Family in Buddhism

Description

The Buddha left his home and family and enjoined his followers to go forth and "become homeless." With a traditionally celibate clergy, Asian Buddhism is often regarded as a world-renouncing religion inimical to family life. This edited volume counters this view, showing how Asian Buddhists in a wide range of historical and geographical circumstances relate as kin to their biological families and to the religious families they join. Using contemporary and historical case studies as well as textual examples, contributors explore how Asian Buddhists invoke family ties in the intentional communities they create and use them to establish religious authority and guard religious privilege. The language of family and lineage emerges as central to a variety of South and East Asian Buddhist contexts. With an interdisciplinary, Pan-Asian approach, Family in Buddhism challenges received wisdom in religious studies and offers new ways to think about family and society.
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Family and the Construction of Religious Communities
Liz Wilson

Part I. Historical Families, Imagined Families

2. Serving the Emperor by Serving the Buddha: Imperial Buddhist Monks and Nuns and Abbots, Abbesses, and Adoptees in Early Modern Japan
Gina Cogan

3. The Tantric Family Romance: Sex and the Construction of Social Identity in Tantric Buddhist Ritual
David Gray

4. Bone and Heart Sons: Biological and Imagined Kin in the Creation of Family Lineage in Tibetan Buddhism
Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa

5. Families Matter: Ambiguous Attitudes toward Child Ordination in Contemporary Sri Lanka
Jeffrey Samuels

Part II. Parents and Children

6. The Passion of Mulian’s Mother: Narrative Blood and Maternal Sacrifices in Chinese Buddhism
Alan Cole

7. Māyā’s Disappearing Act: Motherhood in Early Buddhist Literature
Vanessa R. Sasson

8. Mother as Character Coach: Maternal Agency in the Birth of Sīvali
Liz Wilson

Part III. Wives and Husbands

9. Yasodharā in the Buddhist Imagination: Three Portraits Spanning the Centuries
Ranjini Obeyesekere

10. Evangelizing the Happily Married Man through Low Talk: On Sexual and Scatological Language in the Buddhist Tale of Nanda
Amy Paris Langenberg

11. Runaway Brides: Tensions Surrounding Marital Expectations in the Avadānaśataka
Phillip Green

12. The Priesthood as a Family Trade: Reconsidering Monastic Marriage in Premodern Japan
Lori Meeks

Contributors
Index

Sujets

• East Asian religions
• Buddhism
• History of religions

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 06 août 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438447544
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

