So welcome everyone to the second meeting of this, our fourth series.
And I'm very delighted today to have a very interesting speaker with a very interesting topic.
Ryan Richard OVERBY is the Robert H. In Ho Family Foundation assistant professor in Buddhist studies at Skidmore College.
He works primarily on early medieval Buddhist ritual texts, focusing on Chinese and Sanskrit sources.
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.
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,
New Chinese approaches to translating Durrani and the appearance of cities in Chinese Buddhist texts.
He's also worked on several volumes of the Buddhist Stone Secrets in China project at the Heidelberg Academy
Division and is currently working on a book length study of the great lamp of the odometer in Scripture,
as well as a complete translation and study of the consecration scripture.
So Ryan, over to you. Thank you so much.
I'm going to go ahead and share my screen once more. And get this started.
And hopefully you should all see the slides on the screen. Great.
So I just want to begin by thanking Rob Meyer for his kind invitation to speak at this treasure seminar.
I've enjoyed immensely the presentations of my colleagues and the wonderful conversations that have ensued.
So thanks to all of you in this community who make this treasure seminar so very, very special.
Now, if you've been paying attention to the Treasure Seminars third series,
you will have already heard wonderful talks by Natalie Kummer, David Drews and Robert Meyer.
Touching on the subject of the Dharma Bonica, the preacher of the Dharma,
his ability to reveal new discourses is a matter of obvious concern for these gatherings.
I'm going to continue our collective meditation on the role of the term of Bonica as a revealer of new Buddhist discourses.
In this task, I do not presume to speak about Dharma barnacles as a category or about Dharma Barnacle in general.
Rather, I want to emphasise the fact that once Dharma Bonica has become a kind of possible category for discussion in Mahayana Sutra literature.
Dharma Bannock has become a site for innovation and experimentation with what I call Buddhist repertoires of representing different Mahayana sutras.
Treat Dharma Bonica differently, and the precise mechanisms of revelation and empowerment vary from text to text.
I want to focus on one particular text today, in part because it has such extensive discussions of its vision of the Dharma Bonica,
and also in part because I think this text vision of the Dharma Bonica gives us useful ways for thinking about what sorts
of elements were available for mixing and matching in this and in other Buddhist projects of Revelation and representing.
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.
Second, I'll give a brief account about how the text narrates its own revelation.
In part three, I'll try to reconstruct the texts theory of Buddhist revelation,
exploring the mechanisms for how preachers can authoritatively utter Buddhist truth.
In Part four, I will speculate a bit about why this obscure and marginal Buddhist sutra may still be valuable
for thinking more broadly about Buddhist revelation and repertoires of free presence.
So let's start with part one an overview of the great lamp of the Dharma Dhani Scripture.
So this text called the Dafydd Jue 12. Niching is excellent only in a single Chinese translation.
It contains 52 chapters or PIN in 20 scrolls or two and encompassing some 150 pages in the Korean block printed canon,
or 93 pages in the Japanese edition. The Taisho Fashion Shoot Days or kill.
According to Chinese Buddhist catalogues.
The translation started at the earliest by the 17th of May 592 and was finished at the latest by 22nd July five, 94.
The translator was a mandarin monk named in Chinese Shanghai,
at which scholars have variously reconstructed as Jinnah Gupta or Neena Gupta with Max Dig recently making a really convincing case,
I think, for Diana Gupta as potentially the name in question here.
This monk lived between around 528 to 605 CE.
He was born in Perugia, poorer in Gandhara, and arrived in China in 557.
C.E. He served as a translator at various temples under the Northern Jo State until 574,
when he fled the regime's anti Buddhist prescription and took refuge with the Turkish
guns on the northern steppe after the restoration of Buddhism under the Sway State.
Our monk, Diana Gupta, was in the year 585,
summoned back to the sway capital of Dashing and asked to serve as the chief translator of the Sway Empire,
where his workshop proceeded to translate nearly 40 texts before his exile and death in 605.
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.
I do my best on this slide to give a kind of 50,000 foot overview of the text.
My claim is that the great lamp centres around the transmission of a single tyranny.
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.
And that's the point of the great lamp to transmit the Stani, the wielder of the star.
And he is granted the power to become a perfect term japonica a perfect preacher able to access all the content of a.
