Author biographies Steven Collins is Chester D. Tripp Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He taught at the Universities of Oxford. Bristol, Indiana, and Concordia (Montréal) before joining Chicago in 1991. He is currently a Council Member and former Director of the Pali Text Society. Amongst his publications are Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravāda Buddhism (Cambridge University Press, 1982), Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pali Imaginaire (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Civilisation et femmes célibataires dans le bouddhisme du Sud et du Sud-est Asia: une ‘étude de genre’ (Cerf, 2011) and Self and Society: Essays on Pali Literature 1988–2010 (Silkworm, 2013).Address: Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, Foster Hall, 1130 E. 59th Street, Chicago IL 60,637, USA. E-mail:
關鍵詞
Relics; Idols & Images; Buddha (The Concept); Ritual; Nirvana
摘要
In the first part of the paper, I argue against the idée reçue that rūpakāya is a Pali phrase referring to relics and images of a Buddha after his nirvana. It does not: it refers either to any human body, or to the Buddha's body while alive. In the second part I argue that appreciating how the dhammakāya is actually instantiated through time requires us to abandon the interpretive dichotomy which sets it as an ‘immaterial’, ‘spiritual’ object against ‘material objects’ such as relics, images, and amulets. As instantiated in writing and speech-events it functions in the same ways. It too is an embodied object of ritual pūjā.