Family in Buddhism
FAMILY IN BUDDHISM
Edited by
LIZ WILSON
Cover photo of Sri Lankan monks by Jeffrey Samuels.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2013 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Ryan Morris Marketing by Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Family in Buddhism / edited by Liz Wilson.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4753-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Families—Asia. 2. Buddhist families—Asia. I. Wilson, Liz, date, editor of compilation.
HQ663.F354 2013
305.6'943—dc23
2012036983
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Family and the Construction of Religious Communities
L IZ W ILSON
PART I Historical Families, Imagined Families
2. Serving the Emperor by Serving the Buddha: Imperial Buddhist Monks and Nuns as Abbots, Abbesses, and Adoptees in Early Modern Japan
G INA C OGAN
3. The Tantric Family Romance: Sex and the Construction of Social Identity in Tantric Buddhist Ritual
D AVID G RAY
4. Bone and Heart Sons: Biological and Imagined Kin in the Creation of Family Lineage in Tibetan Buddhism
A MY H OLMES -T AGCHUNGDARPA
5. Families Matter: Ambiguous Attitudes toward Child Ordination in Contemporary Sri Lanka
J EFFREY S AMUELS
PART II Parents and Children
6. The Passion of Mulian’s Mother: Narrative Blood and Maternal Sacrifices in Chinese Buddhism
A LAN C OLE
7. Māyā’s Disappearing Act: Motherhood in Early Buddhist Literature
V ANESSA R. S ASSON
8. Mother as Character Coach: Maternal Agency in the Birth of Sīvali
L IZ W ILSON
PART III Wives and Husbands
9. Yasodharā in the Buddhist Imagination: Three Portraits Spanning the Centuries
R ANJINI O BEYESEKERE
10. Evangelizing the Happily Married Man through Low Talk: On Sexual and Scatological Language in the Buddhist Tale of Nanda
A MY P ARIS L ANGENBERG
11. Runaway Brides: Tensions Surrounding Marital Expectations in the Avadānaśataka
P HILLIP G REEN
12. The Priesthood as a Family Trade: Reconsidering Monastic Marriage in Premodern Japan
L ORI M EEKS
Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank John Strong, Reiko Ohnuma, and Charles Hallisey, whose work on Buddhism and family has long inspired me. The contributors to this volume were generous with their time in gathering to discuss the content and structure of the volume and patient in waiting for the final draft to be completed. Finally, I owe thanks to my own family members, especially my brother Andrew with his endless reserves of support on the telephone. And there is Lisa, for whom I’m ever grateful.
An earlier version of chapter 9 was originally published in the introduction and chapter 1 of Rajini Obeyesekere’s Yasodharā, The Wife of the Bōdhisattva: The Sinhala Yashodharāvata and the Sinhala Yasodharāpadānaya (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009).
1
Introduction
Family and the Construction of Religious Communities
LIZ WILSON
Today my birth is fruitful. Today my human life is justified. Today I am born into the family of the Buddha. Now I am the Buddha’s son. So that there may be no blemish upon this spotless family, I must now act as becomes my family.
—Śāntideva, Bodhicaryāvatāra 3.25–6 1
T he familial ties that bind us in kinship networks are some of the most powerful social forces operating in our lives. Obligations to one’s kin can promote both virtue and vice, and they can both empower and disempower individuals in relation to one another. Family membership imposes obligations on social actors. Just as peer pressure motivates children in classrooms, the pressure of family expectations motivates individuals to act in particular ways. Family membership can be a huge motivational tool for the aspiring Buddhist, as suggested by the quote above (from Śāntideva’s compendium of the Mahāyāna Buddhist path). Family ties are thus capable of performing a great deal of social labor. Family ties can bind us to people whom we respect and whose moral examples provide support for our religious lives. Family ties can also come into conflict with our religious objectives and bind us to people who don’t share our values. For those who seek to find a congenial community with like values, nonkin communities such as those found in monasteries or other intentional communities offer alternative forms of belonging. Such alternative nonkin communities, however, are often structured by fictive kinship ties. To invoke family relationships and take one’s monastic colleagues as brothers and sisters and one’s superiors as parents integrates the individual into the community and draws on the affective powers of sibling and parental relationships to maintain communal bonds.
The chapters in this volume explore how Asian Buddhists create intentional communities, construct religious authority, and guard religious privilege through invoking family ties. Focusing on the construction of religious community through the manipulation of familial and pseudofamilial structures, contributors to this book show how Asian Buddhists in a wide range of historical and geographical circumstances relate as kin to their biological families and to the religious families they join through ordination as monastics or initiation as adepts. The chapters show that the language of family and lineage constitutes a remarkably wide-ranging discourse that thrives in a variety of Asian Buddhist cultural contexts. Countering the widely held assumption in Buddhist studies that Buddhism began as a world-renouncing religion that is essentially antithetical to family life, this volume amply demonstrates that kinship making is a foundational form of practice in Buddhism.
What does it mean to take the robes and precepts of a Buddhist monk or nun? The action of joining the sangha through ordination is described as a termination of ties to home and family. The monastic is one who “goes forth from home into the homeless life” (Pali, agārasmā anagāriyaṃ pabbajjati ). What does this entail? Early Buddhist literature describes the renouncer as one who completely severs all family ties. The Rhinoceros Horn Discourse of the Sutta Nipāta explains that the renouncer should abandon family and wealth for an autonomous lifestyle: “Leaving behind son and wife, and father and mother, and wealth and grain, and relatives, and sensual pleasures to the limit, one should wander solitary as a rhinoceros horn.” 2 In many passages found in Sanskrit and Pali sources, the Buddha declares it impossible to practice celibacy ( brahmacarya ) while living at home. This passage from the Mahāvastu, a Sanskrit biography of the Buddha, has many counterparts in Pali literature: “Now this householder life is constricting. One must go forth to an open space; it is not possible for one to practice the utterly specified, utterly irreproachable, pure, clean celibate life ( brahmacarya ) while staying in a house. I will go forth from home to homelessness.” 3 Such passages in the Buddhist textual record depict the life of the renouncer as completely separate from and even antithetical to family life. And it would seem that families in India perceived monasticism as an antifamilial force. Indian Buddhist literature contains passages representing families condemning the Buddha and his monastic community as threats to their continuity. For example, the Pali vinaya records the disapproval of some of the distinguished families of Magadha who lost their men to the sangha: “That monk Gotama is on a path that takes away people’s children. That monk Gotama is on a path that makes widows. That monk Gotama is on a path which destroys families.” 4
In contrast to the portrait of the Buddha and his monastic followers rejecting family life that the passages above suggest, scholars such as Gregory Schopen and Shayne Clarke have offered literary and material evidence that many Indian monks and nuns continued relationships with their families even after going forth from home to homelessness. Gregory Schopen’s analysis of inscriptional evidence from a variety of Indian sites shows that Indian Buddhist monastics made donations to the sangha in order to benefit their parents, both those who were living and those who had died. 5 Comparing inscriptions of donations made by laity to those made by monastics, Schopen suggests that the concern for parents is even more evident in inscriptions recording donations made by monastics than in inscriptions by lay people. 6 And Schopen indicates that some of the monastic donors whose gifts were earmarked for the benefit of their parents were titled, educated monks, “teachers and transmitters of ‘official’ Buddhist literature,” and not just uneducated monks who might not be expected to know the official norms. 7 Schopen has also argued that Indian monks had considerable family-based economic resources at their disposal, making donations to monasteries that would not have been possible if they strictly adhered to precepts about handling money. Rulings found in the Mūlasarvāstivāda vinaya that Schopen has analyzed suggest that even after going forth from home to homelessness, Indian monastics living under that monastic code enjoyed the right to inherit family property. 8
Shayne Clarke has also found evidence from Indian Buddhist sources that challenges the centrality of the image of the renunciant who has severed all family ties. Clarke has found inscriptional