Rafal Felbur talks about the surviving Chinese and Tibetan versions of the Sūrata-sūtra, their depictions of a charismatic preacher bringing Buddhism to new frontiers, and what forgotten Mahāyāna scriptures like these reveal about the relation between monastics and monarchs. Interview by Miles Osgood. Part 2 of 2.

[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]

[Prologue: Hundreds of Mahāyāna scriptures preserved only in Tibetan and Chinese. Specific example of the Sūrata-sūtra, with a summary of its early episodes. Cliffhanger: what happens when Prasenajit asks to meet the Buddha?]

Last month, we considered two approaches to a neglected corpus of hundreds of Mahāyāna scriptures, lost in Sanskrit but preserved in translation. First, there were the ancient Chinese exegetes who stored and saved these sūtras in their inclusive canons—even though the texts were rarely put to ritual use or scholarly study. Centuries later, a new, digital breed of aggregator appears, making it possible to hold these texts up against Tibetan alternatives for quick comparative analysis.

Both of these approaches—scribal or digital—take up a certain distance from the original material. In today’s episode, instead, we discover the joy and the value of actually reading one of these forgotten sūtras up close, discovering how it twists the tropes of both Mainstream and Mahāyāna texts.

The scripture at hand is the Sūrata-sūtra, whose earliest extant source is a Chinese translation from the third century. The sūtra takes as its hero a mysterious “urban pauper” in Śrāvastī named “Sūrata,” or the “gentle one”: a preacher who does not belong to any monastic institution but teaches with the qualities of a charismatic bodhisattva.

Sūrata is, in fact, such a holy and inspiring teacher that he attracts the envy of the god Śakra, who suspects that Sūrata is hoarding karma to usurp his heavenly power. Śakra subjects the preacher to a series of temptations and tests, but Sūrata holds fast, responding that he has no designs on dominion, since everything in the heavens as on earth lacks any permanence.

Sūrata then picks a fight with a second powerful enemy. Happening upon a precious gem and having no use for it, he gives the treasure to the poorest man in Śrāvastī, in defiance of a king who has been enriching himself at the expense of his subjects. Heading to the palace, Sūrata proclaims that this king, Prasenajit, is the actual “poorest” man in the city— impoverished in spirit—and that material poverty is in fact the truest wealth. When the furious king asks him for a witness who can defend such a statement, Sūrata calls upon the Buddha himself.

This is where the plot gets especially strange. King Prasenajit is a familiar figure from other sūtras, and usually he is himself a devout Buddhist. In this forgotten sūtra, however, the king is greedy, irascible, and also ignorant: his palace becomes the site of a dramatic confrontation for a foreign religion on a new frontier.

That’s where our returning guest this month, Rafal Felbur, picks up the story.

RAFAL FELBUR: Reading this text for the first time—and having been exposed to, having been familiar with, the Mainstream, non-Mahāyāna presentation of Praenajit as this close friend of the Buddha—I was expecting the Buddha to say, “But of course I know him. We are best buddies. We talk to each other all the time.” And it’s really striking, in this scripture, that Praenajit, at that point, says, “What? I have not even heard of this Buddha.”

MILES OSGOOD: “Who’s that?” (laughing)

RAFAL FELBUR: “Who’s that?”

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

Today we return to our interview with Rafal Felbur, Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter to the Chair of Buddhist Studies at Heidelberg University.

Last month, in Part 1 of our interview, we covered some of Rafal’s early research: the dissertation he wrote here at Stanford and the digital “Editing Environment” tool he helped to create as a postdoctoral research fellow at Leiden University.

Today, in Part 2, we dig deeper into the focus of Rafal’s current scholarship: how to approach the enormous corpus of forgotten Mahāyāna sūtras.

Let’s head back into the library and learn more about the Sūrata-sūtra.

[bell chimes]

MILES OSGOOD: All right, well, I want to turn to what I think of as the main event of this conversation, in relation to the talk that you're giving tomorrow and the book that you're working on right now, which is a return to the corpus of Mahāyāna sūtras that you're interested in that have been, in one way or another, neglected—but maybe more specifically, The Sūrata-sūtra, which is your major case study in "Saving the Buddhadharma from Itself." So I had the opportunity to read the introduction to this book, and it makes me really excited about what's to come. And there's already so much packed into there that we could spend another hour on, just in terms of how entertaining the story is itself and all the different interpretive questions that it raises. But in a moment, I'll ask you to at least tell us a little bit of the story of the Sūrata-sūtra. And maybe we should go quickly through the things that initially make Sūrata as a figure kind of interesting and enigmatic: the way in which this sort of poor preacher who is kind of tricky to define—in terms of whether he's a bodhisattva or what exactly his title would be—challenges the authority of a god and a king as a charismatic dharma teacher, to the point that the king takes him and a retinue on a trip to meet a Buddha—to meet the Buddha, sorry—and to learn more. Wherever you want to start, could we end up with that part of the story? Because it seems like that's the piece that most fascinates you as a departure from other Mahāyāna sūtras and the piece of the story to dwell upon. But tell us a little bit about Sūrata and his relation to the Buddha.

