Reading the Mahāvaṃsa : the literary aims of a Theravāda Buddhist history

Resource Information

The work Reading the Mahāvaṃsa : the literary aims of a Theravāda Buddhist history represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of San Diego Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Reading the Mahāvaṃsa : the literary aims of a Theravāda Buddhist history

Title remainder

the literary aims of a Theravāda Buddhist history

Statement of responsibility

Kristin Scheible

Creator

• Scheible, Kristin

Author

• Scheible, Kristin

Subject

• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• Electronic books
• Mahānāma, active 5th century
• Mahāvaṃsa (Mahānāma)
• RELIGION / Comparative Religion
• Buddhist literature, Pali
• Buddhist literature, Pali -- History and criticism

Genre

• Electronic books
• Criticism, interpretation, etc

Language

eng

Summary

Vamsa is a dynamic genre of Buddhist history filled with otherworldly characters and the exploits of real-life heroes. These narratives collapse the temporal distance between Buddha and the reader, building an emotionally resonant connection with an outsized religious figure and a longed-for past. The fifth-century Pali text Mahavamsa is a particularly effective example, using metaphor and other rhetorical devices to ethically transform readers, to stimulate and then to calm them. Reading the Mahavamsa advocates a new, literary approach to this text by revealing its embedded reading advice (to experience samvega and pasada) and affective work of metaphors (the Buddha's dharma as light) and salient characters (nagas). Kristin Scheible argues that the Mahavamsa requires a particular kind of reading. In the text's proem, special instructions draw readers to the metaphor of light and the nagas, or salient snake-beings, of the first chapter. Nagas are both model worshippers and unworthy hoarders of Buddha's relics. As nonhuman agents, they challenge political and historicist readings of the text. Scheible sees these slippery characters and the narrative's potent and playful metaphors as techniques for refocusing the reader's attention on the text's emotional aims. Her work explains the Mahavamsa's central motivational role in contemporary Sri Lankan Buddhist and nationalist circles. It also speaks broadly to strategies of reading religious texts and to the internal and external cues that give such works lives beyond the page

Member of

• South Asia across the disciplines

Cataloging source

DLC

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

Language note

In English

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

• dictionaries
• bibliography

Series statement

South Asia across the disciplines