So what we are now to make probably the highlights of the conference is that we will be mindful of the number of people
online gradually increasing up to this point because it's time for just Harris's keynote about the leadership expo.
That I'll say again with Chris Harrison was found to be a keynote speaker was very heavy, and I'm sure that's hitting him on presenters.
And joining us now is the end of the first day.
But I did notice to tell you about a spirit to say something to institutions, not just to.
People, because it's the highlight at this point, and I think the wrong way to in the eyes of British law,
Harrison is the George, even now professor of religious studies at Stanford University,
educated in his native New Zealand and in Australia, is specialises in Buddhist literature and history, especially that of Mahayana.
And in a study of Buddhist manuscripts in Sanskrit, Chinese used to be is the author of the summary of their encounters,
what is present in numerous journal articles on Buddhist sacred texts.
And the interpretation is one of the editors series Buddhist manuscripts in the same direction all this time.
These include editions and translations of a number of mainstream Buddhist Sufism chapters, including The Virtues, etc. Democracy in Asia Really?
Chinese Seminar The anthology series is and just put a study at Stanford is currently chair of the department.
Said It's this seen as welcome for our conference today.
Thank you. Matthew, can, can you hear me satisfactorily?
Yeah. Yes. Okay, great. Well, greetings everybody from Menlo Park in California, and I'm very happy to be with you.
I mean, I wish I was with you in Oxford. I have regrets about that, but I'm very happy to be here.
I joined the conference half way through your day, so I realised that for many of you,
you've already had a long day and you'll be looking forward to the dinner in the evening.
So thank you, Matthew,
for inviting me to present here and my thanks also to Oxford University and to the glorious UN Foundation for sponsoring this this conference.
I'd like here to offer a few thoughts,
hopefully not to random or unstructured on the topic of reading my on a scripture and these continue or follow on from some reflections
that I laid out in a recent paper entitled Bending Minds and Winning Hearts on the Rhetorical Uses of Complexity in Mahayana Sutras.
And this was a revised version of a paper I first presented at a workshop in Jerusalem.
In 2019, organised by Terry Shulman, which was the last time I got on a plane and went anywhere,
so, you know, I'm looking forward to being able to do that again eventually.
In that paper, I called for the writing of a comprehensive grammar of Mahayana sutras as a further step in their meta analysis,
with attention to such things as stylistic and structural features.
The use of language. The things features that are well known to all of us who read Mahayana, such as we see them all the time, but we haven't yet.
As far as I know, subject of them to systematic analysis, things like the alternation of prose and verse.
What's going on there? The recurrent metaphors, the narrative tropes and so on.
So this list is by no means exhaustive. There are a lot of things that we're very familiar with when we read Mahayana sutras,
and by way of illustrating the challenges and possibilities of of writing such a grammar,
I dealt in this paper with two very important and well-known semantic and structural features of these texts.
One is the whole question of self reference, which David Druce is already drawing attention to in his paper and.
And the the other the other feature, somewhat less, I think sympathised, is the question of interlocking formulae.
And these these two things are typical of many examples of Mahayana surgeries, but by no means found in all of them.
So self-referential reality seems to me rather distinctive. The Mahayana surgery literature.
The use of interlocking formulae is found to a certain extent in mainstream literature,
in the argaman and also in other Indian religious texts such as the Upanishads.
But one could say that it reaches new heights of complexity and in Mahayana sutras.
Now much interesting, stimulating,
occasionally provocative work has already been done on different aspects of MHI on the Suchas to which I am greatly indebted.
And here I must mention the work of Alan Cole, Natalie Gama, David Drews, Christian Wade Amar and others.
And this work is ongoing with some particularly interesting contributions to the conversation in Paris right now.
And here I refer to a special issue of the history of religions on rhetoric and high on the suchas, which is due to appear in November.