RAFAL FELBUR: Yeah. I will start at the end of the story.

MILES OSGOOD: Great.

RAFAL FELBUR: Mm? Correct. All this happens in the text, and there are some really striking narrative developments that we could dwell on extensively, and I'll comment on tomorrow. But at the end: what happens at the end is particularly striking and something that I have not seen in essentially any other Mahāyāna scripture that I've read.

MILES OSGOOD: Even the other neglected ones?

RAFAL FELBUR: Well, there's so many of them...

MILES OSGOOD: Who knows?

RAFAL FELBUR: Who knows, who knows?

MILES OSGOOD: Who knows?

RAFAL FELBUR: I mean, maybe now...

MILES OSGOOD: But you haven't seen it yet.

RAFAL FELBUR: Maybe now we can ask the chatbot (Miles laughs) to tell us what it's...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. Our digital aggregators.

RAFAL FELBUR: That's right.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, yeah.

RAFAL FELBUR: The end. Usually, what happens at the end of a Mahāyāna sūtra is quite predictable. Many Mahāyāna sūtras end with the Buddha proclaiming to the gathered audiences that the teaching just delivered, the sūtra just proclaimed, is true, is particularly holy, and it needs to be memorized, preserved in memory, transmitted, copied, taught to others. The end.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

RAFAL FELBUR: Everybody goes home...

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

RAFAL FELBUR: ... duly inspired.

MILES OSGOOD: Right.

RAFAL FELBUR: That's what I'm expecting to see in my sūtra, in this particular text, because this happens so frequently. But something quite different happens, and it's quite interesting. The Buddha says, "Yeah, that teaching that you just heard: “that was super, that's great, but I have something else to say." And what the Buddha says is really interesting and difficult to make sense of for a historian. The Buddha basically says—and this is something that I've not seen anywhere else. The Buddha says, "In this world...." And there are elements in the text which indicate that by this expression, he means the kind of world that the audiences, the target audiences, or the intended readers of that sūtra, would be living in.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

RAFAL FELBUR: The Buddha, in the narrative frame, says, "In this world..." Indicating the world that the audience...

MILES OSGOOD: ... this chronological time and place.

RAFAL FELBUR: Exactly, yes. So again, the readers or the audiences, whatever, the users of the text would've recognized that reference, "this world" to refer to their living world. The Buddha says, "In this world, I, the Buddha, will not teach the Dharma." That's absolutely unique. I've never seen it anywhere else.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

RAFAL FELBUR: And he goes on to say, this narrative Buddha, that “in a world like this, if I, the Buddha, “were to teach or to attempt teaching the Dharma in the way that Buddhas teach the Dharma...” And I'm paying top dollar to anyone who can figure out what that means: (Miles laughs) not as a narrative detail in the text, but what that means, what that tells us....

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

RAFAL FELBUR: ... about the social history behind this text. The Buddha says, "I will not teach the Dharma “in the way that Buddhas teach the Dharma, “because in this world, which is so wretched, so corrupt, so degenerate...”

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

RAFAL FELBUR: “... if I were to try to teach the Dharma the way that Buddhas normally teach the Dharma..." Again, whatever that means.

MILES OSGOOD: Right.

RAFAL FELBUR: Is he criticizing some institution? Is he criticizing the Buddhism of—are the authors of the text actually trying to criticize the established Buddhism of their day?

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

RAFAL FELBUR: By putting such comments?

MILES OSGOOD: Or is he saying that in... Sorry, I don't want to get ahead of ourselves, but the idea... It seems like the dot, dot, dot there is also saying, “Are the Buddhas insufficient...”

RAFAL FELBUR: Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: “... in some particular way with regard to this context?” Anyway, yeah, carry on.

RAFAL FELBUR: At the same time, he says, "But fear not. Worry not, because this...”

MILES OSGOOD: Wait, wait, sorry. Just to complete the previous clause. “So if Buddhas were to try...”

RAFAL FELBUR: Oh, yes.

