Fetishizing Tradition by Cole Alan;

Author:Cole, Alan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Winds

The treatment of the winds through the trees in the Land of Bliss is a good bit simpler and doesn’t involve the creation of faux animals:31

Furthermore, Śāriputra, when the rows of palm trees and nets of tinkling bells in that buddha-field sway in the wind, a sweet and enrapturing sound issues from them. This concert of sounds is, Śāriputra, like a set of heavenly cymbals, with a hundred, thousand, million playing parts—when these cymbals are played by expert musicians, a sweet and enrapturing sound issues from them. In exactly the same way, a sweet and enrapturing sound proceeds from those rows of palm trees and those nets of tinkling bells when they sway in the wind. When human beings in that world hear this sound, they remember the Buddha and feel his presence in their whole body, they remember the dharma and feel its presence in their whole body, and they remember the sangha and feel its presence in their whole body.

With the regular delivery of this kind of surround-sound dharma, the Land of Bliss provides tradition directly and spontaneously, without the intervening problems of interpretation or boredom, and all those complicated intersubjective elements that usually exist between a discourse and its audience. Moreover, as with the birds, the wind discourse arrives as pure, unadulterated pleasure—something that few speakers or texts can supply.

Remembering that numerous Mahāyāna texts promote the idea that in other lands, Buddhist teaching is accomplished by nonhuman entities, I think it is worth wondering if our author isn’t working to interest the reader in the promise that this natural “music”—surely an essentially non-linguistic entity—could completely replace the troubling play of language which, though made of sound, involves all sorts of complex interactions as words, ideas, histories, and desires combine in the construction of meaning. Reflecting on how the text has constructed this kind of perfect non-linguistic transmission of the linguistic items of tradition, I wonder if we might not have another seductive bargain offered here: read this text in an open and accepting manner, akin to the way the inhabitants of the Land of Bliss listen to the birds sing, and in time those birds will indeed sing for you. It seems to me that if one ignores this tension between these two modes of Buddhist communication—the textuality of our fallen world and the natural transmission of tradition via birds and wind in the Land of Bliss—one loses sight of what appears to be one of the main thematics of the work.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.