Something to look forward to. And secondly, a volume edited by Natalie Gunma in honour of Luis Gomez,
entitled The Language of the Sutras, which is due to appear by the end of this year from Mangalam Press.
But one thing that strikes me about most of the work that's been done so far is that it
often deals with only a single feature of the genre or a limited number of features,
and it often takes has its evidential basis, a single text or a small number of texts.
So but the main thing is is clearly a lot of activity devoted to the business of
interpreting Mahayana sutras in this conference is just one example of that.
So that paper that I've just referred to springs out of a sense, as I said,
that we should be doing more to stand above the genre to consider the individual stories that
some of us get completely hooked on as part of a vast symphony of texts or as participants,
if you like in a vibrant conversation stretching over many centuries,
a conversation that must have proceeded according to certain rules and conventions, which as eavesdroppers on it, so to speak.
We might want to understand or if you want to look at it in another way,
you can see these searchers as part of a complex ecosystem of which we have only fragmentary remains, but we want to know how this ecosystem function.
And it's clear that some of the surgeries have survived refer to and presuppose other
surgeries which must have preceded them to which they sometimes refer even by name.
And the paper presented by David Drews addresses this issue in part.
Now, I don't believe myself that somehow they were all in contact with each other, that all parts of this ecosystem were in communication.
But the obvious presence of certain literary conventions that many structures employ indicate that their composers were not working in a vacuum.
They were not completely isolated from each other. They shared a common language, even if they used it to express different purposes sometimes.
So today I want to move on from that. I don't want to rehash that paper, but I offer a few reflections on the theme of our conference,
which is reading MHI on the scripture and the sounds simple.
But as my title suggests, reading takes many forms and serves many purposes depending on who is doing it and how and why.
And those of us doing Buddhist studies are clearly who have been often clearly been reading for.
In other words, approaching these texts looking for information that we might extract from them for writing history,
understanding doctrinal developments and so on.
And this this kind of extract of reading has, I think, quite rightly been seen as sometimes problematic from a scholarly point of view.
Practitioners, on the other hand, may be reading them, may have been reading them for guidance and inspiration or reading them for merit.
But these ways of reading for are not always straightforwardly extractive, since in the process,
we and others may be reading things into the text, which others would not see, or it might not even be there.
I think a simple example of this is the complicated problem of translation that arises when we try to deal with the gendered language of the texts.
That's to say, especially if we're reading them in Sanskrit, which is a gendered language itself.
And a problem that many of us face, both as scholars and as practitioners,
is whether to go with the presumed generic male emphasis of the text in which say the body,
but is always or referring to Stephanie's paper, almost always male,
or to use inclusive language to alternate between he and she or to address the problem by, in effect, dodging it.
And switching everything to plurals and whatever we do,
we can scarcely avoid importing into our translations and thrust into our reading a sensibility,
even a hypersensitivity which would have been foreign to the original composers of the sutras.
So the more I think about that, the more it looks like a losing game in which the reading for and the reading end become hopelessly tangled.
So in general terms, then whenever we are reading for something,
we run the risk of finding what we are looking for by seeing what is not there and missing what is there, and this is perhaps unavoidable.
I myself find that every time I read any, given Moo-Hyun Sutra, I see something new,
which I never noticed before, and I think that's part of what makes studying them so rewarding.
And along with that sort of more positive observation,
there is the least comforting feeling that I have anyway that I never know enough to see everything there is.
There's always some part of the jigsaw that I just don't understand that I that I know that I don't have the key to unlock and probably never will.
And I think here group reading is a means to be helpful of the kind that we, as teachers normally do with our students,
in which we can test our interpretations against those of others and be confronted with our successes and mistakes and their successes and mistakes.
And I think this leads to a certain feeling of humility, which I think is always a good attitude with which to approach our reading.
For me, part of that means always assuming that the text makes sense, even if I can't see the sense it makes.
In other words, thinking that, you know, at least as a starting point, it's my problem and not that of the text.
