Sins and Sinners Numen Book Series Studies in the History of Religions Series Editors Steven Engler (Mount Royal University, Calgary, Canada) Richard King (University of Glasgow, Scotland) Kocku von Stuckrad (University of Groningen, The Netherlands) Gerard Wiegers (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) VOLUME 139 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/nus Sins and Sinners Perspectives from Asian Religions Edited by Phyllis Granoff and Koichi Shinohara LEIDEN • BOSTON 2012 Cover illustration: Participant at the Makar Melā bathing in front of the Kṛṣṇa temple, Panautī, Nepal. Photograph taken in January 2010, by Prasant Shrestha. Reproduced with kind permission from the photographer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sins and sinners : perspectives from Asian religions / edited by Phyllis Granoff and Koichi Shinohara. p. cm. — (Numen book series, ISSN 0169-8834 ; v. 139) Proceedings of a conference held in the fall of 2010 at Yale University. Includes index. ISBN 978-90-04-22946-4 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-23200-6 (e-book) 1. Asia—Religions—Congresses. 2. Sin—Congresses. I. Granoff, P. E. (Phyllis Emily), 1947– II. Shinohara, Koichi, 1941– BL1033.S56 2012 202’.2—dc23 2012017165 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.nl/brill-typeface. ISSN 0169-8834 ISBN 978 90 04 22946 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 90 04 23200 6 (e-book) Copyright 2012 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. 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CONTENTS Acknowledgements ......................................................................................... vii Introduction ...................................................................................................... 1 PART ONE SINNING IN ASIAN RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS Social and Soteriological Aspects of Sin and Penance in Medieval Hindu Law .................................................................................................... 9 David Brick Sin and Expiation in Sikh Texts and Contexts: From the Nānak Panth to the Khālsā ................................................................................... 31 Denis Matringe “Living Without Sin”: Reflections on the Pre-Buddhist World of Early China ................................................................................................... 57 Michael Nylan Sin, Sinification, Sinology: On the Notion of Sin in Buddhism and Chinese Religions ....................................................................................... 73 James Robson “The Evil Person is the Primary Recipient of the Buddha’s Compassion” The Akunin Shōki Theme in Shin Buddhism of Japan ......................................................................................................... 93 James C. Dobbins The Sin of “Slandering the True Dharma” in Nichiren’s Thought .... 113 Jacqueline I. Stone Ritual Faults, Sins, and Legal Offences: A Discussion About Two Patterns of Justice in Contemporary India ............................... 153 Daniela Berti vi contents PART TWO DEALING WITH SIN After Sinning: Some Thoughts on Remorse, Responsibility, and the Remedies for Sin In Indian Religious Traditions ...................... 175 Phyllis Granoff The Role of Confession in Chinese and Japanese Tiantai/Tendai Bodhisattva Ordinations .......................................................................... 216 Paul Groner Removal of Sins in Esoteric Buddhist Rituals: A Study of the Dafangdeng Dhāraṇī Scripture ............................................................... 243 Koichi Shinohara Redeeming Bugs, Birds, and Really Bad Sinners in Some Medieval Mahāyāna Sūtras and Dhāraṇīs ............................................................. 276 Gregory Schopen Sometimes Love Don’t Feel Like It Should: Redemptive Violence in Tantric Buddhism ................................................................................. 295 Jacob P. Dalton Sin and Flaws in Kerala Astrology .............................................................. 309 Gilles Tarabout Sin and Expiation in Nepal: The Makar Melā Pilgrimage in Panautī .......................................................................................................... 324 Gérard Toffin Sin and Expiation Among Modern Hindus: To Obey One’s Duty or Following Freely Accepted Rules? ................................................... 357 Catherine Clémentin-Ojha Index .................................................................................................................... 381 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank Rev. Brian Nagata and the Bukkyō Dendōkyōkai for their support of the conference at Yale, where some of these papers were presented. The BDK also provided support for preparing the papers for publication. Additional assistance for the conference was provided by the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation and the Lex Hixon Fund, Department of Religious Studies, Yale University. INTRODUCTION The essays in this volume grew out of a conference that was held at Yale University in the fall of 2010. Our choice of topic was guided by our belief that ‘sin’ in its many forms has always been and continues to be a central concern of Asian religious texts and practices. So important is sin that changes in religious practice and doctrine might fruitfully be understood as responses to a compelling need to do something about the frailty of the human condition, our propensity to sin, and to make religion suitable for this degenerate age in which we live and in which sinning is inevitable. It is not only in the primary source material that sin looms so large; debates about the nature and even the very existence of sin in Asian religions continue to enliven the scholarly literature. The complexity of the subject is apparent from the table of contents. This book brings together scholars from very different disciplinary per- spectives and presents material from India, Nepal, Tibet, China, and Japan. Some of the essays explore texts that are among the earliest to have been preserved, while others examine modern and contemporary religious practices or contemporary judicial proceedings. Included are essays on pre-Buddhist China, Buddhist China and Japan; classical and contemporary Indian law; the Sikh tradition; Jainism and Hinduism; Tibetan Buddhism, and Hinduism in Nepal. Across the diversity of these chapters, certain common themes emerge. Although we did not set out to solve the old conundrum of finding a perfect word to substitute for the imperfect term ‘sin’ with its history of Christian connotations, many of the essays deal either directly or indirectly with the basic question of what we are to understand by ‘sin’ in the religious texts and practices we are studying. Michael Nylan in her essay challenges certain presuppositions about ‘sin’, guilt, and shame, subtly illustrating how inapplicable they are to early China, where there is no omniscient punishing God, and the relationship between internal and external, cen- tral to the dichotomy of guilt and shame, is so very differently understood. But this does not imply that there is no understanding of wrongdoing or no moral sense; a belief in human perfectibility goes hand in hand with a recognition of the difficulties of its achievement and the many opportuni- ties for failure. Wrongdoing, moreover, has its consequences, whether or not anyone else is there to witness it. James Robson begins his essay with 2 introduction an exploration of Western reluctance to speak about sin in Buddhism. Western scholars, he argues, saw sin as a Buddhist contribution to Chi- nese religion. Robson challenges this notion and points to early Daoist texts that treat sin and its remedies. Studying a very different context, the South Indian state of Kerala, and not the distant past but the present time, Gilles Tarabout opens his essay on sin and flaws in astrology with brief remarks on the pitfalls of assuming that ‘sin’ in the Christian sense with its concomitant concepts of guilt and repentance is a universal. What is regularly translated as ‘sin’ by astrolo- gers in conversation and in the texts they use has little to do with guilt or repentance and much to do with ritual faults and impurity, and even with attacks by sorcery. David Brick, studying early Indian legal texts, draws a distinction between sins that have consequences in this life, that is, social consequences, and those that have consequences in the next life. With the development of the doctrine of karma, sins can have these two very different and damaging results. Brick’s essay also raises the question of the treatment of sins that are not publicly known and whether it was neces- sary publicly