Natalie Gummer

In the “Chapter on the Benefits to the Performer of the Dharma” (dharmabhāṇakānuśaṃsāparivartaḥ) in the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka (Lotus Sūtra), the Buddha proclaims the many remarkable transformations that will take place in the six sense faculties of the performer of the dharma (dharmabhāṇaka). An analysis of this chapter clarifies both the sūtra’s normative vision for the performance of the dharmabhāṇaka who announces his sensory enhancements and the nature of the bodily transformations that the sūtra promises to enact upon him as a consequence of his performance. This paper demonstrates that the performed sūtra enacts the interdependent rituals of abhiṣeka and darśan through verbal practices of impersonation, self-praise, and ontological transformation. In the process, it sheds new light on the self-referentiality of some Mahāyāna sūtras as a form of performed and performative utterance that aims to transform both speakers and listeners. As in other traditions of sensory-somatic transformation through verbal impersonation in ancient South Asia, the ritual-dramatic utterance of the sūtra engenders a manifestation of presence that takes shape in the complex embodied intersections among the “original” speaker (in this case, the Buddha), the performer, and the audience.

In important ways, texts that are designated buddhavacana, “buddha-speech,” are rituals: at once power substance, ritual manual, and the Buddha’s textual body/relic, their ritual enactment preserves his life essence and enables him to continue to speak and act in the world. These notions, rooted in the ritual cosmology of ancient South Asia, find expression in “biographies” that bear witness to the texts’ transformative powers, as well as a dizzying array of ritual and textual technologies that make the power of the Buddha’s speech-body present and accessible. Seen through the lens of the sutras, seemingly mundane or rote textual practices become potent ritual processes through which the Buddha’s verbal essence is progressively incorporated, reproduced, and disseminated. Sutras thus offer a powerful challenge to common contemporary assumptions both about the nature of language and about the kinds of practices deemed to be “ritual.”

https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=39998

In this paper, I argue that some Mahāyāna sūtras offer ritual and verbal means for transformative visual encounters with buddhas and their perfect fields. I take as a particularly instructive instance the penultimate chapter of the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa, "The Visual Encounter (darśana) with the Tathāgata Akṣobhya and the Fetching of the Abhirati World," (abhiratilokadhātv-ānayanākṣobhyatathāgatadarśana). The chapter begins with a question posed by the Buddha to Vimalakīrti: when he is "desirous of darśana," of seeing and being seen by the Tathāgata, how does he see him? Vimalakīrti replies with a lengthy apophatic description of the Tathāgata, making it clear that he is, as Vimalakīrti concludes, "inexpressible" (avacanīya). Yet almost immediately thereafter, Vimalakīrti provides an actual opportunity for seeing a Tathāgata: the Tathāgata Akṣobhya, whose entire vast world sphere Abhirati, its glittering features amassed in fairly vivid detail in the sūtra, the bodhisattva gathers up into his hand and brings into this Saha world in order to give darśana to Śākyamuni's assembly. Through this encounter, all present are transformed. While the reality of the Tathāgata is ostensibly "inexpressible," then, he and his world can nonetheless be seen and brought into our own, even when both seem far, far away—and precisely through the verbal and ritual technologies of the sūtra, which make him imaginatively present to audiences and allow darśana of him. These technologies have significant implications for our interpretation of Buddhist “literature,” which often defies any comfortable distinction between textual and visual experience.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/716427

Feel free to contact me if you do not have access to the journal.

Abstract:
In this essay, I analyze the multilayered metaphors of sovereignty and sovereign ritual through which the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka and the Suvarṇa(pra)bhāsa, two Mahāyāna sūtras, represent and enact their own potency. I develop a theory of ritual-poetic speech acts and an interpretative methodology from this analysis. According to these sūtras, the dharma that constitutes them is the verbal essence of sovereignty. It consecrates its listeners through predictions and related speech acts that are activated in the moment of utterance; it proclaims the royal decrees through which buddhas govern reality in their own fields; it embodies all buddhas and makes them present in its eternal ritual- poetic substance. Through the performative strategies mobilized by these metaphors, the sūtras rhetorically position their audiences as subjects of (and subject to) this supreme sovereign power and motivate their engagement in a progressive series of ritual-verbal practices of incorporation by which they are in turn transformed into buddhas with the same sovereign essence. The ritual metaphors and mechanisms through which these transformations are evoked and effected reveal linguistic theories and practices quite different from those that continue to dominate the study of religious texts, and demand that we develop new approaches to the interpretation of these and other texts.

