Indian Buddhist Preachers Inside and Outside the Sūtras

Abstract

The subject of the preacher in Indian Buddhist history and literature is one that has gone almost completely unexplored by modern scholars. Indian Buddhist preachers have historically served as voices for Buddhist teaching, but they have also been voiced by that teaching, articulated in the very sūtra texts that they are charged to preserve and protect. This article explores a few portraits of preachers painted in the Buddhist sūtra corpus, and attempts to draw provisional conclusions regarding the impact of such portraits on Buddhist preachers’ own conceptions of doctrinal authority. As Gregory Schopen's work reminds us, we cannot straightforwardly recover an accurate picture of ‘what Buddhism was’ from texts that concern ‘what Buddhism should be’. But, it is no less a mistake to assume either that normative texts do not influence history, or that the traces of such influence are nowhere evident in normative texts. This article explores some of the ways in which these reciprocal impacts may be glimpsed.