MILES OSGOOD: In this particular case, why would they fail, or why would it not...

RAFAL FELBUR: “I will not teach the Dharma “the way that Buddhas usually preach the Dharma, “because if I were to attempt to do this “in this corrupt world, not a single being would be saved, and the Dharma would be completely lost.”

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

RAFAL FELBUR: “Therefore, to prevent this from happening, “to thwart this terrible outcome, “I,” the Buddha says, "I dispatch, I nominate, I designate...”

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

RAFAL FELBUR: “I delegate this poor anonymous preacher to do my work for me."

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. But then what the identity of that preacher is is a complete question mark.

RAFAL FELBUR: Yes.

MILES OSGOOD: Because he's not a bodhisattva per se. He's certainly not one of the Buddhas who were just referenced.

RAFAL FELBUR: Yes, exactly. And who is he? Who is he?

MILES OSGOOD: Who is Sūrata?

RAFAL FELBUR: Who is Sūrata? Again, both as a protagonist in this narrative, but more importantly and much more difficult to answer, who is this protagonist? Who is this Sūrata as a reflection of social historical realities...

MILES OSGOOD: ... that require him?

RAFAL FELBUR: Yes.

MILES OSGOOD: ... that bring him this precedence?

RAFAL FELBUR: Yes, what kind of social realities are reflected in—or normatively put forward...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

RAFAL FELBUR: ... as a kind of normative vision, in that text? I don't know, and I hope tomorrow that I'll have a chance to discuss this with historians who have spent much more time than me.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. Before we get to that conversation and that lecture, which of course will be recorded and put out on our channel, can we speculate a little bit? Because you have an argument that one thing that seems to be happening here is that this must be a version of Buddhism on the frontiers or Buddhism on the periphery. That we have a preacher here who's venturing out into a time and a place that, for some reason, the Buddha himself doesn't feel comfortable with by nature of its corruption, but maybe also, one wonders, by nature of a particular history or geography. And here's where maybe the relationship to the king, Prasenajit, has some relevance: that what's happening here is that Sūrata is able to bring a king and his entire retinue to Buddhism, when, in this particular story, for some reason, they actually haven't had access to it yet before, which again is another atypical thing about these details. So, speculating then, what do you think might be the time and the place of this? What is the "this world" that the Buddha references? What might we imagine?

RAFAL FELBUR: I'm glad that you invoke this protagonist, King Prasenajit. He plays a central role in the text. And I do agree with you that thinking carefully (about) what the text, what the scripture does with this protagonist—with the protagonist the king—is crucial in our efforts to figure out the answers to these big questions. So I'll come back to that in a second. But let me preface my comment by saying that Indic scriptures are notorious for giving their readers almost no historically reliable clues. Right? So, for example, we have all the reason in the world to assume that King Prasenajit...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

RAFAL FELBUR: .... was a historical figure who lived in a particular geographical area. But the fact that this protagonist appears in the text, of course, does not mean that the text was written in...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

RAFAL FELBUR: ... the historical context, the geographical area, in which King... Right? He’s a literary trope.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

RAFAL FELBUR: And the text comes down to us with absolutely no additional evidence, additional material—colophons, notices, bibliographical information—positioning this text historically.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. And then the trope doesn't even help us that much because the trope is being used in an unusual way—where if we were to try to say allegorically, “King Prasenajit” means “this,” when he's used even ahistorically, here, that's not necessarily reliable? Well, here's the Prasenajit question. So what is this trope doing or not doing?

RAFAL FELBUR: Correct. So coming back to this issue of my speculation about how this scripture may have been written by an individual or in a community representing a type of Buddhism on the periphery or on the frontiers of the kind of settled, established Buddhist world: in connection with this, when Prasenajit first makes his appearance on the scene, in the narrative, as a reader of the text, I was expecting this Prasenajit, this king, to be introduced in the scripture as someone who already has a very good, strong, and favorable connection with the Buddha, with Buddhism. Because Prasenajit in Mainstream, so, non-Mahāyāna, literature—whether it's pre-Mahāyāna or not, that's another, non-Mahāyāna—Prasenajit is the quintessential example of a king who supports the Buddha and the community. Right, that's his job description in Mainstream Buddhist literature: the model supporter of Buddhism.

MILES OSGOOD: But not here.

