Professor Naomi Appleton's Inaugural Lecture Recording of Professor Naomi Appleton's Inaugural Lecture View media transcript Good evening to everybody, and welcome to this very special event in a wonderful Playfair Library location. It's great to see you all here. My name is Professor Jeremy Carrette. I'm head of the School of Divinity, and it is my pleasure to welcome you all here to this inaugural lecture for Professor Naomi Appleton in honour of her appointment to the Chair of Buddhist Studies and Indian Religions. It's great to see everybody here, and on this occasion of distinguished recognition it is a particular delight to welcome the family and friends of Professor Appleton who join us here this evening. Welcome to you all. It's also great to welcome those friends and colleagues from across Edinburgh and also from across the country, and for all of you who are joining us here this evening. Inaugural lectures, are moments of celebration. A celebration of an academic achievement in the appointment to the professorial status at the University of Edinburgh. A recognition of international scholarship and leadership in academic life. It is therefore, my pleasure as part of the tradition of inaugural lectures to say a few words before handing over to Professor Appleton for her lecture this evening. Professor Appleton was born in London, but largely grew up in Lancaster. She holds a first degree in Religious and Theological Studies from the University of Cardiff, an MPhil from the same institution in 2004 and a DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2008. After a year teaching at a Liberal Arts College in Portland, Oregon, she took up the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship back at the University of Cardiff 2009-2012. She has been in Edinburgh since 2012 and joined the university as a Chancellor's fellow in Religious Studies. She was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2015 and appointed to Personal Chair of Buddhist Studies and Indian Religions in August 2023, which we celebrate this evening. Professor Appleton's research focuses on the role of stories in the creation, communication, and challenge of religious ideas in ancient India, with a particular focus on Buddhist literature in Sanskrit, and Pali. She is best known for her work on jataka stories of the Buddhist past lives, which form an important genre of Buddhist narrative. She has also worked on Hindu and Jain narrative literature, exploring questions of karma and rebirth, liberation, ethics, and the transmission of religious ideas. It is striking for all her single authored works to note, as all seasoned readers of Professor Appleton will know, that they each begin with the words once upon a time. Which powerfully signals not only the continuity of her research focus, as well as the theme of this evening's lecture, but the way her work focuses upon a whole array of questions in narrative purpose. As she says in her first work, Jataka Stories in Theravada Buddhism, Ashgate 2010, there is a power of texts, a power of words, a power of genre, and the power of truth. The first text explored the ways in which the stories of the Buddhas past lives, participated in developing notions of a path to Buddhahood, and in doing so, shows, as she states at the end of that work, the various levels on which Buddhist doctrine and practice operate. A defining feature of Professor Appleton's work is offering us insights into the importance of interactions, dialogues, and encounters, both within a tradition through patterns, repetitions, and cycles, but also across different traditions. For example, her second major project brought Jain narratives into conversation with Buddhist ones. Exploring how the understanding of karma and rebirth were articulated through multi life stories. This resulted in her second monograph Narrating Karma and Rebirth: Buddhist and Jain Multi-life Stories, Cambridge University Press 2014. Her aim in this text, as she points out, was not so much to identify the direct influence of one tradition on the other, but as she states, to expose what each tradition considers important or rather takes for granted. It is, as she argues, the divergences and the reasons behind them that become significant and on which she insightfully explores. The exploration of interactions, dialogues, and encounters continues in her third major project, funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which explored heroic characters, mainly gods and kings, that shared between Buddhist Jain and Brahmanical Hindu traditions, and how these characters shed light on competing social and religious ideals. The resulting monograph was Shared Characters in Hindu Jain and Buddhist Narrative, Routledge 2017. And it drew attention, as she states, to the common features of characters, roles, and motifs, and whole stories in Hindu Buddhist and Jain narratives. Professor Appleton in this work is able to understand what is shared and how boundaries are constituted, revealing the importance that all of these have to the establishment of the early history of Indian religions. In this way, it is illuminating how her scholarship from that initial frame of once upon a time, weaves across multiple levels of thinking across text, history, meaning, and purpose. In 2017, she was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, which enabled her to realise a long standing ambition to create a database of Jataka stories. It also funded work on the intersection of textual and visual narratives, resulting in an edited volume Narrative Visions and Visual Narratives in Indian Buddhism published by Equinox in 2022. Meanwhile, in 2020, she had an AHRC grant to allow her to work with collaborator Christopher Jones on the role of narrative literature in Mahayana developments in the understanding of Buddhood. And