So, you know, this leads, I should think to a kind of respectful engagement, even while I alert to the rhetorical strategies which the texts betray.
So what does it mean to read on my on a scripture and more importantly, to understand it and deploy their understanding in a meaningful way?
And here I refer you in advance as it were to the very insightful essay by Charles Halsey,
which begins the soon to appear volume the language of The Searchers,
which speaks of this problem, invoking Luis Gomez again concerning and I quote maintaining a certain degree of openness to the text.
And, of course, very resonant for me because it recalls very,
very vividly the experience I had stretching over many years reading the re Maliki intimidation with Greece.
And which we did usually on Skype, so in a kind of forum rather like this.
And and that was an experience of questioning and open dialogue, just about everything.
We were reading every single word and not taking anything for granted, trying.
If I can use this metaphor to keep the wheels of our understanding out of the ruts into which they so easily tend to slide.
And I'm I'm happy to announce here just in passing that our joint or rather group translation of the Maliki city near Daysha is now in Paris,
and it should appear by January of next year.
So the problem of reading for and reading into applies with similar force to
our attempts to make inferences about the people that first read the texts.
We have so little knowledge about them and about how the texts were first used that we are
reduced to inferences and guesswork based almost entirely on the what the texts themselves say.
And so the first order of business in this regard is the problem of ties or just pause to reflect on the term reading itself.
Since we assume that the checks were not in fact read by many people, but heard and so being careful as some people are,
we refer to readers slash heroes, or we could talk more neutrally about the receivers or users or addresses of the text or as a of the audience.
But whatever term we pick carries its own freight and associations, some of which may be entirely anachronistic.
For example, even when even reading when the sutures were composed, if we use that term may have been or not, some silent and moreover,
private operation, but the voicing of the text in a public setting in that way more akin to a kind of performance.
And here we come to the role of the Dharma Bonica, which long ago, she's a tiny mussel and then more recently, David Drews,
Natalie Gummer and others have paid a great deal of attention to those speakers or
preachers of the teaching who do appear to have been performers in some sense.
Now, one might think we know very little about how they operated, but against that we must admit that Mahayana sutras do in fact come with their own
set of instructions in the form of a sequence of verbs well known to all of you.
Typically in the Op-Ed or in the future tense, which take the text as their object.
To take up or learn it, Drahi Ashanti, to retain or memorise it the heart of the U.S.A. to recite it, watch Ashanti to master or internalise it.
How do you have ups the ante to teach it day, show U.S.A. and explain it or elucidate it at length or in full to others?
Parade bias, child restraint. Some Prakash Ashanti too,
which are sometimes added to here through Ashanti to write like Ashanti to cause to
be written like Ashanti or lick up Ashanti to ponder thoroughly unleashed on us,
Scottish Yankee, etc., etc. inserted at appropriate points now.
The precise meaning of these boobs has had a lot of ink spilt over it.
And I hear, again, refer to David's very useful discussion and a 2015 paper.
But if we look at the sequence as a whole, it appears to be feasible and cogent.
These are all things one could conceivably do with the text and the sequence.
You may have noticed generally forms a logical progression in two ways from beginner to
expert in relation to the text and from self to other in relation to its deployment.
Now, all these operations would demand time and dedication and faith.
But writing the sutra presupposes literacy while causing it to be written presupposes a certain level of affluence.
Especially if we consider the probable cost of having a scribe copy out one of the larger text like the progeny are putting me down, I think.
I think the ambush might be going to talk about these issues tomorrow.
I hope so anyway. Here, I found it especially interesting in the course of writing the previously mentioned paper to consider
the list of actions laid out in Chapter five of what we now know as the Ash disaster again.
To give the perfection of insight, the president has a book to others and have them copy and recite it.
To recite it for oneself. Sorry to recite it for others, oneself.
To explain its meaning for others oneself.
To give it as a book to others and have them copy and recite it, telling them that they should acquire its merit and blessings.
