Johnston - Kleinhenz - Encyclopedia of Monasticism

New York: Routledge, 2000

ISBN 13:978-1-57958-090-2 (hbk)

 

Innumerable people have collaborated to bring the Encyclopedia of Monasticism to fruition. At an early stage members of the Board of Advisers counseled on selection of content and recommended possible contributors. Certain members of the board have gone beyond the call of duty in resolving dilemmas, proposing innovations, and bolstering confidence. Among the stalwarts, I owe special debts to Mathew Ciolek, Janice Glowski, Penelope Johnson, Martin Repp, Bruce Venarde, George Weckman, and Father Paschal Baumstein, O.S.B. Without their support and ingenuity, I could not have executed this project.

 

A most pleasant surprise has been the initiative taken by many contributors in suggesting collaborators, proposing new entries, and commenting on editorial issues. I feel particularly indebted for insights offered by Bhikkhu Bodbi, Mathieu Boisvert, Mahinda Deegalle, Marek Derwich, Charles Frazee, Alexander Golitzin, Luis O. Gomez, Rita Gross, Frank Hoffman, Andrew Huxley, Gereon Kopf, Whalen Lai, Steve McCarty, Michael Prokurat, Chris Schabel, Mary Schaefer, and Simon Wickham-Smith. Many others volunteered suggestions or answered queries. Everyone involved personified the collegiality of monastic studies. It is the least factionalized field of research that I know.

 

No less exhilarating has been the willingness of contributors to supply photographs for their own articles and those of others. In particular, Chris Schabel (of the University of Cyprus) - photographer extraordinaire of Christian monasteries - has supplied more than 130 images for the project. Mary Schaefer (of Atlantic School of Theology, Halifax, Nova Scotia) generously offered images of choice sites and liturgical details in Italy, France, and Ireland. John Powers (of the Australian National University, Canberra) made available his unrivaled collection of Buddhist monastics in action, particularly in Korea, Ladakh, and Sri Lanka. He also kindly arranged for David Moore to supply some extraordinary images from Japan. Steve McCarty (of Kagawa Junior College on Shikoku Island, Japan) provided photographs of rare sites and activities in Japan. John C. Huntington graciously provided images through the Huntington Archive of Ohio State University, which is administered by the ever helpful Janice Glowski. In addition, colleagues in western Massachusetts loyally supplied an array of indispensable images. I am profoundly grateful to Professor Marylin Rhie of the Smith College Department of Art for her extraordinary photographs of Chinese, Korean, Javanese, and South Asian monuments. Robert E. Jones of the University of Massachusetts History Department graciously furnished photographs of Russian monasteries.

 

To those who have never edited a reference work, I say the following: today a publisher's computers and their able operators perform tasks that might otherwise seem insuperable. My admiration for reference book editors who flourished prior to 1980 has increased immeasurably. One reason for the proliferation of reference books since the late 1980s lies in the economies of brain and time effected by computers. No less beneficial is e-mail. For a period of almost two years I have exchanged e-mail with collaborators as widely separated as Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Sri Lanka, Cyprus, Finland, and Canada, not to mention the United States and countries of Western Europe. I have experienced on an almost daily basis an interlocking of scholarly endeavor and monastic commitment that spans the globe. Like so much else, research on monasticism has become globalized. In both conception and execution this book embodies that fact.

