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So welcome everyone to the second meeting of this, our fourth series.

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And I'm very delighted today to have a very interesting speaker with a very interesting topic.

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Ryan Richard OVERBY is the Robert H. In Ho Family Foundation assistant professor in Buddhist studies at Skidmore College.

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He works primarily on early medieval Buddhist ritual texts, focusing on Chinese and Sanskrit sources.

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He graduated with a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2010 with a dissertation on the great, great length of the Dhamma daughter in Scripture.

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The text we will be hearing about today. In addition to his publications on topics such as the textual history of the Maha Miri Video, Raj,

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New Chinese approaches to translating Durrani and the appearance of cities in Chinese Buddhist texts.

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He's also worked on several volumes of the Buddhist Stone Secrets in China project at the Heidelberg Academy

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Division and is currently working on a book length study of the great lamp of the odometer in Scripture,

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as well as a complete translation and study of the consecration scripture.

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So Ryan, over to you. Thank you so much.

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I'm going to go ahead and share my screen once more. And get this started.

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And hopefully you should all see the slides on the screen. Great.

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So I just want to begin by thanking Rob Meyer for his kind invitation to speak at this treasure seminar.

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I've enjoyed immensely the presentations of my colleagues and the wonderful conversations that have ensued.

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So thanks to all of you in this community who make this treasure seminar so very, very special.

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Now, if you've been paying attention to the Treasure Seminars third series,

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you will have already heard wonderful talks by Natalie Kummer, David Drews and Robert Meyer.

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Touching on the subject of the Dharma Bonica, the preacher of the Dharma,

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his ability to reveal new discourses is a matter of obvious concern for these gatherings.

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I'm going to continue our collective meditation on the role of the term of Bonica as a revealer of new Buddhist discourses.

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In this task, I do not presume to speak about Dharma barnacles as a category or about Dharma Barnacle in general.

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Rather, I want to emphasise the fact that once Dharma Bonica has become a kind of possible category for discussion in Mahayana Sutra literature.

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Dharma Bannock has become a site for innovation and experimentation with what I call Buddhist repertoires of representing different Mahayana sutras.

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Treat Dharma Bonica differently, and the precise mechanisms of revelation and empowerment vary from text to text.

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I want to focus on one particular text today, in part because it has such extensive discussions of its vision of the Dharma Bonica,

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and also in part because I think this text vision of the Dharma Bonica gives us useful ways for thinking about what sorts

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of elements were available for mixing and matching in this and in other Buddhist projects of Revelation and representing.

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So the plan for today's talk is as follows. First, I'll describe the text and discuss what we can know about its history.

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Second, I'll give a brief account about how the text narrates its own revelation.

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In part three, I'll try to reconstruct the texts theory of Buddhist revelation,

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exploring the mechanisms for how preachers can authoritatively utter Buddhist truth.

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In Part four, I will speculate a bit about why this obscure and marginal Buddhist sutra may still be valuable

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for thinking more broadly about Buddhist revelation and repertoires of free presence.

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So let's start with part one an overview of the great lamp of the Dharma Dhani Scripture.

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So this text called the Dafydd Jue 12. Niching is excellent only in a single Chinese translation.

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It contains 52 chapters or PIN in 20 scrolls or two and encompassing some 150 pages in the Korean block printed canon,

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or 93 pages in the Japanese edition. The Taisho Fashion Shoot Days or kill.

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According to Chinese Buddhist catalogues.

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The translation started at the earliest by the 17th of May 592 and was finished at the latest by 22nd July five, 94.

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The translator was a mandarin monk named in Chinese Shanghai,

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at which scholars have variously reconstructed as Jinnah Gupta or Neena Gupta with Max Dig recently making a really convincing case,

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I think, for Diana Gupta as potentially the name in question here.

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This monk lived between around 528 to 605 CE.

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He was born in Perugia, poorer in Gandhara, and arrived in China in 557.

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C.E. He served as a translator at various temples under the Northern Jo State until 574,

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when he fled the regime's anti Buddhist prescription and took refuge with the Turkish

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guns on the northern steppe after the restoration of Buddhism under the Sway State.

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Our monk, Diana Gupta, was in the year 585,

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summoned back to the sway capital of Dashing and asked to serve as the chief translator of the Sway Empire,

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where his workshop proceeded to translate nearly 40 texts before his exile and death in 605.

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Now, in a text encompassing 52 chapters across 20 scrolls, it is not at all simple to concisely state what the text is about right.

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I do my best on this slide to give a kind of 50,000 foot overview of the text.

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My claim is that the great lamp centres around the transmission of a single tyranny.

