Chiew Hui Ho talks about parasutraic texts in medieval China that chronicle devotion to specific sūtras, how these histories give us a picture of “Buddhism on the ground” distinct from that of miracle tales, and how scriptures like the Diamond Sūtra and Lotus Sūtra thereby develop lives and biographies of their own. Interview by Miles Osgood.

[Prologue]

MILES OSGOOD: Welcome to “The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford” podcast. Come join us by the tree.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar]

“How does a scripture live?” That’s the question our guest poses for us this month, in the subtitle of his talk.

When a sūtra is revised and excerpted over the ages or recedes from view through neglect, only then to re-emerge with its authentic integrity intact, can the text be said to have a body moving through time? Or when translators, commentators, and practitioners devote their lives to protecting and nurturing the sūtra, can the text be said to have a human family, or an ecological habitat? And when the sūtra in turn saves its devotees from disaster, or rewards them with a heavenly abode, is the text, then, in part, the agent and author of its own story?

Questions like these provoke new ways of conceiving of reception history by projecting our definitions of “life” and “biography” onto a scripture. But as we’ll see, when it comes to Buddhist scriptures in particular, it can be just as productive to look in the other direction: to think about how the content of Buddhist sūtras might change our definitions of “life” and “biography.” After all, in this belief system, a sūtra might not just have one life: it might have ongoing lives as well.

CHIEW HUI HO: When we talk about “biography,” right? Usually we talk about a person from birth to death, and then they are… It’s actually chronological, isn’t it? [...] My idea of biography as it applied in the “Lotus Sūtra” is somewhat different. It’s not just from Point A to Point B and then it ends: it doesn’t actually end.”

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

My guest is Chiew Hui Ho, Senior Lecturer in East Asian Buddhism and Chair of Asian Studies at the University of Sydney. He completed his PhD here at Stanford with a dissertation titled “Tales of the ‘Diamond Sutra’: Buddhism on the Ground in Medieval China,” which formed the basis of his first monograph, “‘Diamond Sutra’ Narratives,” published with Brill in twenty nineteen.

He’s also the co-editor of the volume “Buddhism and Violence,” and the author of articles in the “Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies,” “Religion Compass,” and the “Journal of the Society of Asian Humanities.”

Chiew Hui specializes in Buddhist practices in medieval China and their influence on textual reception, and it’s that subject that brought him back to Stanford, for a talk titled, “The Tang Biography of the ‘Lotus Sūtra’ in Parasutraic Writings: How does a Scripture Live?”

As preparation for the interview ahead, let me explain one major premise of that project. As Chiew Hui tells us, the idea that a sūtra might have a (quote-unquote) “biography” comes from a few different sources. First, there’s the twenty sixteen book by Donald Lopez, titled “The Lotus Sūtra: A Biography,” that chronicles the reception history of the scripture as a kind of extended lifespan. Then, there’s the interdisciplinary concept of the “object biography” generally, drawn from anthropology and art history, that describes how artifacts have their own lives and relationships—maybe even their own agency within their history. And finally, internal to the medieval Chinese tradition of parasutraic writing, there’s the 9th-century account of the Lotus Sūtra’s transmission known as the “Fahua zhuanji,” which Chiew Hui translates as quite literally the “Biography of the Lotus Sūtra.”

All of this together is what motivates Chiew Hui’s opening question: what does it mean for a sūtra to have a “biography,” and therefore a life?

Let’s head into the library and find out the answer.

[bell chimes]

MILES OSGOOD: Welcome Chiew Hui to the podcast and welcome back to Stanford.

CHIEW HUI HO: Thank you.

MILES OSGOOD: I gather this is your return after 12 years, after the point where you defended your dissertation, and I thought that would be a nice place to start: to talk a little bit about the graduate school project that took root here, that sounds like was the origin point of this methodology that you've then pursued through multiple projects—of taking an interest, of course in the sūtras as core texts, but especially in what you call “parasutraic writings.” So going into this conversation, I suppose there’s a—there's a ground—you know, there's a grounding question of this “Buddhism on the ground” topic that we will get into that we should ask, which is, “What is a ‘parasutraic writing?’” Could you describe, you know, that corpus to us? And why did it pique your interest? Why did it grab your attention when you were doing your graduate studies here, such that it has formed an engine for you for multiple projects?