The self-referential strategies of Mahāyāna sūtras are woven with time. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, the conception of time as linear, quantifiable, and homogeneous is strongly privileged both in secular history and in much of contemporary life—indeed, to such an extent that different understandings of time are all too easily viewed as evidence of false consciousness. Without denying the considerable insight to be gained by means of the historicist lens through which most contemporary scholars (myself included) usually approach the interpretation of Buddhist sūtras, I seek in this paper to explore the temporal alternatives found in the sūtras themselves. I focus in particular on the temporal frameworks and strategies employed in the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka and the Suvarṇa[pra]bhāsottama, which frequently intervene in the past, present, and future of their audiences. What might we learn by attending to the tension between historical readings of these texts and the temporal frameworks at play in the sūtras themselves? How might the conceptions and experiences of time offered by the sūtras challenge our assumptions about time and history? Are we able to imagine a form of historiography that does not require the imposition of a single temporal framework? I analyze the conceptions and manipulations of time in these sūtras with the aim of identifying alternative hermeneutical approaches and expanding our temporal understanding.

In this paper, I read the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka (Lotus Sūtra) as a highly sophisticated theory and practice of performative utterance. I bring the sūtra’s own stunning array of performative strategies into conversation with J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, as refracted through Shoshana Felman’s psychoanalytic reading of Austin’s work in The Scandal of the Speaking Body. The performative devices (upāya) employed in the sūtra include pervasive self-referentiality, vows, predictions, stories of past lives that shape the present, and direct address to the listener, including explicit instructions on what to do with the Buddha’s speech. They also include ubiquitous descriptions of the surprise, delight, and intense pleasure that the sūtra claims to engender in its listeners—descriptions that are themselves highly performative. Taking a cue from Felman, I argue that the connection between performative efficacy and the erotics of the dharma is located in the Buddha’s body, a body in which (so his teachings tell us) potency is transferred from the Buddha’s sheathed genitals to his mouth—a mouth that continues to perform through the embodiment of speech in the sūtra. The pleasurable performance of this literary body of the Buddha produces “sons born of his mouth.” This simultaneous enactment and theorization of performative utterance has much to offer contemporary theories of the performative, while raising a number of provocative questions about the relationship between literature and the body.

What are Mahāyāna sūtras, and how should we read them?  In this paper, I explore the implications of our answers to these fundamental questions for contemporary translation practices. The scholarly tradition we have inherited generally interprets these texts as repositories of doctrinal teachings, but the sūtras themselves, with their visions of cosmic transformation, elaborate self-referentiality, and striking performative elements, resist (or at least exceed) this characterization.  Indeed, I have recently argued that some Mahāyāna sūtras figure their own performance as an aesthetic, dramatic form of sacrificial ritual, one that offers a verbal substitute for the bodily self-sacrifice of the bodhisattva, as well as the flesh offerings of Brahmanical ritual. How does one read, recite, or hear the ritual body of the Buddha? If we fail to ask such questions, we are bound to impose uncritically and ahistorically our own assumptions about what a text (not to mention a Mahāyāna sūtra) is, and how it ought to be read—and translated.

Given that our conceptions of what a sūtra is and how to interpret it are historically situated, which understandings do we privilege when we translate, and why? Translating a sūtra as a doctrinal work is quite a different undertaking from translating the aesthetically pleasing, ritually recited and resuscitated body of the Buddha, and such different modes of translation further enable and constrain particular avenues of interpretation for subsequent audiences. This paper advocates for a more explicit and deliberate exploration of different interpretations of Mahāyāna sūtras and the different modes of translation that they warrant.