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There's really only a couple of spells in the text, but it's really in chapter two, the second pin that the central Dani has transmitted.

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And that's the point of the great lamp to transmit the Stani, the wielder of the star.

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And he is granted the power to become a perfect term japonica a perfect preacher able to access all the content of a.

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Who does awakening in effect becoming a fully realised Buddha and becoming authorised to utter but of asana.

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But even as the text advocates the Dorothy as a quintessential source of its power.

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It also recommends a series of interesting,

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meditative and ritual techniques which assist our preacher in the tasks of memory, inspiration, and even public relations.

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Empowering our preacher to make strong claims for authority in the public settings of preaching and debate.

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So I want to be very careful here when talking about how the text purports to enable and authorise Buddhist revelation.

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The great lamp of the Torah Madani scripture, like many Mahayana sutras,

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narrates its own textual revelation through numerous interlocking frame stories,

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taking us on a kind of time travelling journey across the Buddhist cosmos.

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This is what I will call the revelation of the great lamp.

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The texts. Authorisation of itself.

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But in describing the powers of the text, it's Dorothy and its associated practices.

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The Great Lamp also gives us a kind of implicit theories for how revelation might work generally for Buddhist preachers.

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It serves as a general purpose authorisation of new but of catching up.

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This is what I will call in this talk revelation with the great lamp.

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The text gives us the tools and framework for ritually producing new discourses.

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So let's start with Revelation of the great lamp,

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the questions the text claims to be an answer to and the text narration of its own previous revelations.

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So the suture begins with a scene on Mt. Khadra Kuta, where the Buddha shaking money interacts with his disciple Ananda,

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as well as with a minor deity named Good Brilliance.

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Shawn Wake Wang Cancel the Godalming good, brilliant steps forward and asks Chuck your money a very,

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very long question which will motivate the sutra as a whole.

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So I'm going to go through this question because I think it's important.

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It's the framing question for this whole mess that is this toe scroll long sutra.

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And the question is as follows World honoured one Because of my compassion for sentient beings,

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I would now like to question the to target a perfect are two perfectly awakened world honoured one

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How can sentient beings attain knowledge of the dharma and vinegar cultivate in conformity with

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the Buddha's meritorious virtue and rely on the teachings of the world on it one to reverently

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practice in accordance with the dharma world honoured one How do sentient beings become non lazy?

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Diligently practice the sutras, comprehensively retain their text and meaning, follow their true import,

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contemplate them in accordance with the Dharma, rapidly recite them, and by means of that Dharma obtain power.

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World honoured one. How do sentient beings attain entrance into the dharma doors of wisdom?

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Whose foundations are the syllables? These are the actions right into languages.

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When they abide in these dharma doors, they can analytically understand, and because of their understanding,

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they can enter into the primordial door of contemplation and attain the meaning of all Dharma,

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until at last their ten entrance into the profound dharma of the 12 chain of dependent origination.

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And they'll completely understand it. World honoured.

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One How can sentient beings encounter perceptual objects without becoming fatigued, without having scattered thoughts liberated in their own minds?

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How can they well understand the excellent dramas and be able to accord with an enter into them?

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World honoured one now because I want to cause sentient beings to awaken to the vault of the to target us and to attain the knowledge of two targets.

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I dare to ask the two targets to expound the profound scripture of this tiny door.

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Why is that? World honoured.

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One It's difficult to attain a human body even if you do get a human body.

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Your life span is short and in a short life. There are three bad things.

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What are the three? Their mind and nature are contrarian, inferior, and they don't accept good speech.

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Number two, they always harboured jealousy and fear that others are superior to them.

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Three Even when they know that others are superior to them, they are ashamed and they don't ask questions.

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These are the three bad things. Because of this, I now ask that a target a world honoured one about the Dhani text.

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Right. So our God then good brilliance is being brave here. He knows that not asking questions, being too timid to ask questions is a bad thing.

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And so he's going to fight to counteract that, right?

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Finally, world honoured one, the two together has previously uttered incalculable billions of sutras.

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Some he uttered because of a question. Some he spontaneously uttered without a question.

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World honoured one.

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We now see that a great assembly with nine Knights of Gods has gathered in the presence of the target of our perfectly awakened one,

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and therefore we now request from the Takada a sutra text concerning the ultimate dharma of the Dhani.

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World honoured one.

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If a person can study this most supreme Dhani daw than all the other Buddha dramas will naturally increase without expending too much effort.

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Okay. So I just want to pause here a quick pause to sum up what we know.

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The request for this text is the request for Adani, right?

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It's Adani text. And its overarching goal is to be able to fully understand the Buddha's teachings.