 

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Manuscript Production: Buddhist

 

In accord with ancient Indian religious custom, the utterances of the Buddha were preserved by trained monks solely in an oral format throughout the initial phase of Buddhist history. However, a Sinhalese Theravāda chronicle, the Mahāvamsa, relates that during the reign of king Vaṭṭagamani (29-17 b.c.) almost 400 years after the death of the Buddha, dissension in the monastic order led to an assembly of 500 senior monks at the Ālokavihāra in Sri Lanka, where, "in order that the true doctrine might endure, they wrote it [the words of the Buddha] down in books." These first written texts, inscribed in Pāli on golden plates, were subsequently deposited in the Mahāvihāra monastery at Anurādhapura, becoming the basis for all later recensions. This tradition fits our knowledge of the period quite well, for, with the exception of ancient Indus valley script, writing in India (e.g., the edicts of Aśoka [c. 268-233 B.C.] and coins from the second century B.C.) pre-date the assembly by only a relatively short period. Writing on metals is also well attested around the time. For example, the original edition of the Mahāvibhāsā, a Buddhist Sarvāstivāda philosophical work composed around a.d.i 00 following a council sponsored by Kaniṣka, is said to have been inscribed on copper plates.

 

Prepared leaves (pattra) of various palms, notably the talipot (Corypha umbraculifera) and the palmyra (Borassus flabellifer), were the first widely disseminated writing materials among Buddhists in South India and Sri Lanka. Indeed they are still occasionally used today in southern and Southeast Asian countries for the transcription of sacred texts. The talipot furnishes a very resilient and uniform writing surface, but it seems to have been gradually superseded by the palmyra. The latter is certainly less tender and will survive in more northerly climates. In addition it has a variety of other uses, most notably in the production of toddy (tādĪ), an alcoholic beverage.

 

The young leaves at the top of the palm were harvested when young and just about to unfurl. They were blanched in boiling water, dried, and polished on both sides. Any piece up to about 20 feet in length was cut into rectangular strips of about three by 10 to 30 inches. The smaller sizes were employed for the copying of short texts, whereas the longer ones suited more extensive compositions. Both sides of the leaf were written on. In southern Asia the characters were inscribed with a sharp stylus, a wash of ink (usually of carbon) being then brushed over and the excess sanded off. However, in North India and central Asia characters were directly applied in ink by a thin brush. The surface of the leaf was regularly oiled to keep it pliable and to dispel insects, and the volume was generally bound by threading a cord (sūtra or nādĪ) through one or more holes punched near the middle of the leaves. The finished book, called a pustaka (Sanskrit) or pothĪ (Hindi), was held between wooden covers (paṭa) of roughly the same rectangular shape. Given the fact that most natural materials survive a surprisingly short time in the climatic conditions of monsoon Asia (such artifacts cannot be expected to last more than 200 years), only a few wooden covers have come down to us from ancient times.

 

The emergence of Mahāyāna Buddhism in the early first millennium a.d. seems to have accelerated the copying of sacred writings (sūtras), not least because it had few ordained monks able to sustain an oral tradition. Many of its early texts praised the copyist's art as highly meritorious, the Perfection of Wisdom Sutra in Eight Thousand Lines stating, "If a good man or woman cannot receive and keep the . . . [sutra], read and recite it, or practice as it preaches, he or she should copy it." Thus, we should not assume that such scribal work was uniquely the preserve of the ordained monk.

 

Mahāyāna texts were certainly available in central Asia by the middle of the third century, although when the Chinese pilgrim Faxian visited northwestern India in the late fourth century, he found no written texts. Memorization and the oral tradition must still have been the order of the day in this region.

 

In those parts of Buddhist Asia that have cooler climates, such as northwestern India and central Asia, birch bark, cloth, animal hides, and occasionally copper plates were also employed for the transcription of sacred literature. It seems that originally the Sogdians and Uygurs used imported palm leaves but switched to the paper scroll, probably adopted from China, toward the end of the third century. The earliest extant central Asian manuscript, found at Kizil and containing fragments of the work of Aśsvaghosa, dates from the second century a.d., demonstrating how much longer a manuscript can survive in a fresher, drier environment.

