Adam T. Miller, University of Chicago Divinity School.
摘要
Understanding the relationship between works of religious literature and their worlds is one of the central preoccupations of the history of religions, and Mahāyāna sūtras are often particularly challenging in this regard. That there is a relationship is a given, no matter how unclear it may seem at times, as is the fact that what we come to understand about this relationship depends in large part on our assumptions, our interests, our questions—in short, on how we read. Although temporally and geographically far removed from the texts treated here, the Book of Mormon illustrates this point well. While it claims to be a historical record of Jewish groups in the Americas and Christ’s postresurrection visit thereto, the Book of Mormon has been variously framed and accordingly studied as a literary product that reflects and refracts the nineteenth-century context in which it emerged, as the scripture that gave deep roots to a Christian restorationist movement that eventually became a new “world religion,” and as a structurally complex and self-aware narrative that reaches beyond the text and into the moment of its own “coming forth.” A similarly wide range of approaches has been taken to Mahāyāna sūtras, especially in recent years, and it is largely to this conversation that David Drewes, Natalie Gummer, and Christian Wedemeyer here each contribute. As a collection, however, these innovative studies in history, performativity, and solidarity together draw our attention to the generative power of metatextuality and thus open up new directions for thinking about the complex relationship between works of religious literature, the worlds in which they emerged and circulate(d), and the worlds they aim(ed) to produce.