Who does awakening in effect becoming a fully realised Buddha and becoming authorised to utter but of asana.
But even as the text advocates the Dorothy as a quintessential source of its power.
It also recommends a series of interesting,
meditative and ritual techniques which assist our preacher in the tasks of memory, inspiration, and even public relations.
Empowering our preacher to make strong claims for authority in the public settings of preaching and debate.
So I want to be very careful here when talking about how the text purports to enable and authorise Buddhist revelation.
The great lamp of the Torah Madani scripture, like many Mahayana sutras,
narrates its own textual revelation through numerous interlocking frame stories,
taking us on a kind of time travelling journey across the Buddhist cosmos.
This is what I will call the revelation of the great lamp.
The texts. Authorisation of itself.
But in describing the powers of the text, it's Dorothy and its associated practices.
The Great Lamp also gives us a kind of implicit theories for how revelation might work generally for Buddhist preachers.
It serves as a general purpose authorisation of new but of catching up.
This is what I will call in this talk revelation with the great lamp.
The text gives us the tools and framework for ritually producing new discourses.
So let's start with Revelation of the great lamp,
the questions the text claims to be an answer to and the text narration of its own previous revelations.
So the suture begins with a scene on Mt. Khadra Kuta, where the Buddha shaking money interacts with his disciple Ananda,
as well as with a minor deity named Good Brilliance.
Shawn Wake Wang Cancel the Godalming good, brilliant steps forward and asks Chuck your money a very,
very long question which will motivate the sutra as a whole.
So I'm going to go through this question because I think it's important.
It's the framing question for this whole mess that is this toe scroll long sutra.
And the question is as follows World honoured one Because of my compassion for sentient beings,
I would now like to question the to target a perfect are two perfectly awakened world honoured one
How can sentient beings attain knowledge of the dharma and vinegar cultivate in conformity with
the Buddha's meritorious virtue and rely on the teachings of the world on it one to reverently
practice in accordance with the dharma world honoured one How do sentient beings become non lazy?
Diligently practice the sutras, comprehensively retain their text and meaning, follow their true import,
contemplate them in accordance with the Dharma, rapidly recite them, and by means of that Dharma obtain power.
World honoured one. How do sentient beings attain entrance into the dharma doors of wisdom?
Whose foundations are the syllables? These are the actions right into languages.
When they abide in these dharma doors, they can analytically understand, and because of their understanding,
they can enter into the primordial door of contemplation and attain the meaning of all Dharma,
until at last their ten entrance into the profound dharma of the 12 chain of dependent origination.
And they'll completely understand it. World honoured.
One How can sentient beings encounter perceptual objects without becoming fatigued, without having scattered thoughts liberated in their own minds?
How can they well understand the excellent dramas and be able to accord with an enter into them?
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.
I dare to ask the two targets to expound the profound scripture of this tiny door.
Why is that? World honoured.
One It's difficult to attain a human body even if you do get a human body.
Your life span is short and in a short life. There are three bad things.
What are the three? Their mind and nature are contrarian, inferior, and they don't accept good speech.
Number two, they always harboured jealousy and fear that others are superior to them.
Three Even when they know that others are superior to them, they are ashamed and they don't ask questions.
These are the three bad things. Because of this, I now ask that a target a world honoured one about the Dhani text.
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.
And so he's going to fight to counteract that, right?
Finally, world honoured one, the two together has previously uttered incalculable billions of sutras.
Some he uttered because of a question. Some he spontaneously uttered without a question.
World honoured one.
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,
and therefore we now request from the Takada a sutra text concerning the ultimate dharma of the Dhani.
World honoured one.
If a person can study this most supreme Dhani daw than all the other Buddha dramas will naturally increase without expending too much effort.
Okay. So I just want to pause here a quick pause to sum up what we know.
The request for this text is the request for Adani, right?
It's Adani text. And its overarching goal is to be able to fully understand the Buddha's teachings.
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.
More on this in a moment.
So after this long opening salvo, the Buddha Shakir Money approves of the question and tells Onondaga that the question has been asked before.
So here we get our first temporal shift. The Godalming excellent brilliance was in the long distant past.
A wealthy and learned Brahmin who requested a dance from the Buddha named a fulgent or funk Wang.
So this is the first of several temporal nestlings. A fulgent, in turn,
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.