CHIEW HUI HO: It didn't actually form, like in the initial phases of my doctoral research, because the idea actually came much later. I mean, I was actually concentrating on the tales, and then we are calling it “miracle tales,” but then I tend not to call it “miracle tales” because I think it's underpinned very differently from usual miracle tales in a Western sense. So it started out—it all started with actually a course with Paul.

MILES OSGOOD: Paul Harrison.

CHIEW HUI HO: Yes, right. So we studied the “Diamond Sūtra” and then writings related to the “Diamond Sūtra.” And then—so that's when I was exposed to the tales. And so Paul introduced the tales to us, and we read the tales. And the tales are all very interesting to me. And after serious considerations, I decided that it'll be a topic for my doctoral research. And that's how I started. And I don't have a methodology. I don't know what they should be called. And those things actually came much later.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hm. Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: Especially the—you know, the parasutraic part. Yeah. And essentially, I think it's necessary to come up with this term to sort of talk about tales. And so the first thing I did was to talk about why they shouldn’t be called “miracle tales,” because they're underpinned very differently with a very different worldview. And the next thing is “parasutraic.” And we tend to concentrate on—traditionally, we tend to study a lot of commentaries: you know, writings that are directly about the doctrines of the sūtra. And... But then when we studied the tales of the “Diamond Sūtra,” we discovered that the tales are not often—most of the time, they have nothing to do with the “Diamond Sūtra” philosophically, doctrinally. And then they're not commentaries. And then during my research, I also found that there are other writings that are very similar to these tales. They might not be directly related to the “Diamond Sūtra.” It could be someone writing a praise on an event related to the “Diamond Sūtra": for example, someone writing a praise about Emperor Xuanzong writing a commentary, but then nothing about the content of the commentary or the content of the “Diamond Sūtra."

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: So there are—these writings are related to “Diamond Sūtra.” There's no explicit content—content of the “Diamond Sūtra.” So these are writings that—they circle around the sūtra. They encourage people to take up practice of the “Diamond Sūtra,” to engage with the sūtra.

MILES OSGOOD: Right, so you have this phrase that comes up in your research, both with regard to the “Diamond Sūtra” and the “Lotus Sūtra” of being a “sūtra practitioner.” And, you know, so I understand what you're saying, where you're saying that the commentaries are different from the corpus of parasutraic writings that you're looking at, where a commentary presumably is saying something about the content or philosophically engaging with the propositions that are there in the sūtra. Then there's this other distinction that you make—and you make this in your writing as well—against the... against miracle tales, against “zhiguai” I guess. Could you say a little bit more about the distinction on that side of things? What assumptions might we bring into this, if we call them “miracle tales,” and why would that be misleading compared to what you are reading and what you're seeing?

CHIEW HUI HO: I think it's necessary to talk about the tales in relation to “zhiguai” and to miracle tales, because we have miracle tales in other traditions as well, in the Western traditions as well. And then one of my questions is, “How do they differ?” Right?

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO. These “Diamond Sūtra” tales. And “zhiguai” is because—there are many people who actually call “Diamond Sūtra” tales or Buddhist tales of these sorts “zhiguai.” But they're not “zhiguai.” And because, well, the reason why it's mixed up with the genre of “zhiguai” is because we have the earliest collections of Guanyin tales from around—from the period when “zhiguai” was actually very popular and flourish(ing). And some scholars—or when, then, you know, they mix them up together and they call everything “zhiguai,” including the Chan Buddhist tales. Yeah. So I think at least we have to differentiate it very carefully because “zhiguai,” they have—their goals are multiple. Buddhist tales, their goals are very directed. They encourage faith. They encourage engagements. And so this is a very obvious difference in goals, right? And I find it necessary to differentiate that. And with respect to miracle tales, “miracle” is—how do we—actually, it's a translation problem. I discussed with Paul, and Paul is very particular about translations. And I think it's a good starting point because you have to really describe it well with a label, right? But if you call it “miracle tales,” just like Western miracle tales, then we can't really find out what its true nature is, right? And therefore, yeah—I start to think about it and then I start with... There is actually some literature on Buddhist miracles or super knowledges, superpowers, and how are they related? So in the Buddhist worldviews, they're all related to—somehow related to practice...

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

CHIEW HUI HO: ... and to the superpowers achieved—and is related to spiritual attainments.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah. So it's very different.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, could you give us some examples, just to start us off, of ways in which characters or historical figures are engaging with the sūtras as, as it were, “sūtra practitioners,” or in other forms in parasutraic writings that would be maybe neither miraculous nor commentarial, that is more distinctive to this corpus? What kinds of ways does the sūtra get invoked? What kinds of ways does the sūtra get used?