To give it as a book to a single non regressing bodhisattva urging them to train in it.
To give it as a book to a single non regressing bodhisattva explaining its meaning to them.
To teach the perfection of insight to a single body after wanting to attain awakening more quickly.
Now there are some problems with variance here, but the sequence, which we find a version of in the Gundry version edited by Falcon Charisma,
does appear to list these actions in ascending order of meritorious ness.
So the effect that just giving the traditional perimeter as a book to other people for them
to copy and read is trumped by taking the trouble to recite the text for them yourself,
which is in turn trumped by actually teaching them what it means and so on,
with interestingly, verbal operations assuming a higher status than those involving writing.
And all this suggests to me a rather active culture of proselytise zation of sharing the text so as to enlarge the reading community.
If we can call it that, or at least it suggests the envisaging of such a culture is desirable.
But the key thing here, I think for me is the interpersonal nature of the operations involved,
the social nature of the relations between the text and its addressees,
and between the addressees themselves, which the composers of these texts certainly wanted to promote as a religious activity in itself.
Now, lately, my thinking about these, these issues have been greatly stimulated and pushed in a new direction by work by Pierre Brancaccio on the art,
historical and archaeological record, and I'm very happy to see that Pierre is here today along with many other friends of mine,
so it's great to see you all even in this, this digital medium.
So, so Piers Work has specifically dealt with narrative depictions in Gandara and Up,
which appear to reference dramatic art and incorporate images of the spectators sometimes seen from behind.
Also of great interest in a similar fashion has been ongoing research on donor depictions in South Asia.
Buddhist Art by Rob Lin Roth.
Which seems to evidence in an analogous, self-referential city insofar as the donors are depicted as part of the images they are donating,
sometimes engaged in the very act of consecrating those images.
And this is quite intriguing when you think about it, because the funding of the image also it involves funding an image that that also incorporates
a picture of the funders doing something that at the time it has made has yet to happen.
That is to say, we have a similar interplay in the art historical record between the inside and the outside,
the before and the after or kind of crossing of the boundaries between them.
The said donors and in the case of liberal. So it being in two places at once,
which is certainly reminiscent of the ways in which the audience within Mahayana Sutra is connected with the audience outside it.
And so what this suggests to me is a kind of triangle of three forms of communication or of art, if you wish.
Dramatic performance, literary production and sculpture, all of which appear to be invoking or evoking each other and alive to the creative
possibilities of self-referential reality and of drawing the spectator into the action.
Now, of course, at present, this is little more than a hypothesis.
Perhaps even a schnapps day, as the Germans would say, but following it up seems worthwhile, and this is something I've only just begun to do.
And I think I think pursuing it through any kind of conclusion would would take, at the very least,
a more thorough knowledge than I presently have of the various forms of drama current at the time.
Mahayana sutras began to be produced both forms of drama, I might say, deriving from the ancient Mediterranean and those developing in India.
Now, the idea that Mahayana sutras have certain dramatic qualities and resonances is nothing
new in care and advanced it in regard to the sediment from the Frederica in 1884,
if you look at the opening remarks of his introduction.
Arthur buried Dalkeith classic work on the Sanskrit drama, which was published in Oxford in 1924,
also notes in passing the imprint of Buddhist dramas on the form of that particular text.
But these and similar remarks up to the present, such as Natalie Gama's reflection on race theory in the Savannah, I have been as far as I know,
mostly references to this or that aspect of the text, rather than a comprehensive effort to look at the genre as a whole in this light.
And so I would say any attempt to produce a grammar of Mahayana sutras might provide a platform to pursue this idea,
which I freely admit may lead us nowhere. But why not try it anyway and to do this anyway?
To make a start on this, I I've been reading a work by my Stanford colleague, Rush Rim and the classics department.