One of these involves a moment, actually, of kind of meditative transport.
Best of fragrances. This is on the bottom right of the screen.
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.
He concentrates his attention on the Buddha of that Southern land, a Buddha named Gem Banner.
Jim Bannister notices the attention and summons best of fragrances to his Buddha land for a teaching session.
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,
a fulgent serving as a repeating figure, either as the disclosure of the text or as the hearer of the sutras.
A revelation from the distant past. So most of the action of the text, of the great lamp of the Dharma,
Dani's Scripture actually happens in the centre part of your screen with the wealthy
Brahmin and other audience members questioning the Buddha Fulgent about the great lamp.
So when chuck your money narrates to Ananda the revelation of the Dhani by the previous two target a fulgent.
He describes the true significance of the text, and this passage is, I think, worth paying attention to.
I think it's the most pivotal passage for understanding the agenda of the great lamp as a whole.
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.
So overread. I will. Here's the passage. Ananda then that of fulgent to target to in the presence of the Great Assembly,
uttered the profound sutra text of this Dhani for the sake of the bodhisattvas and traffickers and so on.
Thus this Dhani Daw can comprehensively contain all other sutra texts.
If one receives and retains this Dhani, then the content of the body of all Buddhas.
Even if one has never heard or seen, it will automatically become clear and one will be called a Dharma Master.
A Dharma Bonica. So let's just pause for a moment here.
We we already know a lot about Dani in general, thanks to wonderful prior studies by people like Etienne Lamont Yen,
Prague, Ronald Davidson, Richard McBride, Paul Kopp, Greg Dash, just to name a few.
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.
Or, as Davidson translates something like compression or encoding of Buddhist scriptures.
With with Davidson, we can creatively think about Dani as a kind of zip file.
Right. It takes a really large and unwieldy text and it compresses it into a small set of nonsense syllables.
And indeed, from time to time, we find Dani that claim to efficiently encode precisely the text in which they are located.
My favourite example of this is from the Dani chapter of the long covered Tara Sutra, which gives Dani's,
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.
Right. The text claims quite straightforwardly. Yeah.
Imani mantra pardon. Petitioner Tena Loncar Vitara Sutra.
Patchett Hum Bhavish Shetty Write the long kava Tara Sutra is read by whoever reads these mantra syllables.
The meaning of this is even clearer in the Chinese translation, right?
Reading the mantra of the Dani chapter of the long car, Vitara is functionally identical to reading the sutra as a whole.
So this is precisely like the zip file theory, right? The only compresses the text which hosts it, right?
It serves as a short fragment of language that serves as a substitute for a particular sutra.
This is what we might call a 1 to 1 relationship between a Dani and its host sutra.
What we have in here in the great lamp, though, is a bit more radical, right,
and certainly important for thinking about the mechanics of Buddhist revelation.
We have a claim that this specific Dani in the Great Lamp has a one to many relationship,
that it somehow contains all other Buddhist texts and even more radically receiving and retaining
the DHANI grants you the ability to realise the content of the awakening of all Buddhas,
thereby earning the name preacher or Dharma Bonica.
The translation of this in Chinese is Dharma Master Fasher.
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.
This text transmits a single Dani less than 40 words in length,
which purports to grant one access to all Buddhist teachings and to all the content of the awakening of all Buddhas.
How on earth could this possibly work? In the next section,
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.
To do so, I'm going to tie together passages from different parts of this massive text,
as there is really no single place where this is all explicitly theorised.
Now I think I have a strong case to be made here,
but I warn you in advance that this theory is the product of careful interpretation and reconstruction,
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.
So I want to begin with the Dani. It's not just the revealed Dani as a whole that compresses vast amounts of information.
The Dani of the Great Lamp works at the level of just a single word Jew in Chinese.
Here we have the claim in its starkest form. Right? A single Dharma word of this Dani comprehensively contains incalculable billions of sutras.
The Scripture will later claim that the single word is equivalent to something called the vaults of the two targets.
Okay, so here we have this long passage, which, again, sorry to keep reading these long passages to you,
but it's kind of the nature of the beast of this talk, right?
The door of a single word of the sutra is the vaults of the to target us.