Early Buddhist thought and practice were shaped in several important respects by the rejection of the sacrificial rituals that were so central to Brahmanical tradition. For instance, as scholars have recognized, the bodhisattva path inverts the logic of substitution that informs animal sacrifice: the bodhisattva perfects himself not through sacrificing another in his place, but by sacrificing himself for the sake of others. This article argues that some Mahāyāna sūtras (specifically, the Suvarṇa-(pra)bhāsottama, the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka, and the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa) invert this inversion by portraying themselves as aesthetic, dramatic forms of sacrifice, rituals of recitation that obviate the violence not only of animal sacrifice, but also of the bodhisattva's self-sacrifice. These sūtras substitute themselves for both the fire and the food of sacrificial ritual, offering audiences a performative technology for transformation and a bloodless path to buddhahood.

The self-referential discourse that characterizes the sub-genre of to which the Sūtra of Utmost Golden Radiance (Suvarṇa(pra)bhāsottama Sūtra) belongs has led scholars to posit a "cult of the book" focused on the written sūtra as potent object. While Buddhists in various times and places have certainly revered the material text, the central role many such sūtras accord to the dharmabhāṇaka, the Buddhist preacher, demands that greater attention be paid to the role of oral performance in the actualization of the sūtra's self-proclaimed transformative potential. Through an examination of both what the sūtra has to say about its preacher, and how the preacher’s performance changes the meaning of the text, this article argues for the centrality of oral performance and aural reception in the sūtra's normative vision, and for the importance of deriving an interpretive methodology from that normative vision

In this presentation, Natalie Gummer looks at the “Chapter on the Benefits to the Performer of the Dharma” (dharmabhāṇakānuśaṃsāparivartaḥ) in the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka (Lotus Sūtra), in which the Buddha proclaims the many remarkable transformations that will take place in the six sense faculties of the performer of the dharma (dharmabhāṇaka). Her analysis of this chapter clarifies the sūtra’s normative vision both for the self-referential performance of the dharmabhāṇaka and for the bodily transformations that he is said to undergo as a consequence of his performance. In the process, the presentation sheds light on the temporal aspects of self-referentiality as elements in the embodied performance of authority and demonstrates some of the ritual and performative precedents for the creation of new forms of buddhavacana.

Why do stories of past lives and visions of the future play such a central role in many Mahāyāna sūtras? In this presentation, I explore how attending to the narrative and performative orchestration of time in the sūtras can enhance our understanding of their promises to transform the present lives of their listeners, readers, and reciters. This exploration also offers fresh perspectives on the ways in which contemporary approaches to narrating the past and the future may offer comparable, if also quite different, resources for altering the present.

I propose to explore the translation of the concept of upāyakauśalya in the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka and related Mahāyāna sūtras. I seek to examine both its role in the “translation” of Buddhism for contemporary Euro-American audiences and its efficacy as a way of thinking through the process of the (literal) translation of Buddhist texts. These two modes of translation are deeply interrelated, and treating them in tandem will prove illuminating of both.

Scholarly treatments of upāyakauśalya generally cast the concept in a doctrinal role as a hermeneutical strategy that enables the happy coexistence of conflicting teachings, albeit in a strictly hierarchized relationship to one another. I have no intention of calling this doctrinal reading into question; evidence of the term’s use in this role abounds, both in Buddhist sūtras and, perhaps most influentially, in Chinese Buddhist scholastic debates that seek to rank the Buddha’s teachings and the sūtras that convey them. But I do want to offer evidence of a quite different reading, both in Buddhist sūtras and in the uses to which they were put, and in light of that evidence, to probe the preeminence of doctrine in the construction of Buddhism in the Euro-American academy.

Much of my recent work points to the centrality of performance and performativity in Mahāyāna sūtra literature. Read through this lens, whatever doctrinal hedging might be happening in these sūtras, upāyakauśalya is also articulating a sophisticated theory—and practice—of performative language, one that overlaps with but also reaches beyond that of J.L. Austin: through an array of devices, the sūtras actively intervene and reshape the experience of listeners. Why, then, do scholars of Buddhism (myself included) so often default to the doctrinal reading? I suggest that this move has to do with the ways in which we have “translated” Buddhist literature into the doxocentric view of religion that emerged with and undergirds the maintenance of secular modern spaces (like the academy).