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There's already a sense in this final passage that understanding just this Dhani will enable you to understand other teachings of the Buddha's right.

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More on this in a moment.

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So after this long opening salvo, the Buddha Shakir Money approves of the question and tells Onondaga that the question has been asked before.

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So here we get our first temporal shift. The Godalming excellent brilliance was in the long distant past.

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A wealthy and learned Brahmin who requested a dance from the Buddha named a fulgent or funk Wang.

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So this is the first of several temporal nestlings. A fulgent, in turn,

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would reveal previous incarnations in which he had heard the Durrani from still more ancient to target us both on this world and in other worlds.

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One of these involves a moment, actually, of kind of meditative transport.

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Best of fragrances. This is on the bottom right of the screen.

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Who is a previous incarnation of a fulgent enters into meditative states and is able to see a distant Buddha land in the South called good affluence.

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He concentrates his attention on the Buddha of that Southern land, a Buddha named Gem Banner.

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Jim Bannister notices the attention and summons best of fragrances to his Buddha land for a teaching session.

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So the great lamp frames itself as the object of repeated interventions into the world, each one mediated by a two together with the Buddha,

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a fulgent serving as a repeating figure, either as the disclosure of the text or as the hearer of the sutras.

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A revelation from the distant past. So most of the action of the text, of the great lamp of the Dharma,

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Dani's Scripture actually happens in the centre part of your screen with the wealthy

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Brahmin and other audience members questioning the Buddha Fulgent about the great lamp.

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So when chuck your money narrates to Ananda the revelation of the Dhani by the previous two target a fulgent.

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He describes the true significance of the text, and this passage is, I think, worth paying attention to.

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I think it's the most pivotal passage for understanding the agenda of the great lamp as a whole.

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If you were uncharitable to me, you might say, Professor OVERBY, you are overreading this particular passage, but it's really fruitful for my project.

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So overread. I will. Here's the passage. Ananda then that of fulgent to target to in the presence of the Great Assembly,

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uttered the profound sutra text of this Dhani for the sake of the bodhisattvas and traffickers and so on.

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Thus this Dhani Daw can comprehensively contain all other sutra texts.

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If one receives and retains this Dhani, then the content of the body of all Buddhas.

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Even if one has never heard or seen, it will automatically become clear and one will be called a Dharma Master.

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A Dharma Bonica. So let's just pause for a moment here.

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We we already know a lot about Dani in general, thanks to wonderful prior studies by people like Etienne Lamont Yen,

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Prague, Ronald Davidson, Richard McBride, Paul Kopp, Greg Dash, just to name a few.

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And from all these works, we learn that Dani, with its play on the verb ter to retain or to hold, can carry with it a sense of efficient retention.

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Or, as Davidson translates something like compression or encoding of Buddhist scriptures.

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With with Davidson, we can creatively think about Dani as a kind of zip file.

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Right. It takes a really large and unwieldy text and it compresses it into a small set of nonsense syllables.

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And indeed, from time to time, we find Dani that claim to efficiently encode precisely the text in which they are located.

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My favourite example of this is from the Dani chapter of the long covered Tara Sutra, which gives Dani's,

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in order to protect from Raksha says, as well as for the purpose of what we might say, effectively processing the Scripture as a whole.

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Right. The text claims quite straightforwardly. Yeah.

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Imani mantra pardon. Petitioner Tena Loncar Vitara Sutra.

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Patchett Hum Bhavish Shetty Write the long kava Tara Sutra is read by whoever reads these mantra syllables.

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The meaning of this is even clearer in the Chinese translation, right?

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Reading the mantra of the Dani chapter of the long car, Vitara is functionally identical to reading the sutra as a whole.

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So this is precisely like the zip file theory, right? The only compresses the text which hosts it, right?

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It serves as a short fragment of language that serves as a substitute for a particular sutra.

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This is what we might call a 1 to 1 relationship between a Dani and its host sutra.

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What we have in here in the great lamp, though, is a bit more radical, right,

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and certainly important for thinking about the mechanics of Buddhist revelation.

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We have a claim that this specific Dani in the Great Lamp has a one to many relationship,

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that it somehow contains all other Buddhist texts and even more radically receiving and retaining

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the DHANI grants you the ability to realise the content of the awakening of all Buddhas,

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thereby earning the name preacher or Dharma Bonica.

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The translation of this in Chinese is Dharma Master Fasher.

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So this sets the stage. We have a text which claims a long lineage of recurring revelation from the mouths of various to target us.

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This text transmits a single Dani less than 40 words in length,

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which purports to grant one access to all Buddhist teachings and to all the content of the awakening of all Buddhas.

