This essay explores how classical Buddhist literature, across a variety of traditional genres, portrays the wondrous smile of the Buddha. Despite its literary register, the Buddha’s smile is first and foremost a nonverbal gesture, and if we are to understand its significance, then we must employ a theoretical approach that treats it as such. Multimodality provides such an approach. While an emergent body of psychological research has argued that the smile is a universal human gesture connected to a rather limited set of emotional states like happiness, the recognition that smiles can be voluntary acts highlights the importance of situational context. Since the Buddha’s smile comes from an historical and cultural context quite foreign to the body of evidence that has informed modern physiological science, we must read carefully for incongruency and allow difference to guide our thinking. The essay argues that, while the figurative trope of the Buddha’s smile remains enigmatic and rich in possible meanings due to its inherently nonverbal character, it nonetheless gestures toward his status as a figure of sovereign power and superhuman knowledge. Although this interpretation has largely eluded modern commentators, it finds support in classical Buddhist understandings and points to the power and flexibility of language itself, particularly gesture, body language, and figurative behavior. For evidence, the article also includes, as an appendix, an English translation of a short story from the Hundred Buddhist Tales (Avadānaśataka) featuring the luminous and powerful smile of the Buddha.

In this paper, I read the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka (Lotus Sūtra) as a highly sophisticated theory and practice of performative utterance. I bring the sūtra’s own stunning array of performative strategies into conversation with J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, as refracted through Shoshana Felman’s psychoanalytic reading of Austin’s work in The Scandal of the Speaking Body. The performative devices (upāya) employed in the sūtra include pervasive self-referentiality, vows, predictions, stories of past lives that shape the present, and direct address to the listener, including explicit instructions on what to do with the Buddha’s speech. They also include ubiquitous descriptions of the surprise, delight, and intense pleasure that the sūtra claims to engender in its listeners—descriptions that are themselves highly performative. Taking a cue from Felman, I argue that the connection between performative efficacy and the erotics of the dharma is located in the Buddha’s body, a body in which (so his teachings tell us) potency is transferred from the Buddha’s sheathed genitals to his mouth—a mouth that continues to perform through the embodiment of speech in the sūtra. The pleasurable performance of this literary body of the Buddha produces “sons born of his mouth.” This simultaneous enactment and theorization of performative utterance has much to offer contemporary theories of the performative, while raising a number of provocative questions about the relationship between literature and the body.

What are Mahāyāna sūtras, and how should we read them? In this paper, I explore the implications of our answers to these fundamental questions for contemporary translation practices. The scholarly tradition we have inherited generally interprets these texts as repositories of doctrinal teachings, but the sūtras themselves, with their visions of cosmic transformation, elaborate self-referentiality, and striking performative elements, resist (or at least exceed) this characterization. Indeed, I have recently argued that some Mahāyāna sūtras figure their own performance as an aesthetic, dramatic form of sacrificial ritual, one that offers a verbal substitute for the bodily self-sacrifice of the bodhisattva, as well as the flesh offerings of Brahmanical ritual. How does one read, recite, or hear the ritual body of the Buddha? If we fail to ask such questions, we are bound to impose uncritically and ahistorically our own assumptions about what a text (not to mention a Mahāyāna sūtra) is, and how it ought to be read—and translated. Given that our conceptions of what a sūtra is and how to interpret it are historically situated, which understandings do we privilege when we translate, and why? Translating a sūtra as a doctrinal work is quite a different undertaking from translating the aesthetically pleasing, ritually recited and resuscitated body of the Buddha, and such different modes of translation further enable and constrain particular avenues of interpretation for subsequent audiences. This paper advocates for a more explicit and deliberate exploration of different interpretations of Mahāyāna sūtras and the different modes of translation that they warrant.

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The self-referential strategies of Mahāyāna sūtras are woven with time. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, the conception of time as linear, quantifiable, and homogeneous is strongly privileged both in secular history and in much of contemporary life—indeed, to such an extent that different understandings of time are all too easily viewed as evidence of false consciousness. Without denying the considerable insight to be gained by means of the historicist lens through which most contemporary scholars (myself included) usually approach the interpretation of Buddhist sūtras, I seek in this paper to explore the temporal alternatives found in the sūtras themselves. I focus in particular on the temporal frameworks and strategies employed in the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka and the Suvarṇa[pra]bhāsottama, which frequently intervene in the past, present, and future of their audiences. What might we learn by attending to the tension between historical readings of these texts and the temporal frameworks at play in the sūtras themselves? How might the conceptions and experiences of time offered by the sūtras challenge our assumptions about time and history? Are we able to imagine a form of historiography that does not require the imposition of a single temporal framework? I analyze the conceptions and manipulations of time in these sūtras with the aim of identifying alternative hermeneutical approaches and expanding our temporal understanding.

Early Buddhist thought and practice were shaped in several important respects by the rejection of the sacrificial rituals that were so central to Brahmanical tradition. For instance, as scholars have recognized, the bodhisattva path inverts the logic of substitution that informs animal sacrifice: the bodhisattva perfects himself not through sacrificing another in his place, but by sacrificing himself for the sake of others. This article argues that some Mahāyāna sūtras (specifically, the Suvarṇa-(pra)bhāsottama, the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka, and the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa) invert this inversion by portraying themselves as aesthetic, dramatic forms of sacrifice, rituals of recitation that obviate the violence not only of animal sacrifice, but also of the bodhisattva's self-sacrifice. These sūtras substitute themselves for both the fire and the food of sacrificial ritual, offering audiences a performative technology for transformation and a bloodless path to buddhahood.

Examination of Japanese Jōdo Shin Buddhism in general and in particular how its doctrines of "other power" and entrustment in Amithāba Buddha influence living an ethical life from a Mahāyāna Buddhist perspective.