CHIEW HUI HO: Not miraculous in the usual way, right? For example, you... Well, the... Let's talk about the practices first.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm. Sure.

CHIEW HUI HO: In the tales, usually the practices are related to recitation, reading, copying—and recitation being the most common. And there are tales of devotees who recite the “Diamond Sūtra.” And one of the things that characterizes the corpus that I study: usually they really encourage people to really recite a lot of the “Diamond Sūtra.” And it's very different from the Guanyin stories. Guanyin stories, usually you just call Guanyin when you're in trouble. Sometimes they're not even practitioners in the first place. But the “Diamond Sūtra” tales are usually about people who have engaged with the “Diamond Sūtra” for an extended period of time. So then there'll be different sorts of things that they will encounter. And usually, the stories could be very formulaic. There's a sort of like a prelude telling us that the person practiced, engaged, and recited the “Diamond Sūtra.” There's some problem he or she encountered, and there'll be some sort of solution. The problems can vary. I mean, it could be meeting a tiger on a way in a mountain, and then the tiger not attacking the person. Yeah. And, or, from someone surviving a boat capsize.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: In both of those cases, by nature of that person being protected by having undergone a practice of reciting the sūtra, perhaps?

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah, right, so: then you look at, oh, okay, are there people who survive, you know, drowning? Of course there are. Right? So... But then the tale is written in such a way that it prepares and—and primes you to interpret it as a sort of—a sort of “miracle.” But it's a “wonder,” right? So but then, “miracle” in a Western sense—and especially, you know, with David Hume, right? From his time, right? It’s usually interpreted in such a way that it's related to the powers of the great intelligence, right? And then it's usually externally applied. But then the Buddhist tales are usually internally applied, because the trigger is usually the person him or herself, right? That you’ve got to recite the sūtra to call for these things. And then there's another concept that you'll bring in, you know, because of the merit that you have accumulated that enables you to survive drowning. Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, so it's some matter of internal training—internal... “piety” is probably the wrong word, but...

CHIEW HUI HO: There's—of course, there's a sense of piety as well. Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, but it's not an intercession by a deity on one's behalf or by a saint or something along those lines.

CHIEW HUI HO: If ever, it is because of the devotion, the piety, the recitations that actually call for that help. Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, well, this leads me nicely to my next question, which is sort of about, you know, looking at the celestial versus the terrestrial. Because, you know, you mentioned humbly that you felt like a methodology or perhaps a scholarly perspective or angle was only in formation in your dissertation. And I take that point. At the same time, the subtitle to that thesis, you know, about “Buddhism on the ground,” is one that then returns in the introduction and opening chapter of “‘Diamond Sūtra’ Narratives” and does seem to be a sort of motivating scholarly perspective for you: that you are staking out a way of looking at this religion and a scope about that. So can you tell us about that choice and how that commitment has evolved over time?

CHIEW HUI HO: Yes, I mean, I actually wrote in the introduction that I think it was introduced by Ninian Smart, and—in response to how we take up religion and how we study religion. And it's still the case that—and traditionally people concentrate on major figures in Buddhist histories and talk about the great things that they do, but then nobody is doing research on what common people were doing on the ground. And so there's this huge gap. And of course it is difficult to study pre-modern periods and what people are doing.

MILES OSGOOD: Sure.

CHIEW HUI HO: But I think it's possible to actually do it through the tales, especially when we have a lot of evidence in relation to the “Diamond Sūtra” because of the Dunhuang manuscripts. We do have many manuscripts related to the “Diamond Sūtra,” whether—and whether they are actually, like, for example, paratexts like colophons attached to manuscripts. Yeah. And they can be studied for what people believed and what people were actually doing and in relations.... So the study of the miracle tales in itself is insufficient to actually throw light on, because there's these questions of whether they are true or false. But then when you can supplement with other sources, then you’ll be rich enough for you to at least make some inferences about what people were doing on the ground. And therefore, given that there's a gap, and there's an opportunity to look at these tales through other materials to sort of come up with a picture of what people are doing, then I think it's worth engaging with Buddhism on the ground, which is still lacking. Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. And I take it that's one of the things that's front and center for you, when you think about now, as your projects move forward, going from the “Diamond Sūtra” to the “Lotus Sūtra"—and having also the “Garland Sūtra” there, as a sort of third point of comparison—is it seems as though as you're looking at the parasutraic, you're also interested in these kind of structural parameter-related questions about, where do... What can we chronicle—almost in a quantitative sense—about what we see in the protagonists of these stories, and who these stories might be meant for, in terms of an audience? Where, you know, some of the parasutraic texts that have maybe more to do with the “Diamond Sūtra” than the “Lotus Sūtra” might involve, monas(tic)—might involve laity more than monastics or vice versa. And that might imply something about who these stories were meant for or who found the most inspiring and where the laity was drawn in terms of one sūtra or another. So can you tell us just a little bit about—now that you're working on the “Lotus Sūtra” more specifically—how you see that distinction?

