Religion: A Very Short Introduction by Thomas A. Tweed

Author:Thomas A. Tweed [Tweed, Thomas A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, General, history, Comparative Religion
ISBN: 9780190064693
Google: 7f3-DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-09-25T00:31:20.437551+00:00

Conclusion

Religions, sects, and NRMs have created distinct institutions, like the LDS Church, but religious practice has been mediated by the technologies that the devout employ as well as the institutions they organize. We can see the mediating power of technologies and institutions—and note institutional splits—by reconsidering the Bāmiyān cave-temple complex, where yellow-robed Buddhist monks once gathered in a monastery and used ancient communication technology to write Sanskrit texts on palm leaves.

In that valley along the Silk Road route to China, India, and Persia, and beneath the two cliff-dwelling Buddhas, a thousand monks lived out their faith amid the aroma of incense and the sound of chanting. In the monasteries below, early sectarian divisions were evident. The Bāmiyān monks aligned themselves with the Lokottaravādin school, which arose during Buddhism’s first schism. That early debate concerned the proper religious ideal. It focused on whether the arhat, a person who has achieved enlightenment, is perfect. The monastic order at Bāmiyān descended from those who challenged the arhat ideal affirmed by the other original Buddhist schools, which their opponents would call the Hīnayāna, or “Lesser Vehicle.” They decided that those who achieve liberation are fallible. That opened a slight gap between humans and buddhas, and it led to the development of the Mahāyāna, those who called themselves the “Greater Vehicle.” That major Buddhist branch, which dominated East Asia, proposed an alternative ideal: the wise and compassionate bodhisattva, who renounces his own liberation to save all beings. They also venerated buddhas as supernatural agents with wondrous powers, a view already expressed in the Mahāyāna texts stored in the library at Bāmiyān and hinted at in the cave temple’s sculpture and murals, including those colossal Buddhas. So those Bāmiyān monks, who gathered in monasteries and wrote on palm leaves, were the inheritors of one institutional split and forerunners of another.

7. An 1834 engraving of the Buddhas in Bāmiyān, Afghanistan, shows how the statues looked before they were destroyed. The people and camels at the base of the larger Buddha, which was about 175 feet tall, give some sense of their monumental size.

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