《維摩詰經》的身份話語：一個文學社會學的解讀 － 以Ratnâkara的身份敘事為例－=A Literary Sociological Interpretation of Identity in the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa Sūtra: The Narrated Identity of Ratnâkara
Like most Mahayana sutras, the origins of the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa are unknown. We still lack reliable external evidence about its compilation date and region, as well as its social and political background. Despite this, scholars have attempted to answer these questions with internal evidence from the sutra. For example, Lamotte 1962 uses the method of source criticism to thoroughly analyze the origins of the sutra’s various doctrinal concepts. Satoshi Kawano 2006 uses redaction criticism in an attempt to identify possible editorial connections between the “Dharma Offering” chapter of the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa and the “Medicine King Bodhisattva” chapter of the Lotus Sutra. Seishi Karashima 2015 uses form criticism to show with certainty that the sutra’s Indic linguistic features match those of Middle Indic, northwestern Prakrit, and even Gāndhārī. Uniquely, Hajime Nakamura 1966 uses a narrative analysis of social and political content to clearly demonstrate that the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa shares common social foundations with the Lotus Sutra. However, after Nakamura, studies employing a sociological perspective to examine the context in which the text was compiled are extremely rare. In view of this, this paper attempts to analyze the narrative identity of the figure of Ratnâkara in the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa by focusing on his ethnic, social, age, and religious aspects of identity, and their potential relationship with the historical Mahayana movement. Of these, age identity is rarely remarked upon by scholars studying the social background of the Mahayana movement. Although Ratnâkara’s ethnic and social identities reflect the mercantile economy and republican polity which led to the production of the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa, this point has been clearly demonstrated in Nakamura 1966. Ratnâkara’s religious identity is that of a bodhisattva, whose importance in the Mahayana movement needs no further elaboration.
