chapter 5 Not Just Stories: Jain and Buddhist Narratives as Epistemic Technology Tillo Detige The abundance of stories in South Asian traditions is proverbial, with diverse narrative genres constituting extensive bodies of stories composed or told in various languages. Among these, this chapter focusses on Buddhist jātakas and Jain dharmakathās, narratives about karma and rebirth,1 revisiting their functioning in subject formation as what I term an epistemic technology.2 My concept sits close to Michel Foucault’s “technologies of the self,” practices “which permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”3 I argue that like ritual, devotional, and meditational practices, South Asian stories construct practical, embodied knowledge which is distinct from, and cannot be reduced to the abstract, conceptual knowledge derived from theoretical learning. Story-telling has more precisely a distinctly relational, intersubjective aspect both in terms of social aspects of the practice and the listeners’ mimetic attuning to the experiences of story actors. As such, story praxis forms a structural feature of the Buddhist and Jain traditions, active in the epistemic formation of their listeners, and by extension in these traditions’ cultural and social continuation.4 1 For a study already combining the stories of these two traditions, see Naomi Appleton, “Heir to One’s Karma: Multi-life Personal Genealogies in Early Buddhist and Jain Narrative,” Religions of South Asia 5, no. 1/2 (2011): 227–44; Naomi Appleton, “The Multi-life Stories of Gautama Buddha and Vardhamāna Mahāvīra,” Buddhist Studies Review 29, no. 1 (2012): 5–16; Appleton, Narrating Karma and Rebirth: Buddhist and Jain Multi-Life Stories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 2 For an account of the function of stories in a Hindu tradition, see Kirin Narayan, Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). 3 Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 1 (London: Penguin, 1997), 225. 4 For a comparable argument regarding the function of ritual and devotion in Jainism, see Tillo Detige, “The Veneration of Living Digambara Jaina Renouncers” (in preparation). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004417526_007 For use by the Author only | © 2020 Koninklijke Brill NV 96 Detige Already given the sheer prevalence and popularity of stories in South Asia, one would expect scholarly accounts of South Asian traditions to grant them a similarly central position in their analyses. Yet Western scholarship instead long based its understanding of these traditions on a reading of theoretical texts and the recording of abstract “doctrines,” marginalizing the narratives and failing to attend to their functions. If attention was given to Buddhist and Jain stories, they were appreciated and dealt with as mere stories, as folklore or literary compositions, as a popular layer of the tradition, an exclusively lay phenomenon divorced from renouncers’ practices, or a late, “medieval” development, contrasted to a putatively pure, original tradition. Even today, when the issue of the narratives’ function is broached, and stories are appreciated as relevant dimensions of these traditions, they often continue to be conceived of as tools or media for the dissemination of religious doctrines and beliefs, mere containers communicating preformed, theoretical contents from story-teller to listener. Bereft of any particular properties, according to this conceptualization the use of stories could just as well be replaced by any other form of knowledge transfer and acquisition, any other way of teaching and learning. I argue instead that narratives function as an idiosyncratic mode of learning, and of learning how to learn, how to think about, and how to experience the world, which any attempt at etic understanding and description of these traditions needs to appreciate. 1 Buddhist Jātakas The jātakas or “birth stories” of the Buddha are among the most popular Buddhist narratives.5 Individual jātakas relate events from earlier lives of Gautama Buddha, the historical buddha. Many jātakas are recorded as having 5 On the jātakas, see Léon Feer, A Study of the Jātakas: Analytical and Critical, trans. G. M. Foulkes (1875; Calcutta: Susil Gupta, 1963); Thomas W. Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth-Stories ( Jataka Tales): The Commentarial Introduction Entitled Nidāna-Kathā, The Story of the Lineage (1880; New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1999), i–lxxx; Frank E. Reynolds, “The Many Lives of Buddha: A Study of Sacred Biography and Theravada Tradition,” in The Biographical Process: Studies in the History and Psychology of Religion, ed. Frank E. Reynolds and Donald Capps (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), 37–61; John Garrett Jones, Tales and Teachings of the Buddha: The Jātaka Stories in Relation to the Pāli Canon (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979); Oskar von Hinüber, A Handbook of Pāli Literature (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), 54–58; Frank E. Reynolds, “Rebirth Traditions and the Lineages of Gotama: A Case Study in Theravāda Buddhology,” in Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions of South and Southeast Asia, ed. Juliane Schober (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), 19–39; Sarah Shaw, The Jātakas: Birth Stories of the Bodhisatta (New Delhi: Penguin, 2006), xix–lxvii; Naomi For use by the Author only | © 2020 Koninklijke Brill NV Jain and Buddhist Narratives as Epistemic Technology 119 crypto-religious. This culturally defined, interpretative matrix needs to be transcended to fully comprehend the function of stories as a fundamental characteristic of South Asian traditions. This allows a structurally different model of Buddhist and Jain epistemologies that highlights and appreciates these traditions’ specific “otherness” instead of constructing them as variants of Western religion, as belief-systems centred on scripturally sanctioned doctrines, their stories functioning merely to transmit the latter. 9 Unlearning to Learn through Stories Much of the past decades of research on South Asian traditions has been devoted to analysing increasing Western influences since colonial times. In the case of Buddhism, such epistemic infiltration gave rise to transformed traditions which have been referred to as “Protestant Buddhism” or “modern Buddhism.”91 As a part of such processes, the role of stories has also eroded and yielded to other ways of learning. Such is corroborated by Ranjini Obeyesekere in introducing her translation of the Saddharmaratnāvaliya, a fifteenth-century Sinhala story collection. Obeyesekere attests both the importance and crucial function of stories (and rituals) in her Sri Lankan, Buddhist community in the mid-twentieth century, as well as their demise and instead the rise of doctrinal teaching since: Looking back on my childhood, I realize that we were never given religious instruction as such, either in school or at home. We participated in Buddhist rituals and ceremonies, mostly with the extended kin group, went to the temple on full moon days (that, too, mainly during vacations), and listened to many, many Buddhist stories. That was how we learned to be Buddhists. The stories of the Saddharmaratnāvaliya and the Jātaka Tales have, I think, always performed this function, ever since they were translated into Sinhala. They have been central to the dissemination of Buddhist values and doctrine, copied and recopied by monks, and passed on from generation to generation. In recent years [these stories’] role has diminished. Buddhism is taught as a subject in schools, in Sunday schools or Daham pāsäl, that have sprung up all over the country, and children study 91 See, for example, Snodgrass, “Defining Modern Buddhism”; and Hallisey, “Roads Taken and not Taken,” 47 (and 60n75 for further references). For use by the Author only | © 2020 Koninklijke Brill NV 120 Detige doctrinal texts and understandably, are extremely bored with them. Ours was a much more exciting way to come to the Teachings.92 Obeyesekere’s perspective on stories as “disseminating values and doctrine” itself indicates a doctrinal bias permeating her own thinking, or is merely an undertheorized phrasing. Yet what I retain here is her testimony of how the theoretical learning of doctrine has replaced stories as the dominant method of knowledge acquisition in institutional settings. Gananath Obeyesekere’s analysis of the scholarly depreciation of jātakas similarly starts by noting the demise of the jātakas’ importance.93 This is the intellectual pedigree which causes a Sri Lankan scholar at the end of the twentieth century to censure a Sinhala collection of jātaka tales, the Jātakapota, as being incompatible with an “educated” worldview, as “positively naïve,” and as “positively damaging” to “an educated Buddhist view.”94 Instead of being understood as a processoriented, embodied, and intersubjective technique for the cultivation of specific experiences, the stories are seen as