Symbols, icons and stupas

·期刊原文
Symbols, icons and stupas
Perrett, Roy W.
The British Journal of Aesthetics
Vol.36 No.4 (Oct 1996)
pp.432-438
COPYRIGHT 1996 Oxford University Press (UK)

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In a recent article Jane Duran has argued that the usual Western
historian's description of the Buddhist reliquary stupa in Indian
art as a psycho-cosmic symbol is problematic.(1) This is because our
notion of a symbol suggests that symbols are heavily conventional,
but such a claim about stupas is implausible in the Indian cultural
context. Nor should we say that the stupa is symbolic in an iconic
sense. Instead she proposes that a Langerian analysis which connects
the notion of the symbolic to notions of rite and play is more
fruitful for understanding both stupas and our notions of symbol and
symbolic.
While I agree that connecting the notion of the symbolic to notions
of ritual and play may indeed be useful, I shall argue that (pace
Duran) the more usual senses of symbol and icon can quite plausibly
be used of the Buddhist stupa.
First, some terminology. The term symbol is used in various ways in
the literature of aesthetics. I shall be using the term in the
familiar way it is used in classical semiotic theory. The locus
classicus here is, of course, Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of
signs. Peirce defines a sign as `something that stands to somebody
for something in some respect or capacity' (2.228).(2) In other
words, the signification relation is irreducibly triadic: its
characteristic form is `X interprets Y as Z' or `Y is a sign of Z to
X'. Peirce further divides the class of signs into three categories:
icons, indices and symbols.
An icon is `a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes merely
by virtue of characters of its own' (2.247). Such a sign is suited
to represent anything with the corresponding characters. Icons thus
isomorphically share properties with what they represent, often in a
useful fashion (as when a colour sample is an icon for the paint in
a particular tin, or a floorplan is an icon for a room).
An index is `a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by
virtue of being really affected by that Object' (2.248). That is,
there is a dyadic `natural' relation between sign and object which
is independent of our practices of using the sign in certain ways.
Thus smoke is an index of fire, low barometric pressure is an index
of impending rain.
A symbol is `a sign which is constituted a sign merely or mainly by
the fact that it is used and understood as such' (2.307). Thus the
signs of the devanagari script are symbols for various sounds in the
Sanskrit language. The script does not exploit any resemblance
between the letters and the sounds, nor is there a `natural' causal
relation between the letters and the sounds. Instead there is a
general practice of using the script for this purpose and the
letters are symbols by virtue of this convention.
Duran does not define what she means by the terms symbol and icon.
However, her reason for opposing the usual description of stupas as
symbols is that the notion of a symbol requires that symbols are
heavily conventional, but that in ancient India both the time period
and level of literacy would have prevented such conventionalization
(pp. 67, 72). This claim seems to imply a notion of symbol that at
least overlaps with Peirce's with respect to the emphasis on the
conventionality of symbols.
Is Duran's argument here sound? I suggest it is not. Firstly, note
that the Peircean semiotic account of the general triadic nature of
signs entails that a sign is a sign for someone. Hence when we claim
that `Y is a sign of Z' we are really claiming that `Y is a sign of
Z for X'. But it is not necessary for the truth of our claim that
everyone understands Y to be a sign of Z. Instead when we make
claims about symbols we usually operate with contextually implicit
restrictions of scope. Thus when historians of ancient India claim
that the Buddhist stupas were symbols of certain complex
psychological and cosmic states, this claim cannot be refuted by the
rejoinder that large numbers of people of that period did not
understand them as such (any more than the claim that in ancient
India certain devanagari signs were symbols for certain Sanskrit
sounds can be refuted by the undoubted fact that very large numbers
of people of that period did not understand them as such). The
conventionality of symbols requires an established practice of some
sort, but not a universal practice.
Accordingly historians' claims about stupas as symbols are surely
supposed to be understood as claims of implicitly restricted scope
about the understanding of a, possibly quite small, class of
Buddhist practitioners (much as historians' claims about, say, the
symbolism of Gnosticism, Jewish Kabbalah or Sufi poetry are to be
understood as claims about the understanding of certain, possibly
quite small, groups of religious practitioners in the societies of
those periods, rather than as claims about the understanding of the
members of those societies in general). In other words, Duran's
claim that `[we] think of Western religious symbols as symbolic
because we assume that they will be understood by many or most
adults functioning within the culture' (p. 71) is far too strong.
