Maria Heim is Professor of Religion and Elizabeth W. Bruss Reader at Amherst College. She is the author of The Forerunner of All Things and Theories of the Gift in South Asia.
Voice of the Buddha is a study of the intellectual practices and theories of scripture developed by the fifth-century thinker Buddhaghosa, the principal commentator, editor, and translator of the Theravada Buddhist intellectual tradition. Buddhaghosa considered the Buddha to be omniscient and his words “oceanic”: every word, passage, book, and the corpus as a whole are taken to be “endless and immeasurable.” Commentarial practice then requires disciplined methods of expansion, drawing out the endless possibilities for meaning and application. This book considers Buddhaghosa’s explicit theories of texts, and follows his practices of exegesis to discover how he explored scripture’s infinity. Reading with Buddhaghosa yields fresh insight into all three collections of the early Pali texts—Vinaya, the Suttas, and the Abhidhamma. By exploring the philosophical and hermeneutic significance of the immeasurability of scripture as a general principle and in commentarial practice, this book offers new tools to understand the huge scriptural and commentarial literature of the Pali tradition. And by taking seriously a traditional commentator’s theory of texts, it beckons us to learn from commentaries themselves how we might read and interpret them and the texts on which they comment.
目次
Dedication Acknowledgments Abbreviations for Pali Texts Introduction
Part I Building Blocks for an Interpretative Program 1 The Buddha’s Omniscience and the Immeasurability of Scripture 2 Scripture, Commentary, and Exegetical Distinctions
Part II Interpreting the Three Piṭakas 3 The Contexts and Conditions of Buddhavacana in the Suttanta 4 Disentangling the Tangle: Abhidhamma as Phenomenological Analysis 5 The “Completely Pleasing” Exegesis on the Vinaya
Conclusion
Appendix A The Recollection of the Dhamma Appendix B Commentary on the Section on Verañja Starting the Vinaya Appendix C Four Oceans and Three Piṭakas Bibliography Index
