Sign, Language, South Asian, Mahayana Buddhism, Buddhism, India, Meditation
摘要
Studying the link between forms of knowledge and particular sense modalities--which senses are privileged and which devalued in a culture--is important to understanding what counts as valid knowledge in a particular epistemological system and what is considered valuable to achieving the ends of a religious system in which the epistemology is embedded. In the case of Mahayana Buddhism in India, the symbolic role of the vision is dominant over other sense faculties, producing ocularcentric discourses and practices in philosophy, myth, symbolism, and meditation practice. With regard to philosophy, visual metaphors in a number of Mahayana sutras provide a vocabulary in which visual perception serves as a paradigm for knowledge and enlightenment. In the Perfection of Wisdom (prajnaparamita) and other Mahayana literature, immediate access to reality is symbolized by vision and set in opposition to language and conceptual thinking, which are understood to construct an artificial and delusive lifeworld.
In addition to its philosophical manifestations, this tension between vision and language--in this case the spoken word--also functions in the Gandavyuha Sutra as a strategy of legitimation in the struggle of the heterodox Mahayana movement for authority and legitimacy. While the orthodox monastic community relied on its oral tradition of sutra memorization and recitation for its authority, the Gandavyuha and other Mahayana texts suggest that the Mahayana employed visionary narrative to establish legitimacy for its novel doctrines and sutras.
This emphasis on vision also serves as a basis for the abundant mythical imagery in Mahayana sutras. Much of this visionary narrative involves the transposition of doctrine and visual metaphor into concrete imagery. This imagery is also important in Mahayana and Vajrayana visualization practices in which practitioners actualize deities in the visual imagination as a form of ritualized meditation. Attention to the ocularcentrism of Mahayana Buddhism makes for interesting comparisons to Western ideas and practices regarding the role of vision and its relationship to knowledge and religious practice.
