Dehadana: The 'gift of the body' in Indian Buddhist narrative literature.

Abstract

Many famous stories drawn from Indian Buddhist narrative literature involve paradigmatic acts of generosity in which an animal or human character gives away his entire body or a part of his body to whomever requests it. Such stories are almost always jatakas (accounts of the Buddha's past lives), and serve to demonstrate the great selflessness and compassion cultivated by the Buddha during his long career as a bodhisattva. Stories about such gifts of the body (dehadana) were extremely popular in Indian Buddhism, appearing in innumerable variations throughout the history of the literary tradition. This dissertation seeks to elucidate the gift-of-the-body theme through a close reading of the stories themselves. It is based on a select corpus of 32 such stories preserved primarily in Sanskrit and Pali. Chapter One contains a general discussion of the Buddhist narrative genres known as jataka and avadana, and argues that stories of dehadana constitute a prominent subgenre within this larger generic context. Chapter Two furthers this argument by demonstrating that dehadana stories deriving from different authors, texts, regions, and time periods constitute a literary and generic tradition with recognizable and consistent conventions, motifs, and literary strategies. Chapters Three through Six discuss the subgenre in relation to a variety of different interpretive contexts: Buddhist ethical discourse on the virtue of generosity, Buddhist conceptions of the body, Buddhist conceptions of gender, and so forth. A final section puts forth the dissertation's conclusions: The gift-of-the-body theme serves as a focal point that is able to bring together a variety of different and sometimes opposing Buddhist conceptions. The ability of the theme to perform in this way depends in part upon the very nature of the theme itself, particularly the complete identification it achieves between the giver and his gift. Additionally, however, the successful functioning of the theme depends upon the narrative context through which it is conveyed. Stories involving the bodhisattva's gift of his body to others are not randomly constructed; they are structured in particular ways that enable them to bear particular meanings.