Overview

Vamsa is a dynamic genre of Buddhist history filled with otherworldly characters and the exploits of real-life heroes. These narratives collapse the temporal distance between Buddha and the reader, building an emotionally resonant connection with an outsized religious figure and a longed-for past. The fifth-century Pali text Mahavamsa is a particularly effective example, using metaphor and other rhetorical devices to ethically transform readers, to stimulate and then to calm them. Reading the Mahavamsa advocates a new, literary approach to this text by revealing its embedded reading advice (to experience samvega and pasada) and affective work of metaphors (the Buddha's dharma as light) and salient characters (nagas). Kristin Scheible argues that the Mahavamsa requires a particular kind of reading. In the text's proem, special instructions draw readers to the metaphor of light and the nagas, or salient snake-beings, of the first chapter. Nagas are both model worshippers and unworthy hoarders of Buddha's relics. As nonhuman agents, they challenge political and historicist readings of the text. Scheible sees these slippery characters and the narrative's potent and playful metaphors as techniques for refocusing the reader's attention on the text's emotional aims. Her work explains the Mahavamsa's central motivational role in contemporary Sri Lankan Buddhist and nationalist circles. It also speaks broadly to strategies of reading religious texts and to the internal and external cues that give such works lives beyond the page.

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9780231171380

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Reviews

This ground-breaking book successfully provides a corrective in the study of Buddhism and Sri Lanka by going beyond the received, common interpretations of the great chronicle text, the Mahavamsa. -- Bradley Clough, University of Montana In its proem and in its chapter colophons, the Mahava?sa repeatedly proclaims itself as aiming to inculcate sa?vega ( anxious thrill ) and pasada ( serene satisfaction ) in its readers. Taking this as her cue, Kristin Scheible explores the ways in which the text encodes these two emotions and their relationship to one another, in its use of light imagery, and in the role it gives to nagas (snake like divinities) and Buddha-relics. In so doing, she views the work as a piece of religious literature, in contrast to other scholars who have generally seen it through a historian's lens, or who have read it from a political or ethnic perspective as something intended to bolster notions of kingship and Sinhalese nationalism. Clearly written, solidly grounded in Buddhist scholarship, well attuned to theory in the fields of history, literature, and religion, and just plain insightful, this book is inspiring not only for what it has to say about an important Sri Lankan Buddhist text, but more generally for our study of Buddhist literature as a whole. -- John S. Strong, Bates College

This ground-breaking book successfully provides a corrective in the study of Buddhism and Sri Lanka by going beyond the received, common interpretations of the great chronicle text, the Mahavamsa. -- Bradley Clough, University of Montana

Author Information

Kristin Scheible is associate professor of religion and humanities at Reed College.

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