Secondly, Duran supposes that the level of literacy in ancient India
would have precluded the availability to the general Buddhist
community of the conventions necessary for the stupas to function as
symbols for them: `We can hypothesize that literacy and acquaintance
with the more ramified parts of the Buddhist tradition would have a
great bearing on a supplicant's ability to make the relevant
associations, and there is no reason to believe that many would have
been so able' (p. 67). In fact this very dubious and unsupported
assertion shows little understanding of the importance of oral
traditions in India and of the historical situation that gave rise
to the building of the stupas and the growth of the cults associated
with them.
Although there existed writing systems in ancient India from before
the time of Asoka (c. 268-232 BCE), the oral tradition has always
been very much privileged over the written. Scribes in India have
had a low status and the texts they write are judged very
unreliable. The written word is valued only as a teaching aid for
those too dull to remember. Indeed the very act of writing is held
to be ritually polluting in a late Vedic text, where it is said that
a pupil should not recite the sacred Veda after eating meat, seeing
blood or a dead body, having intercourse or engaging in writing.(3)
Even when a considerable body of written texts emerges along the
way, these are only regarded as part of an essentially oral
tradition. In India it is this oral tradition that is held to embody
the pure transmission of knowledge, and even today access to
traditional knowledge of subjects like art, music, grammar or
philosophy is widely held to require a direct oral transmission from
master to pupil.
This general feature of Indian learning is also preserved in the
living Tibetan Buddhist tradition, which derives from Indian
Buddhism.(4) Furthermore, in Tibetan Buddhism (as in Indian Tantric
Buddhism) there are very complex visualization meditations that
require the practitioner's understanding of an intricate system of
symbols. Typically a practitioner's understanding of such symbols is
primarily due to an oral explanation by a lame. To be sure, there
are written texts explaining some of this symbolism, but these are
often deliberately incomplete in their details. Moreover, many
Tibetan Buddhist lay practitioners cannot read them anyway, either
because they are illiterate in classical Tibetan or because of the
scarcity of printed copies of the texts. Nevertheless these
practitioners have an excellent grasp of the symbolism involved in
their traditional Buddhist practices, which they are well able to
articulate orally.
These considerations about the primacy of the oral tradition in
India need to be coupled with what is known historically about the
growth of stupa worship in India.(5) Stupas were originally erected
after the death and cremation of Gautama Buddha in order to
accommodate his remains. During the early period of Buddhism
lay-persons made offerings to the Buddha's remains, but monks were
prohibited from concerning themselves with his funeral ceremonies.
Gradually the term stupa came to include not only such funerary
stupas, but also caityas or sacred sites where no relics were
enshrined. Following Asoka's conversion to Buddhism, stupa worship
spread throughout India and various sects apparently formed around
some of these stupas.
At first these stupas were constructed and administered by
lay-persons and were not affiliated with any of the monastic schools
or sects. Soon, however, stupas were also constructed within
monastic compounds and monks came to worship at them. But monks were
not permitted to live within the precincts of the stupa nor to
receive alms offered to the stupa. Thus the stupas became
economically independent institutions (despite monastic
counter-arguments that stupa offerings were of little karmic merit).
Subsequently groups of believers began to dwell around the stupas,
supporting themselves with the offerings made to these stupas. They
came to be regarded as independent religious specialists who
assisted pilgrims to the stupas, arranging lodgings for them and
instructing them in the practice of worship and the significance of
the carvings there.
These religious specialists were not ordained Buddhist monks
(bhiksus), though they resembled monks and nuns in the way they
served as leaders of orders, taught lay-persons and received alms
from them. They also engaged in strict religious practices. The
religious activities of these specialists were a crucial factor in
the development of Mahayana Buddhism, with its greater hospitality
to the aspirations of lay practitioners. Stupas came to be more than
objects of worship. They eventually became centres for a new class
of monastic Mahayana practitioners, with quarters for lay devotees
located nearby. The building of stupas, the carving of images, and
the worship and offerings made at stupas all became included within
the variety of practices leading to the attainment of the Mahayana
ideal of Buddhahood.