CHIEW HUI HO: Let's begin with: we can only make conclusions based on what we have. And sometimes they might be—they might not be a true reflection of actually what actually happened on the ground. And I can only say based on, you know, what available evidence I have...

MILES OSGOOD: Of course.

CHIEW HUI HO: Based on “Diamond Sūtra"—because there are obviously a lot more lay representations and therefore... And we know based on the manuscripts in the—in Dunhuang—there are many lay engagements. And then... But the “Lotus Sūtra” parasutraic writings—two collections I've talked about—they're actually very different. One of them traditionally has been taken to be a miracle tales collection, but it's not.

MILES OSGOOD: Hm.

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah, the “Hongzan fahua zhuan.” Because when I read it closely, some of the stories, there are no miraculous contents. Basically about someone who just engaged with the “Lotus Sūtra” and then his life: that's all. And so there's no sort of, you know, content of wonders at all. Yeah. So they are not comparable to the “Diamond Sūtra” collections I've studied.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah. So—but they are still parasutraic writings of the “Lotus Sūtra” because they are about and they encourage faith in the “Lotus Sūtra."

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. If anything, it sounds like they are more distinctly parasutraic writings as opposed to miracle tales or some other designation we would give them.

CHIEW HUI HO: No, they both are parasutraic because they circle around the scriptures, except that they are—you cannot say that it's collections of... accounts of wonders. Yeah, definitely. Because not all, not all accounts are, yeah—

MILES OSGOOD: Even if they're compiled as such. Is there a reason why they're compiled as such?

CHIEW HUI HO: Well, that has got to do with the goal of the collections, because the collections—usually the compilers are very specific about what you want to achieve with the collections. And sometimes you have paratext within the collection—within the parasutraic text itself. That will tell you, right: the prefaces, the colophon.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah...

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: ... that will tell you what to expect. But it sounds like they might also mislead you in certain ways where it's sort of like, “Oh, if you go forward with this, “these are all, kind of, in the realm of the miraculous, but in fact, they turn out to be—”

CHIEW HUI HO: I think, you know, when you say that they mislead you, when you are misled, it is because of yourself, I think.

MILES OSGOOD: Ah.

CHIEW HUI HO: It is because you don't read it well, you know, because, you know, we are at a time—considering the time, right? Yes, they have papers to write, but they don't write effortless—like they don't have abundance of paper like us and pen and write easily. It still requires effort, right? So they are very specific about their tasks and their goal and what they want to achieve. And they are very economical in the way that they write. So they have to express a lot of things with fewer words than us.

MILES OSGOOD: I see.

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: So you get these rubrics that are maybe more capacious than—or... yeah, or to us would mislead us, but that's because we haven't done a proper job...

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: ... putting ourselves back into that time.

CHIEW HUI HO: So if you read them carefully, I think it's possible to know what they're for. And so the way that the title—my stance... and... is that the way they're titled tells you what they're all about. So, “Hongzan fahua zhuan,” right? So, “chuan,” right? It's basically—if it's a miracle tale collection, it will tell you “lingyan zhuan,” “lingyan—,” “lingyan ji,” “Yingyanji,” “yingyan zhuan.” And so the title actually will tell you what you're supposed to take it to be.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah. And if they don't call it “zhiguai,” don't call it a “zhiguai”: that's my point. And don't get it mixed up. And so in this case, right, when they call it a “zhuan” and then a “chuan” right? And then we have the “Fahua zhuanji,” “chuan,” “chuanji,” right? So they are already telling you how you're supposed to understand them.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah. And so we can sort of try to understand them based on that character. And you roughly know that it's related to “chuan,” “transmission,” or “zhuan,” which is “biography.” But then there's a problem, right? If you were to say “Biography of... Broadly Promoting the ‘Lotus Sūtra,’” that would sound a little bit strange, but it might not be strange if you attend the talk...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: ... tomorrow.

