Buddhaghosa and the Theravadin Tradition of Self-Renunciation

CHAPTER SIX PERFECTION AND LIBERATION: BUDDHAGHOSA AND THE THERAVADIN TRADITION OF SELF-RENUNCIATION Recall that our specifĳic goal in this middle portion of the book is to explore how the pneumatological category of divine activity can further the Christian-Buddhist dialogue. In the preceding chapter, I have suggested that divine activity can be explicated in the Christian tradition with reference to the theological doctrine and spiritual practice of sanctifĳication. We have explored the understanding of sanctifĳication as deifĳication in Eastern Orthodox perspective in general, and in the desert tradition of Orthodox spirituality more specifĳically. We have proceeded with the hope that the desert “technology of liberation” will provide a bridge for dialogue with the Buddhist tradition. But how can this dialogue be engaged at its depths when the goal of desert spirituality is union with God, a God absent from the Buddhist frame of reference? I suggest that this question may be meaningfully engaged, but only by bracketing its pointedness initially in favor of explor- ing the very similar phenomenology of Buddhist technologies of liberation. My hypothesis is that there is an analogical point of contact for dialogue between the ways in which the spirituality of the desert illuminates divine activity in the Christian tradition on the one hand, and the ways in which the spirituality of Buddhist adepts illuminates the soteriological movement of the Buddhist tradition on the other. Put another way, I am hopeful that a comparison of the technologies of liberation in both traditions will further specify the fruitfulness of the pneumatological category of divine activity. But any talk of Buddhist technologies of liberation opens up to a wide diversity of practices designed to attain nibbana or awakening. For purposes of manageability and in order to engage one form of Buddhist spirituality and practice more deeply, I focus on the Theravadin arahant. As the Desert Father is a model Christian saint, so also is the sainthood of the arahant acknowledged in the Buddhist tradition of spirituality.1 1 See George D. Bond, “The Arahant: Sainthood in Theravada Buddhism,” in Richard Kieckhefer and George D. Bond, eds., Sainthood: Its Manifestations in World Religions 132 chapter six Further, our understanding of the Theravadin tradition here will widen our understanding of Buddhism as a whole given our focus in Part I on the Mahayana tradition.2 Most importantly, I think a comparison of the Desert Fathers and Theravadin arahants will provide striking parallels with regard to their technologies of liberation, leading to questions about how their goals—union with God in one case, and nibbanic freedom in the other— are similar or diffferent. The following will proceed methodologically according to the preceding discussion (in chapter 5), albeit with diffferent emphases. The histori- cal overview of the emergence of the arahant tradition will be developed (§6.1), followed by an analysis of the Theravadin soteriological path of morality, concentration, and wisdom especially as developed by Buddhaghosa in his Visuddhimagga (§6.2). The fĳinal section will locate the broader framework of the arahant path in the Theravada tradition (§6.3). 6.1. The Theravadin Arahant The emergence of the arahant tradition is entangled in the complex his- tory of various renunciant traditions in India during the sixth century bce. In what follows, I will comment briefly on this sixth century milieu, look a (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1988), 140–71. See also Juliane Schober, “Trajectories of Buddhist Sacred Biography,” in Juliane Schober, ed., Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions of South and Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 1997), 1–15. Again, as with the Christian tradition, the Theravadin arahant has been conceived historically in male terms. Yet women are not entirely absent from the discussion. For representative studies of this issue, see Ellison Banks Findly, “Women and the Arahant Issue in Early Pali Literature,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 15:1 (1999): 57–76; Tessa J. Bartholomeusz, Women Under the Bo Tree: Buddhist Nuns in Sri Lanka, Cambridge Studies in Religious Traditions 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. ch. 1; and Bela Bhattacharya, Buddhist Women Saints of India (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 2000). For women’s voices in the scriptural tradition, see the Therigatha literature included in the Khuddaka Nikaya: C.A.F. Rhys Davids, trans., Psalms of the Early Buddhists, Vol. I: Psalms of the Sisters (1909; reprint, London: Pali Text Society and Luzac, 1964). Again, in what follows, I wish to speak inclusively about the Theravadin arahant even if my imme- diate goal is not to address the gender issue in indological and buddhalogical studies. 2 Of course, historically, Mahayanists have rejected both the arahant tradition as being misguidedly focused on the individual self and the arahant’s goal of nibbana as literally evacuated of meaning in light of the awakened sense that nirvana itself is samsara and vice-versa. All the more reason, then, for the “many tongues” of Buddhism to be registered in this book’s pneumatologically framed dialogue between Christian and Buddhist traditions..

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