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How on earth could this possibly work? In the next section,

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I want to briefly explain what I think this text is up to with these claims and explore the possible mechanisms by which this might be made plausible.

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To do so, I'm going to tie together passages from different parts of this massive text,

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as there is really no single place where this is all explicitly theorised.

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Now I think I have a strong case to be made here,

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but I warn you in advance that this theory is the product of careful interpretation and reconstruction,

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rather than any systematic statement on the part of the sutra. Took a lot of detective work to figure out what the heck is going on here.

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So I want to begin with the Dani. It's not just the revealed Dani as a whole that compresses vast amounts of information.

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The Dani of the Great Lamp works at the level of just a single word Jew in Chinese.

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Here we have the claim in its starkest form. Right? A single Dharma word of this Dani comprehensively contains incalculable billions of sutras.

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The Scripture will later claim that the single word is equivalent to something called the vaults of the two targets.

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Okay, so here we have this long passage, which, again, sorry to keep reading these long passages to you,

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but it's kind of the nature of the beast of this talk, right?

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The door of a single word of the sutra is the vaults of the to target us.

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If you were to fully explain the door of the single word, even with all the voices and music of the great Chickillo Chasm,

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with all the voices of the Divine Kings, right, the trees, [INAUDIBLE] gods,

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the yama gods, the tacita gods near Monserrat near Metta Russia Vartan all the way up to the palaces,

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the markings, all two, all of them together, amplifying the sound of the Dharma.

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That single word would still not be exhausted. Why is that?

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Because that's the door of the single word reveals the profound vastness of the vaults of Buddha's Brahma.

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The vastness of this vaults of. To target. As is in.

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Global, unbounded, unlimited and inexhaustible. If you were to expound it, you would cost the bodies and minds of all sentient beings to be purified,

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peaceful and blissful, and they would now all attain what was previously unattainable.

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And that is all because of this vaults of to target us.

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Okay. So we see in this passage the phrase vaults of to target us.

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Those of you who know Chinese are probably going to raise your hand at this point and you're going to say, Ryan, this is just right song.

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Right. Relay song is a common Chinese translation of this funny word to target a GABA.

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Right. So what we see, though, is that this term relight Zong has many variants found throughout the great lamp.

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And how this works is that the the vault of the two targets is functionally identical to a single

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word of the dance and that it's impossible to exhaust the contents of the vault or vaults.

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Even if we were to enlist all the gods of the desire realms.

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So I'm saying vaults in the plural, because elsewhere in the sutra the vault is described as threefold.

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Here's just one example of this. Right. These three vaults are the verbal teachings of all the Buddha to target us all utterances,

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speech, sound, derivations, critiques, explanations and analogies.

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They all arise from these three vaults of teachings.

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The great lamp is downright playful with variations on this key term.

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I've counted 44 different variants in its use of the concept, and I've ordered them here by how many times they occur in the text.

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So we have things like the three vaults of teaching, the three vaults of of karma or action,

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the vaults of the two targets, the three vaults of the action of teaching and so on and so forth.

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So there's a lot of variation here. And all of these are basic variations on a theme, right?

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We have a vault or a song in the sense of an inexhaustible treasury, and that's the key term.

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Elsewhere in the text, we actually get a definition of what this word tongue means,

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and it's precisely the meaning of a Treasury that is a Treasury by virtue of its being inexhaustible.

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You can't run out of stuff that comes from it. Sometimes this list is simply about the vaults of Buddhas or the vaults of to target us.

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But sometimes we get this numerical prefix that it is three or three fold.

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Elsewhere in the suture, we get some elaboration on that. Number three, that it has numerous correlations.

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We'll go into that in a moment. And so here's the sort of mid-tier lists of terms as they appear.

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You'll see that up here shows up quite a lot here, that these these actions are pedagogical actions.

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Right. That they're about appear. And here's finally our last set of terms which occur only once each.

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But they largely just kind of reinforce the general pattern. These vaults are about teaching.

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They're about empire. They're about the activities of Buddhas.

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You might be asking at this point again, what about this light's on, right?

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Isn't this just to target a GABA? And my answer is as follows If this is indeed a to target a GABA text,

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it's a really interesting and different spin on that tradition, as far as I understand it.

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When I read works on to target a GABA, I'm thinking here of Michael Radishes.

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Excellent book on the Mahayana Nirvana Sutra and its kind of relationship to the target of GABA tradition.

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I think here of Chris Jones's really fascinating book on that to target a GABA.

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Both of them concur that the GABA of to target a GABA can mean chamber and that it's really a kind of extension of the Stupas Reliquary Chamber.

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Right, which contains the shutter mirror and by analogy.