If you were to fully explain the door of the single word, even with all the voices and music of the great Chickillo Chasm,
with all the voices of the Divine Kings, right, the trees, [INAUDIBLE] gods,
the yama gods, the tacita gods near Monserrat near Metta Russia Vartan all the way up to the palaces,
the markings, all two, all of them together, amplifying the sound of the Dharma.
That single word would still not be exhausted. Why is that?
Because that's the door of the single word reveals the profound vastness of the vaults of Buddha's Brahma.
The vastness of this vaults of. To target. As is in.
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,
peaceful and blissful, and they would now all attain what was previously unattainable.
And that is all because of this vaults of to target us.
Okay. So we see in this passage the phrase vaults of to target us.
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.
Right. Relay song is a common Chinese translation of this funny word to target a GABA.
Right. So what we see, though, is that this term relight Zong has many variants found throughout the great lamp.
And how this works is that the the vault of the two targets is functionally identical to a single
word of the dance and that it's impossible to exhaust the contents of the vault or vaults.
Even if we were to enlist all the gods of the desire realms.
So I'm saying vaults in the plural, because elsewhere in the sutra the vault is described as threefold.
Here's just one example of this. Right. These three vaults are the verbal teachings of all the Buddha to target us all utterances,
speech, sound, derivations, critiques, explanations and analogies.
They all arise from these three vaults of teachings.
The great lamp is downright playful with variations on this key term.
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.
So we have things like the three vaults of teaching, the three vaults of of karma or action,
the vaults of the two targets, the three vaults of the action of teaching and so on and so forth.
So there's a lot of variation here. And all of these are basic variations on a theme, right?
We have a vault or a song in the sense of an inexhaustible treasury, and that's the key term.
Elsewhere in the text, we actually get a definition of what this word tongue means,
and it's precisely the meaning of a Treasury that is a Treasury by virtue of its being inexhaustible.
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.
But sometimes we get this numerical prefix that it is three or three fold.
Elsewhere in the suture, we get some elaboration on that. Number three, that it has numerous correlations.
We'll go into that in a moment. And so here's the sort of mid-tier lists of terms as they appear.
You'll see that up here shows up quite a lot here, that these these actions are pedagogical actions.
Right. That they're about appear. And here's finally our last set of terms which occur only once each.
But they largely just kind of reinforce the general pattern. These vaults are about teaching.
They're about empire. They're about the activities of Buddhas.
You might be asking at this point again, what about this light's on, right?
Isn't this just to target a GABA? And my answer is as follows If this is indeed a to target a GABA text,
it's a really interesting and different spin on that tradition, as far as I understand it.
When I read works on to target a GABA, I'm thinking here of Michael Radishes.
Excellent book on the Mahayana Nirvana Sutra and its kind of relationship to the target of GABA tradition.
I think here of Chris Jones's really fascinating book on that to target a GABA.
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.
Right, which contains the shutter mirror and by analogy.
Right, that this the stupa with a reliquary chamber becomes internalised that each of us possesses or contains a to target a GABA.
We are the host right for this potential for Buddha hood.
However, in the Great Lamp, the light song is not something we innately possess.
It's not something that is contained within us in any straightforward way.
The text consistently speaks of accessing the vaults entering into.
They use the Chinese verb through to go in as a way of talking about how to get into these vaults.
And often we get in through these things called doors, mun or Mukha or wata in Sanskrit.
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.
And once we have access to the vaults, we have access to, again, all the pedagogical utterances of all Buddhas.
Right. As we've seen, these vaults contain the pedagogical and opaque activity of the Buddhas.
Okay, so what makes the vaults three or threefold? The great lamp has numerous passages on this.
Some of them are quite mysterious.
We have passages from the great lamp that make it clear that one enters the three different types of vault via three different doors.
You enter the first via the syllable of the second via the syllable, and the third via the syllable na.
These syllabic doors are grouped with other groups of syllables, so the syllable R has a group of 14 syllables that belong to it.
CA has 21. NA has seven. The total here, by the way, gives us 42 syllables,
which is the number of syllables not in the standard Sanskrit of mala, but rather in the other patchiness delivery.
So I think that's a significant point here. The names of the three vaults themselves are not very informative.
They are named in the text as the vault of the beginning vault of verbal teachings,
the subsequent vault of verbal teachings, and the final vault of verbal teachings.
