Text as Father: Paternal Seductions in Early Mahayana Buddhist Literature [Hardcover]

This book presents in one handy place, a veritable shopping list of the doubts that have slowly emerged in me over twenty years of Mahayana practice. The rituals of our personal lives and even our religious life itself can keep us busy enough to overlook some of the issues which might not escape a full-time philosopher or even a literary critic. I suppose I needed to hear someone else state them out loud as concretely as has Professor Alan Cole.

And just what are some of these issues with the Mahayana? Well...most of them have to do with the legitimacy of the texts (none of which seems to have been in evidence before the Common Era) and therefore the beliefs, practices and aspirations of the religions based upon them.

In a somewhat facetious way Cole has named chapter two of his book "Who's Your Daddy Now?" Without recourse to the Maury Show, Cole's pop-culture analogy references the central question of the Mahayana's paternity.

While we are fortunate to not have any 7th century BCE religions pretending to be rightfully Buddhism today (i.e. religions from before the Buddha claiming they are Buddhism), we definitely have some 1st-5th century CE "Silk Road religions" (i.e. religions that were born of the doctrinal and ritual conflations/melanges that inevitably took place as Buddhism spread up and down the 'superhighway' between Asia and Europe), presuming to do just that. What's a Buddha to do when these dubious hybrids call you Daddy?

Like a baby born a year after a break up, certain Buddhist sutras and their followers have shown up many centuries after the Buddha's death claiming to be his true or ultimate heirs. Some of these highly literary sutras and their polemic followers have even dismissed everything that came before them as provisional, unnecessary or fake. Many Mahayana texts are downright obsessed with their own legitimacy (always taking time out to tell you they are the true word), an obsession which Cole establishes as stemming from the fact that they would fail the paternity blood test that ought to link them with the historical Buddha. Some of these sutras and the cults that follow them even decentralize, subsume or destabilize the legitimacy of Shakyamuni Buddha himself, creating a cascading failure in their members to identify the original tenets of Buddhism as taught by the very man after whom Buddhism was named.

The rewards these sutras offer the reader for his heresy are very subtle, convoluted but exciting (sometimes resembling a pyramid scheme) and I leave it to Cole to explain them in his dense, but amusing way. But most of them have to do with secretly aggrandizing the monastic AND the lay reader (and let's consider the elevated status of laymen and their concerns in the Mahayana, from Vimalakirti to President Ikeda) in some clever ways that might escape even Buddhist scrutiny.

Has your sutra ever referred to itself as a book or a scroll? (when the Buddha never advocated the WRITING of sutras...and certainly would never have written them on scrolls...they used palm-leaf books in India)

Has the Buddha in your sutra ever told you: 'the next thing I say to you will be true, everything I said up until now was unnecessary (false)'?...I mean come'on, is the Buddha a sage or a chatty salesman?

Has your Mahayana Dharma Master ever said "it doesn't matter if this sutra can be directly attributed to the Buddha or not, because it contains the essence of Buddhism"?

Then read this book to help yourself figure out if you should be satisfied with that statement. I have been slowly "chewing" on this book for most of a year now. As Cole gives voice to my doubts, I am heartened (not discouraged) that Buddhism is a process of letting go, of even our most cherished illusions.

Fun discussion of some of the more obvious clues in the Lotus Sutra and other Mahayana that the sutras were literary devices, to reinstate an active Buddhism. I think it needs to further consider the fallen state of Buddhism at that time and how Buddhism had declined in favor of middle period upanishads that become more popular with the people, when these sutras had been written. I think the motivation of the authors was in the spirit of reformation of declining monastic sects and corruption in both hindu and Buddhist sects. Also, the cultural norms of the times, need to be considered as well, as modeled on family structure and social norms. The idea of reading the sutras as though they are "conspiracy theory" by literary tricksters, is certainly fun, but one might overlook the visionary, yogic background of the authors, as well as their obvious literary skills.

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