Buddha in the Crown: Avalokitesvara in the Buddhist Traditions of Sri Lanka.

• Author: McDermott, James P.
• Position: Review

By JOHN CLIFFORD HOLT. New York and Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1991. Pp. xvi + 269, two line maps, 38 plates.

Sri Lanka is typically identified as a Theravada Buddhist country. Although dominated by Theravada, Sri Lanka's culture is nonetheless highly pluralistic. Taking Avalokitesvara, perhaps the most popular of bodhisattvas in Mahayana Buddhism, as a focal point, John Holt raises the issue of "how elements of one religious culture are assimilated into another and then legitimated" (p. vii). Specifically, Holt is concerned to trace the cultic history of Avalokitesvara, beginning with his emergence in Indian Mahayana, through his eventual assimilation and identification by 1380 with the Sinhala guardian deity Natha Deviyo, to his more modern transformation in identity into the bodhisattva Maitreya, the future Buddha.

Central to Holt's thesis and analysis is the Sinhala distinction between the laukika ("of this world") and the lokottara ("above or beyond this world"). Recognizing the common interpretation of these terms as equivalent to "the profane" and "the sacred," respectively, Holt finds this understanding to blur the underlying conceptual distinction between the terms. In his view, laukika is actually

"situational" and "temporal." To put the matter in terms of Buddhist religious discourse. to be laukika-oriented is to be "conditioned," to act on the basis of temporal and situational attachments. In terms of Buddhism's "pathway" imagery or its hermeneutic, to be laukika-oriented is always antecedent processually to lokottara. Conditioned existence in samsara is, in fact, antecedent to the experience of nibbana. The path to nibbana is one of becoming "increasingly" unconditionally oriented, or lokottara . . . . (p. 23).

As these concepts apply to the assimilation and transformation of Avalokitesvara, Holt's thesis is that Avalokitesvara originally embodied both laukika and lOkOttara concerns. Eventually, for political reasons his laukika relevance came to be emphasized during the process of his assimilation. With the end of traditional Sinhalese kingship, his lokottara significance was reasserted as Natha became increasingly identified with Maitreya. In short, Holt maintains...