MILES OSGOOD: I think we'll come back to that at the end of this interview and with the talk tomorrow. So these texts are already telling you... You know, you've mentioned in your writing that a big corpus for you is the Tiantai patriarch biographies, right? So sometimes we are talking about biographies of specific people who have relationships to the sūtras. But it sounds like you're saying the language of the titles of these texts is also—is already suggesting to you...

CHIEW HUI HO: ... how you should take them.

MILES OSGOOD: ... biographies of sūtras themselves. Is that right? Or almost something along those lines?

CHIEW HUI HO: That's my argument for tomorrow's talk. And I have to demonstrate to you how you can actually parse it in such a way.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: But there's... And now that's a problem of translation. You see, the English is very restrictive, but Chinese, right? If you write that character, put in that character... If you can—I can read it, “zhuan,” and you can read it, “chuan,” right? And Irene can read it differently, and yeah. So that's how I think it was meant to be.

MILES OSGOOD: That there's an ambivalence built in...

CHIEW HUI HO: ... Yes. Right.

MILES OSGOOD: ... to the character itself.

CHIEW HUI HO: And in fact, the collection itself, you know, contains all these different connotations. So there's a sort of a boundary and a way. But it's not a leniency. It's not, you know, “miracle tale” collections. Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, okay. Well, just to pause for a moment on the kinds of outcomes that do—that do come from these engagements with the sūtra that we might not call “miraculous,” but that are very important from a Buddhist cosmological karmic perspective. It seems like one of the things that you've hit on is not just—and I love this, that the paratexts and the parameters of these parasutraic writings already distinguish them between “Diamond,” “Garland,” and “Lotus” Sūtras. But that also there is nevertheless also within the content of these stories something that's distinctive about the “Lotus Sūtra” stories, which has to do with accounts of different forms of heavenly rebirth that are given to different kinds of practitioners based on the level of their engagement with the sūtra. So could you tell us about the different realms one can be reborn into by nature of having—of having this “Lotus Sūtra” practitioner practice? And what do you learn from the fact that different patriarchs or different monastics land in different places with regard to their—to this variety of engagements?

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah, actually, this question is—is interesting and important in such—in a way that... Because it actually makes me think of things that I never really write in that article, and (for) which I might not give you an answer now.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah. But now that you bring up this: the afterlife of both, right? It’s something... You know, if we are talking about what really distinguishes these different parasutraic writings of different scriptures, right? This is one of them, because in the “Lotus Sūtra” collections, you'll find that people will have afterlives—people die and, you know, or they have good rebirth. Usually it's not named in the “Diamond Sūtra” collections. But the “Lotus Sūtra” collections—in the “Lotus Sūtra” collections, they make sure that they name, like, going to “Tuṣita,” “Trāyastriṃśa,” right?

MILES OSGOOD: They’re more specific about the abodes.

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah. The Pure Lands, right? And sometimes there's comparison, for example—oh, you know, someone recited the “Lotus Sūtra” X number of times, and then the parent is reborn in a certain heaven, and then the parent came and said, “Oh if you were to, you know, recite another X number of times, I'll go to the Pure Land. I'll have an upgrade.” You know? And so there are these kinds of things going on. So there seems to be some sort of, you know—some sort of a hierarchy.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah. And...

MILES OSGOOD: Is it being codified in that moment, as to like what you have to do to end up in certain abodes?

CHIEW HUI HO: No, it's usually, right... Because the text is about the “Lotus Sūtra.” So the focus is always on the “Lotus Sūtra,” meaning that—okay, how many times that you recite and then you can have an upgrade: things like that. But then, you know, because you also ask what specific things did they do to be reborn in Tuṣita or the Pure Land, right? I might have actually missed out, because you can actually probably look closer and see, for example, this story about “Lotus Sūtra” recitations and someone being born in Tuṣita, for instance: how Maitreya actually was featured in the tale. So that's something that I never—I didn't focus on in that article. And I can actually go back there—I mean, if I'm writing a book on the “Lotus Sūtra"—and finally go back and do more refined scanning—scanning, right, of the text—and see whether it’s always—does Maitreya ever even appear in a tale where, you know, the protagonist gains rebirth in Tuṣita?

MILES OSGOOD: Hm.

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: Do you have a hypothesis about what you might find if you comb back through for that?

CHIEW HUI HO: I don't want to give a premature... so... But my hunch is that basically it's still based on the “Lotus.” But if there—I believe there might be a few cases that... We might not be able to see a pattern. But a few cases might be able to give us a theory.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. And it sounds like what you're saying overall is the emphasis is not on the devotion or the labor of a practitioner. It's always on the power of the “Lotus Sūtra."