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Right, that this the stupa with a reliquary chamber becomes internalised that each of us possesses or contains a to target a GABA.

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We are the host right for this potential for Buddha hood.

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However, in the Great Lamp, the light song is not something we innately possess.

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It's not something that is contained within us in any straightforward way.

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The text consistently speaks of accessing the vaults entering into.

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They use the Chinese verb through to go in as a way of talking about how to get into these vaults.

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And often we get in through these things called doors, mun or Mukha or wata in Sanskrit.

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So the vaults here are a kind of metaphorical place that we have access to through the language of the text of the great lamp itself.

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And once we have access to the vaults, we have access to, again, all the pedagogical utterances of all Buddhas.

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Right. As we've seen, these vaults contain the pedagogical and opaque activity of the Buddhas.

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Okay, so what makes the vaults three or threefold? The great lamp has numerous passages on this.

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Some of them are quite mysterious.

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We have passages from the great lamp that make it clear that one enters the three different types of vault via three different doors.

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You enter the first via the syllable of the second via the syllable, and the third via the syllable na.

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These syllabic doors are grouped with other groups of syllables, so the syllable R has a group of 14 syllables that belong to it.

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CA has 21. NA has seven. The total here, by the way, gives us 42 syllables,

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which is the number of syllables not in the standard Sanskrit of mala, but rather in the other patchiness delivery.

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So I think that's a significant point here. The names of the three vaults themselves are not very informative.

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They are named in the text as the vault of the beginning vault of verbal teachings,

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the subsequent vault of verbal teachings, and the final vault of verbal teachings.

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So that's really not very helpful. Right.

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But it does correlate these three fold vaults with also different kinds of categories that we find in the perfection of wisdom literature.

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So here we have the the language of humans, the language of gods, and the language of neither humans nor gods.

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And we also have the three vaults correlated with the vine moksha mukha,

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the three doors of liberation, of emptiness, spineless and spinelessness and desire, lawlessness.

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So the great lamp frames, the syllables, specifically the three syllables of aka and NA as fundamental tools for entering into the vaults.

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It uses the word zucman syllabic doors, and it's very clear that it's it's being very literal with this metaphor, right?

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That's through these doors that you enter into the Treasury.

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It contains lengthy discussions that I'm not going to dive into here about how the syllable, for example,

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is the primordial root of all language and phenomena implicit in all other linguistic expressions.

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It's the foundation of all words and things. It speaks of the syllable as the matter core, or a matrix from which all things arise.

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The text makes specific reference to the care and maintenance of writing boards as a metaphor for the meditative taming of the mind.

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And it speaks about how combining syllables in specific orders allows one to produce an infinity of meanings.

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In these sorts of moves, the great lamp participates in a long history of Buddhist engagement with the ABC theory.

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The use of the actual mochas or syllabic.

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Cause as much cause both for the recollection of established doctrines and for the creative unfolding of new sermons.

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Janet Gyatso long ago wrote a beautiful chapter on the so-called letter magic of the perfection of wisdom tradition,

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showing us how the intrinsic meaninglessness of Sanskrit syllables nevertheless combine causally to form infinite varieties of sentences.

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Write. And this meaningful combination of empty things serves as a perfect metaphor for understanding.

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The ontology of the permeates itself right for understanding doctrines about how empty things can produce the phenomenal world as we understand it,

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when combined in the right sequences. So to make a very, very long story short, here's my model of how new revelation is theorised in the great lamp.

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The sutra transmits a Dani containing some nonsense syllables.

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The syllables are devoid of intrinsic meaning, yet they're infinitely productive in causal sequence.

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Syllables represented by the three syllable gates of are cut and nuh are literally doors into the vaults of Buddhas,

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a vast treasury from which all but of large enough flows to speak in more mathy terms.

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I like to think of the vaults as like the set of all possible true utterances by all Buddhas.

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Right. And it is in some sense, like the conceptual space of truth itself.

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You might even put a logically speaking, if you want it to be, go out on a limb.

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You might even think of it as perhaps something like the Dharma. Quiet, right?

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Although the future never really claims this explicitly,

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every syllable of the Dhani and every syllable of the sutra is a potential way into the

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vaults and is therefore potentially productive of billions of sutras each on its own.

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So you can see where I'm going with this. It's really quite a radical consequence in my view.

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We see here how the Dhani a concept evoking thoughts of memory and retention and recovery is twisted into something quite different in the great lamp.

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It should be clear by now that the Dhani itself has very little to do with memory, right?

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And much more to do with creativity and invention. The spell is not really about retaining what has come before.

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It is rather about certifying the trustworthiness of the new discourses that we utter.

