So our next speaker is a doctoral student in the Asian Studies Department at the University of Edinburgh.
He specialises in the visual ity of Indian Buddhism and has a particular interest in development and application of visual methodologies.
Close reading of suture materials. He has recently advantages, offer pieces and I suppose articles on the back of the suture in the negative,
all that stuff she students and teachers at a recent monastery in the.
Thanks very much, Greg. I just like to start by offering my thanks to the organisers for this technological and organisational feat.
And yeah, my presentation focuses on a section of the larger society of us,
which rather describes the dual trees of Amitabh as pure land and in very basic terms, this part of the description.
Involves the repetitious manipulation of two lists.
So that was the seven precious materials soft rock now and the elements or parts of a tree.
What I'm asking here, what I'm interested in is really do the particular patterns that these repetitions make.
Help us to identify this passages purposes beyond your expectation in effect, are we being told what to read for?
Now, in the past, this bust has been viewed as a stencil for visualisation practise.
So do these patterns stipulate a particular way of reading intended to create mental imagery?
Or are we looking at some other function? Is that a perhaps a simple legacy of memorisation or even a poetic ornamentation of the text
in order to amplify a metaphor or perhaps a contribution to the drama of its performance?
Is it even possible that the patterns help to make an argument for the effectiveness of the sociological tool that the passage encodes?
So do we have to be exclusive, I suppose, would be the follow on from that, could more than one of these apply?
So the central example from the largest collective you are, Sutra is probably well known to many of you.
Also well-known is that in speaking in general terms, the descriptions of trees, and that's often the identification years,
not entirely secure palm trees or taller forms are frequently a part of the description of Royal Capitals and their surroundings.
And that includes pleasure, growth, gardens and so on.
And it's not unrelated to broader swaths of sensuous imagery drawn from Indic myths surrounding the northern paradise,
which were kuru and related to certain aspects of pleasure.
Gardens of Indra in London, Havana. And in some ways is adjunct, if you like to conception surrounding the wish fulfilling treat rickshaw.
Now, a criterion that's useful for distinguishing these descriptions is the repetitive natures.
So that's to say that very similar descriptions appear in several texts, as well as being repetitive in and of themselves.
No examples can be found in the permutations of the story of the king moustache.
Not in that if you have a donor and if I'm on a plateau or if we want to look at specific Mayan examples,
we can cite descriptions of ratty parada in the questions of ruffled colour or a kind of nutty in the perfection of wisdom in eight thousand lines,
or perhaps somewhat less. Obviously, the description of the Great Park City Papa in the come to view a suitable.
No, the point I'm trying to sort of make here is that the seemingly pervasive and stock nature of these descriptions.
And just to back that up, really in the Vastu, for example,
there are even explicit intra textual instructions to expand on descriptions with
reference to previous sections of that text or with reference to capitals by name.
Subsidiary to this is the fact that some of these descriptions feature questioning of various types,
and some do not get into that little bit more later on.
So. I mentioned that there are various possible explanations for the complexity that we will find in our central example.
Of course, a legacy of memorisation is a strong candidate, given that lists are a basic mnemonic device.
And I referred to another prevalent explanation, which is visualisation.
And Paul Harrison has previously suggested that we see this elaborate description as a template
for visualisation quote that we could liken to the wiring diagram for a television script,
for a play or a musical score. So some kind of text that precipitates a performance.
Similarly,
Katherine has more recently supported this view with his discussions of the terminology and visual character of the parallels found in the house,
who doesn't suit up and elsewhere. Further corroboration for a view of this passage in the largest accounts, U.S., etcetera,
some kind of meditative practise or visualisation could be found in such tanks as the Tianhe Sutra,
which is explicitly concerned with, well, let's just say, visualisation practise and contains a clear echo of the passage that we're interested in.
Yeah. I should also mention the second part of your whole petition.
So a purported commentary on the largest contributor, Citra,
in this text recommend strongly visualisation is the fourth and most important of five contemplated gates that are used to quote unquote here.
Reveal the way to meditate on pure land to see but a and to be born in this land.
So just to be a little bit more specific about the verses and prose,
auto commentary in this text includes a list of 17 merits of the pure land, which are then used to explain how this meditation was undertaken.
And this is a list of descriptive items, the eighth of which makes reference to the description of two trees.
So in some way,
it seems that the passage from the largest captive you hostage to maybe the kind of cognitive stencil from its two practises involving mental imagery.
However, before we just say OK.
Case closed except point, I think we should look a little more closely at the patterns that are found within this passage and on screen.
Here is a key. We've had time to absorb that for the diagrams and tabulation or make of the patterns in the passage itself.