 

An important collection of documents was found in 1931 at Gilgit in northern Kashmir by Sir Aurel Stein, consisting mainly of Buddhist texts on birch bark, palm leaves, and paper dating from the sixth to the tenth century. Interestingly very little evidence exists of illumination in these manuscripts, with the exception of the odd stylized lotus or roundel. However, from the ninth century, especially in texts translated into Khotanese and in those that circulated among the Uygurs, we find Buddha images appearing in the margins of a few texts. The color red also seems to have been introduced for decorative purposes at about this time. The lack of illumination in early North Indian and central Asian manuscripts seems mainly due to the difficulty of rendering a colored image on birch bark. However, illuminated palm leaf manuscripts are also uncommon in these areas before the nth century. The occurrence of manuscript illumination on the Indian subcontinent from the late tenth century is probably related to the rise of Tantrism, especially in the monasteries of Nepal and eastern India. The oldest Tibetan texts, representing the period of the first diffusion of the Buddhist doctrine (seventh to ninth century), were scrolls of yellow paper, probably made under Chinese influence. However, from the tenth century the Indian pustaka style came into fashion in Tibet, although the paper strips were cut considerably larger than their palm-leaf counterparts. Such texts are often illuminated with images of Indian and Tibetan masters or Tantric deities.

 

In all regions of Buddhist Asia, with the exception of the south and southeast, which did not succumb until the 19th century, traditional materials were eventually eclipsed by the use of paper, which, although used by the Chinese from the second century, was brought to India from Europe by the Muslim colonists of the 13 th century. Nevertheless the traditional shape and binding of manuscript scriptures, deriving from the natural form of palm leaves, was retained, and modern Western book forms are a largely modern phenomenon.

 

Tradition holds that the earliest Indie texts arrived in China during the late Han period (c. 70). However, the first extant translations of Buddhist writings into Chinese were probably made by An Shigao (d. c. 170) and Lokaksema (147-185). The first complete Chinese canon (tripiṭaka) was compiled sometime in the fourth century. From then on it became fashionable for rulers and wealthy people to donate painstakingly copied collections of Buddhist scriptures to temples. As more texts were translated from central Asian and Indian sources, these collections grew in size. For example, the Kaiyuan Era Buddhist Catalogue, compiled by Chih-sheng in 730, lists 1,076 sutras in 5,048 fascicles. An unusual tradition of copying sutras with ink made from one's own blood (watered down and usually taken from the tongue) is well attested in the Tiantai tradition and seems to have survived in China until the early zoth century.

 

Although in the beginning Chinese manuscripts were written to no set form, in time the practice of copying texts in lines of 17 characters became the norm. As a result the paper scroll declined in significance, and by the Tang period (618-906) two kinds of Buddhist manuscript form had evolved: the "Sanskrit clamped binding" (fan jia zkuang), based on Indie models and basically unsuited to developing traditions of Chinese orthography, and the "Sutra folded binding" (jing zhe zbuang), which was basically a rectangular, bound book constructed from a concertina ed paper scroll. The first examples of illustration in Chinese Buddhists texts also date from the mid-Tang.

 

From the Song period (960-1126), printing from wooden blocks, often made from plum or pear, began to make an appearance on a large scale, although this did not stop the production of handwritten texts, especially given the high aesthetic and spiritual emphasis placed on calligraphy in eastern Asian cultures. Printing blocks were prepared by writing the text on thin paper and transferring this upside down to the block, where it was held in place by a glue of rice flour. The wood around the characters was then removed to a depth of a fifth of an inch or so. The printing process was completed by a careful laying of paper on the inked block.

 

A Chinese Diamond Sutra scroll dated 868 and found in caves at Dunhuang, Gansu province, now in the British Library, was regarded as the oldest printed book in the world until 1966, when a copy of the DhāraṇĪ Sūtra printed from wooden blocks and produced sometime before 751 was discovered at Pulguk Temple near Kyongju, Korea. Korean Buddhists also lay claim to having printed the first book with moveable type, Selections from Sermons by Buddhist Masters, dated 1377 and produced at Hungdok Temple in northern Ch'ungch'ong province. The first Japanese woodblock-printed text is the One Million Pagoda Buddhist Dhāra ṇĪ, which was mass produced and enshrined in portable miniature pagodas during the reign of Emperor Shōtoku (764-770). From the end of the nth century, the six great temples of Nara, such as the Todaiji, had become major printing concerns.

