CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 35Indian and Buddhist StudiesStudy and Philosophy of ReligionBiblical Studies and Interpretation

The DOI matches its Crossref record, with a small difference in title or year.

Head, Eyes, Flesh, Blood: Giving Away the Body in Indian Buddhist Literature

Ohnuma, Reiko·2006·Columbia University Press eBooks
DOI 10.7312/ohnu13708
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood is the first comprehensive study of a central narrative theme in premodern South Asian Buddhist literature: the Buddha's bodily self-sacrifice during his previous lives as a bodhisattva. Conducting close readings of stories from Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, and Tibetan literature written between the third century BCE and the late medieval period, Reiko Ohnuma argues that this theme has had a major impact on the development of Buddhist philosophy and culture. Whether he takes the form of king, prince, ascetic, elephant, hare, serpent, or god, the bodhisattva repeatedly gives his body or parts of his flesh to others. He leaps into fires, drowns himself in the ocean, rips out his tusks, gouges out his eyes, and lets mosquitoes drink from his blood, always out of selflessness and compassion and to achieve the highest state of Buddhahood. Ohnuma places these stories into a discrete subgenre of South Asian Buddhist literature and approaches them like case studies, analyzing their plots, characterizations, and rhetoric. She then relates the theme of the Buddha's bodily self-sacrifice to major conceptual discourses in the history of Buddhism and South Asian religions, such as the categories of the gift, the body (both ordinary and extraordinary), kingship, sacrifice, ritual offering, and death. Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood reveals a very sophisticated and influential perception of the body in South Asian Buddhist literature and highlights the way in which these stories have provided an important cultural resource for Buddhists. Combined with her rich and careful translations of classic texts, Ohnuma introduces a whole new understanding of a vital concept in Buddhists studies.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.7312/ohnu13708

Cites

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Dana is a type of giving-sacrificial giving-that is distinct from all other types of giving; it is primarily ritual in nature rather than moral, and depends for its effects upon having the proper object, procedure, and recipient.

    “Dana is thus a type of giving -sacrificial giving -that is distinct from all other types of giving. It is primarily ritual in nature -rather than moral -and depends for its effects upon having the proper object, procedure, and recipient.”

    From Narratives of Hospitality and Feeding in Tibetan Ritual (2013) · cites this paper as Ohnuma 2006: 155

  • In sacrificial discourse, both the object given and the recipient of the gift are of the utmost importance, for it is only by sacrificing the proper object to the proper recipient that the sacrificial ritual automatically produces its proper reward in the form of merit.

    “With a sacrificial discourse, she writes, summarizing Egge, both the object given and the recipient of the gift are of the utmost importance, for it is only by sacrificing the proper object to the proper recipient that the sacrificial ritual automatically produces its proper reward in the form of merit.”

    From Narratives of Hospitality and Feeding in Tibetan Ritual (2013) · cites this paper as Ohnuma 2006: 155

  • Reiko Ohnuma sees ritual offerings made to the Buddha and the gift of the bodhisattva's own body as examples of the 'pure' gift, where the giver expects no return whatsoever.

    “Considering examples such as ritual offerings made to the Buddha and the gift of the bodhisattva ' s own body, Reiko Ohnuma ' s book Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood: Giving Away the Body in Indian Buddhist Literature sees these as examples of the ' pure ' gift (2006: 149), where the giver expects no return whatsoever.”

    From Narratives of Hospitality and Feeding in Tibetan Ritual (2013) · cites this paper as Ohnuma 2006: 149

  • Egge and Ohnuma suggest that sacrificial discourse may be contrasted with karmic discourse, in which the primary emphasis is on the mental state and ethical intentions of the donor rather than the appropriateness of the gift or the worth of the recipient.

    “Egge and Ohnuma suggest that sacrificial discourse may be contrasted with karmic discourse, however, in which ' the primary emphasis is on the mental state and ethical intentions of the donor (rather than the appropriateness of the gift or the worth of the recipient). . . . Emphasis thus shifts from the external factors of gift and recipient to the internal factor of the donor ' s own mind . . . '”

    From Narratives of Hospitality and Feeding in Tibetan Ritual (2013) · cites this paper as Ohnuma 2006: 156

Citations

Cites

Still being checked.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Metadata

Authors
Ohnuma, R.
Corresponding author
Ohnuma, Reiko
Venue
Columbia University Press eBooks
Publisher
Columbia University Press
Published
2006-12-31
DOI
10.7312/ohnu13708
OpenAlex
W4249407126
Cited by
31
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 1 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 1 · 2020: 2 · 2014: 1 · 2012: 24
FWCI
1.22
Type
book
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
Columbia University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Religious studies › Indian and Buddhist Studies
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Study and Philosophy of Religion
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Religious studies › Biblical Studies and Interpretation
Keywords
bodhisattva, Sanskrit literature, Pali literature, Chinese Buddhist literature, Tibetan Buddhist literature, body, The Gift, kingship, ritual offerings, death, compassion, Buddhahood, altruism

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review