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If I think that I have access to the three vaults of the Buddhas, then everything I say is in a sermon is by definition the true word of the Buddha.

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Right. This means that I can compose new sermons or even write entirely new Buddhist sutras with confidence and authority.

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The Dhani is on this interpretation a kind of authorising token.

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It gives me permission to claim that whatever I say is put over China.

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The only thing I need to authorise my utterance of new Book of China is the claim to possess this very short dhani of the Great Lamp.

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It's only 40 or so words long. So quite short.

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Easy to memorise. Easy to write down. Easy to keep with me. So how could this actually play out?

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Right. Luckily, the Great Lamps is 52 chapters long and it contains a wealth of fascinating material,

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not just about the theoretical foundations justifying the sermons of Darma Monica's,

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but also the practical on the ground details about how to actually perform the role of Dharma Bonica.

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We now move to the section of the talk I call Repertoires of Representation.

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So again, the Great Lamps ideological program I think runs into some problems.

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The problem is very simple. Once I've attained the Dani, how should I behave?

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Right? In what ways should I practically instantiate and make vivid my status as a perfect Buddhist preacher?

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If I'm going to travel around northwestern India or Central Asia claiming to be

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a Dharma Bonica who has access to the perfect awakening of all the Buddhas,

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I need to learn how to look the part, right? I need to learn how to be convincing.

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If the dance is a bold ideological gambit intended to make possible the production of new Buddhist revelation,

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it is in the quotidian advice about rhetoric and stagecraft that the ideological vision is actually instantiated.

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Made real for Buddhist preachers in their communities.

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Now, the great lamps model of rhetoric is pretty sophisticated.

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It emphasises not just the utterance of true doctrines, but instead pays attention to issues of affect, presentation and context.

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The text is filled with practical advice for rending the rendering the audience

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more receptive to the teachings of ensuring not only truthful communication,

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but also effective persuasion.

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Now, my undergraduate major was in Sanskrit, but I admit that this was studied under the auspices of a classics department.

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This means whenever I spend time thinking about rhetoric, I always turn to Aristotle, right?

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In Aristotle's techno rhetoric, we find three means of persuasion pitstops by which a speaker may successfully hook an audience.

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These are ethos, pathos, and logos.

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Ethos is all about constructing a speaker as a kind of powerful moral force.

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Pathos is about what we might call, in modern terms, targeted advertising.

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Right? And logos is about solid, logical argumentation.

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I'm going to completely ignore logos in the rest of this talk.

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You can ask me about it in the Q&A if you're interested.

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The great Line-Up really doesn't pay much attention at all to logos, ethos and pathos are much more important for the Great Land's rhetorical program.

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And that makes sense, right? Because if anything I utter could be the truth just by virtue of me having the Dani.

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Then the most important thing is to simply convince people that I, as a preacher, have the authority to do so.

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So first up is pathos, right?

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The ability of the speaker to understand their audience and to customise their message to ensure the receptivity of the crowd.

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The great lamp often exhorts preachers to tailor their messages to their audiences to ensure their delight and their willingness to learn.

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This is essentially about, you know, targeted advertising, communicating precisely the right message to the right audience at the right moment.

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So here we have this beautiful passage.

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You know, when the Dharma preachers want to preach the Dharma, they should preach in accordance with the needs of the audience.

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If they know that those beings would profit from hearing about charity,

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then you should preach about charity and you shouldn't preach about anything else.

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If there's a person who would delight in upholding the precepts, you should preach about the precepts, right?

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Beings from time to time delight in practising endurance, vigour, meditation or gnosis.

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And you should preach those things to them so that they understand. The next means of persuasion is ethos, the moral authority of the speaker.

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In the great lamp, the preacher is expected to have a confident demeanour, an attractive appearance, and an appropriately crafted stage for preaching.

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The text actually lists four techniques for proper stagecraft,

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all of which would be common sense for like a modern day politician or indeed a modern day Buddhist preacher.

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Right. Choose a pleasant location for your sermon. Place the preacher on a high throne with nice decorations.

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Appoint bodyguards to protect the preacher from annoyances.

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And appoint a team of roving security guards to control the crowd, to expel hecklers, and to shush disruptive children.

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All right, so there's this, like, team of employees around the Dharma Bonica in this in this sutra that I find really, really fascinating.

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All of these things make clear that Buddhists were thinking very carefully about what we might call today,

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the practice of, you know, effective propaganda and stage management.

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The public image of the preacher is considered in amazing detail right in this text.

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Here is a great passage about the kind of professional appearance of a preacher.

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A preacher should when they want to teach to others, they should have a straight posture, a dignified appearance.

