Buddhist sutras not only provide an exposition of ultimate truth, they also contain many insights from the Buddha’s lifetimes of experience spent on the path to enlightenment. In recent years, there has been no shortage of studies on Buddhist literature. However, in going further to investigate the literariness of the sutras, one must ask, “What exactly is their literariness?” As in the case of the essentialist theories of Chinese literature, if one employs a rigid, essentialist theory, there is no way to identify the true literariness of the sutras. In addition, there is confusion between the concepts of “Buddhist literature” and the “literature of the sutras” as well as a lack of understanding of the concept of the literariness of the sutras. This study attempts to clarify the long-held confusion in academic studies of the literariness of the sutras and to redefine the meaning of their “literariness.” The corpus of all Mahayana sutras is too vast to be encompassed by this present study. Therefore, it will take as exemplars the Chinese translations of the Agama Sutra, the Ananta Nirdeśa Sutra, and the Saddharma Pundarika Sutra , which respectively represent the beginning and end of the Buddha’s teachings, showing how the earlier and later periods of the Buddha’s forty-nine years mirror each other. My methodology makes use of basic hermeneutical principles along with the methods of analysis and synthesis. This process begins with taking an understanding of a text’s content and then interpreting it in order to carefully extract the deeper layers of meaning. In other words, starting from the superficial language of a text, it is difficult to understand and interpret the concealed and extra-textual meanings. Only by starting from the context can its meaning be apprehended. With the method of analysis, the entirety of the text is broken into parts, and after studying them one by one, the characteristics of these parts which are implicit in the whole can be revealed. Then, having established the basic definition of the literariness of these Buddhist scriptures, this dissertation looks at the reproduction and transformation of Buddhist scriptures into new versions, exploring how Buddhist scriptural literature was popularized in order to play a greater missionary function.
