The Buddha: A Storied Life

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Learning from John Strong: Many Ways of Reading the Many Life Stories of the Buddha.

I was reading two quite different things on the same day recently, one for "work" and one for "pleasure," but it just so happened that each included comment about how most of us do not think enough about what it is that we do when we read. The first was a book by the Australian writer Gerald Murnane who said about himself. "I discovered early in life that the act of reading is much more complicated than most people seem to acknowledge." The second was an essay by the American Sanskritist, Sheldon Pollock, who began an essay entitled "How We Read with the observation that to ask about how we read may seem like a silly question to many, "since reading is something like walking, that we do without much thought once we learn how. Do we ask ourselves what it means to read when we sit down with our coffee and morning newspaper? Of course not, but we might well, because it is no straightforward matter."

I suspect that these two comments came together so forcefully in my mind because I was thinking-far from the first time-about a statement that John Strong made three decades ago about Buddhist life worlds. "In my view, Buddhism, as it is popularly practiced," Strong said, "consists primarily of deeds done and stories told, that is, of rituals that regulate life both inside and outside the monastery, and of legends, myths, and tales that are recalled by, for, and about the faithful."3 Strong elaborated on such stories "that are recalled by, for, and about the faithful," by adding that they can be thought of in terms of what Roger Bastide, in a very different context, called "belvedere phenomena," compilations of traditions that reveal a broader context, that enable one to see a whole surrounding countryside, in all of its various aspects (doctrinal, sociological, ritual, soteriological).

I confess that I didn't particularly like this comment when I first read it, and John Strong has reminded me since that I told him so. If I try to understand now what I didn't like about it then, I think it was because I didn't know what a belvedere is and I didn't bother to look the word up in a dictionary. I simply- and wrongly-assumed that it was a fancy word for a place where one could see "a whole surrounding countryside," something like a scenic viewpoint on a highway where one pulls off to enjoy a vista for a few moments, only to get back into the car and continue on one's way. The metaphor struck me as naïve, possibly even suggesting that stories enabled one to "see," simply and directly, Buddhist life worlds as if they were right in front of one's eyes, like "a whole surrounding countryside," without any of the difficulties of historical or ethnographic reconstruction, and without any efforts of imagination, inference, and interpretation. It smacked of "positivism" to me, which at that time was a ready-at-hand term of abuse in certain sectors of the humane sciences. The contents of my reaction were not wrong. It is still the case today that no one should ever be complacent about under-acknowledging that, as Sheldon Pollock has put it, "sense-making becomes more complicated, becomes more of a problem requiring second. order reflection, the further in time and space the origins of the text are from the reader." If the contents of my reaction were not wrong, my reaction was still misplaced.

How Does One Introduce the Buddha Biography?

On the one hand, the more one learns about the Buddha biography, the more impossible an introduction begins to seem. The Buddha biography is not a simple narrative following the life of the Buddha, moving from a clear beginning (birth) to a clear end (death and parinirvâņa). It is a story that encapsulates myriad other stories. It is so vast and so layered, textured, and complicated with so many renditions, tellings, and retellings, that the more one learns about the ever-expanding Buddha biography, the more difficult it becomes to wrap our arms around any of it. An introduction to the Buddha biography soon becomes near impossible: we find ourselves surrounded by so many recensions, artistic manifestations, and versions from different parts of the world at once that we drown in its magnificent abundance. How exactly does one introduce something as vast and ubiquitous as that?

On the other hand, an introduction to the Buddha biography is one of the most primary and predictable discussions in the field; there is no Buddhism without the Buddha. The Buddha biography is introduced constantly, in classrooms and textbooks and sermons all around the world. In this sense, introducing the Buddha biography should be easy. The story is essential, waiting for us to tell it one more time.

Indeed, the Buddha biography is perhaps the strongest throughline, the most palpable thread connecting communities and ideas, that runs right through about 2,500 years of Buddhist history: it is the story of Siddhartha Gautama, his birth, his early life as a prince, his awakening to become the Buddha, and his teaching career and death. This Buddha's life story is threaded through most texts in the vast corpus of Buddhist thought. If the Buddhist repertoire of sacred literature can fill, or even be, a library, the Buddha biography necessarily has a similar reach, and is evident on both the most reached-for and dustiest of shelves. Some Buddhist texts are entirely devoted to the Buddha biography, while others circulate independent scenes scattered between teachings. What we perceive as biography, then, is shuffled throughout the vast corpus of Buddhist writings in various ways, for various effects. Sometimes a scene emerges as the Buddha answers a question (which leads to the teaching conveyed by the text), or as he responds to a particular event. Perhaps the monks have asked him to elaborate on a legal matter, or a situation has arisen that has him contemplating a past-life narrative. Or nuns have gotten into trouble (as nuns sometimes do), and the Buddha is summoned. Whatever the situation may be, scenes of the Buddha's life unfold like the petals of a celestial mandarva flower, each one revealing an- other layer of this never-ending story. The more we learn about Buddhist texts, the more of the Buddha biography we encounter.

When it comes to engaging with this extraordinary abundance, few scholars have contributed as much as John S. Strong. From his work on the literary legends of Aśoka' and Upagupta²-both of which help us to understand the tradition's narrative trajectory-to his detailed study of particular moments in the Buddha's final life-such as his extraordinary work on the Buddha's relics, or the mysterious perfumed chamber-Strong's work quite simply has no intellectual parallel. In his recent work on the narratives that complicate the history (and historicity) of relics in Sri Lanka, he turns away from the historical to the "storical," moving away from historical reconstructions to examine the work of their "fictionality"s