RAFAL FELBUR: And so in this scripture—not here at all. The first... Right, his first appearance in the narrative, in the Sūrata-sūtra, is... He's in the middle of some official business in his court. Our protagonist, Sūrata, meets him. They have an encounter. The Buddha—the Buddha shows up. And... Oh, sorry, no, before the Buddha—right, sorry. Our protagonist and the king have an encounter. And in the course of that encounter—for various reasons that we can go in(to)—the main protagonist, Sūrata, says, "Hey, King, by the way, regarding that topic “that we were just talking about, “the best guy to talk to is this Buddha guy, right? “And this Buddha guy, he just happens to be hanging around “in the outskirts of town. You should go and talk to him." Reading this text for the first time, and having been exposed to—having been familiar with—the Mainstream, non-Mahāyāna presentation of Prasenajit as this close friend of the Buddha, I was expecting Buddha to say, "Well, but of course I know him. “We are best buddies. We talk to each other all the time." And it's really striking in this scripture that Prasenajit at that point says, "What? I have not even heard of this Buddha."

MILES OSGOOD: “Who's that?”

RAFAL FELBUR: “Who’s that?”

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. (chuckles) Yeah. So I have a kind of naive hypothesis that I want to throw at you, that you can tell me why it's right or wrong or compelling or impossible. But relating to your research and your interest in the transmission of these particular texts that then took root in China and Tibet only to be expunged, dissolved, lost in their original Indic sources, is what's happening here a version of a fable of, in fact, Buddhism arriving in these, kind of, what were once foreign lands of China and Tibet, where kings had not heard of the Buddha and where charismatic poor preachers had to have success in convincing and converting royalty and their retinues to get on board with this new religion? I mean, one way.... I'm not really truly asking if this is a sort of predictive model for this kind of eastward, northward proselytizing. But I do wonder if it explains something about the fact of these texts being preserved in those areas because it might align with a certain version of history there. I guess, in at least a metaphorical sense, or a kind of cultural mythology sense, is there a way in which this story of Sūrata is the story of Buddhism arriving in China and Tibet?

RAFAL FELBUR: Is the story of Sūrata actually a story of Buddhism's arrival in China and Tibet? Very different places, very different environments for Buddhism to enter. Very tempting question. I don't know. I don't know if it's possible to know, but it's a very tempting question, a very enjoyable question to consider. A truly fun intellectual game to play. I think it's important—in trying to answer this—I think it's important to distinguish between, very clearly between, the Tibetan context and the Chinese context. Both of these contexts or each of these contexts presents its own challenges in interpretation. Let me begin with the Tibetan because I think the case is slightly...

MILES OSGOOD: Great.

RAFAL FELBUR: ... more clear-cut. Could the Sūrata-sūtra reflect the experience of Buddhists or Buddhist preachers, Buddhist proselytizers, making their way into the Tibetan cultural milieu? I don't think so. And here is why I think it's not likely. We didn't get into all these details in our discussion today. Maybe I'll get to that tomorrow. The Sūrata-sūtra presents a particular vision of the relationship between what we would call—I guess, just for simplicity—“secular” and “religious” power. And it's a kind of theocratic vision, if I'm understanding the text correctly. And again, tomorrow I hope to receive a lot of pushback (Miles chuckles) and be exposed to alternative readings. But I think it's a vision in which religious figures arrogate to themselves the power to command secular rulers to use religion—sorry, to use their secular power in the service of religion. And I think, by the time—that's speculation. I think that by the time Buddhist scriptures began to be translated in earnest into Tibetan, the structures of power in the Tibetan Empire—we're talking about the late eighth, early ninth century—the structures of power in the Tibetan Empire were pretty well-defined. And I think... Again, this is speculation. I think that it would be a hard sell for a missionary or a missionary-like figure from India to come into Tibet and say, "Hey, you know what? I have a whole new vision of how things should be run here."

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

RAFAL FELBUR: Right? You're a little bit late to the game. Right?

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

RAFAL FELBUR: Because here you are entering into a cultural context in which these structures of power are already well...

MILES OSGOOD: .... really well established.

RAFAL FELBUR: And in fact, when you compare the Chinese version of this text to the Tibetan version of this text...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

RAFAL FELBUR: ... you see that they are basically the same thing. This part is here; this part is here. This section is here; this section is here. They track each other very closely with one exception. And that exception is that—with the exception of the passages directly addressing kingship.

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm.

RAFAL FELBUR: Simply put....

MILES OSGOOD: These are included in the Tibetan version?

RAFAL FELBUR: They are included in the Chinese.

MILES OSGOOD: Oh, in the Chinese.

RAFAL FELBUR: Extensively so. And, they are... I have to be careful in my choice of terminology here.

MILES OSGOOD: Sure.

