Buddhists

Understanding Buddhism Through the Lives of Practitioners

Todd Lewis

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118322062
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhism

Buddhists: Understanding Buddhism through the Lives ofPractitioners provides a series of case studies of Asian and modern Western Buddhists, spanning history, gender, and class, whose lives are representative of the ways in which Buddhists throughout time have embodied the tradition.

• Portrays the foundational principles of Buddhist belief through the lives of believers, illustrating how the religion is put into practice in everyday life
• Takes as its foundation the inherent diversity within Buddhist society, rather than focusing on the spiritual and philosophical elite within Buddhism
• Reveals how individuals have negotiated the choices, tensions, and rewards of living in a Buddhist society
• Features carefully chosen case studies which cover a range of Asian and modern Western Buddhists
• Explores a broad range of possible Buddhist orientations in contemporary and historical contexts

Part I
Buddhists in the Earliest and Medieval Eras

Chapter 1
The Female Householder Mallika

Kristin Scheible

Editor's Introduction

There are quite a few notable women whose lives are recounted in the earliest texts. Some were most intimately connected to the Buddha's life story, such as Queen Maya, who gave birth to him; her sister, the Queen Mahapajapati, who nursed and cared for him and later pestered him for acceptance into his order; his wife Yasodhara, who loved him; and Sujata, who provided the nourishment that enabled him to press forward to his final realization of nirvana. There was also the merchant wife Vishakha (see Chapter 3), who was first and foremost among women patrons and builder of the Purva Vihara in Shravasti. And then there were the eminent theris, women arhats whose influential poetic, personal accounts of their lives have been preserved in the canonical Therigatha (“Verses of Female Saints”).

This chapter's subject is a devout follower of the Buddha, and her unusual life moves from low-caste street vendor to becoming favorite queen of Pasenadi, the king of Kosala. As skillfully constructed here from scattered canonical references and commentaries, Mallika's actions and her destiny in past and future rebirths become subjects that elicit many important discourses by the Buddha. These incidents center on karma, the effects of merit and demerit, the reality of spouses being united repeatedly over lifetimes, and the ways that character traits, too, carry over to future lifetimes. One surprising peculiarity in the Buddhist reckoning of merit-making is that the holier the recipient (needy or not), the greater the quantity of merit earned. Knowing this helps to explain how Mallika's gift to the Buddha, the highest of all spiritual beings, could have led to such an extraordinary and rapid rags-to-riches transformation in her life.

What this biography also highlights is how much the tradition preserves, and highlights, the Buddha's preaching to kings and courtiers. He was a skillful and determined leader of a missionary movement built on moral foundations, and so it should not be surprising that his encounters with political leaders, and their wives, find a common place in the Buddhist canon. It might also surprise the student that such an exemplary person as Queen Mallika, immediately after her charmed and virtuous life, was reborn in a horrible Buddhist hell (if only for a short time), due to an incident with a dog. But such is the logic of karma and its ripening (vikalpa) in the world of samsara.

Introduction: Mallika's Historical, Geographical, and Cultural Context

India, the birthplace of Buddhism, looked far different at the time of the Buddha from how it does today. It would have been much less populated, and 16 mahajanapada (independent republics and kingdoms) dotted the landscape.¹ It was a time of social change, upheaval even. At this time, as historian Romila Thapar has suggested, republics were “parting company with Vedic orthodoxy,”² which set the stage for new voices, such as those of women and non-Brahmins, to make an impact.³ The Buddha was one of a number of itinerant teachers who sought refuge in the jungle forests but whose teaching was centered in cities. The early community surrounding the Buddha drew from various sectors of society, disrupting the traditional caste-based transmission of religiosity in favor of a different authority, that of the Tri Ratna: the Buddha as its teacher, the Dharma that was his teaching, and the sangha, his community of monks. This social shift may not seem radical to a reader today, but it was radical for the period under consideration, when women's roles and caste roles had been clearly defined and were rigid.

