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Buddhism in Symbolic Form Jay G. Williams

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Buddhism in Symbolic Form Jay G. Williams The Stupa Buddhism in Symbolic Form Jay G. Williams Gwenfrewi Santes Press “Wherever the head rolls” i ii The Stupa: Buddhism in Symbolic Form Jay G. Williams Gwenfrewi Santes Press “Wherever the head rolls” ISBN 0-9629662-6-6 iii Copyright © 2010 By Jay G. Williams Hamilton College For permission to reprint from copyright materials in excess of fair use, acknowledgement is made to the following: Crown Publishers, Temple University Press, Collier Books, Praeger Publications, Cornell University Press. I would also like to express my thanks to Dharma Publishing Co., the Lama Govinda Trust, The Macmillan Company, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Shambala Mountain Organization for permission to use various illustrations and to Wikipedia for their free use policy. It should also be noted that readers are free to copy and use any of the photographs taken by me or collected on Wikipedia. All rights reserved Printed In The United States of America i Foreword This work has been a long time in the making. It was, at first, part of a much larger study on religious symbolism around the world. I traveled that world looking for examples, for deeper insights. Many pictures were taken and many words were written, but nothing quite came right. The manuscript lay in the file, unfinished. Then, more recently, as I sorted through my slides and prints, it all came clear. Concentrate just on the one great Buddhist symbol and forget the rest. That is enough. So I rewrote and rearranged and rethought. The result is this small volume. My first idea was to place the photographs in the text so that the reader would not have to flip back and forth. The more I studied the problem, however, the more complicated that way of organizing the book became and so, finally, I decided on the format now used. The first part of the book contains some figures, but none of my photographs. These are arranged by country in Part II along with very short identifications and discussions. References to them will be found in Part I, but the reader---and I apologize for this--- will have to flip back and forth to see what I am talking about. Most of the photographs I took myself, though I have had to glean from elsewhere pictures and plans of Borobudur and a few other places. Pictures that are not mine are starred. The fact that the photographs are almost all mine means, of course, that many important stupas are not pictured in the book. I simply could not travel everywhere. I do believe, however, that I was able to photograph many of the most important sites---enough at least to give the reader a clear picture of the variety of forms and styles. It has been a great joy for me to return to a subject I have always found so intriguing and inspiring. I have tried to keep the book from being too technical or erudite. It is meant, not for the specialist, but for the general reader. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have in writing it. Jay G. Williams Professor of Religious Studies Hamilton College ii Table of Contents Foreword Table of Contents Part I: The Stupa 1 The Stupa and its Symbolism 15 The Pilgrimage 25 The Cosmic Man 29 The Chorten 31 Part II: Illustrations 35 I. Nepal 37 II. India 44 III. Myanmar and Thailand 61 IV. Sri Lanka 72 V. Borobudur 81 VI. China 86 VII. Korea and Japan 98 Epilogue 103 Bibliography iii THE STUPA There is no doubt but that the stupa (Pali: thupa; Sinalese; dagoba) is the most distinctive and suggestive symbol to have emerged from the Buddhist tradition.1 Wherever the disciples of the Enlightened One have gone, they have built stupas as the very signature of their presence. To be sure, different peoples have interpreted the stupa in very different ways. To the uninformed, in fact, it would hardly seem that the Sinhalese dagoba and the Japanese pagoda are the same symbol at all. Nevertheless, there is a sure, though invisible line linking the earthbound, simple mound of the Asokan tradition (See I.B.) to both the soaring golden monuments of Yagon (Rangoon) (II.B.) and the many roofed towers of Kyoto (VII. E.). According to the Digha Nikaya, the stupa idea was first set forth by the Buddha, himself, just before his death. 10. 'What are we to do, lord, with the remains of the Tathagata?' 