Reading the Rasavāhinī: A Religious and Literary Reading of a Buddhist Narrative

Abstract

This dissertation argues for the value of reading Buddhist narratives as literature. Specifically, it argues for the value of reading them as Literature—with a capital “L”—which is to say, for their artistry and also for their enduring relevance for readers across vast time and place. I suggest that reading Buddhist narratives, not just as religious texts but also as Literature, reveals their deepest valences and full range of intellectual and aesthetic complexity. Most importantly, I contend that it is by virtue of the very affordances of Literature that Buddhist narratives have the capacity to be ethically edifying, not just as didactic texts that convey clear ethical instructions to passive recipients, but as ethically formative exercises that engage readers and provoke introspection, reflection, and meta-reflection. This manner of engaging with Buddhist narratives is at odds with the way narrative has largely been read in the history of Buddhist studies. However, I contend that its value lies in its capacity to help readers see more in the texts, and it can help scholars better understand how religious narratives shape the moral lives of their readers. This dissertation takes as a case study a Buddhist narrative anthology composed around the thirteenth century in Sri Lanka entitled Rasavāhinī. It demonstrates how the text both implicitly and explicitly communicates its literary aims and its status as Literature, and models the benefits and pleasures of reading it as it instructs us to read it; attentively, appreciatively, and receptive to the transformative emotions it promises to bring as a conveyer (vāhinī) of aestheticized emotion (rasa). My methodology entails a two-pronged approach. The first prong deploys the tools of close reading and sensitive reading in order to attend to the text’s form, literary strategies, and creative use of language. Shifting the focus of attention from the “moral at the end of the story” to its literary dimensions, I demonstrate the text’s surplus of meanings and its related capacity to engage readers in the active production of meaning. The second prong deploys the methods of ethical reading. By modeling a self-reflectively ethical reading, I show how Buddhist narratives cultivate and heuristically educate the moral lives of readers. The introduction distinguishes between reading Buddhist narrative “as literature” (and between literature and Literature more broadly), versus reading it as purely doctrinal or propositional, or as a source of historical or social knowledge, as narratives have long been treated in Buddhist studies. Chapter One introduces the Rasavāhinī, the text that serves as a case study at the center of this dissertation, and explores some of the ways the text signals its literariness and instructs its audience to notice and enjoy its artistic expression. Chapter Two expands on the method of close reading, demonstrating the surplus of interpretive possibilities that emerge through a slow and sensory-focused reading that is attentive to the text’s formal features, as well as its creative use of language and literary devices. Chapter Three expands on the method of ethical reading, furthering the claim that the stories are not just morally instructive texts, but also moral exercises that provide opportunities for learning through direct, embodied cognition when they are engaged with as dynamic, open works by active and personally invested readers. In the conclusion I summarize the major arguments made in each chapter, reflect on some of the conclusions arrived at through my close and ethical readings, and propose new avenues for future scholarship on Buddhist narratives and their applications to ethics.