RAFAL FELBUR: They are not there in the Tibetan.

MILES OSGOOD: Okay.

RAFAL FELBUR: I don’t... The reason I have to be careful with my terminology here is because I don't want to say that they were “removed” from the Tibetan.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

RAFAL FELBUR: That would already be applying a certain interpretation.

MILES OSGOOD: Of course.

RAFAL FELBUR: I have no evidence that they were removed. Maybe they were simply not there in the original Indian text that the Tibetans were working from. Maybe the removal happened earlier.

MILES OSGOOD: We don't know.

RAFAL FELBUR: But I think it kind of makes sense, if—that's a kind of informal answer, that the Tibetan translators...

MILES OSGOOD: ... would not have been keen on this...

RAFAL FELBUR: ... working under imperial patronage...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

RAFAL FELBUR: Right?

MILES OSGOOD: Why? So what is it saying about kingship that's potentially a problem?

RAFAL FELBUR: Well, right, basically that the... For example, the passage in which King Prasenajit, at a certain point in the scripture, decides to—it's not exactly clear what he decides to do, but—hand over secular control of his kingdom to these Buddhist characters, figures.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

RAFAL FELBUR: That wouldn't really—that would fall flat.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, yeah.

RAFAL FELBUR: And I can very well imagine that the Tibetan translators or scribes said, "Hey, John, Jack, whatever, right? (laughing) “Do you really think we should include this? Nobody will notice, right?" (laughs)

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. “Do we think this is maybe not authoritative?”

RAFAL FELBUR: Exactly.

MILES OSGOOD: “This is not legitimate?”

RAFAL FELBUR: Yeah, yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, fascinating. Okay, so then conversely, does it say something about China? Or do you think it's just like, "Oh, they just preserved it," in the way we were talking about half an hour ago, that because they were includers, it's like, "Even if this is politically risky, it belongs. It belongs in there."

RAFAL FELBUR: Yeah. Well, so we covered the Tibetan case. Now we're back to the Chinese case. Three points. Number one: we know, for various reasons that I will not get into, that the Chinese translation that we have was produced in the early fourth century by a historical individual about whom we know quite a bit. And we know about that individual... One of the things that we know about that individual—we have quite a bit of information about his biography—some details are still murky, but we have quite a bit—is that he was not a... He was not affiliated with Buddhism in the capital city. He was not deeply involved with municipal Buddhism of the day.

MILES OSGOOD: Sure.

RAFAL FELBUR: And so this connection to royal power in his case, I don't think it's very strong.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

RAFAL FELBUR: Mm? We also know that this particular individual, the author of the Chinese translation and his group, were, in most cases, when they were producing a Chinese translation of an Indic scripture—they were in most cases working with manuscripts, potentially some texts brought in memory, but mostly manuscripts brought in from Central Asia. Right? And that itself indicates that the text would have had to be composed not in China, but before reaching the Chinese.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. Right.

RAFAL FELBUR: I'm not even getting into this big and continuously debated question of whether the earliest chapters of Buddhism's presence in, broadly speaking, “China” were chapters closely connected with political authority...

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

RAFAL FELBUR: ... with kingly/imperial power.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

RAFAL FELBUR: Or were they not connected? Did Buddhism, in other words, enter almost imperceptibly, right, beneath the radar of central authorities into China? Or was it imported in kind of purposeful coordination by central... ? That's a debated, hotly debated issue, which maybe we can save for another time.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, okay. Well, that's good. Let's leave on that note of suspense. But having gotten some picture of not only what it would mean to infer something about an Indic source originally, but then also to learn something about the context of Tibet and China by nature of the one difference between the two texts in those two different places, that opens up so many possibilities about what it means to go back to these forgotten sūtras, these forgotten scriptures, and what the potentialities are for scholars. So to learn more, I think everybody's going to have to tune in tomorrow to tomorrow's lecture, whether they're live here at Stanford or watching it later on our YouTube channel. For now, I'll just say thank you so much for this exhaustive, comprehensive, and inclusive look at these texts and at your own body of work. Thanks so much, Rafal.

RAFAL FELBUR: Thank you, thank you, Miles.

[Epilogue]

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

Thanks again to Rafal Felbur for joining us on the show. As I mentioned, you can watch his full lecture about the Sūrata-sūtra and the study of marginal Mahāyāna texts on our YouTube channel. Keep an eye out, too, for his forthcoming monograph, a bilingual synoptic critical edition of the sūtra, to be published with Brill, titled: Saving the Buddhadharma from Itself.

[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]