Supporting the Buddha and his sangha financially were his benefactors: merchants with their fortunes from trade and the kings who exchanged their patronage for dharma teaching. The Buddha frequently stayed in Sravasti, the capital of the mahajanapada Kosala. King Pasenadi (Skt. Prasenajit) was the king of Kosala, and the focus of our chapter here, Mallika, was one of Pasenadi's queens and herself a devout patron of the Buddha. The Tri Ratna were already established by the time Mallika convinced her husband to convert to Buddhism. Through various episodes in Mallika's life, we can see how taking refuge in the Buddha, dharma, and sangha would have been understood in quite a literal way; more than once during a time of crisis, Mallika would seek out the Buddha for support. While she may have been typical in her faith, Mallika was not at all typical for a laywoman of her time, as she had access to the Buddha himself. The name Mallika is embedded in a canonical list of the most notable female householders (upasika).⁴ Mallika also appears in a list of seven people, “famous even to the gods,” who performed extraordinary acts of devotion that bore fruit in their lifetimes.⁵

Mallika was just a wife and layperson, albeit a queen and devoted supporter of the Buddha. According to canonical and commentarial accounts, her life story was interwoven with the Buddha's, and such proximity to the central biography of Buddhism warrants our attention. She was a queen, but not a singular one—she was one of a few queens of Pasenadi, although she was low born. She had sex with a dog (and enjoyed it). She argued with her husband, taunted him, and upstaged him. She was not, ostensibly, a Buddhist moral exemplar, and yet the most often pronounced expression of the Buddhist version of the Golden Rule comes embedded in her story. Unfortunately, Mallika's biography is not present in a coherent, chronologically sound, narratively coherent way. Instead, Mallika's story is revealed in bits and pieces, each a fragment with edges to explore, each a new surface to reflect some light on the morally didactic material conveyed within.

Mallika's Biography

Over a half-century ago, with an eye toward discerning social history, the scholar I.B. Horner (whose biography is included in this textbook; see Chapter 7) called for a careful examination of laywomen's lives as represented in the earliest Buddhist texts. She cast about and discovered a trove of information, albeit in scraps scattered throughout the canonical materials:

Then, too, there was Queen Mallikā, chief consort of King Pasenadi of Kosala, with whom the Buddha converses now and again; and Nakulamātā, the pious and devoted wife of Nakulapita. And this is typical: such records exist but they are scattered through the Vinaya and the Nikāyas. These, then, have to be searched and carefully sifted in order to build up any reliable picture of the position held by lay-women at the time and the place to which this literature purports to refer.⁶

To find Mallika, let alone cobble together her biography, requires the “sifting” I.B. Horner called for, and some text-to-text jumping—premodern Buddhist “biographies” jump genres and become attached to, and assumed into, new works. Mallika is a character caught in the Buddha's own community, a karmic net that is cast and recast with characters shuffling between roles and recurringly related in birth after birth. Sometimes Mallika's present-day experiences are explained through a story of a past life of the Buddha, and sometimes they are explained by the Buddha, peering into her past lives. References to Mallika weave in and out of early stories, and that is how Mallika's story begins: she makes an appearance in the frame story of the Kummasapinda Jataka (415), where the Buddha himself provides details of her previous life.

Mallika was the beautiful and good daughter of the chief garland maker in Savatthi. As a 16-year-old, she once made her way to a garden with some of her friends. She carried three portions of gruel in her basket, a biographical element that connects this story with others.⁷ Leaving town, she passed the Buddha on his way into town; he caught her eye, and she was motivated to offer him her gruel, which he accepted. This pleased Mallika, who then dropped at his feet to pay respect, “rapt in joy” (pitim gahetva). This act prompted a smile from the Buddha; asked about this marked reaction, he explained, “Ananda, the fruit from this offering of gruel will be that this girl will on this very day become the chief queen of the King of Kosala.” Later that day, when the King Pasenadi of Kosala was riding by, exhausted after a battle with rival king Ajatasattu of Magadha, he was diverted by the singing of a charming young woman.

Remarkably, her rapidly ripened merit was such that, rath...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Buddhists
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Buddhists in the Earliest and Medieval Eras
• Part II: Buddhist Lives in the West
• Part III: Buddhist Lives in South and Southeast Asia
• Part IV: Buddhist Lives in the Himalayan Region
• Part V: Buddhist Lives in East Asia
• Index
• End User License Agreement