings and paintings are actually not easily viewed, being either placed too high above the viewer or too low. He argues that the carvings were for wor- ship, "to historicize and manifest the presence of the Buddha" (74), and not to be



444 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

read as narrative. He finds further evidence for this in the depictions of the jdtakas on four Southeast Asian monuments in Thailand, Burma, and Java.

Strong's marvelous reading of a Sanskrit biography of the Buddha contained in the Vinaya of the Malasarvastivada school brings out a more subtly nuanced view of gender relations in the biographies of the Buddha, while McGill's article explores the most popular jdtaka, that of the Buddha's penultimate life as King Vessantara. This life of the Buddha as a king delineates one of two leading conceptions of Buddhist kingship, as future Buddhas, while Thomas John Hudak's essay explicates the A'okan model of Buddhist kingship as protectors of religion.

A more modern example of Buddhist kingship is examined by Paul Chris- topher Johnson through the western biographies of King Mongkut (Thai, r. 1851-1868), mainly known in the West through Yul Brynner's performances in The King and I. Johnson examines the process by which modern western biographies have created what he calls "a positivist hagiography of progress, science and 'rationality"' (233) about a Buddhist king. Mongkut was a king in the AMokan model-he protected and even reformed Buddhism-all the while embracing European scientific principles. According to Johnson, the failure of the biographies is that they reveal more about western conceptions of rationality than they do about Mongkut's highly nuanced conception of rationality that "was negoti- ated between various interests, of which Western science was only one. It also in- cluded his kingship, his fear of colonial encroachment," and his Buddhism (251).

In addition to the early Buddhist saints discussed in Walters's article, there is Mark R. Woodward's essay on a group of early Pali texts that emphasizes the ways in which these biographies explore philosophical tenets in the lives of the early followers of the Buddha, and Reginald Ray's article on Nagarjuna (India, second- third century) that questions the meaning of longevity in Buddhist biographies. Two contemporary saints are also discussed: James Taylor writes about a Thai forest meditation master, and Gustaaf Houtman discusses a Burmese lay meditation teacher. These two biographies are analyzed in terms of how a local and oral biography became a literary genre of national salience and how a nontraditional biography was legitimized as Buddhist hagiography. Houtman's subject, U Ba Khin (1899-1971), was one of the rare unordained meditation teachers to achieve renown in Burma, and he simultaneously maintained an important government post throughout most of his active years. He initiated meditation teachings among his office staff as well as among the general public and the foreign community. Herein lies the uniqueness of the biography; he is not the usual ordained teacher living apart from worldly affairs.

In examining the biography Houtman is one of the few authors in this volume to grapple with the differences between sacred biography and hagiography. He follows Frank Reynolds's distinction that the former "'depict a distinctively new religious image or ideal,"' while the later depict someone "'who has real- ized ... an image, ideal, or attainment already recognized by his religious community"' (320). Houtman argues that U Ba Khin's biography succeeds in both categories "given that it portrays how BK implemented the Buddha's teachings" and "given that BK modified the methodology he inherited to suit unordained people, and that he founded his own institutions and lineage while pursuing his



Book Reviews 445

secular career at the same time" (320). Houtman is arguing for a unique biographical tradition in Burma, unique, that is, from western biographical genres. He explains that the Burmese biographical tradition is based on their distinctive conceptions of life-really the possibility of multiple lives and the belief in "insubstantiality and no-self" (312)-and of history, which for the Burmese begins with the Buddha. In other words, their history begins with biography.

In her introduction Juliane Schober argues that Buddhist sacred biography is unique among the biographical traditions of world religion in its degree of "interpretive plasticity, shifting referents, and contexts" (13). This point is made in different ways by all the essays that ably demonstrate the Buddhist biographical process is a dialectical encounter between Buddhism and the various cultures in which it has flourished.

The richness of this volume is enhanced by the methodological diversity of the authors, who are scholars of religion, anthropology, literature, and art history, although several combine disciplines. It is also a balanced presentation of types of biographical subjects, time periods, and geographical spread. It is gratifying to find an adequate index to all the articles that allows for specific comparisons. Brown's black-and-white illustrations along with McGill's color illustrations were much appreciated, though given the importance of iconography to this collection more illustrations are wanted. But this is a small quibble in view of the high cali- ber of the essays that are quite readable and easily accessible to non-Buddhist scholars and students. I only wish space allowed for a more thorough examina- tion of each essay. I cannot recommend this work too highly for its contribution to Buddhist Studies and to the studies of sacred biography and sainthood.

Serinity Young Southern Methodist University

CompellingKnowledge:A Feminist Proposal for an Epistemology of the Cross. By Mary M. Solberg. State University of New York Press, 1997. 226 pages. $18.95.

This book proposes a theological discussion between four sets of think- ers. The participants consider what people do, based on the relationship between what one knows and does not know. First, the thought of scholars such as Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich, Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Douglas John Hall, and Lorraine Code plays one part in the conversation. The thought of the sixteenth-century German theologian Martin Luther-as interpreted by scholars such as Walther von Loewenich, Paul Althaus, Gerhard Ebeling, Joseph Ver- cruysse, and Alister McGrath-plays another part. A third part is played by the author herself, who presides over the discussion. The fourth part played in this discussion is that of the reader, who is invited

"... to collaborate in, and to elabo-

rate, this 'work in progress"'(98). The trajectory of the discussion is summarized by Solberg: "The questions

feminist philosophers raise about epistemology are critical to the academy, the



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Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions of South and Southeast Asiaby Juliane Schober