So that's really not very helpful. Right.
But it does correlate these three fold vaults with also different kinds of categories that we find in the perfection of wisdom literature.
So here we have the the language of humans, the language of gods, and the language of neither humans nor gods.
And we also have the three vaults correlated with the vine moksha mukha,
the three doors of liberation, of emptiness, spineless and spinelessness and desire, lawlessness.
So the great lamp frames, the syllables, specifically the three syllables of aka and NA as fundamental tools for entering into the vaults.
It uses the word zucman syllabic doors, and it's very clear that it's it's being very literal with this metaphor, right?
That's through these doors that you enter into the Treasury.
It contains lengthy discussions that I'm not going to dive into here about how the syllable, for example,
is the primordial root of all language and phenomena implicit in all other linguistic expressions.
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.
The text makes specific reference to the care and maintenance of writing boards as a metaphor for the meditative taming of the mind.
And it speaks about how combining syllables in specific orders allows one to produce an infinity of meanings.
In these sorts of moves, the great lamp participates in a long history of Buddhist engagement with the ABC theory.
The use of the actual mochas or syllabic.
Cause as much cause both for the recollection of established doctrines and for the creative unfolding of new sermons.
Janet Gyatso long ago wrote a beautiful chapter on the so-called letter magic of the perfection of wisdom tradition,
showing us how the intrinsic meaninglessness of Sanskrit syllables nevertheless combine causally to form infinite varieties of sentences.
Write. And this meaningful combination of empty things serves as a perfect metaphor for understanding.
The ontology of the permeates itself right for understanding doctrines about how empty things can produce the phenomenal world as we understand it,
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.
The sutra transmits a Dani containing some nonsense syllables.
The syllables are devoid of intrinsic meaning, yet they're infinitely productive in causal sequence.
Syllables represented by the three syllable gates of are cut and nuh are literally doors into the vaults of Buddhas,
a vast treasury from which all but of large enough flows to speak in more mathy terms.
I like to think of the vaults as like the set of all possible true utterances by all Buddhas.
Right. And it is in some sense, like the conceptual space of truth itself.
You might even put a logically speaking, if you want it to be, go out on a limb.
You might even think of it as perhaps something like the Dharma. Quiet, right?
Although the future never really claims this explicitly,
every syllable of the Dhani and every syllable of the sutra is a potential way into the
vaults and is therefore potentially productive of billions of sutras each on its own.
So you can see where I'm going with this. It's really quite a radical consequence in my view.
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.
It should be clear by now that the Dhani itself has very little to do with memory, right?
And much more to do with creativity and invention. The spell is not really about retaining what has come before.
It is rather about certifying the trustworthiness of the new discourses that we utter.
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.
Right. This means that I can compose new sermons or even write entirely new Buddhist sutras with confidence and authority.
The Dhani is on this interpretation a kind of authorising token.
It gives me permission to claim that whatever I say is put over China.
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.
It's only 40 or so words long. So quite short.
Easy to memorise. Easy to write down. Easy to keep with me. So how could this actually play out?
Right. Luckily, the Great Lamps is 52 chapters long and it contains a wealth of fascinating material,
not just about the theoretical foundations justifying the sermons of Darma Monica's,
but also the practical on the ground details about how to actually perform the role of Dharma Bonica.
We now move to the section of the talk I call Repertoires of Representation.
So again, the Great Lamps ideological program I think runs into some problems.
The problem is very simple. Once I've attained the Dani, how should I behave?
Right? In what ways should I practically instantiate and make vivid my status as a perfect Buddhist preacher?
If I'm going to travel around northwestern India or Central Asia claiming to be
a Dharma Bonica who has access to the perfect awakening of all the Buddhas,
I need to learn how to look the part, right? I need to learn how to be convincing.
If the dance is a bold ideological gambit intended to make possible the production of new Buddhist revelation,
it is in the quotidian advice about rhetoric and stagecraft that the ideological vision is actually instantiated.
Made real for Buddhist preachers in their communities.
Now, the great lamps model of rhetoric is pretty sophisticated.
It emphasises not just the utterance of true doctrines, but instead pays attention to issues of affect, presentation and context.
The text is filled with practical advice for rending the rendering the audience
more receptive to the teachings of ensuring not only truthful communication,
but also effective persuasion.