expressions of irrational beliefs which are to be discarded in the light of and in favor of a rational worldview.95 The expectation that a Buddhist “educated view” is more rational even than any other (“much less …”) signals a typical “Protestant Buddhist” stance. In fact, Rhys Davids had already, quite accurately, predicted a declining interest in the jātakas vis-à-vis the, in his perspective, “rival” truth claims of science and the modernistic Western teleology of “progress.”96 92 93 94 95 96 Thera Dharmasēna, Jewels of the Doctrine: Stories of the Saddharma Ratnāvaliya, trans. Ranjini Obeyesekere (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), x. Gananath Obeyesekere, “Buddhism and Conscience: An Exploratory Essay,” Daedalus 120, no. 3 (1991): 231: “These stories were the lifeblood of everyday Buddhism, yet they are almost never part of the scholarly discussion in the modern literature of Buddhism…. [T]heir almost total neglect in Buddhist Studies is because they have been relegated as unimportant folktales that have little to do with the profoundly philosophical corpus” (emphasis added). Merlin Peris, “The Jātaka Bodhisatta,” Sri Lankan Journal of the Humanities 22 (1996): 62, quoted in Naomi Appleton, “A Place for the Boddhisatta: The Local and the Universal in Jātaka Stories,” Acta Orientalia Vilnensia 8, no. 1 (2007): 118: “That they are to any extent genuine past-birth experiences of the Buddha, brought to light by this power of past-birth recollection, is thus not possible to be maintained as an educated view—and much less as an educated Buddhist view. To go beyond this and indiscriminately accept them as reflecting the Boddhisatta character would indeed be positively naïve—if it were not also positively damaging of it.” Reynolds (“The Many Lives of Buddha,” 57) also notices modernist reformers’ deemphasizing of jātakas as part of a process of “demythologization.” Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth-Stories, lxxix: “The popularity of the Jātakas as amusing stories may pass away. How can it stand against the rival claims of the fairy tales of science, For use by the Author only | © 2020 Koninklijke Brill NV Jain and Buddhist Narratives as Epistemic Technology 121 The dismissal of jātakas first occurred in the rationalist depiction of Buddhism constructed by nineteenth-century Western savants. As a component of “Protestant Buddhism” it then took to the soil of the tradition’s native lands. One striking case of this historic transplantation of Western, culturallydefined interpretations of the jātakas took place around the turn of the twentieth century through the relations between the Thai court and Western scholars of Pāli and Buddhism.97 In 1904 King Chulalongkorn published an essay on the jātakas which has remained very influential in Thailand for the understanding of the jātakas. Through a large survey he had conducted in the preceding decade, Chulalongkorn had been dismayed to find out that in most of his kingdom jātakas and other stories formed the basis of Buddhist teaching, and had recommended alternative teaching materials to be dispatched throughout the land.98 In his essay, Chulalongkorn adopted Western scholars’ philological, historicist, rationalist, and folkloristic interests and a prioris, including a disparaging attitude towards the stories. The monarch echoed, and in fact plagiarized, much of the ideas of Rhys Davids. His arguments for dismissing the jātaka stories certainly sound familiar: the Jātakaṭṭhavaṇṇanā is not entirely canonical and hence dispensable as a source, jātaka tales are “preBuddhist”99 and can thus be discarded or at least marginalized, and the idea of rebirth is unbefitting a rationalist view. For Chulalongkorn, the stories of past lives are therefore mere folktales or moralizing parables which can only be mined for information on ancient society.100 Jory ultimately frames his discussion of Chulalongkorn’s take on the jātakas in an argument that the latter served his political interests. Jātakas formed a thriving part of the Thai popular culture, and by delegitimizing the jātakas, Chulalongkorn attempted to curb alternative forms of authority represented in these tales and in their performance to replace them by his own modernist, centralized, administrative state.101 While this does not necessarily exclude political strategies, pragmatic motives, and conscious decisions and designs, I consider the Thai monarch’s perspectives on the jātakas, notably his rationalism 97 98 99 100 101 and the entrancing, many-sided