Jonathan A. Silk

“What, If Anything, is Mahāyāna Buddhism? Problems of Definitions and Classifications.”

This study investigates some problems regarding the definition of Mahāyāna Buddhism. Tracing the history of the notion in modern scholarship, it pays particular attention to the question of the relation between Mahāyāna and so-called Hīnayāna or Sectarian Buddhism. Finding the commonly used methods of classification which rely on necessary and sufficient conditions to be inadequate to the task, it suggests the alternative employment of polythetic classification, a method which permits a constantly variable set of questions and data to be taken into account in the most flexible and accommodating manner.

Putative Persian perversities: Indian Buddhist condemnations of Zoroastrian close-kin marriage in context

Ancient and medieval sources from Greece to Korea speak of the morally reprehensible habits of the Persians, who engage in close-kin marriage. Indian Buddhist texts also preserve similar ideas. One interesting passage in a narrative text makes use of this motif in a particularly interesting way, thereby indicating the character who appeals to the trope as ethically beyond the pale. The present paper explores the background of this common depiction of Persian marriage customs for its own intrinsic interest, and as a means to explicate the passage in question.

The Story of Dharmaruci : In the Divyāvadāna and Kṣemendra’s Bodhisattvāvadānakalpalatā

Of the myriad tales found in Indian Buddhist literature, the story of Dharmaruci is, from many points of view, among the more interesting, engaging as it does iconic themes of incest and patricide. A great deal may be said about this story, particularly in comparison with the tale of Mahādeva, the schismatic monk blamed by some for the initial rupture in the Buddhist monastic community roughly a century after the death of the Buddha. Any detailed study of this story, as of any such story, however, naturally requires the best possible textual sources. The present contribution, therefore, is dedicated in the first place to an effort to establish the textual basis for the Dharmaruci story in Indian sources in Sanskrit, as found in the Divyāvadāna collection, and upon that basis in Kemendras Bodhisattvāvadānakalpalatā .

Review ArticleThe Proof Is in the Pudding:What Is Involved in Editing and Translating a Mahāyāna sūtra?

While different readers will have different expectations from something called a ‘critical edition,’ at a minimum one might expect reliable treatment of the sources employed, and from a translation consistent and reliable renderings, with or without meaningful commentary or annotation. The present review examines how far a recent contribution fulfills these minimal criteria.

Review Article: Buddhist Sūtras in Sanskrit from the Potala

The recent publication of twenty shorter Buddhist sūtras in Sanskrit edited from a manuscript kept in the Potala Palace, with corresponding editions of Tibetan and Chinese translations, when available, is a noteworthy contribution to our inventory of Indian scriptural materials. The present contribution offers several suggestions for improvement to the edited texts in anticipation of their further future study.

A Missed Opportunity

Eugène Burnouf can, with full justification, be deemed the father of modern scientific Buddhist studies. It is consequently (or perhaps the logic is the other way around) possible to say, as Donald Lopez does in the first sentence of his twenty-seven-page introduction to this complete English translation of the work, that Burnouf’s Introduction à l’histoire du Buddhisme indien of 1844 “was the most influential work on Buddhism to be written during the nineteenth century.” Lopezmakes, briefly but soundly, a case for this claim immediately thereafter. He goes on to note, however, that “This masterpiece . . . is largely neglected today. One might argue that the book has all but disappeared and remains unread and unexamined, not because it is outdated or has been superseded (although it is and has been on a number of individual points), but because it became so fully integrated into the mainstream representation of Buddhism, which it helped to create, that it is no longer visible.” Lopez continues in the following paragraph to offer what comes closest to his case for a translation of the volume:

Incestuous Ancestries: The Family Origins of Gautama Siddhārtha, Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 20:12, and The Status of Scripture in Buddhism*

ç 2008 by The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. 0018-2710/2008/4704-0001

“Dressed for Success : The Monk Kāśyapa and Strategies of Legitimation in Earlier Mahāyāna Buddhist Scriptures.”

10.00 Incest plays a central role in the narrations of the origin stories of many traditions, generally in highly mythologized ways, recounted in stories such as those of the Japanese Izanami, wife and sister of Izanagi, or of Hindu myths concerning, for instance, the creator Praj a pati. 1 Among the origin stories belonging to Buddhist and Jewish traditions are to be found incest tales that differ from the Japanese and Hindu stories, and resemble each other, in narrating the lineage of holy founders rather than accounting for the origins of the world as such. 2 The Buddhist and the