from this project, there is a collected volume in press and a co- authored monograph nearing completion. Alongside these various projects, she also engages in translation work, seeking to make Buddhist texts available to a wider audience. With Sarah Shaw in 2015, she published a translation from Pali of the ten longest and most popular Jataka stories. In 2020, she published a translation and study of 40 Sanskrit stories of past lives that explore the nature of Buddhahood. It is clear how Professor Appleton has added new depth and layers to her research field and inspired an international audience of scholars. But she has also shown and continues to show, for which I remain indebted, incredible service and support to the School of Divinity over many years. Within the school, she has shown and continues to demonstrate outstanding leadership. She first served as director of EDI, leading to a successful application for the Silver Athena Swan Award in 2018, and was Director of Teaching 2020-2023. And she is currently Director of Research, aided by the experience gained from the Theology and Religious Studies subpanel at the national Research Excellence Framework in 2021. She has also been instrumental in the growing of Buddhist studies at the University of Edinburgh, co founding and co directing the Edinburgh Buddhist Studies network with Dr Halle O'Neal of the Edinburgh College of Art. The network has grown to include 30 members and arranges academic events, school outreach work, and other forms of public engagement. The network's collaboration across different schools in the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Science, has made it possible to launch a new multidisciplinary masters programme in Buddhist Studies and return Sanskrit to teaching in the University. She has served on the board of the UK Association of Buddhist Studies, 2005-2014, and convened the Spalding symposium on Indian religions 2014-2020. And she was elected to the Board of International Association of Buddhist Studies in 2023. She is an active part of this international scholarly community and has been invited to speak in a whole variety of different places, including Bangkok, Paris, Heidelberg, Yale, Vancouver, and Vienna. And in addition to these international engagements and the creativity of her thinking in her work, she enjoys the creativity of sewing, knitting, gardening, and playing the piano, and, of course, spending time with family and friends. I hope as this overview shows that Professor Appleton has been transformative in her research field, and she has enriched the School of Divinity in many ways across the research, teaching, and academic life. It is recognition of all these achievements that I am delighted this evening to welcome Professor Appleton to give her inaugural lecture: What are stories for? Answers from the Buddha and Beyond. Would you all welcome to the platform for her inaugural lecture, Professor Naomi Appleton, Chair of Buddhist Studies and Indian Religions. Thank you so much for that very kind introduction. And thank you all for taking the time to be here. I especially want to thank my wonderful colleagues in the School of Divinity in Edinburgh Buddhist Studies, and in the wider university and field who have made and continued to make my working life so rewarding. And I'm also hugely grateful to family and friends who've come to celebrate with me today and whose support has also been integral to my academic success. As every self respecting Edinburgh tour guide, will tell you... - my colleagues are anticipating this joke because they've heard them - this statue, standing proudly in the New College Quad is of Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, late headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Since I walk past his statue daily on my way to the office, it seems only appropriate to begin my inaugural professorial lecture with a quotation from the Great Wizard. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry is knocked into a dream like state and has a very helpful and revealing conversation with Dumbledore despite the latter having been dead for some time. Understandably perplexed, Harry asks, Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head? To which Dumbledore replies, Of course, it is happening inside your head, Harry. But why on earth should that mean that it is not real? This lecture is a defence of seeing what goes on in our heads as being as valuable, if not more so than what goes on in the real world, external to us. Now, as an audience of intellectuals, I may well be preaching to the choir here. We all live inside our heads to a certain extent, perhaps more than is healthy, and we like to believe that this is a value to ourselves and even to society. More specifically, this lecture is a defence of the role of the imagination, particularly imaginative experiences prompted through engagement with narrative literature, in forming and transforming us as human beings. Taking a different angle. It is an explanation, at least in part of why stories have so often been at the heart of religious traditions. Now, it's often assumed that religious stories primarily exist to make claims about something historically true, an actual prophet that walked the earth, for example, or a miracle that actually happened. My approach is rather different, treating religious stories as narrative first and only history in as much as they offer us windows into the development of religious ideas and practices. To borrow the terminology of my long standing mentor and role model, John Strong, I focus on the storical rather than historical dimensions of narrative. I argue that stories have the capacity to change us to help us understand things better, remember things better, feel things better, live better, and that that is why they are so popular in