Now, my undergraduate major was in Sanskrit, but I admit that this was studied under the auspices of a classics department.
This means whenever I spend time thinking about rhetoric, I always turn to Aristotle, right?
In Aristotle's techno rhetoric, we find three means of persuasion pitstops by which a speaker may successfully hook an audience.
These are ethos, pathos, and logos.
Ethos is all about constructing a speaker as a kind of powerful moral force.
Pathos is about what we might call, in modern terms, targeted advertising.
Right? And logos is about solid, logical argumentation.
I'm going to completely ignore logos in the rest of this talk.
You can ask me about it in the Q&A if you're interested.
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.
And that makes sense, right? Because if anything I utter could be the truth just by virtue of me having the Dani.
Then the most important thing is to simply convince people that I, as a preacher, have the authority to do so.
So first up is pathos, right?
The ability of the speaker to understand their audience and to customise their message to ensure the receptivity of the crowd.
The great lamp often exhorts preachers to tailor their messages to their audiences to ensure their delight and their willingness to learn.
This is essentially about, you know, targeted advertising, communicating precisely the right message to the right audience at the right moment.
So here we have this beautiful passage.
You know, when the Dharma preachers want to preach the Dharma, they should preach in accordance with the needs of the audience.
If they know that those beings would profit from hearing about charity,
then you should preach about charity and you shouldn't preach about anything else.
If there's a person who would delight in upholding the precepts, you should preach about the precepts, right?
Beings from time to time delight in practising endurance, vigour, meditation or gnosis.
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.
In the great lamp, the preacher is expected to have a confident demeanour, an attractive appearance, and an appropriately crafted stage for preaching.
The text actually lists four techniques for proper stagecraft,
all of which would be common sense for like a modern day politician or indeed a modern day Buddhist preacher.
Right. Choose a pleasant location for your sermon. Place the preacher on a high throne with nice decorations.
Appoint bodyguards to protect the preacher from annoyances.
And appoint a team of roving security guards to control the crowd, to expel hecklers, and to shush disruptive children.
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.
All of these things make clear that Buddhists were thinking very carefully about what we might call today,
the practice of, you know, effective propaganda and stage management.
The public image of the preacher is considered in amazing detail right in this text.
Here is a great passage about the kind of professional appearance of a preacher.
A preacher should when they want to teach to others, they should have a straight posture, a dignified appearance.
Their throat and tongue should be open. Their word should be excellent, their pronunciation should be refined,
their voice should not crack, their tongue should not slip out when they speak right.
Their teeth should be white and evenly spaced.
So if you do this, there will be nobody in the crowd who is not pleased to hear you and hearing you.
They will be delighted and they will increase their merit.
There is the opposite case, though, the the preacher who is not so good at public presentation.
If the Dharma Master does not have the qualities discussed above, he only is characterised by evil qualities and misdeeds.
Right? His posture is not erect. He's fidgety.
His body movements are agitated. His teeth are yellow and crooked.
His mouth and lips are chapped. He trembles in the cold, in heat.
His body has content thin. What's interesting here is that when you have a sermon from a bad Dharma bonica, right,
somebody who is not rhetorically sound in terms of ethos, in terms of their presentation of that authority.
People, when they hear and see the sermon, they will feel disgust.
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.
They won't receive it with faith in their hearts, and then they will slander the Dharma.
And so this is the teacher's fault, right?
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,
which, as we know, is a really horrible sin with pretty profound consequences.
Okay. So. Let's see here.
As we read the texts, I could go on and on. But these examples suffice.
The great lamp spends a great deal of time and energy on practical rhetorical advice.
Right. It's not enough simply to transmit the Dani.
Recall that the Dani was to be transmitted in chapter two of the sutra and there are 50 more chapters after chapter two.
Right.
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.
And as we read the text, it quickly becomes clear that much more is at stake than simply authorising new Buddhist sermons.
The text portrays the sermon itself as a kind of ritualised event,
an event in which the Buddha's presence and pedagogical authority are represented in the world.
So if the preacher is granted access to the three vaults, what is the difference between a preacher and the Buddha proper here?
For example, the Scripture advises the preacher to deal with hostile questions by placing himself in the lion throne of the Buddha.
He says to himself. Now, where I sit is the lion throne of the two Toccata.