CHIEW HUI HO: Yes.

MILES OSGOOD: And the power of the “Lotus Sūtra” may not necessarily be predictable or reducible to kind of mathematical earnings of, you know, how many times you recite it and therefore get these kinds of rewards.

CHIEW HUI HO: But the more you recite, the outcome is always better.

MILES OSGOOD: (laughing) Okay.

CHIEW HUI HO: That's for sure. Yes.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. Okay. So there is at least some logic you can follow, you can put your trust in.

CHIEW HUI HO: Yes.

MILES OSGOOD: Okay, that makes sense. Well, okay. So thinking about the “Lotus Sūtra” more generally, I do want to come back to this idea of there being a biography or a lifespan of this particular text and of the particular parasutraic corpus as well. I know this is going to be the topic of your talk tomorrow. And to get the full argument, we'll have to take that in at length and ask you questions about it. But can you give us a little bit of a preview or an overview of sort of how you see the lifespan of the “Lotus Sūtra” by way of its parasutraic writings in the Tang Dynasty? Where does it begin, where does it end? What are its phases?

CHIEW HUI HO: Okay, let's start with with the pre-history of the research, because as I was, you know, telling you before, Donald Lopez actually wrote (The) Lotus Sūtra: A Biography under the Princeton University Press. So it makes me think about, you know, yeah... How can a sūtra have a biography? How do you talk about a sūtra having a biography?

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: And then prior to that, when I was writing my dissertation—and of course I mentioned the two “Lotus Sūtra” collections—I actually had some trouble translating the collections’ names. And if you look into my book, I think you can sense some sort of, yeah... It's not totally well done.

MILES OSGOOD: Were there other translations you entertained that you could have gone with?

CHIEW HUI HO: I just feel it wasn't something that I was totally satisfied with, for sure. And then—and maybe that lingers on—and then when I see “A Biography” again, right? It makes me think about—because it all lingers with the word “chuan,” “zhuan.” Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: What else could that word mean if not “biography”?

CHIEW HUI HO: Because... That word is available in Chinese. And in the—if you're talking about historical writings, it usually refers to biographies of people. Yeah, right. So, because, you know, Sima Qian, he started this new “jizhuanti” right? To apply in historical—historiography. And so he introduced this “zhuan” genre, you know, talking about the biographies of people that he collected in his history, the “Shiji,” “Records of the Grand Historian.” So this is something that he sort of pioneered. And later on these genres were taken up in various—and of course it's also taken up in “zhiguai” because some accounts of “zhiguai,” that comes in, you know, the biography of people and of course in Buddhism as well, and became very big. So Sima Qian in some sense has a sort of great impact on how we write biography. And so this term is used and it's applied to people. But as far as I know, like, I don't think we thought about a biography of a—like, in a Chinese sense, biography of a text.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah. And then that's why we have trouble when we try to translate this term where—especially in the name of these two collections.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. So I hear that as the story of coming to terms with this term and this generic—this genre category.

CHIEW HUI HO: Mm-hmm.

MILES OSGOOD: Can we say something about there being the story of the years themselves, these kind of medieval years where this parasutraic literature is developing? Is there something like an adolescence, a maturity, an end, a rebirth? I know you write about perpetual renewal of this tradition. But in what way might it have a lifespan or a life evolution?

CHIEW HUI HO: Are you talking about biography? Or...

MILES OSGOOD: Now I'm talking about sort of the parasutraic writings themselves.

CHIEW HUI HO: Okay, if you're talking about parasutraic writings, right? You know, the parasutraic writings come about only when people want to propagate this scripture, or it started to gain some ground.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: And then people are aware of it and then wanted to push it further, right? So it must have some sort of beginning.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: So people took notice of it. And in my book, I said that one of the reasons is because it was made available in the public domain, in inscriptions, in monasteries, and... So that people can see. And that's how people gain knowledge of it: not just the monastics...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: ... or people who have access to a book, but people who, you know, may be illiterate, but could see it, actually, and then ask people, “What is this?” Right? So it might have started from that sort of beginning. And then people started to collect these tales. And then that's the beginning.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: Where does it go from there? Once the people have hold of it, once it's a sort of publicly available text and not a kind of cloistered one...

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: ... what happens to the text going forward from there?

