Dear list members,
Our next seminar will be at 6:00-7:30pm on Thursday May 11 in the
Rogers Room (N397) of the John Woolley Building, University of
Sydney.
We hope you can attend.
Kind regards,
AABS Executive
The Lalitavistara in its Devotional and Intertextual
Context
This paper advances the proposition that the Lalitavistara, a partial biography of
the Buddha composed in the early centuries CE, is a text responding in
part to devotional elements in the narrative of the Mahābhārata. The Lalitavistara includes
one specific mention of the five Pāṇḍavas and Draupadī, and also reflects
some of the technical language used of the avatāra in the few times this doctrine
occurs on the Mahābhārata.
It also mentions the name Nārāyana in particularly interesting
ways, and uses derivatives of the verb pūj
in the sense of “to worship/act of worship” many times. Alf Hiltebeitel
has already shown that the Buddhacarita
makes reference to the Śānti- and
Anuśāsana-parvans of the Mahābhārata, and it
would be surely significant if another Buddhist text composed early in
the Common Era also refers to the Mahābhārata
in a manner that shows the author knew its narrative quite
well.
In an earlier paper Tracey Coleman has suggested the need to compare the
Buddha with Kṛṣṇa in the sense that both are regarded as exemplary
measures of dharma within
their own traditions. It is this connection with the rising popularity of
Kṛṣṇa in the early centuries of the Common Era that may have contributed
to the highly devotional nature of a text like the Lalitavistara. This
may be so notwithstanding traces of Buddhist devotionalism already in the
Pāli Canon.
Greg Bailey, formerly Reader in
Sanskrit, is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Program in Asian Studies,
La Trobe University, Melbourne. He has published translations and studies
of the Gaṇeśa Purāṇa,
Bhartṛhari’s Śatakatrayam
and books on the god Brahmā, early Buddhism and many articles
on Sanskrit literature, as well as a book on contemporary Australia. At
present he is working on social, literary and economic aspects of the
relationship between early Buddhism and the Mahābhārata, and a detailed study of
some Sanskrit verbal forms.
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