Head, eyes, flesh, and blood : giving away the body in Indian Buddhist literature / Reiko Ohnuma.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ohnuma, Reiko.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Gautama Buddha--Pre-existence.

Gautama Buddha.

Buddhist literature--India--Themes, motives.

Buddhist literature.

Sacrifice in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvii, 372 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, 2007.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Illustrations

Tables

Conventions Used in This Book

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I. The Gift-of-the-Body Genre

II. Conventions of Plot

III. Conventions of Rhetoric

IV. Dāna: The Buddhist Discourse on Giving

V. A Flexible Gift

VI. Bodies Ordinary and Ideal

VII. Kingship, Sacrifice, Offering, and Death: Some Other Interpretive Contexts

Conclusions

Appendix: A Corpus of Gift-of-the-Body Jātaka

Notes

Bibliography of Works Cited

Index

Notes:

Originally presented as the author's thesis (Ph.D.--University of Michigan).

Includes bibliographical references (p. 337-358) and index.

ISBN:

9780231510288

0231510284

OCLC:

818856022