So I'm going to answer these debaters questions very well, and I'm going to, you know, reconcile their doubts.
Right. I think of this is like a really nice kind of like psych up speech that you give to yourself before you.
You know, when you're nervous to go out and give a talk, you're like, what if this goes poorly?
Well, you know, here we have the Dharma Bonica saying, I can do it right.
I can be the Buddha in this moment of preaching. And my seat is the seat of the Buddha.
And this might be like a just one kind of trivial example,
but I think there are other kinds of examples throughout the text that make
it very clear that the scene of preaching is also a scene of representation.
Here's another passage for the audience. The Great Lamp asks the audience to regard the preacher's words as authentic part of China.
Right. I don't think you can get any clearer than this is as a piece of evidence.
Right. Whatever this Dharma Master utters is no different from the golden verbal teachings of the world.
Honoured one. Finally, in this passage, the equivalence is discussed in terms of merit.
The preacher is said to be a profound field of merit worshipping.
The preacher says the great lamp is precisely karmically equivalent to worshipping a Buddha.
He who worships the Dharma Master is worshipping the Buddha.
Tathagata. Ah, hut, some yak, some Buddhas and attains incalculable merit.
Why? If there were no Dharma masters, then there would be nobody to preach.
If there were no masters preaching, then who would be able to learn the vaults of profound Dharma?
Therefore, you should regard this Dharma Master as a Buddha and never think otherwise.
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.
There is a mutual co imagining here.
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.
So I'm going to conclude with some broader reflections on how this all fits together.
We've already seen in the work of David Druce write that Mahayana can be characterised as a textual movement oriented
around the activities of Dharma Porticos preachers who are involved in the composition of new forms of alleged Buddha.
Vajrayana. In her talk for the third series of the seminar,
Natalie Gummer drew on the Dharma Penderecki's really interesting account of the Dharma Bonica as a kind of represents Buddha who
begins physically manifesting a different sort of body with transcendent qualities once they are empowered as a Dharma bonica.
Rob Meyer, in his talk,
correctly placed early Mahayana revelations from the panda and other scriptures into conversations with the later Tibetan term traditions.
It's clear enough that Dharma Bonica are vitally important figures for thinking about the modalities of Buddhist revelation.
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.
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
of preaching right down to little details about the preacher's ideal staff and bodyguards.
Secondly, the great lamp mixes different elements of the Buddhist tradition together to create a
specific vision of the Dharma Bonica as the key figure who ritually represents the Buddha.
The text draws from a deep well of Buddhist tradition.
It has ideological continuity with the perfection of wisdom, literature, perhaps with the emerging tradition of the to target a GABA and so on.
But its entire project is oriented around the use of a magical spell and careful rhetoric and stagecraft,
aiming to ritually instantiate the Buddha in the very body of the preacher.
The text was translated into Chinese in the five nineties at the dawn of two movements, which would transform East Asian Buddhism forever.
One such movement, called Chan, stressed the idea that some Buddhist teachers could be living Buddhas.
Another movement, which has been variously called esoteric Buddhism or tantric Buddhism,
would use magical spells and ritual play to transform a practitioner into a living Buddha.
So viewed in this light, the Great Lamp reveals some profound continuities in the Buddhist traditions of South and East Asia.
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.
To be provocative, we might trace a broader history of Buddhist ritual in which the Buddha's presence periodically reappears
in footprints and under trees interred in reliquary shrines carved into stone in masterpieces of art.
But the Buddhist presence even begins to inhabit human bodies themselves.
It begins to speak through them. Now, the great lamp of the Dharma, Dani's scripture is a textual dead end, right?
It's not really cited a lot in later traditions. It doesn't form the basis of any East Asian Buddhist schools.
We don't have extant versions of this in Indic languages or in the Tibetan translated corpus.
It's a dead end. It's a road not taken in Buddhist, intellectual and ritual history.
But this massive yet marginal text, in my opinion, can be put into conversation with other Buddhist visions of the Dharma bonica
to think about Buddhist traditions as a series of experiments in representing.
And whenever you represent the Buddha, you have the potential to issue forth Buddha vagina.
And after all, any Buddhist technology of representing is also, by extension, a technology for revelation.
So thanks so much. I really look forward to your questions and comments.
I'll stop there.