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Their throat and tongue should be open. Their word should be excellent, their pronunciation should be refined,

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their voice should not crack, their tongue should not slip out when they speak right.

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Their teeth should be white and evenly spaced.

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So if you do this, there will be nobody in the crowd who is not pleased to hear you and hearing you.

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They will be delighted and they will increase their merit.

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There is the opposite case, though, the the preacher who is not so good at public presentation.

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If the Dharma Master does not have the qualities discussed above, he only is characterised by evil qualities and misdeeds.

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Right? His posture is not erect. He's fidgety.

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His body movements are agitated. His teeth are yellow and crooked.

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His mouth and lips are chapped. He trembles in the cold, in heat.

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His body has content thin. What's interesting here is that when you have a sermon from a bad Dharma bonica, right,

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somebody who is not rhetorically sound in terms of ethos, in terms of their presentation of that authority.

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People, when they hear and see the sermon, they will feel disgust.

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And since they don't respect the man, they won't respect the Dharma because they denigrate the Dharma even though they've heard it.

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They won't receive it with faith in their hearts, and then they will slander the Dharma.

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And so this is the teacher's fault, right?

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If you don't teach with a proper kind of authoritative presence, you cause other people to fall into the sin of slandering the Dharma,

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which, as we know, is a really horrible sin with pretty profound consequences.

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Okay. So. Let's see here.

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As we read the texts, I could go on and on. But these examples suffice.

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The great lamp spends a great deal of time and energy on practical rhetorical advice.

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Right. It's not enough simply to transmit the Dani.

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Recall that the Dani was to be transmitted in chapter two of the sutra and there are 50 more chapters after chapter two.

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Right.

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The Dani is supplemented, in other words, to an extraordinary degree by passages like this that describe how to present or perform as a Dharma Bonica.

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And as we read the text, it quickly becomes clear that much more is at stake than simply authorising new Buddhist sermons.

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The text portrays the sermon itself as a kind of ritualised event,

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an event in which the Buddha's presence and pedagogical authority are represented in the world.

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So if the preacher is granted access to the three vaults, what is the difference between a preacher and the Buddha proper here?

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For example, the Scripture advises the preacher to deal with hostile questions by placing himself in the lion throne of the Buddha.

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He says to himself. Now, where I sit is the lion throne of the two Toccata.

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So I'm going to answer these debaters questions very well, and I'm going to, you know, reconcile their doubts.

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Right. I think of this is like a really nice kind of like psych up speech that you give to yourself before you.

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You know, when you're nervous to go out and give a talk, you're like, what if this goes poorly?

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Well, you know, here we have the Dharma Bonica saying, I can do it right.

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I can be the Buddha in this moment of preaching. And my seat is the seat of the Buddha.

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And this might be like a just one kind of trivial example,

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but I think there are other kinds of examples throughout the text that make

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it very clear that the scene of preaching is also a scene of representation.

387
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Here's another passage for the audience. The Great Lamp asks the audience to regard the preacher's words as authentic part of China.

388
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Right. I don't think you can get any clearer than this is as a piece of evidence.

389
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Right. Whatever this Dharma Master utters is no different from the golden verbal teachings of the world.

390
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Honoured one. Finally, in this passage, the equivalence is discussed in terms of merit.

391
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The preacher is said to be a profound field of merit worshipping.

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00:41:05,220 --> 00:41:10,410
The preacher says the great lamp is precisely karmically equivalent to worshipping a Buddha.

393
00:41:11,040 --> 00:41:15,509
He who worships the Dharma Master is worshipping the Buddha.

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00:41:15,510 --> 00:41:20,010
Tathagata. Ah, hut, some yak, some Buddhas and attains incalculable merit.

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Why? If there were no Dharma masters, then there would be nobody to preach.

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If there were no masters preaching, then who would be able to learn the vaults of profound Dharma?

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Therefore, you should regard this Dharma Master as a Buddha and never think otherwise.

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00:41:37,710 --> 00:41:46,770
So not only is the preacher enjoined in the text to imagine himself as a Buddha, the audience is also instructed to participate in that vision.

399
00:41:47,310 --> 00:41:49,740
There is a mutual co imagining here.

400
00:41:49,740 --> 00:41:57,300
We can envision the whole scene of preaching as a kind of performance, and both the preacher and the audience have a role to play here.

401
00:41:58,390 --> 00:42:01,810
So I'm going to conclude with some broader reflections on how this all fits together.

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We've already seen in the work of David Druce write that Mahayana can be characterised as a textual movement oriented

403
00:42:09,310 --> 00:42:16,540
around the activities of Dharma Porticos preachers who are involved in the composition of new forms of alleged Buddha.

