Buddhist Saints in India: A Study in Buddhist Values and Orientations

·期刊原文

Buddhist Saints in India: A Study in Buddhist Values and Orientations

Reviewed by Kevin Trainor

History of Religions

Vol.37 No.1 (August 1997), pp.96-98

COPYRIGHT 1997 University of Chicago

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Reginald Ray has undertaken a formidable task. As he notes, modern
European and American accounts of Indian Buddhism have tended to
neglect the figure of the Buddhist saint, whom he defines as "a
person in whom the ultimate potentiality of every human, indeed
sentient, being has been more or less fully realized" (p. 44).
Drawing on textual accounts of the Buddha's life and several of his
prominent followers, Ray identifies a basic typology of Buddhist
perfection, which, he maintains, reflects a coherent Indian
religious ideal, one firmly rooted in the "Indian mind." Central to
this ideal, according to Ray, is the tradition of "forest Buddhism,"
a tradition that, in Ray's assessment, had its origins in the
earliest historical stratum of the Buddhist movement but was later
largely obscured by a tradition of settled monasticism. Ray's
substantial work surveys an extensive body of primary and secondary
sources with an eye toward a fundamental revision of common views
about the sociology of the early Buddhist tradition. He describes
himself as working out of the history of religions and Buddhology,
the latter incorporating a diversity of disciplines. As the book's
subtitle suggests, Ray explores the foundational values and
orientations of the Indian Buddhist tradition, articulating a
provocative hypothesis about the history of the earliest Buddhist
community. Dissatisfied with the skeptical attitude of many
contemporary scholars toward earlier efforts to reconstruct the
history of original Buddhism, Ray asserts that it is indeed possible
to identify "the general character and shape of the early tradition
and community" (p. 9).

That early tradition, as Ray reconstructs it, was preeminently one
of forest asceticism, a tradition that he identifies with the Buddha
and with later charismatic religious virtuosi who became the focus
of cults of religious devotion centered around their enshrined
corporeal remains. Ray argues that this ideal of forest asceticism
provides the basis for a series of Buddhist exemplars, identified by
the titles "buddha:" "arhant," "pratyekabuddha," and "bodhisattva."
Ray depicts these figures as wonder-working meditational adepts who
stood apart ideologically and institutionally from the communities
of town-and-village monastics whose primary religious practice was
mastery of Buddhist texts and conformity to the minutiae of their
elaborate codes of monastic discipline. He attributes the virtual
invisibility of the forest saint ideal to a process of
"monasticization" in which later communities of settled monastics
effectively displaced the earlier ideal of the forest-dwelling saint
and came to regard their own mode of life, defined by textual
mastery and disciplinary purity, as the ideal of the Buddha himself.
Ray argues that this process of rendering invisible the original
Buddhist ideal of forest asceticism has occurred in both the ancient
history of the Buddhist tradition and in the modern Euro-American
tradition of scholarship. Early in the history of Buddhism, perhaps
even during the lifetime of the Buddha, the tradition of settled
monasticism arose from a complex mix of "creative and degenerative
factors" (p. 402) and eventually displaced the forest tradition, a
process that Ray maintains was particularly pronounced in Theravada
Buddhism. He argues that the Mahayana movement is best understood as
a continuation or revival of the early forest tradition, noting that
if this is true, then "the fundamental ideal and inspiration of the
Mahayana may indeed be said to derive from the earliest and most
authentic Buddhism, just as the Mahayana has always claimed" (p.
417). And, according to Ray, because the Pali canon (which Ray
argues was more thoroughly monasticized than those of some other
early Buddhist schools) has served as the primary source for modem
attempts to write the history of early Buddhism, the early forest
saint tradition has undergone a second process of erasure.

Ray acknowledges that his thesis will provoke considerable debate
since it stands in stark contrast to much recent scholarship on the
history of early Buddhism and on the rise of the Mahayana movement.
His work is commendable for its efforts to move beyond the
"two-tiered model of Buddhism" defined by the opposition between
monastic and lay Buddhists. He also makes a valuable contribution by
drawing attention to a substantial body of secondary literature on
Buddhist sainthood, much of it in French. Yet as one of those who
remains skeptical about efforts to uncover the early history of the
Buddhist tradition by identifying allegedly early textual strata in
the extant scriptural canons, I remain unconvinced by Ray's thesis.
I find that he provides a very selective and at times tendentious
reading of the texts from the Pali canon that he puts forth as
evidence of an original forest tradition. Few scholars of Buddhism
would disagree with Ray's assertion that forest renunciation and
some forms of ascetic practice were defining elements in the ethos
of the early Buddhist movement and in later Buddhist communities. It
remains unclear, however, why we should prefer an account that on
the basis of a selective reading of the resources posits the
existence of an original community of forest renunciants who alone
embodied authentic tradition, a tradition that was later distorted
by worldly monastics more concerned with their own disciplinary
purity and scholarly attainments than with meditation and
realization. This account bears more than a passing resemblance to
influential nineteenth-century narratives of an original authentic
monastic tradition that was later corrupted by a Buddhist laity
incapable of understanding the Buddha's true teaching, though in
Ray's version the culprits are worldly monastics. While Ray's
account of the early tradition represents an advance over earlier
narratives by highlighting the importance of devotional elements in
the early tradition (elements interpreted by nineteenth-century
scholars as evidence of the decline of the tradition under lay
influence), it nevertheless is essentially a narrative of decline
and renewal insofar as it grants authenticity to some forms of
Buddhist practice (forest ascetics, both before and after the
appearance of the Mahayana) and denies it to communities of settled
Buddhist monastics (especially those of the Theravada tradition) who
appear to have integrated the ideals of disciplinary purity, textual
erudition, meditational attainment, and devotion to the Buddha.

Ray's concluding chapter does in fact articulate a "threefold model"
of Buddhism that affirms the functional integration and respective
contributions of forest renunciants, settled monastics, and lay
Buddhists to the ongoing continuity of the Buddhist tradition, a
perspective that stands in tension with the historical argument
around which much of the book is organized. The contribution of
Ray's work lies not in his identification of an original, authentic
form of Buddhism but in the wealth of primary and secondary
materials he has utilized toward the end of identifying some of the
enduring ideals of perfection that have shaped a diversity of
Buddhist communities in the history of India.