religious settings. The particular religious setting that I will be talking about is South Asia or India as a somewhat anachronistic shorthand, in the fifth century BCE to the fifth century CE, what I jokingly refer to as the long fifth century. This was a time and place in which different religious groups sought to establish and develop alongside one another, groups that became what we call the Hindu Jain and Buddhist religions. Stories from simple fables to elaborate epic poems were one of the key ways in which these religious groups explored and expressed their ideas about the world and the place of us humans within it. It's probably time we had a story, and I will begin with a story said to have been told by the Buddha. Once upon a time, in the great North Indian city of Varanasi, the king had a gardener to attend to his palace grounds. This gardener, however, wanted to leave his garden unattended for a few days in order to take part in a festival. He asked a troop of monkeys that lived in the palace garden to look after the plants in his absence. The monkeys were certainly willing, but they were uncertain how best to ensure that the plants had sufficient water without wasting any of this very precious resource. In the end, they decided that the best thing to do was to pull up each of the plants in turn, measure their roots and decide how much water to give them on that basis. A man who was passing by saw this and remarked in the verse that forms the scriptural heart of the story: Assistance from a fool does not lead to happiness. A fool fails, just like the monkey gardener. Now, not only is this a story told by the Buddha, but in it, the Buddha tells us that the passer by within the story was himself in a past life. Stories of the Buddha's past lives, usually understood to have been told by the Buddha to his followers, are known as Jataka stories, and as you've already heard, these form, a particular interest of mine. It's important to note that the Buddha is not a name, but an epithet, meaning awakened one, hence, officially only applied to the Buddha after he achieves awakening. That is to say, the attainment that enables him not only to escape the cycle of rebirth himself, but also to teach others to do so as well. Until that time, he is referred to as the Bodhisattva instead, or I prefer the term Buddha-to-be because the term bodhisattva has some different connotations in different branches of Buddhism. Achieving Buddhahood, you should understand takes many many lifetimes. And so we have many many stories of things the Buddha-to-be did and situations he encountered during his long travels to that destination. Many of the most famous Jataka stories concern the Buddha-to-be's great acts of heroism or self sacrifice. Qualities he honed on the long path to the great destination of buddhahood, and we will come to some of those later in this lecture. But some Jataka stories, such as that of the monkey gardeners, are just good moral fables. Here, the Buddha-to-be is wise enough to laugh at the monkeys, but the chuckles in the room a moment ago suggest that we could have all managed that much ourselves. In other words, there's nothing particularly Buddhist about the content of this story. As a fable, it's about animal protagonists who mirror human traits, helping humans to see their behaviours more clearly from a distance. In the Jataka genre, other favourites of this kind include the story of two otters who argue over who should get the bigger share of a fish that they've caught collaboratively. They eventually ask a jackal to adjudicate, and the jackal gives one the head and the other the tail and takes the main part of the fish as his fee. Lawyers eh. Or there is the story of the talkative tortoise who persuades two geese to take him with them when they migrate because he's worried he'll get lonely left behind with nobody to talk to. They hold a stick between them and he holds on with his mouth. Except that being a talkative tortoise, he cannot keep his mouth shut and so falls to the ground. While these stories are found in Jataka collections, by definition told by the Buddha about things he did or witnessed in his past lives. They are also found in other story collections, often with different emphases or moral teachings attached. Indeed, the story of the tortoise and the birds reach Europe via Persian translations of the broadly Hindu Pancatantra collection, known in Europe, therefore, as the tales of Bidpai or of Pilpai, and related stories are found in Aesopic fables as well. Animal fables often embody a very general morality and play on human traits that go well beyond Indian cultural or religious norms, and this is evident in their ability to travel. However, in recognising them as part of common folk tale or fable stock, we must not forget the implications of each time a story is framed and retold, to teach and to entertain a specific audience and often to glorify a specific teller of tales. Each time a story is retold, it tells us something about the needs and desires of its new community. While these may be common stories, they are often told by uncommon storytellers. In other words, the fact that these stories are Jataka stories is important to our reading of them, even if they also crop up in other story collections. The Buddha, in the telling of Jatakas, is presented as a prolific storyteller with many hundreds of stories attributed to him. Why does the Buddha tell stories? He always seems to know exactly what tale his audience needs at any moment to help them to reflect on their behaviour or circumstances. It's not hard to see that the story of a talkative tortoise might well persuade somebody who's a little bit too keen on the sound of their own voice to keep quiet, or that the story of the otters could be used to stop people from being quarrelsome. The Buddha in these