Now, if we understand the repetition to be a key feature of ritual,
then it's various and quite obvious here and can be observed across five parts and
depending on how you wish to pass the example of this particular textual unit.
The most interesting aspects from our perspective today on the third of the cases as a third and fourth parts,
so I'll really move rather rapidly across the first two parts and just mention a couple of points from them.
The first is that we see the enumeration of the full list of the runner at the start.
So that's the first order of business is running through the seven precious materials.
And then there's the proposal of the equivalent of the precious materials for their appearance or their colour,
although that's up until literal interpretation. The second point to mention is from the second part,
and this is that we see a use of a crescendo structure that encompasses a performance of relationship between the numerical
statement of the number of materials of composition of these different categories of trees and their subsequent listing.
So we're told that a category of trees that have three types say, for example,
of precious materials as their composition, and then we could given those three materials.
OK, so moving on now to the substance, really.
Concatenation roughly equivalent on a day process, the type here shrink or sun clock.
Various other terms the third and fourth plants exhibit the complete enumeration
of every possible member of the two lists for what is referred to as exhaustion.
But they do this in combination so the seven precious materials and the individual parts of the tree.
Now, the two parts that we're looking at.
Feature two types of concatenation with different levels of complexity.
So part three enumerate seven categories of trees that have the first six elements Bruce,
Trunk, etc. made of one substance and then the final element.
The fruit is of the next colour or material on the list,
and then the colour of the fruit is then that of the first six parts of the next category of trees and so on.
That's just the Sanskrit where we see the repetitions more easily and then English, their trees made of gold, of flowers and so on.
Gold and fruits of silver and the trees of silver with fruits of barrel just to get through the detailed text straight to the pattern there.
The concatenation that I set out in this diagram appears to represent a ratio of six to one.
And in fact, this is really reflective of the meaningful content of the passage.
In terms of actual repetitions, ratio is really two to one.
I just skipped back, you can see that very clearly to gold, to one silver, and then the next line to silver is to one Chris a barrel.
And so on, and I just feel like that up really to bear in mind when we move forward and look at some other parallel examples later on.
OK, so the force in this sequence of atoms is a more complex type of concatenation.
And this instance, yet another series of types of trees, and you read it in this case,
each type as every one of its elements comprised of a different colour or material.
So the enumeration precedes.
I gradually shifting the colour of material assigned to the various elements by one position as the rest of rotation continues.
You see it quite clearly here.
Streaks of gold and the trunks are of silver limbs parallel and gone to the next category, which then are of silver and trunks or apparel and so on.
So. Now. The pattern that this creates is really a rather satisfying arrangement in a seven by seven grid form.
Somewhat notably, has the seventh precious material at its court.
This part also appears to make news for contiguity or Co-occurrence In-law's Index Co. of a rather extreme type in
the conflation of three parts with colours and materials and the concatenated population of syntactic positions.
So as the sequence is followed, each element of the tree is both contiguous with every precious material and also precipitates,
causing a causal relation with the next thing that's hard to occupy that position.
However, the absolute exhaustion by the detailed enumeration of both metrics of both lists in a manner that completely meshes one list,
then the other is hard to ignore as a means of verbally establishing a relationship of co-occurrence that
may be substituted for an actual or real relationship with a nod to the possible virtual nature of reality.
Also, in general terms, in the example, overall, from the largest crop visitor,
we see a tax unit that goes beyond the self-financing of its presence and its use of a poetic function of language.
So that's referencing Clinton's famous famous statement will set towards messages so that such.
So the example here includes patterns that are really recognisable as such,
so that I can ascertain an intra textual relations either within that unit or with resulting resembling units outside of
it that help establish and reinforce index correlations on a verbal level that may be substituted for real relations.
And then so be mistaken for mistaken for efficacy.
No, such deliberate substitution is amplified.
If this activity is set within a few of the artificially constructed or coincidental symbolic associations of languages,
actual or of the signifiers of language is causally connected automatically to the reference, which I accept is not universally necessarily the case.
My suture materials. But it's a big subject we really have to put.
Now this would be achieved by the use of certain features,
so this poetic means I mentioned so we have repetition, diagramming accumulation, exhaustion.
And these are used to aid in the establishing of index cards to assist in the constructing of an existing.
Which, as I mentioned, the goal of all this is to produce certainty or to borrow a yellow phrase.
This passages is a type of rhetoric that uses poetry for persuasion.
Now we can skip rather quickly over the fifth part, the fifth and final part,
which is merely something of a consummation that just involves the listing of each part of the trees as composed of the Ratna.
You see their roots made of that seven precious substances,
trunks of the seven precious substances and so on, so fairly uninteresting that and to be frank.