In conclusion, I want to turn from metaphorical translation to the actual translation of Buddhist texts and ask how a performative reading of upāyakauśalya might offer a different set of considerations and a different approach for translators of Mahāyāna sūtra literature. How do we translate performative efficacy, and how is that different from translating the doctrinal “meaning” of a text?

This presentation explores how "The Appearance of a Stūpa" chapter in the Sanskrit Lotus Sūtra functions as a form of performative utterance that embodies and makes present the past and the future. In the process, it also creates the conditions of transformation for the sūtra's auditors and orators in the moment of utterance. In this way, my approach to the text encompasses the subjective, cosmological, and bodily/performative aspects of reading that inform the workshop.

The sūtra claims to make the whole body of the Buddha present, then makes that body appear in a colossal jeweled stūpa (reliquary structure) that emerges from the earth. But the buddha interred within is still very much alive—and indeed, every time the sūtra is preached, he reappears and speaks again. And his appearance is the impetus for making present through story the unimaginably distant past and future. I read this text as a simultaneous meditation on and manipulation of time as the medium—and language as the agent—of transformation.

In this paper, I propose to read the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka (Lotus Sūtra) as a highly sophisticated theory and practice of performative utterance. I bring the sūtra’s own stunning array of performative strategies into conversation with J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, as refracted through Shoshana Felman’s psychoanalytic reading of Austin’s work in The Scandal of the Speaking Body. The performative devices (upāya) employed in the sūtra include pervasive self-referentiality, vows, predictions, stories of past lives that shape the present, and direct address to the listener, including explicit instructions on what to do with the Buddha’s speech. They also include ubiquitous descriptions of the surprise, delight, and intense pleasure that the sūtra claims to engender in its listeners—descriptions that are themselves highly performative. Taking a cue from Felman, I argue that the connection between performative efficacy and the erotics of the dharma is located in the Buddha’s body, a body in which (so his teachings tell us) potency is transferred from the Buddha’s sheathed genitals to his mouth—a mouth that continues to perform through the embodiment of speech in the sūtra. The pleasurable performance of this literary body of the Buddha produces “sons born of his mouth.” This simultaneous enactment and theorization of performative utterance has much to offer contemporary theories of the performative, while raising a number of provocative questions about the relationship between literature and the body.

How do our assumptions about time affect the ways in which we read? As recent scholarship has demonstrated, the conception of time as linear, quantifiable, and homogeneous is strongly privileged both in secular history and in much of contemporary life—indeed, to such an extent that different understandings of time are all too easily viewed as evidence of false consciousness. Without denying the considerable insight to be gained by means of the historicist lens through which most contemporary scholars (myself included) usually approach the interpretation of Buddhist sūtras, I seek in this paper to explore alternatives found in the sūtras themselves. I focus in particular on the temporal frameworks and strategies employed in some Mahāyāna sūtras (the Suvarṇa[pra]bhāsottama, the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka, and a few others). These sūtras frequently collapse past, present, and future and attempt to draw their audiences into a transcendent time-space not subject to the limitations of history. What might we learn by attending to the tension between historical readings of these texts and the claims to temporal transcendence made by the sūtras themselves? How might the conceptions and experiences of time offered by the sūtras challenge our assumptions about time and history? Can we even begin to imagine a form of historiography that does not require the imposition of a single temporal framework? I wish to analyze the conceptions and manipulations of time in these sūtras with the aim of identifying alternative hermeneutical approaches and expanding our temporal understanding.

