Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood: Giving Away the Body in Indian - download pdf or read online

By Reiko Ohnuma

ISBN-10: 0231137087

ISBN-13: 9780231137089

ISBN-10: 0231510284

ISBN-13: 9780231510288

Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood is the 1st accomplished learn of a relevant narrative subject in premodern South Asian Buddhist literature: the Buddha's physically self-sacrifice in the course of his past lives as a bodhisattva. engaging in shut readings of news from Sanskrit, Pali, chinese language, and Tibetan literature written among the 3rd century B.C.E. and the past due medieval interval, Reiko Ohnuma argues that this subject has had an incredible influence at the improvement of Buddhist philosophy and culture.Whether he's taking the shape of king, prince, ascetic, elephant, hare, serpent, or god, the bodhisattva many times offers his physique or components of his flesh to others. He leaps into fires, drowns himself within the ocean, rips out his tusks, gouges out his eyes, and shall we mosquitoes drink from his blood, continually out of selflessness and compassion and to accomplish the top nation of Buddhahood. Ohnuma areas those tales right into a discrete subgenre of South Asian Buddhist literature and methods them like case reviews, examining their plots, characterizations, and rhetoric. She then relates the subject of the Buddha's physically self-sacrifice to significant conceptual discourses within the historical past of Buddhism and South Asian religions, equivalent to the kinds of the present, the physique (both traditional and extraordinary), kingship, sacrifice, ritual providing, and demise. Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood finds a truly subtle and influential belief of the physique in South Asian Buddhist literature and highlights the way those tales have supplied a massive cultural source for Buddhists. mixed together with her wealthy and cautious translations of vintage texts, Ohnuma introduces an entire new realizing of an essential idea in Buddhists stories. (6/1/2007)

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Download PDF by Reiko Ohnuma: Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood: Giving Away the Body in Indian

Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood is the 1st accomplished learn of a principal narrative subject matter in premodern South Asian Buddhist literature: the Buddha's physically self-sacrifice in the course of his earlier lives as a bodhisattva. carrying out shut readings of reports from Sanskrit, Pali, chinese language, and Tibetan literature written among the 3rd century B.

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Extra resources for Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood: Giving Away the Body in Indian Buddhist Literature

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Courtesy of the Saint Louis Art Museum, William K. Bixby Trust for Asian Art. introduction in the third-person rather than the first-person) a series of four of his previous lives, the fourth of which involves the hungry tigress. In order to give one a sufficient taste of this literature, I now quote the episode in full: [Once upon a time, there was a brahmin’s son] named Satyavrata who was highly esteemed by the people. He was learned in all the sciences, his heart was devoted to compassion, he was fond of tranquility, and his mind was opposed to marriage.

Thus, when the hare unexpectedly dies, this death calls attention to itself; it brings home to one the reality of extreme self-sacrifice with new and unanticipated force. This forcefulness derives from the story’s relationship to the larger generic tradition rather than from the story itself. In support of this interpretation, I might point out that Peter Khoroche has claimed that the Jātakamālā does indeed show a much greater concern with emphasizing the bodhisattva ideal of self-sacrifice than does the Pāli Jātaka collection.

So] come, gather various types of wood, and light a fire. ” “Very well,” he replied, and with a delighted mind, he gathered various types of wood and fashioned a great pyre out of a womb of burning embers. He lit the fire there in such a way that it would quickly grow great. Shaking my dusty limbs, I approached to one side. When the great pile of wood was blazing and roaring, I jumped up and fell into the middle of the flames. Just as cool water relieves the anxiety and fever of whoever enters into it, and gives them satisfaction and joy, so did the blazing fire, when I entered it, relieve all of my anxiety, as if it were cool water.

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Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood: Giving Away the Body in Indian Buddhist Literature by Reiko Ohnuma


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