Abstract
Buddhist Studies scholarship in general, and its (re)turn to the literary specifically, is overwhelmingly concerned with texts and authors. But what can this research into “Buddhist texts” and “Buddhist authors”, however robust, ever reliably tell us if not accompanied by comparative inquiry into the destabilizing tactics of readers? This article first highlights analytical resources for a comparative history of reading Buddhist literature in Inner Asia by looking to the work of Michel de Certeau and Roger Chartier. I then turn to a case study of collaborative reading that developed across the contiguous monastic and imperial networks binding together Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu, and Chinese readers at the turn of the 18th century. Focused specifically on letter exchanges between the polyglot scholars Güng Gombojab, Katok Tséwang Norbu, and Situ Paṇchen, I underscore how collaborative reading developed to open the literary heritage of trans-Eurasia beyond the technical abilities or material access of any single reader.
Highlights
The knowledge and knowledge practices of Buddhist scholasticism in late-imperial Inner Asia was overwhelmingly concerned with text, much like the Buddhist Studies scholarship that has long been devoted to, and influenced by, its study
Historical work in Buddhist Studies, especially when it is focused on late imperial scholasticism in Inner Asia, is overwhelmingly what it has been for two centuries: a text-centered endeavor
In what Michel de Certeau called markets of symbolic capital and interpretative authority—in “scriptural economies,” such as we find in 18th century Buddhist scholastic communities in Inner Asia to which I turn—texts are unmade, parsed, ribboned and braided anew by reading, alone and together across great chasms of space and language
Summary
The knowledge and knowledge practices of Buddhist scholasticism in late-imperial Inner Asia was overwhelmingly concerned with text, much like the Buddhist Studies scholarship that has long been devoted to, and influenced by, its study. It is true that this focus on textual cultures has been productively decentered in recent decades in the study of contemporary Tibetan, Mongolian, and Siberian Buddhist communities. Historical work in Buddhist Studies, especially when it is focused on late imperial scholasticism in Inner Asia, is overwhelmingly what it has been for two centuries: a text-centered endeavor.. Inquiries into the discursive content of texts, their rhetorical flourish, their poetic qualities, and their genre divisions continue to fill monographs, volumes, and special issues of journals such as this edition of Religions.6 These last two centuries of disciplining Inner Asian text as an object of Buddhist Studies inquiry—whether of text inscribed in stone, paper, flesh, or sound—have always been accompanied by the disciplining of Inner Asian authors. Inner Asian scholasticism, for example, is traditionally rendered into an object of contemporary Philosophy or History by engaging text by appeal to authors In this normative mode of disciplinary analysis, the social context, profile, and putative “intentions” of an author help organize the interpretation of “the meaning” of the texts that he, and very rarely she, once wrote. I show that by means of long-distance correspondence made possible by the centralized bureaucracies of contiguous empires, these lay and monastic literati could call upon co-readers thousands of miles away to read texts on their behalf, across a plethora of languages beyond the linguistic abilities of any one of them, drawn from material texts and archives that were otherwise inaccessible
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