What exactly are Mahāyāna sūtras, and how should we read them?  In this paper, I want to explore the implications of our answer to this fundamental question for contemporary translation practices. The scholarly tradition we have inherited generally interprets these texts as repositories of doctrinal teachings, but the sūtras themselves, with their visions of cosmic transformation, elaborate self-referentiality, and striking performative elements, resist (or at least exceed) this characterization.  Indeed, I have recently argued that some Mahāyāna sūtras figure their own performance as an aesthetic, dramatic form of sacrificial ritual, one that offers a verbal substitute for the bodily self-sacrifice of the bodhisattva, as well as the flesh offerings of Brahmanical ritual. But how, then, are we to interpret these sūtras? How might historical Buddhist readers (and perhaps more saliently, auditors) have experienced these overtly performative works? How does one read, recite, or hear the ritual body of the Buddha? The obvious fact that these questions resist any definitive answer should not prevent us from asking them. Indeed, if we fail to do so, we are bound to impose uncritically and ahistorically our own assumptions about what a text (not to mention a Mahāyāna sūtra) is, and how it ought to be read—and translated.

Given that our conceptions of what a sūtra is and how to interpret it are historically situated, which understandings do we privilege when we translate, and why? Translating a sūtra as a doctrinal work is quite a different undertaking from translating the aesthetically pleasing, ritually recited body of the Buddha, and such different modes of translation further enable and constrain particular avenues of interpretation for subsequent audiences. Our understanding of Mahāyāna literature would be greatly enriched through a more explicit and deliberate exploration of different interpretations of Mahāyāna sūtras, and the different modes of translation that they warrant.

In this paper, I argue that the Suvarṇaprabhāsottamasūtra, a Mahāyāna Buddhist sūtra deeply concerned with sovereignty, draws a functional equivalence between rituals of sacrifice through which sovereignty is established and maintained and aesthetic-dramatic-emotive experience (specifically, of the sūtra itself). This argument builds on Daud Ali’s provocative speculation that the absence of food and feasting in representations of the South Asian early medieval royal court marks an aversion toward sacrifice. This aversion, prompted in part by Buddhist critiques of the Vedic figuration of kingship and society in sacrificial terms (the king as “feeder” and the people as food), contributed to the cultivation of less violent modes of courtly enjoyment. The Suvarṇaprabhāsottama both bolsters and nuances Ali’s theories. In place of flesh sacrifice (whether that of the Vedic victim or of the self-sacrificing bodhisattva), we find the sacrifice and consumption of a textual body, replacing violence with eloquent performance and the intense aesthetic pleasure it engenders, yet clearly invoking sacrificial and consecratory rituals in its account of its performance, substance, and effects. The ritual transformations of king and cosmos are said to be brought about through the eloquent performance of the sūtra and the aesthetic responses of auditors. By extension, this sūtra and others like it may illuminate the broader connection between the exercise of sovereignty and the experience of literary-poetic works: eloquent performance and aesthetic enjoyment confer and confirm sovereign power in the courtly setting in part because of their efficacy as substitutes for sacrifice.

This paper explores processes of ethical subjectivation that inform the normative discourse of the Suvarṇaprabhāsottamasūtra. This sūtra (and several others related to it) represents the textual practices involved in acquiring knowledge of the sūtra as both the means and the end of embodying its power—a power figured in terms that are closely aligned with masculine virility (the quintessence of kingliness) and sacrificial rites for conferring and enhancing sovereignty. These textual practices involve a subjection of the self to the sovereign authority of the sūtra, leading to a progressive embodiment of the sūtra’s power. This process culminates in the attainment of the dharma body of a buddha, the pinnacle of sovereign power—a body identified with the sūtra itself. The Suvarṇaprabhāsottamasūtra’s concomitant focus on kings as its ideal auditors introduces intimations of South Asian realpolitik that only enhance the productive, if paradoxical, relationship between self-sacrifice and sovereign freedom.

"This paper sets forth the argument that some Mahāyāna sūtras (including the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka and the Suvarṇabhāsottamasūtra) figure their the aural performance and oral reception as a form of ritual insemination that generates intense physical and aesthetic pleasure in the listener, and initiates a process of gestation through further textual practices. These include achieving insight into and knowledge of the text (prajñā, jñāna), committing it to memory (smṛti), enabling it to incubate by holding it in mind (as suggested by the related terms dhāraṇa, dhāraka, dhāraṇī)—and eventually, allowing it to shine forth in the eloquence (pratibhāna) of one’s own speech as a dharmabhāṇaka. In these sūtras, becoming a dharmabhāṇaka is tantamount to a prediction of future rebirth as a buddha, which entails the production of a new, perfected body that in some sense is identical with the sūtra itself—the immortal dharma body (dharmakāya) of a buddha.