This close historical connection between the growth of stupa worship
and the laity, coupled with the primacy of the oral tradition in
India, means that there are actually very good grounds for supposing
that the conventions governing the symbolism of stupas would have
been widely understood in the ancient Indian Buddhist community,
notwithstanding the level of literacy. The religious specialists at
the stupas (many of whom in later times would have been literate)
would have orally instructed those many lay-persons whose alms
supported the specialists. The popularity of stupa worship in India
and the subsequent spread of the architectural form and its
associated practices throughout the Buddhist world suggest this
instruction was rather successful.
Duran's central argument from conventionality for supposing that it
is problematic to claim that stupas are symbols thus fails. What
about her rejection of the suggestion that stupas are icons? Her
argument here is less forthright. She says: `It does not make sense
to say that the stupa is symbolic in the flatter, more fully iconic
sense in which we so often use the term for European symbols,
because our knowledge of the culture indicates that the
relationships are more fluid' (p. 73). However, she also wants to
allow that `the fit between symbol and thing signified should at
least be somewhat iconic' (p. 71).
Although Duran does not develop her reasons here in any detail, her
ambivalence is easy to sympathize with. On the one hand, to say that
stupas are symbols seems to suggest that their relation to what they
signify is just conventional. But the fit between the stupa and the
psycho-cosmic states it signifies seems tighter than that. On the
other hand, to say that the stupa is an icon of such states seems to
suggest that the relation is entirely non-conventional and hence to
make the fit a bit too tight.
Perhaps we can at least blunt the first horn of this dilemma a
little by remembering that to say that a symbol is something with a
conventional significance does not imply that a symbol's
significance is simply decided by an arbitrary fiat. While it is
true that it is of the nature of a convention that it might have
been otherwise, it does not follow from this that conventions are
arbitrarily selected. As David Lewis has shown in some detail,
conventions are often adopted as solutions to recurrent problems
that can be modelled as game-theoretical coordination problems: like
which side of the road to drive on, or which language to adopt.(6)
The structure of such co-ordination problems sets quite specific
constraints on what will count as a solution; in this sense the
convention adopted as the solution is definitely not arbitrary.
Now even if the existence of such coordination problems is not
necessary for conventions, it is sufficient.(7) Moreover, the
practice of pictorial depiction arguably involves solving such a
co-ordination problem: the depictor wants her audience to recognize
both what her picture is of and that it is a picture, where these
two aims can only be achieved by performing a single complex
task.(8) The growth and adoption of pictorial conventions arise as
solutions to this co-ordination problem and in this sense these
conventions are not arbitrary. In so far as stupas are pictorial
symbols, they too utilize such non-arbitrary conventions.
But while this may alleviate some of our uneasiness about describing
stupas as symbols, it still does not go all the way. There remains a
strong temptation to regard stupas as more than merely conventional
(albeit non-arbitrary) signs. Surely the relation between the stupa
and what it is a sign of is supposed to be tighter than that, more
isomorphic. Historians like Rowland, for instance, tell us that even
the very groundplan of the stupa represents the cosmic structure and
that the pilgrim's circumambulation of the stupa mirrors the course
of both the sun and the Buddha's life.(9) In other words, is not the
stupa better described as an icon, rather than a symbol?
This suggestion has some plausibility. After all, at least according
to Peirce's semiotic, a floorplan is an icon for a room. When we use
a floorplan to study the properties of a room, we exploit a property
of the sign which it would have had even if its object had not
existed. This is possible because of an isomorphism between the plan
and the room: there is a correspondence between properties which
each could have had whatever the character of the other. A floorplan
can thus provide us with information about the room it plans. For
instance, given an understanding of the conventions of
representation and scale, measurements on the plan provide us with
information about the dimensions of the room. Similarly, the
groundplan of the stupa can provide us with knowledge about the
nature of the cosmos.
The worry about this suggestion, however, is that it seems to make
the relation between the stupa and what it signifies not
conventional enough. But in fact that difficulty only arises if we
are supposing that the stupa has to be a pure icon. In most sign
systems, all the signs are to some extent symbols. Take icons like
floorplans, for instance. It is only because there exists a general
practice of using floorplans that we are able to apply floorplans.
In this sense the floorplan is a sort of conventional symbol.
However, once we have a general convention that tells us how to use
the floorplan as an icon, we do not need a specific convention to
determine the meaning of each floorplan. While there may be some
highly conventional signs that involve no iconic or indexical
elements and hence are pure symbols, our usual examples of icons and
indices are not pure. Peirce certainly recognized this point and, as
was his wont, coined a neologism for it: `Any material image, as a
painting, is largely conventional in its mode of representation; but
in itself, without legend or label it may be called a hypoicon'
(2.276).