 

One of the earliest examples of Japanese calligraphy is a scroll containing the Commentary on the Lotus Sūtra, dated around 609 to 615. Sūtra copying (shakyō) slowly became part of the Japanese state bureaucracy with government offices dedicated to this task, such as the Kawaradera in Nara established by Emperor Temmu (r. 673-686). The earliest of these texts, also known as shakyō, consisted of scrolls made by pasting together individual pieces of paper on the old Chinese model. Copyists (kyōsei) were appointed on the basis of an examination system in which calligraphy and knowledge of Chinese characters were assessed. During the reign of Emperor Shōmu in the eighth century, 2.4 sets of the Buddhist Canon, each containing 5,048 volumes, were produced under the system. The increase in sūtra production during this period probably had political overtones, as it was explicitly connected to the official "pacifying and protecting the state" (chingo kokka) ideology.

 

In eighth-century Japan the copying of texts by private individuals, often on blue paper with ink containing powdered gold or silver, became popular, a practice probably imported from China. However, the regular paper for these purposes, made from either hemp or mulberry, was stained with a light yellowbrown dye that possessed insecticidal properties. In the Heian period (794-1185), official scriptoria were abandoned, and most major works of calligraphy at this time are ascribed to famous religious personages, such as Saichō (767-812) and Kukai (774-835). Another major renewal in copying, probably associated with the rise of the cult of the Lotus Sūtra, occurred in the tenth century. The copying of the entire Tripitaka in one day became another specifically Japanese novelty. Thus, 13,315 monks of the Saishō-shitennō-in in Kyoto completed the task in the presence of Emperor Gotoba in a single day in 1211. In a related development the 12th-century courtier Fujiwara no Sadanobu is reported to have copied the entire Buddhist Canon single-handed (ippitsu issaikyō).

 

The earliest extant Pāli palm-leaf manuscript is a fragment of the Theravāda Vinaya preserved in the Singh Darbar, Kathmandu, dating from the eighth to the ninth century. However, older Pāli texts engraved on stone, gold, or silver have been found in India and Southeast Asia. One of the oldest of these, a Burmese gold-leaf votive manuscript of 2.0 leaves incised with extracts from the Vinaya and Abhidhamma in Telugu-Canarese script of South India, dates from the Pyu period (fifth century). All modern editions of Pali texts are ultimately based on manuscripts that have been repeatedly copied in the southern and Southeast Asian Theravāda heartlands, although the continuous production of such complete-text manuscripts can be traced back only to the late 15th century. Nevertheless it is known that a complete set of the Tripiṭaka, costing almost twice the sum of construction of a typical pagoda, was copied in 1293 during the Burmese Pagan period. Burmese lay donors were especially astute in this regard, for some included in their wills monies for the planting of palm trees for the production of writing materials and the provision of slaves for their maintenance. Burmese scribes were generally itinerant laymen who lived in the monastery for the duration of their labors. Laws promulgated by the kings of the country ensured that their spelling mistakes and drunkenness were rigorously punished. Decoration of the resulting manuscripts was confined mainly to gilding on the edges of the leaves. The introduction of the printing press by missionaries in 1776 led to the gradual demise of palm-leaf books in Burma. However, after the Fifth Buddhist Council at Mandalay in 1871, King Mindon had the definitive text of the Pāli Buddhist scriptures carved onto 729 stelae, referred to by one commentator as the "biggest Bible in the world," and erected at Kuthodaw (Royal Merit) pagoda, where they can still be viewed.

 

Ian Harris

 

See also Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka; Discourses (Suttas): Theravāda; Nālandā, India; Sri Lanka: History

 

Further Reading