Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions of South and Southeast Asia.

AuthorPrebish, Charles
PositionReview

Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions of South and Southeast Asia. Edited by JULIANE SCHOHER. Honolulu: UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII PRESS, 1997. Pp. xi + 366, 4 plates. $49.

The papers included in this useful volume were collected from two symposia held in 1990. The first was held at Arizona State University and focused on "Interpretations of Jataka Tales in Southeast Asia." Four of the twelve papers included here (by Robert Brown, Thomas Hudak, Frank Reynolds, and Mark Woodward) were presented at that initial meeting. The second symposium was held several months later at the University of Chicago, concentrating on "Buddhist 'Life Stories': Sacred Biography in South and Southeast Asia," and included papers by Reginald Ray, John Strong, and Jonathan Walters. Later, contributions from Gustaaf Houtman, Paul Johnson, Forrest McGill, James Taylor, and Juliane Schober were added. Unlike many edited volumes, this offering is composed entirely of previously unpublished papers.

Following the preface, editor Schober introduces the volume with a tidy introduction titled "Trajectories in Buddhist Sacred Biography," in which she briefly but carefully lays out the parameters of the book. Acknowledging that "religious biographies mediate between the ideal and the real, the conceptual and the pragmatic" (p. 2), she moves away from the "rationalist, positivist reconstruction of chronological history" (p. 3) employed by early scholars such as Hermann Oldenberg, T. W. Rhys Davids, and C. A. F. Rhys Davids, and instead turns to the work of Frank Reynolds and Charles Hallisey, who argue in favor of the value of mythic, artistic, and cultural themes for understanding the role of biography in early Buddhism. In so doing, she rejects Erich Frauwallner's suggestion of an biography" in favor of the more progressive approach of Etienne Lamotte, Andre Bareau, and others.

Although recent volumes such as Reginald Ray's Buddhist Saints in India and John Strong's The Legend and Cult of Upagupta utilize and explore comparative biographical materials in Buddhist Studies, the general topic of sacred biography remains largely neglected, as Schober points out. Drawing together scholars utilizing textual scholarship, history of religions, art history, and anthropological approaches, she attempts to utilize a cross-disciplinary inquiry that advances the entire topic of sacred biography.

The volume is divided into four parts. Part 1 explores "Buddha Biography in Textual and Visual...

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