AvadānasandJātakasin the Newar Tradition of the Kathmandu Valley: Ritual Performances of Mahāyāna Buddhist Narratives (original) (raw)

Among all the Sanskrit story narratives available in the vast archive of textual collections in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, certain Buddhist tales among them found special provenance in the Mahāyāna culture of the Newars, the indigenous inhabitants of this surviving oasis of later Indic Hindu-Buddhist civilization. This paper will examine how two stories, the Sṛṇgabheri Avadāna and the Siṃhalasārthabāhu Avadāna, have been domesticated into the local religious field and adopted with special meaning for subgroups in the local society. The former recounts the consecutive, linked lives of a husband and wife, in a story of karmic retribution and reunion, a narrative that has a role in contemporary Buddhist widow mourning rites at the major stūpa in Nepal, Svayambhu. The latter, among the most popular jātaka narratives in the Buddhist world, relates the fate of a group of Buddhist merchants who are shipwrecked and captured by cannibalistic demonesses; in Nepal, this story was transposed into a tale of trans-Himalayan conf lict, and its central figure is regarded as a hometown hero. Until today, a three-day festival procession of him circumnavigates the city of Kathmandu. This paper will explore these local domestications of Buddhist stories and analyze how these traditional celebrations have changed in the context of the shifting regional and political landscape of Nepal and the region. Among all the Sanskrit story narratives available in the vast archive of textual collections in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, certain Buddhist tales among them found special provenance in the Mahāyāna culture of the Newars, the indigenous inhabitants of this surviving oasis of later Indic Hindu-Buddhist civilization. Although they speak a Tibeto-Burmese language, Newars preserve the many strands of culture characteristic of later Indic Buddhism. In a community whose living Buddhist traditions trace its origins back at least 1500 years, and where later traditions of Vajrayāna Buddhism have been woven into a rich fabric of Mahāyāna Buddhism, it is still the case today that jātaka and avadāna narratives remain central to Newar Buddhists. This paper examines the prominent stories that have been domesticated into the local religious field and adopted with special meaning for subgroups in the local society. I have defined 'domestication' as the dialectical process by which a religious tradition is adapted to a region's or ethnic group's socioeconomic and cultural life. 1 While 'Great traditions' supply a clear spiritual direction to followers who are close to the charismatic founders, including norms of orthodox adaptation and missionizing, religious traditions' historical survival is related-often paradoxically-to their being 'multivocalic' so that later devotees have a large spectrum of doctrine, situational instructions, and exemplary folktales to draw on. The study of 'religious domestication' seeks to demonstrate the underlying reasons for selectivity from the whole as the tradition evolves in specific places and times to the 'logic of the locality' (Figure 1).