404
00:42:16,540 --> 00:42:19,899
Vajrayana. In her talk for the third series of the seminar,

405
00:42:19,900 --> 00:42:26,889
Natalie Gummer drew on the Dharma Penderecki's really interesting account of the Dharma Bonica as a kind of represents Buddha who

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begins physically manifesting a different sort of body with transcendent qualities once they are empowered as a Dharma bonica.

407
00:42:35,230 --> 00:42:36,670
Rob Meyer, in his talk,

408
00:42:36,670 --> 00:42:44,890
correctly placed early Mahayana revelations from the panda and other scriptures into conversations with the later Tibetan term traditions.

409
00:42:45,490 --> 00:42:52,030
It's clear enough that Dharma Bonica are vitally important figures for thinking about the modalities of Buddhist revelation.

410
00:42:52,900 --> 00:42:58,100
Now, I'm grateful to have spent a lot of time with the great lamp of the Dharma Dhani Scripture for a couple of reasons.

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First and foremost, as we've seen in this talk, the great lamp gives us a great deal of quite practical advice about the rhetoric and stagecraft

412
00:43:06,310 --> 00:43:11,260
of preaching right down to little details about the preacher's ideal staff and bodyguards.

413
00:43:11,860 --> 00:43:17,110
Secondly, the great lamp mixes different elements of the Buddhist tradition together to create a

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specific vision of the Dharma Bonica as the key figure who ritually represents the Buddha.

415
00:43:23,890 --> 00:43:26,530
The text draws from a deep well of Buddhist tradition.

416
00:43:26,890 --> 00:43:34,600
It has ideological continuity with the perfection of wisdom, literature, perhaps with the emerging tradition of the to target a GABA and so on.

417
00:43:35,530 --> 00:43:42,099
But its entire project is oriented around the use of a magical spell and careful rhetoric and stagecraft,

418
00:43:42,100 --> 00:43:46,240
aiming to ritually instantiate the Buddha in the very body of the preacher.

419
00:43:47,020 --> 00:43:54,130
The text was translated into Chinese in the five nineties at the dawn of two movements, which would transform East Asian Buddhism forever.

420
00:43:54,700 --> 00:44:01,060
One such movement, called Chan, stressed the idea that some Buddhist teachers could be living Buddhas.

421
00:44:02,020 --> 00:44:06,520
Another movement, which has been variously called esoteric Buddhism or tantric Buddhism,

422
00:44:06,910 --> 00:44:13,060
would use magical spells and ritual play to transform a practitioner into a living Buddha.

423
00:44:13,720 --> 00:44:19,600
So viewed in this light, the Great Lamp reveals some profound continuities in the Buddhist traditions of South and East Asia.

424
00:44:19,990 --> 00:44:27,340
Maybe if we're thinking about the precursors to Chan and esoteric Buddhism alike, we should be thinking about the figure of the Dharma Bonica.

425
00:44:28,030 --> 00:44:35,050
To be provocative, we might trace a broader history of Buddhist ritual in which the Buddha's presence periodically reappears

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00:44:35,350 --> 00:44:41,980
in footprints and under trees interred in reliquary shrines carved into stone in masterpieces of art.

427
00:44:43,060 --> 00:44:46,810
But the Buddhist presence even begins to inhabit human bodies themselves.

428
00:44:47,060 --> 00:44:53,800
It begins to speak through them. Now, the great lamp of the Dharma, Dani's scripture is a textual dead end, right?

429
00:44:54,160 --> 00:45:00,190
It's not really cited a lot in later traditions. It doesn't form the basis of any East Asian Buddhist schools.

430
00:45:00,790 --> 00:45:05,740
We don't have extant versions of this in Indic languages or in the Tibetan translated corpus.

431
00:45:06,280 --> 00:45:10,750
It's a dead end. It's a road not taken in Buddhist, intellectual and ritual history.

432
00:45:11,860 --> 00:45:19,120
But this massive yet marginal text, in my opinion, can be put into conversation with other Buddhist visions of the Dharma bonica

433
00:45:19,780 --> 00:45:24,790
to think about Buddhist traditions as a series of experiments in representing.

434
00:45:25,330 --> 00:45:30,250
And whenever you represent the Buddha, you have the potential to issue forth Buddha vagina.

435
00:45:30,910 --> 00:45:37,990
And after all, any Buddhist technology of representing is also, by extension, a technology for revelation.

436
00:45:38,590 --> 00:45:41,990
So thanks so much. I really look forward to your questions and comments.

437
00:45:42,010 --> 00:45:42,640
I'll stop there.