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| Empty Vision: Sign and Language in South Asian Mahayana Buddhism | ||
| 作者 | McMahan, David L. |
|---|---|
| 出版日期 | 1998 |
| 頁次 | 324 |
| 出版者 | University of California, Santa Barbara |
| 出版者網址 | http://www.ucsb.edu/ |
| 出版地 | Santa Barbara, CA, US [聖巴巴拉, 加利福尼亞州, 美國] |
| 資料類型 | 博碩士論文=Thesis and Dissertation |
| 使用語言 | 英文=English |
| 學位類別 | 博士 |
| 校院名稱 | University of California, Santa Barbara |
| 系所名稱 | Department of Religious Studies |
| 指導教授 | Larson, Gerald James |
| 畢業年度 | 1998 |
| 附註項 | 445 |
| 關鍵詞 | 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. |
| 點閱次數 | 595 |
| 建檔日期 | 1999.10.26 |
| 更新日期 | 2017.01.16 |
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