CHIEW HUI HO: It will be the start of a snowball effect, you know. People—as people get to know about it, more people start practicing and then engaging with it. And then the people start telling people, others...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: ... their experience. And then as more and more of these accounts proliferated, then they come to be compiled.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, so then the “Lotus Sūtra” practitioner work that we might associate with particular patriarchs or with monastics starts to be something that other people, including the laity, feel that they can participate in as well?

CHIEW HUI HO: That's actually a distinction between the “Diamond Sūtra” and ...

MILES OSGOOD: Oh, okay.

CHIEW HUI HO: … the “Lotus Sūtra” collections, because the “Diamond Sūtra” as I was saying, right—we have a lot of things—evidence, I would say.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: But the “Lotus Sūtra” is—from what we can see... There's of course, fair representations of lay engagements, but then it is much less...

MILES OSGOOD: Not to the same extent.

CHIEW HUI HO: ... than the “Diamond Sūtra” for various reasons.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: I mean, it's more extensive, more difficult for people to engage. But anyway, there are still shorter versions: for example, extracts like a certain chapter that's very famous: the chapter on Avalokiteśvara. So that is—that’s practice. And so—and that's a legitimate form of practice as well. And so—and you'll find that in collections, there's some representations of those kind of—those sort of practices, and engaged by lay people as well. So in its nature is very different: parasutraic. So you can say that it's broader in its scope. It contains accounts of wonders as well as non-accounts of wonders and maybe—and something else. For example, “Hongzan fahua zhuan” started with the category of image. So it talks about fashioning a certain landscape with—related to the “Diamond Sūtra” or a bodhisattva found in the “Lotus Sūtra.” And then it is this fashioning is replicated in China.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

CHIEW HUI HO: So it's telling the tale about how important landscape and sacred geography is—how important it is in (the) “Lotus Sūtra” cult.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah. So this is something that is totally not related to wonders, tales of wonders, right, or biography.

MILES OSGOOD: Right.

CHIEW HUI HO: So this is some—so it's sort of broader.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, it's a detail that's maybe more...

CHIEW HUI HO: And then the “Fahua zhuanji” is much broader as I will say tomorrow. Yeah. So there are other things. Yeah. But I know you're interested in, you know, history and what is the different—

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. Well, I'm curious about that. And I think that's maybe where we will end, is just... You know, so you take this idea of there being potentially a biography or a lifespan of a sūtra from Donald Lopez, but also from within the texts themselves: they seem to be suggesting that language to you. And I suppose that feels quite different from saying, “Oh, I have a chronicle, I have an archive, I have a history of a text,” to say “I have—I can tell the story of a life of a text, or the biography of a text,” feels quite different. And I wonder just how you conceive of that. Is it useful because it offers biological analogies of sort of like, “Oh, here's the maturity of a textual tradition. “Here's the health of a textual tradition. “Here's the—as you say—the propagation of a textual tradition.” Is it more because it feels like it has interpersonal analogies: “Oh, here's the social status “of a tradition. Here's the identity or self-recognition of a tradition.” I guess I wonder what kinds of things as a scholar are offered to you by thinking in terms of “life” and “biography” as opposed to maybe more neutral categories of “history,” “chronicle.”

CHIEW HUI HO: I think when we—yeah, when we talk about “biography,” right? Usually we talk about a person from birth to death, and then they are... It's actually chronological, isn't it? Yeah. And basically, a biography tends to be historical more or less, right?

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

CHIEW HUI HO: And when we are talking about biography—and my idea of biography as it applied in the “Lotus Sūtra” is somewhat different. It's not just from point A to point B and then it ends: it doesn't actually end.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: That's one of my arguments. And what I want to argue is: it is actually a pre-modern sort of biography written... And the idea of object biography... Because I mentioned that before, you know: it's an interdisciplinary view taken up by museum studies, anthropology, who try to account for the life of an object, not just as an inanimate thing, but having agencies and being able to influence things and being an agent itself in the way that it influences people. And so from that perspective, we can actually see that there's some sort of a presentation by the compiler of “Fahua zhuanji” in such a way, you know—presenting in such a way that it's not a usual kind of biography of a person.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: But then having agency, having some sort of influence. But then it's really also interesting because in the first—in the very beginning, deals with the ontology of embodiment. Yeah. How—it is... And by the way, when in Buddhism, we're talking about cosmic time. It's not just, you know, the time in the human world.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: And so... And that very beginning is not specified, you know, with—in which year. But it says that the Buddha “expounded the dharma.” And “expounded the dharma...” And it's so expansive that you can't contain it. Yeah. But...

