Stephen F. Teiser’s Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture

Last week, I attended the 48th Annual Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture at Yale. This year the lecturer was Princeton University’s Stephen F. Teiser.

The Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture Series is endowed by the colleagues, friends and family of the late Dr. Edward H. Hume. Its purpose is to bring to Yale the best scholars in the various areas of East Asian studies. (Dr. Hume served as president of the colleges of Yale-in-China during the mid-1920s, and also founded the Hsiang-ya Medical School and Hospital in Changsha.)

Dr. Teiser is D.T. Suzuki Professor in Buddhist Studies and Professor in the Department of Religion at Princeton, where he also earned his Ph.D. His books include 1988′s The Ghost Festival in Medieval China, 1994′s “The Scripture on the Ten Kings” and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (for which he was awarded a Joseph Levenson Book Prize), and last years’s Reinventing the Wheel: Paintings of Rebirth in Medieval Buddhist Temples (for which he received the prestigious Prix Stanislas Julien from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, Institut de France). He is also director of the Tibet Site Seminar, an interdisciplinary program for Ph.D. candidates in Buddhist Studies and Art History funded by the Luce Foundation.

Dr. Teiser’s latest research focuses on liturgical manuscripts from medieval China, hence the subject of his talk: “The Construction of Paradise in Chinese Buddhist Liturgies.” The advertising material from the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale explains further:

    Temple paintings and visualization practices in Chinese Buddhism offer different visions of the pure land, a paradise graced by a Buddha and devoid of the suffering of normal life. This lecture examines the way the afterlife was conceived and enacted in a different source: liturgies for funerals, memorial services, healing ceremonies, and other rites in eighth-tenth century Dunhuang (northwest China). The lecture proposes a performative analysis of several hundred manuscript prayers written by local Buddhist priests.

Though I would have been interested to hear Dr. Teiser talk about most anything, my interest was especially piqued by this topic; as a Buddhist theologian, I wondered how this research might inform the ways those of us in ministerial roles approach liturgies today.

For those who don’t know, the Dunhuang Caves are a network of hundreds of cave shrines and temples in northwest China along the Silk Road. Construction of this system probably began in the 4th century C.E. with the intention of storing Buddhist art and literature. Because these repositories house about a millenium’s worth of practice materials, the Dunhuang Caves are today regarded as treasure troves by Buddhologists.

Among other things, Dr. Teiser is interested in prayer formularies and liturgical materials and manuals found among the texts of the Dunhuang Caves. He walked us through one such text, called a “Liturgy for a Departed Mother.” The text is comprised of eight parts:

  1. Praising the Virtue of the Buddha
  2. Stating the Purpose of the Ritual
  3. Extolling the Beneficiary of the Rite (i.e., the mother)
  4. Mention of Past Rituals
  5. Performance of Ritual Actions
  6. Ornamentation/Transferring Merit (this is an especially important section, Dr. Teiser noted; without it, he said, the beneficiary is “in limbo”)
  7. Prayers for the Enjoyment of Benefits in Future Lifetimes
  8. Benediction
Dr. Teiser’s basic point seems to me to be that texts like this one (as well as pieces of art) offer “selective” representations of paradise. In section “g” of the “Liturgy for the Departed Mother,” for example, he quoted the following passage:
    We pray that the tuft of white hair show her the way; that she ascend to Brahmā’s Heaven in one moment of thought; that she be reborn through magical transformation in a red lotus; and that she travel to a Buddha-land in the space of a kṣana.

This passage is loaded with paradisiacal imagery (the most obvious being the “tuft of white hair” which refers to the Buddha Amitābha’s most famous attribute), but it shows a preference for certain bits of imagery over others. Compared with other texts and especially intricate cave paintings depicting paradise, it becomes clear that the priest who authored this liturgy has constructed a vision of paradise out of a very select set of images.

This is what it is, of course–as Dr. Teiser reminded us, these liturgies have only a few short stanzas to describe paradise and will therefore be limited in their descriptions–but it’s something important to bear in mind. Dr. Teiser very effectively underscored his point by sharing pieces of artwork from his students at Princeton. After he read them a description of paradise, he asked them to draw what they saw in their minds’ eyes. One student, obviously taken with the descriptions of music in paradise, drew musical notes wafting through the air. Another, who clearly enjoyed the descriptions of multi-colored landscapes and structures, drew multi-colored buildings and rolling hills. And so on.

I very much appreciated Dr. Teiser’s talk as well as the new insights and reminders it offered. I’m really looking forward to his next book on all of this material.