The stupa is, I suggest, such a `hypoicon', i.e. not a pure icon,
but a symbol with iconic features. As such it is at least partly
conventional. Interestingly it is this feature that provides a
context for understanding the importance of ritual practice in
inculcating an understanding of the general conventions which govern
the use of such a sign. It is well recognized that the stupas were
constructed so that the pilgrim's circumambulation of the stupa
should provide an experience which mirrored the passage to
Buddhahood. That is, the pilgrim's ritual practice deliberately
symbolically re-enacted the course taken by the Buddha, locating
this within the cosmos.(10) This mimetic practice, doubtless guided
by the religious specialists resident at the stupa, thus provided a
way of initiating practitioners into the general conventions
governing the symbolism of the stupa. Thus initiated, the
practitioners were themselves able to utilize the stupa's iconic
features.
I conclude, then, that the customary description of the Buddhist
stupa as a symbol is not so very problematic. However, perhaps the
most accurate description (at least in the terminology of Peirce's
semiotic) is that the stupa is a `hypoicon', i.e. a (semiotically)
impure icon that is also a symbol.
Roy W. Perrett, Philosophy Department, Massey University, Palmerston
North, New Zealand
NOTES
(1) Jane Duran, `The Stupa in Indian Art: Symbols and the Symbolic',
British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 36, No. 1(January 1996), pp
66-74. The description of stupas as `symbols' is a commonplace among
historians of Indian art and religion. Duran cites Benjamin
Rowland's well known The Art and Architecture of India (Baltimore:
Penguin, 1967) in this respect. Two further representative titles
may serve as indices of a general trend: Lama Anagarika Govinda,
Psycho-cosmic Symbolism of the Buddhist Stupa (Emeryville: Dharma,
1976) and Adrian Snodgrass, The Symbolism of the Stupa (Ithaca:
Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1985).
(2) Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard U. P., 1965). I follow custom and cite references to this
work by volume and paragraph number (thus 2.228 for Vol. 2, pare.
228). There is a very large secondary literature on Peirce.
Personally I have found Christopher Hookway's Peirce (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985) particularly useful.
(3) Aitreya Aranyaka 5.5.3 as quoted in Frits Staal, `The Concept of
Scripture in the Indian Tradition', in Mark Juergensmeyer and Gerald
Barrier (eds), Sikh Studies (Berkeley: Berkeley Religious Studies
Series, 1979), pp. 122-123. On the primacy of the oral in the Indian
religious traditions, see also William A. Graham, Beyond the Written
Word (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Chap. 6; and
Harold Coward, Sacred Word and Sacred Texts (Maryknoll: Orbis,
1988).
(4) For a perceptive discussion of some aspects of the oral
tradition in Tibetan Buddhism, see Anne Carolyn Klein, Path to the
Middle: Oral Madhyamika Philosophy in Tibet (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1994), 99. 1-28.
(5) A seminal article here is Hirakawa Akira, `The Rise of Mahayana
Buddhism and its Relationship to the Worship of Stupas', Memoirs of
the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko, Vol. 22 (1963), pp.
57-106. For further references, see his A History of Indian Buddhism
from Sakyamuni to Early Mahayana (Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 1990), pp. 339 340.
(6) David K. Lewis, Convention: A Philosophical Study (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969).
(7) For the claim that recurrent co-ordination problems are not
necessary for the development of conventions, see Stephen R.
Schiffer, Meaning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 151-152.
(8) For an extended argument to this effect, see David Novitz,
Pictures and Their Use in Communication (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1977), Chap 2.
(9) Rowland, pp. 50-51 (as cited in Duran, pp. 66 67).
(10) The most spectacular example of this sort of phenomenon.
however, is not actually located in India. It is the stupendous,
multi-levelled Buddhist monument at Borobudur in Java (alluded to by
Duran on p. 72). Of this Dietrich Seckel writes: `Borobudur has
rightly been called a psychophysical pilgrim's path: the terraces
lead the pilgrim through the different cosmic spheres, levels of
apprehension, and stages of redemption. It is an initiation course
into the Buddhist faith, executed in stone' [The Art of Buddhism
(New York: Crown, 1964), p. 132]
My thanks to Peter Lamarque for his useful editorial advice.