story of man’s gradual rise and progress?” “Progress,” in Rhys Davids’s thought, can be taken as referring not only to modernity but also to a religious evolution culminating in Protestant Christianity; see Snodgrass, “Defining Modern Buddhism,” 192. Jory, “Thai and Western Buddhist Scholarship,” 893–909. Jory, “Thai and Western Buddhist Scholarship,” 910–1. Here a historicist perspective in which the historical Buddha stands at the origin of the Buddhist tradition also replaces an understanding of the Buddhist tradition as timeless and renewed by countless numbers of buddhas. Jory, “Thai and Western Buddhist Scholarship,” esp. 893–97. Jory, “Thai and Western Buddhist Scholarship,” 910–14. For use by the Author only | © 2020 Koninklijke Brill NV 122 Detige and historicism, as situated on a deeper, epistemic level, prior to his policies and political ideas. Chulalongkorn’s essay and the broader epistemic shift of which it was both an expression and a further catalyst led to an even stronger decrease of the jātakas’ importance in Thailand than in Sri Lanka.102 While in both countries jātakas remain popular to this day, the cultural setting in which they thrive is characterized by an altered episteme, clipping short the stories of much of their potential in terms of knowledge production. In the contemporary period, where in the words of Vallely “a cognitive relationship to the world reigns,”103 and gains a foothold in new territories, “the non-rational, nondiscursive elements of human experience are marginalized.”104 So it is to at least some degree with the narrative mode of learning, and the intersubjective, embodied knowledge associated with it. So just stories after all? Structurally embedding stories in our model of South Asian traditions, accommodating them on their rightful place at the heart of these historical traditions, can still be a way to learn to learn differently, perhaps unlearn this unlearning. Acknowledgements Ghent University. Research supported by a fellowship granted by the FWO (Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek). An earlier, partial version of this chapter’s arguments appeared in Dutch in Tillo Detige, “Een haan van deeg en een hert van goud: verhalen over karma en hergeboorte uit jaïnisme en boeddhisme,” in India: Een wereld van verhalen, ed. 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For use by the Author only | © 2020 Koninklijke Brill NV Parables in Changing Contexts Essays on the Study of Parables in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism Edited by Eric Ottenheijm Marcel Poorthuis LEIDEN | BOSTON Contents Introduction. Parables in Changing Contexts: a Preliminary Status Questionis 1 Eric Ottenheijm and Marcel Poorthuis part 1 Parables as Religious Practice 1 On the Rhetoric of “Inheritance” in Synoptic and Rabbinic Parables Eric Ottenheijm 2 Parables in the Service of Emotional Translation Ronit Nikolsky 3 From Midrash to Mashal: the Sacrifice of Isaac as Misunderstanding Marc Bregman 4 The Transformative Creativity of Islamic Storytelling: Jewish and Christian Sources of Parables in the Ḥadīth 72 Marcel Poorthuis 5 Not Just Stories: Jain and Buddhist Narratives as Epistemic Technology 95 Tillo Detige 15 37 57 part 2 Redefining Genre 6 Talking Animals in Parables: a Contradictio in terminis? Lieve M. Teugels 129 7 A Fable on Two Mosquitoes from the Babylonian Talmud: Observations on Genre and Gender 149 Tal Ilan For use by the Author only | © 2020 Koninklijke Brill NV vi Contents 8 The Redactional Role of Parables in Genesis Rabbah Tamar Kadari 9 A Note on Parables in the Babylonian Talmud Geoffrey Herman 160 182 part 3 Plots, Motifs, and Characters 10 The Invasion of the King: the Virtual Mashal as Foundation of Storytelling 205 Marcel Poorthuis 11 Parables, Fiction, and Midrash: the Ten Maidens and the Bridegroom (Matt 25:1–13) 226 Peter J. Tomson 12 It Is Like a Woman Who …? Women in Early Rabbinic and Early Christian Parables 236 Albertina Oegema, Jonathan Pater and Martijn Stoutjesdijk 13 “If a nefesh sins …” (Lev 4:2): Parables on the Soul in Leviticus Rabbah 4 265 Lorena Miralles-Maciá 14 From Debtor to Slave: an Explorative Bildfeld Analysis of Debt and Slavery in Early Rabbinic and New Testament Parables 280 Martijn J. Stoutjesdijk 15 Parables in Changing Contexts: a Retrospect Eric Ottenheijm and Marcel Poorthuis Cumulative Bibliography 307 Index of Authors 331 Index of Subjects, Biblical and Ancient Names Index of Ancient Sources 341 301 333 For use by the Author only | © 2020 Koninklijke Brill NV