For those of you taking notes, rain and spot are him understanding Greek tragic theatre, and I found that surprisingly illuminating,
I must say, although it deals with the plays of Aeschylus Sophocles in Europe at ease and 5th century BCE Athens.
So a point in space rather different from the locations in which Mahayana sutras were conceived on practically every page of Russia's book,
I find perceptions and Insights, which I could transfer to the study of Mahayana sutras Mutantes MetaMaus.
But even if there were no relation between them at all,
it would still be useful to compare to complex communication systems with their own sets of conventions and modes of operation.
So I find this very illuminating, especially, you know, just thinking in general terms.
Rush Rooms frequently voiced caution against interpreting Athenian drama in the light of our own experience in theatre.
And here the word light is in fact, very important for us.
Theatre is something intimate and close up under electric lights where we can see and read the actor's facial expressions for the Greeks.
In fifth century B.C. Athens, it was in the open air in bright sunlight, with distances requiring far greater vocal projection by the actors.
All of them masked. What a weird thought. Everybody wearing masks.
The same caution goes for us.
I think not to impose our own ideas of what reading entails on the way in which South Asian Buddhists could read received.
I am a surgeon and again, on a general level,
I'm particularly interested when rain refers to the audience's imagination as the Ancient Theatre's greatest resource.
And he does that when speaking of the Convention of Mask Acting.
And it prompts us to think that the imagination of the audience is no less important to Mahayana sutras,
as that audience is encouraged to imagine all kinds of wonderful scenarios conjured up by the spoken or the written word are
taken back and forward through time are instructed and challenged by conversations between the various characters the Buddhas,
the Great Shava, because the body sounds, etc. As we know, there are typically two audiences involved.
One inside the searcher, often conceived on the grand scale with beings of every sort in attendance,
which gathers at the beginning in the night Donna and rejoices at the end or applauds if you like.
And then there's the audience outside the suture. The scale of which we can only guess that.
What is more, the audience on the inside reacts to what is happening at various points,
usually by realising different attainments, sometimes by applauding or offering encouragement and support.
In that sense, getting in on the action in a way which perhaps mimics some of the responses which the
composers of the texts hope to elicit in their addresses and their hearers and readers.
That's the missile scene resembles a dramatic performance. The action proceeds primarily by dialogues with an interesting mixture of longer
speeches and rapid fire exchanges resume resembling the sticker Museu of Greek plays,
although they're not averse.
The scene changes occur occasionally and so on, and all these features, I must say, are nicely exemplified by the movie Malachite near Daysha.
But we find them aplenty and other Mahayana sutras as well, even if not in all of them.
So what's also interesting to think about is the very notion of mitter theatricality in which is, you know,
it's somewhat contested right and vague and difficult to define in relation to the self-referential
city of Mahayana sutras and the tendency to sort of borrow an idea from Christian Way,
a monitor to constantly breach the fourth wall and and and speak to the audience in a way that pulls them into the action.
And all this I regard as an exercise in reading as rather than reading into in the hope that from it,
I we might gain a fuller, more nuanced understanding of my sutures.
But of course, it's not. Read Reading as in that way, reading Mahayana sutras sutures is dramas is not necessarily in conflict with reading,
for reading, for information and reading them for inspiration, even for pleasure, which it can be pursued alongside.
So to sum up, I thought I would go on too long, but in fact, I'm finishing early.
I think the short talk with a plea for continuing to experiment with different
approaches to reading by my reiterating the point that it is time for us to
work towards writing a comprehensive grammar of Mahayana sutras so that our
reading reading of them at our interpretive work on them is better informed.
I'm not sure if I have the wit, the stamina or the years left to do this myself,
but I think it should be done and at the same time, we should carry on thinking about how am on a suchas workers complete text,
what the influences are and what kind of dynamic social arrangements and processes they are part of in a way
which gets us to move beyond always talking about individual features and singular examples of the genres.
So I leave you with that, with those thoughts.
Thank you for your attention. So.