The process of transformation from listener to speaker, from śrāvaka to dharmabhāṇaka to buddha (the ultimate speaker, whose dharma body is the sūtra itself) is, then, figured as transformation from female to male. This gendering of somatic and soteriological transformation is indicated not only in the inseminatory and incubatory aspects of practices involving the sūtras, but also in the invocation of widespread South Asian tropes for ritual and sovereign potency. For instance, the Suvarṇabhāsottamasūtra manipulates the image of the king as the husband of the earth (mahīpati) to establish its own role as a repository of virile and kingly power, a potent liquid of unction/seminal fluid that impregnates the king himself with sovereign power and ensures his transformation, even as it usurps his role in satisfying and fertilizing the female earth. In the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka, the Buddha subtly references the myth of Prajāpati and its ritual applications when he claims sole responsibility for generating the golden-bodied bodhisattvas who have been incubating beneath the surface of the earth—bodhisattvas generated by and for the preaching of the sūtra itself. These examples and others suggest that, according to these sūtras, enlightenment is (en)gendered through textual practices that are, in a quite radical sense, embodied, and that both fundamentally rely upon and have the potential to disrupt normative conceptions of gender. "

Recent scholarship explores how political power came to be articulated in part through aesthetic practices during the early centuries of the common era in South Asia—in particular, through the poetic forms of kāvya and praśasti (courtly poetry and royal encomium). The Suvarṇaprabhāsottamasūtra, a Mahāyāna sūtra of roughly the same time period, conforms to neither of these genres, yet it shares with them several crucial (self-proclaimed) characteristics, including the power to confer and confirm the qualities of successful sovereignty, and an aesthetic "flavor" (rasa) through which this power is conveyed. This paper seeks to demonstrate that, by playing on the multivalence of rasa, the sūtra establishes its own provocative vision of the relationship between poetics and power: the oral performance of the sūtra is a ritual of consecration that affuses the king with sovereignty. Attention to these liquid connotations of rasa might further illuminate a consecratory function in other poetic performances.

The Sanskrit Vimalakīrtinirdeśa and Suvarṇa(pra)bhāsottamasūtra depict the potency of their language differently, but they share a focus on its fiery and food-like qualities. The sūtras also describe the measureless lifespan and perfected body of the Buddha who is their auditor and orator, and of other listeners and speakers who respond appropriately to their words. I argue that these two features are closely connected, both in their appropriation of central elements of Vedic theory, ritual, and cosmology, and in their prefiguration of alchemical tropes and practices. The Suvarṇa(pra)bhāsottamasūtra portrays itself as a fiery liquid that infuses its listeners with vitality, luminosity, and joy; the Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra emphasizes its power to “cook” beings into unsurpassed, perfect awakening. Both suggest that the words of the sūtras, like Vedic verses, embody a generative and profoundly transformative power that is accessed through ritual consumption, whether of food, by fire, or through recitation.

As Steven Collins has suggested, the concept of nirvāṇa in early Buddhist thought constitutes a deliberate inversion of the Brahmanical image of fire: whereas in Vedic ritual and cosmology, fire is a life-giving force that, properly manipulated, serves to maintain cosmic order, Buddhist thought identifies fire with the kleśas, causes of suffering that are extinguished through the attainment of nirvāṇa. In some Mahāyāna sūtras—most famously, the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka—nirvāṇa comes to be figured as a lesser attainment, one that is superceded by anuttarasamyaksambodhi. In this paper, I argue that the demotion of nirvāṇa in such sūtras marks not only a selective inversion of earlier Buddhist conceptions, but also a skillful and large-scale reappropriation of aspects of Vedic sacrificial theory that other Buddhists had explicitly rejected. In such sūtras, fire functions as a potent trope for the transformative potential of the Buddha’s highest teachings—that is, the sūtras themselves—and their ritual enactment. Just as the sun of the Vedic cosmos “cooks” the world, and the fire of the sacrifice “cooks” offerings to the deities, the sūtras literally “cook” (pari-pac) audiences into the attainment of complete and perfect awakening that is anuttarasamyaksambodhi. Numerous and striking further parallels between the vision of perfect Buddhahood articulated in these sūtras and the theory and practice of Vedic sacrificial ritual suggest that at least some forms of Mahāyāna Buddhism, far from being constructed in opposition to Brahmanical tradition, deliberately co-opt its central tropes of cosmic order and ritual efficacy to articulate and actuate the Mahāyāna’s own superior transformative power—both in relation to Brahmanical tradition and in relation to other Buddhists.