'Hinder not yourselves, Ananda, by honouring the remains of the Tathagata. Be zealous, I beseech you, Ananda, in your own behalf! Devote yourselves to your own good! Be earnest, be zealous, be intent on your own good! There are wise men, Ananda, among the nobles, among the Brahmins, among the heads of houses, who are firm believers in the Tathagata; and they will do due honour to the remains of the Tathagata.' 11. 'But what should be done, lord, with the remains of the Tathagata?' 'As men treat the remains of the king of kings so Ananda, should they treat the remains of a Tathagata.' 'And how, lord, do they treat the remains of a king of kings?' 'They wrap the body of a king of kings, Ananda, in a new cloth. When that is done they wrap it in carded cotton wool. When that is done they wrap it in a new cloth, and so on till they have wrapped the body in five hundred successive layers of both kinds. Then they place the body in an oil vessel of iron, and cover that close up with another oil vessel of iron. They then build a funeral pyre of all kinds of perfume, and burn the body of the king of kings. And then at the four cross roads they erect a cairn to the king of kings. This, Ananda, is the way in which they treat the remains of a king of kings. 1 Perhaps the most elaborate and extensive study of the stupa is Adrian Snodgrass, The Symbolism of the Stupa (Ithaca, N.Y.: SEAP, 1985). 1 'And as they treat the remains of a king of kings, so, Ananda, should they treat the remains of the Tathagata. At the four cross roads a cairn should be erected to the Tathagata. And whosoever shall there place garlands or perfumes or paint, or make salutation there, or become in its presence calm in heart—that shall long be to them for a profit and a joy.’2 The idea of the stupa, then, is overtly derived within the tradition itself from the notion of the cairn, barrow, or tumulus, that rounded mound of earth which served, from East Asia to the far reaches of the Celtic world, as a burial place for the mighty. In some non-Buddhist areas the cairn was elongated and became less circular and more serpentine in structure. In other areas, the mound of earth was faced by stone and/or plaster and became pyramidal in shape with sharp, well-hewn edges. The stupa, then, is related to a whole host of familiar Neolithic and Bronze Age burial mounds ranging from the pyramid of Cheops to the great tumulus of New Grange. It is a continuation of a tradition which seems to know no beginning or particular area of origin. The stupa is a variation upon a primordial symbolic theme. It is ironic that of all the tumuli once built in India very few non-Buddhist stupas remain. Gautama patterned his own symbol after the tumuli of the great kings. Indeed, he even lists the king of kings as among those whose remains a stupa might contain. 12. 'The men, Ananda, worthy of a cairn, are four in number. Which are the four?’ 'A Tathagata, an Able Awakened One, is worthy of a cairn. One awakened for himself alone is worthy of a cairn. A true hearer of the Tathagata is worthy of a cairn. A king of kings is worthy of a cairn.’3 The royal tumuli, for the most part, have all been destroyed or eroded away. So too have the Jain stupas which were apparently patterned after the Buddhist. What remains of the thousands of non-Buddhist and Buddhist stupas that once dotted the landscape of India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal are a few Buddhist structures scattered across the land. They stand in mute testimony to the ascendance of Buddhism in India, to its victory among the non-Indian neighbors, and to its slow but steady decay in its motherland. With the possible exception of an early example at Vaisali,4 the oldest extant stupas derive from the age of Asoka (ca. 274-232 B.C.E.), that Mauryan emperor who, in the 2 T.W. and C. A. F. Rhys Davids, trans., Dialogues of the Buddha, 2 vols., (London: Oxford U. P.: 1910), 11,154-56. The Tibetan translation of the Vinaya-Irsudraka Vastu of the Mula sarvastivadins contains further "dialogues with the Buddha" pertaining to the construction of stupas. See Pema Doyce, Stupa and Its Technology: A Tibeto-Buddhist Perspective (New Delhi: India Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and Motilal Banarsidass, 1996), pp. 1-21. 3 Dialogues of the Buddha II, 156. 4 Debala Mitra, Buddhist Monuments (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1971), 75. 2 face of the bloody slaughter of the people of Kalinga (Orissa) by his troops, repented of the carnage and converted, it would seem, to Buddhism. Asoka, like Constantine in the West, made his own personal faith that of his empire. Clearly, his motives were more than political.
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