MILES OSGOOD: Go ahead.

CHIEW HUI HO: ... you can actually put it in—you can actually do it somehow, contain it somehow. But this is always the—you know, a very Buddhist way of expressing things. Not being able to contain: “Oh, it's so expansive.” But then you still manage to contain it for people. Yeah. And so it started with explication, you know, expounding the discourse. And not in... Just verbally, yeah. Not in any textual form. But in “Fahua zhuanji” you will come to see that, a certain point in time, it will be committed to writing, and then it will have influence subsequently. So you can actually see that the compiler has some sort of an idea about the “Lotus Sūtra” having agency. And it actually appears—you know, it appears according to a rhythmic theory of time in Buddhism. It actually will arise, it will mature, and then it will be concealed because the conditions are not right. And then it will manifest itself.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: That's really clarifying. So I was thinking in these terms of biography being a known generic entity that of—like you say, describing the beginning of life to an end, and then imposing that as a way of giving order onto an otherwise potentially amorphous, difficult history of a large corpus of parasutraic texts. But it sounds like you're saying in multiple ways, we actually need to think about it in the reverse order. We need to think about the ways in which that Buddhist history, and that parasutraic set of writings, as changing our sense of biography. That, on—you know, it changes our sense of biography because we change our estimation of what counts as a living active agent in a story. It might not just be the practitioner: it might be the “Lotus Sūtra” itself. And it changes our notion of biography because it changes our notion of time: that this is something that is reborn across multiple generations and has renewed life and vitality and importance in a culture, not just in the course of one lifespan.

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: That's wonderful. Well, so you know, the way I want to close then is just to ask you: where are you taking this model, this heuristic, in your research going forward? You've done the “Diamond Sūtra” and the “Lotus Sūtra.” Do you imagine do continuing on with parasutraic writings and their biographies with other texts and parasutraic sets? Or is this starting to inspire new departures and offshoots?

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah, I have other ideas, but then I haven't finished because this is just the beginning. And for tomorrow's talk, I'll not go into the accounts of wonders because we have no time. But I only have time to talk about why it's a biography and explain why it's a biography. But this is just a beginning because—it's incomplete because this biography is supported by a system. And what I call a “system” is a system of faith and devotions that is actually sort of encapsulated in the categories of engagements. The collection is divided into 12 categories, and the remaining six are actually—those are related to how you engage with the scriptures. I think if you want to really talk about... Because biography—the way that we have it, right—requires us to look at how—it's not just how people take up. It's the relationship between the text and the people. And how do you unravel the relationship? You really have to study the accounts in these categories very carefully, right? So this collection—this collection is very big. So there are hundreds... And so to finish up, I think I'll have to really read them very carefully.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: And as I said, they are not that formulaic compared to the “Diamond Sūtra.” So there are a lot more variations. Which means it's harder to interpret them or to see patterns. And so it requires more effort. But I think that this idea can be applied to other texts in Buddhism and Buddhist Studies: for example, esoteric texts, the Pure Land texts as well. Yeah. So in its application, it's very wide. But unlike a traditional human biography, which will be about the life of a person, the scandals of the person, blah, blah, blah, the biography that you see in “Fahua zhuanji” as I will demonstrate, will not be the same as a biography or the biographical patterns you can actually see when you study other parasutraic writings of other sūtras.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah. So it's a lot more work, but in its application, I think it can be done to other texts.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

CHIEW HUI HO: Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: That makes sense, but also it makes sense then that you'd be in the thick of it with the “Lotus Sūtra” for quite a while because of the eccentricities and the varieties within.

CHIEW HUI HO: Yes, yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: Well, wonderful. Well, we look forward to seeing how that research evolves in the coming years. But especially how we can learn more about it tomorrow in the talk that you're going to give, a talk that we're also going to be recording and putting on our YouTube channel. So thank you so much Chiew Hui for having this conversation with us, for explaining the ins and outs of the parasutraic corpus of the “Lotus Sūtra” and the life therein. This was a wonderful conversation, thank you.

CHIEW HUI HO: Thank you very much.

[Epilogue]

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

Thanks again to Chiew Hui for joining us on the show. If you want to go into greater detail, you can watch his full lecture on our YouTube channel, titled “The Tang Biography of the Lotus Sūtra,” or read his twenty twenty-three article for the Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies, titled “Parasutraic Narratives and Cultic Repertoire.”

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]

Until next time, this has been “The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford” podcast.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]