The Suvarṇa(pra)bhāsottamasūtra (the Sūtra of Utmost Golden Radiance), the self-anointed  “king of kings of sūtras” (sūtrendrarāja), addresses itself explicitly to a kingly audience, and advocates a particular vision of kingship to that audience. It also figures itself as a potent repository of kingly qualities that are conveyed to the king of humankind through the ritual of preaching the sūtra. The trope of kingship in the sūtra assures the human king of the power of the sūtra to consecrate him—both as king and as a future Buddha—and simultaneously provides a pretext for the king who undergoes the ritual of hearing the sūtra to claim the status of a bodhisattva. Indeed, the predominance of royal themes and rituals in the sūtra, as well as its self-proclaimed consecratory qualities, might be seen as provocative precursors to what Ronald Davidson terms the “imperial metaphor” in esoteric Buddhism. This paper investigates how broader South Asian representations of kingship in the early centuries of the Common Era might illuminate the rhetorical function of kingship in the the Sūtra of Utmost Golden Radiance—and conversely, how the sūtra might shed light upon kingship and its metaphorical applications, especially in relation to the production of literature.

The Mahāyāna sūtras that are the subject of this study, the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka (Sūtra of the Lotus of the Fine Dharma) and the Suvarṇa(pra)bhāsottama (Sūtra of Utmost Golden Radiance), claim to be the body of the Buddha. While he may appear to pass into final nirvāṇa, they tell us, he lives on in the speech that poured forth from his mouth, his body. And while the written texts that enshrine that speech constitute an embodiment in their own right, the Buddha's body comes most fully alive when the texts are performed. He is not a relic of the past; he is not a dead teacher who belongs to history. His body continues to speak whenever the sūtras are uttered with pratibhāna, with the inspired eloquence that allows his nourishing, seminal, sovereign, pleasurable, eternal body to transform listeners.

I present in this monograph a study of the sūtras as performative, transformative embodiments of the Buddha, examining the performativity of the sūtras on three interrelated levels. The study is grounded in an attempt to make sense of the sūtras' representation and advocacy of their own performance and ritual embodiment in the ancient South Asian context of their initial production and use. What emerges from this foundation, however, is a theory of performative utterance and a method of interpretation that expands and perhaps alters scholarly understandings of what the sūtras are and do, challenging received ideas about the nature and function of texts deemed “religious,” about the relationship between imagination and reality, and about the agency of texts, as well as the speakers and listeners who embody them. These theoretical and methodological insights lead in turn to my third level of analysis, in which I engage with the sūtras as interlocutors. The theory and practice of performative utterance in the sūtras resonates in surprising and illuminating ways with current debates in the study of religion and the humanities more broadly. Perhaps the Buddha's body can indeed continue to perform in the present.

At present, the notion of the secular as a neutral, unmarked position that enables “objective” knowledge has come under intense scrutiny. Its dependence on the production of "religion" as a form of false consciousness and its collusion with the similarly problematic pseudodichotomies that produce "the west" and "modernity." At such a time, I see particular value in engaging in dialogue with the texts of a tradition labeled "religious," "premodern," and "eastern" about issues of contemporary concern: their very otherness might be a source of real insight. Such a dialogue raises some pointed questions about the relationship between non-religious scholars of religion (like myself) and the materials they study. So, too, does the provocative and disconcerting overlap between scholarly practices and the practices advocated in the sūtras. As scholars of religion seek to reevaluate and perhaps redraw the boundaries that define the field and their work within it, these sūtras (and other such materials) might be able to perform anew in the still-secular academy.