I should just note before we move on, though, to further aspects of this passage,
both of which are reviewed by the tabulation of signifiers of of all parts of the verbal sequence and
the previous tabulations of a lie that the verb and some of the other parts to make it more clear.
And the first point is really this suffix Maya Madoff created, fabricated with cheques.
I would suggest as the principal sign that by repetition guideline into the target of the ritual, if it is indeed ritual recitation.
And that would be the creation of fabrication of these trees, I guess, as a mental image.
And by its repetition creates emphasis and also reinforces the central argument passage.
I've highlighted that records and allocations to Omega. And you'll see here how pervasive it is throughout the overall structure of the passage.
Now, the second point, which I think is revealed here,
is the gradual unfolding of a passage from a rather relative simplicity to a climax of complexity in part for.
And the type of momentum that this implies, it's there and in the second part of this escalation,
but it's seen really across the whole package and the enumeration of a set and escalating fashion may be,
I'm going to suggest a way of building momentum into the performance that could
be conceived as an elevation of excitement and anticipation engendered by it,
by a steady escalation. So I think we've seen reasonably clearly the presence of concatenation in the central example.
We can now turn to look at some parallels and the implications this may have for our interpretation of the passages.
So the closest parallel can be found in the description of King Arkema City Party in the Malagasy,
which contains structure description of jewelled palm trees.
And here it is explicitly taller. So there's a.
Tabulation of the concatenation there, and the two lists are slightly different,
the arrangements up to right now, and obviously it's a short list of three elements.
Now, similarly to part three of the largest captive U.S. tour discussed above,
the tabulation presented here represents more accurately the meaningful content and a much stricter denotation of the verbal pattern is now on screen.
Now, look, the point to take from this, really is that we're seeing clear concatenation here.
We're seeing an enumeration of the subterranean list of this house that.
And what we see here is a one to one repetition. Now, this description is extensive of King Regiments Capital and carries on,
and we move on to the railings surrounding the castle, we see again concatenation.
So similar to the first part, from the largest account to you hostage and the previous aspect of this description,
we see enumeration of the basic which occurred before it solely elaboration. And we have included this example.
It's really evident from the use of truncation that the pattern is so familiar to the authors of this passage that all other aspects seem superfluous.
Other aspects of their description are not needed, and it seems to me that the essential aspect is this one to one ratio.
So you see that I've highlighted a grid run through the list, then concatenated three parts and they drop out.
We just have really suffix on that. And the precious materials concatenated through the central part of the elaboration.
However, it's another example from the kind of you have.
Which is Sydney's 15th encounter.
With a kind of betrayal where it's showing the manner in which research was performed, calculations from Ghana by English,
where a young young lad that raises an interesting point and really starts to put
some flies in the ointment was the idea of this passages of regionalisation.
Here we have a list of over 100 quantities that is rigorously concatenated.
So each phone number is described as the multiplication of which precedes it gives us a pattern, something like a BBC, CCD and so on.
Now, importantly, the semantic content has no relation to the examples we saw above.
But I think the use of concatenation is strikingly clear. What's also clear from the context?
Is the association of this time with learning English for its mastery of all kinds of education was extensively listed,
beginning with that of writing and arithmetic. And he's also stated as passing on this extensive range of all the knowledge to others,
and the image we have of him includes a cohort of 10000 fellow students.
If you can imagine that. And I think what we can.
Extrapolate from this is it concatenation can be associated, at least in the minds of the authors of this particular passage,
with what one might loosely regard as institutionalised or or rote learning, perhaps you'll see it quite clearly there.
Could I cut a number? Got him, got him a gardening problem? And so.
Now this example really leads us rather neatly onto the potter method of Vedic memorisation,
both to correct retention of text by grouping of words into pairs and the repetition of the second of each pair is the first of the next.
Now, I make no claim for knowledge or expertise in either Indian education or Vedic recitation.
However, the use of concatenation here being the whole point of this technique.
And so the similarities to the examples above seems evident enough to be of some interest
in charting the possible influences on the construction of our Buddhist examples.
And I would flag up here the one to one ratio.
So. Clearly in use of the technique of memorisation.
Aside from that concatenation is an established aspect of poetic embellishments,
the early treatise on Dramaturge, The Shastra shows awareness to this figure.
It lists poetic ornaments and provides a typology of yamaka,
which prepared includes a category that is approximately equivalent to that of the closest term by that text to Kavala.
Now, this is not gone without notice, concatenation has been discussed by several scholars,
and perhaps the most useful in this regard is obvious article from the mid-90s and the forms and usages of concatenation and profit.
