Between Performance and the Page: Buddhist Preaching in East Asia

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

A skilled preacher brings a text to life. Despite the central role Buddhist preachers played in elucidating texts for lay audiences, scholars have paid little attention to the topic. This panel responds to this lacuna by introducing largely neglected sources and proposing new methodologies for studying the dynamic interplay between preaching as performance and the page as material artifact. In line with the conference theme of “Asia in Motion,” each panelist discusses the multi-directional movement between text and practice in East Asian Buddhist preaching. Preachers employed rhetorical and bodily techniques to enliven textual traditions and drew upon these performances to give authority to written works. The first paper uses medieval Chinese manuscripts from Dunhuang to uncover the modular and intertextual nature of lectures on Sakyamuni and assess how their performance functioned to legitimate the message of texts. The second examines how notations in a manuscript of ninth-century Japanese preaching notes reveal distinct rhetorical modes as strategies for connecting with diverse audiences. The third turns to the medieval Japanese liturgical genre known as koshiki to show how performative techniques recorded in manuscripts such as vocalization, prostrations, and re-enactment made Buddhist teachings accessible and engaging. The final paper addresses Buddhist preachers in nineteenth-century Japan, who utilized printing as a means to spread spoken sermons to a wider audience. This diachronic and transnational arrangement will highlight continuities in formal and performative features while also illuminating shifts in manuscript and printing technology and genre over time and across space.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing-Diaspora

Session Organizer

• Bryan Lowe, Vanderbilt University

Chair

• Michael Jamentz, Kyoto University

Individual Presentations

• Modularity of Form and Content in Buddhist Liturgies at Dunhuang - Neil Schmid, University of Vienna

• Rhetorical Strategies and Manuscript Cultures in Buddhist Sermons from Ninth-Century Japan - Bryan Lowe, Vanderbilt University

• Singing and Enacting the Dharma: Koshiki as Preaching Literature in Medieval Japan - Michaela Mross, University of California, Berkeley

• The Living Word: Buddhist Homiletic Practice and Print Culture in Meiji Japan - Helen Findley, University of Chicago

Discussant

• James Robson, Harvard University