Really, what Belleair does for us is demonstrate very convincingly just how well recognised this this was.
And then she starts off with its origins in the in the regulator and then moves into China scripture, which could anger.
And also points out Vogue, a great fashion as it were for this technique when it came to descriptions in later Myer,
Austria and China appropriate literature. I think this is of interest to us, really, because these are often,
although not exclusively, descriptions of places or aspects of the natural environment.
And I've just borrowed a couple of her examples here really, just to reinforce the points you see here.
Quite clearly, a concatenation of the text model of the revered is presented in another.
Means memorisation, but you can see they're highlighted the repetition over the lines there.
And if we want to sort of question, that was another example of us from the two.
If you have a donna, which shows quite nicely the use of poetic use of concatenation in some of the verses from that text.
No concatenation, also something of a rhetorical dimension serving as it does to increase access.
Here, so in that example, from the larger society of us,
who contributes to one of a number of forensic techniques to aid in the constructing
of index quality to the goal of the passage and thus adding to the verbal text,
persuasive force aims to substitute probable relationships for actual ones.
Now returning to the implications for the interpretation of this passage,
while I don't wish to entirely overturn or deny the possibility of the interpretation
of the passage from the larger scope to privacy Trump and perhaps its closest.
Parallels that exhibit strong structural similarities as as visualisations are in
line with Kathryn Harrison and the text mentions are now only accent in Chinese,
and actually I concede, in fact, the patterns I've identified here may well,
they may well be the meditation and some of them being used for remembering this this script.
However, the identification of poetic resonances and parallel examples that bear no relationship in their imagery,
but close accords in their use of concatenation,
in my view, the is an idea of these impossibly prolix passages for some kind of specific technical diagram for the construction of mental imagery.
In fact, this raises the possibility that what we see here is an attempt to further increase the glory of any associated
figure by the application of recognised forms of embellishment and the description of their abode or domain.
So then these descriptions are probably intended to heighten the impact of the metaphor of we talk a spiritual sovereign.
So that's in the case of the largest captive U.S. soldier,
and the deployment of literally ornament serves to further increase as it were the praise quotient of this passage.
Of course, just to make things a little bit more complicated, a little bit more of.
It may also be that these literary images were singled out for adornment by virtue of their already established pragmatic context.
Nevertheless, it seems hard to me not to see these patterns as the display of a well-recognized form of poetic technique,
one that can be loosely associated with descriptions of places and environments.
And is here in play, two versions of elaborate monikers from within a nexus of Indian imaginative themes regarding roil cities,
Paradise Gardens and this would suggest, I think, that it was not a matter of pragmatic necessity or stipulation, but one of artistic discretion.
As a result of the various levels of complexity evident in available examples, we don't just see concatenation,
we also see some inversion of pairing and we see different degrees of the use of these particular patterns.
It is quite hard to draw clear dividing lines between the literary and pragmatic readings of these articles.
Of course, visualisation may well require exemplary and repetitious memorisation, or, for that matter,
a poetic figure to both announce the presence of a particular text event and engage in such retention.
Nonetheless, the identification of specific patterns and especially concatenation of an organising feature,
I think, assist us in understanding just why some of the shooters were said to be a copy creator made by poet.
Now, I'd just like to close by refreshing or pointing out again some of the categories of descriptive material
encountered and some of the problems are just some of the questions I think that the analysis raises.
So very briefly, there are three types of descriptions.
Those with no obvious patterning.
And that's most of those text I mentioned at the outset, in fact, those with patterns apply to to the whole description of us to.
And then those with parents apply to only select parts of the description, the largest club to view how it fits into that bracket, really.
So. What really raises a few questions for us here,
why is this particular section with the largest of captives which are being singled out for this treatment for its atonement or manipulation,
depending on how you wish to take it?
And why why are the jewel trees and based on the parallels, perhaps from palm trees and why palm trees, what's the significance of this image?
Is this a symbol of royalty?
Now, some of the descriptions do include obvious patterning, such as concatenation or obviously seen or understood as a matter for visualisation.
Should we now take them as such, but would and then what do we infer from the presence of these patterns in examples that have no relation whatsoever?
Content wise is that is the escalating concatenation of quantities to be understood as visualisation.
And then finally, just being a little bit more detailed here,
I'm thinking about this difference between the two to one ratio as opposed to what seems to be the more standard one to one repetition.
Is this a particular Buddhist innovation? Is the fact that it's slightly loosened its organisation important?
And what should we make really of the fact that most of the clearest parallels to our central example are from ostensibly non-violent?
So that really concludes what I have to say in the matter.
I'd just like to thank you all for your attention. I began with a quick spinning GIF.