texts appears to appreciate the universal human appeal of a good story as well as their value in exploring morality and wisdom. But the question, why does the Buddha tell stories is not quite the right question to ask. The Buddha himself is in the stories, revealing his past lives to audiences within the text. In many ways, the Buddha himself is best viewed as a literary character. After all, we lack any historical evidence for him as a person, but his presence in a wide variety of texts forms a rich picture of him. Perhaps we should instead ask, why do Buddhists tell stories of the Buddha telling stories. Several answers are already apparent: because they demonstrate his vision, which penetrates even his distant past lives, as well as his teaching prowess and perhaps even his humanity and sense of humour. Stories like that of the monkey gardeners, the squabbling otters, and the talkative tortoise are not really stories about what it is like to be an animal. They are stories about basic human foibles illustrated through animals, and that is perhaps why they have such broad cross cultural appeal. However, not all Indian animal stories function in this way. Some are about animals as animals. Remembering that for most early Indian religious traditions, animals are considered to be part of the cycle of rebirth. That is to say, humans can be reborn as animals and vice versa, as all beings move through different realms of rebirth, which also include heavenly and hellish realms. As such, animals are our fellow sufferers, stuck in this apparently endless wandering on from birth to birth with rebirth determined by one's actions or karma. Multi-life stories, illustrating the workings of karma are common in Indian traditions, especially Buddhism and Jainism. One feature of stories is that they can help us to navigate complex abstract ideas in a way that is relatable because they are explored through embodied characters, encountering specific circumstances. There are also often memorable ways to recall the virtues of certain behaviours or the dangers of others. To put it another way, it's one thing to tell someone that bad deeds lead to rebirth as an animal, and good deeds lead to rebirth as a deity, and quite another to tell them a story. There was once a frog present at a sermon given by the Buddha. Through the potency of the Buddha's presence and teaching, this frog felt a great sense of clarity and peace, even faith, a common response for any being who encounters the Buddha. Unfortunately, an inattentive human audience member accidentally squashed the frog to death. But because of the frog's positive state of mind, he was immediately reborn as a god in a heavenly realm. Gods are born spontaneously, independently, and fully grown, unlike humans, and they also have the ability to see their past lives. This frog god immediately knew what had happened to him and returned to pay the Buddha a visit and offer his praise. This brief tale demonstrates karma in action. It highlights the importance of mental state, especially a death to what one experiences next, and emphasises the likelihood that proximity to the Buddha helps generate the right sort of mental state. It also shows how even the lowliest of animals can enjoy a significant improvement in rebirth state. How much more so we might well reflect, should a human audience member be rejoicing in their encounter with the Buddha. But it is not only Buddhists who told a story of a frog reborn as a god. A similar story is found in an early Jain narrative collection, too. The Jain version is a little more elaborate and starts a lifetime before the frog is a frog. The frog to be, we learn was a human lay follower of the Jain founding teacher Mahavira, who's an equivalent figure to the Buddha for Jains. He was responsible for building a great water tank for travellers, along with gardens, rest houses, and other facilities, which was a very kind thing to do and should have been generative of positive karma. But he also got rather attached to his creations, so much so that when he died, he was reborn as a frog in his own tank. Hearing people around the tank, praising his former self, he realised what had happened and felt great remorse. Despite being a frog, he took on the five Jain lay vows. Hearing that Mahavira was giving a talk nearby, he resolved to go and hear it. He climbed out of the tank and began to hop along the road towards the venue. But en route, he was squashed by a horse carrying a human audience member. As he lay at the side of the road with his entrails beside him, he took on the five ascetic vows normally reserved for Jain monastics, and directed his mind towards the omniscient jinas. As a result, he was reborn in a heavenly realm. As is generally the case when looking at two related stories, the differences are very revealing. Buddhist and Jain karma theory is closely related, but there are also important differences. As this story suggests, in the Jain narrative universe, animals tend to have more agency, able under the right circumstances to see their past lives and take on ascetic practices. While Buddhist animals are quite passive and can only really experience positive mental states as a result of encountering the Buddha or another faith inducing great being. I feel I should apologise at this point to any of my colleagues who've been here long enough to remember what I talked about in my job talk 12 years ago, which was precisely this set of stories of frogs becoming gods. It's a favourite. The uniqueness of the Buddha is a theme to which we will keep returning, and this extends to when the Buddha himself is born as an animal. The Buddha-to-be is never an ordinary animal caught up in the world of violence and instinct. As a great elephant, he pulls his own tusks out to give to a hunter. As a hare, he jumps into a fire in order to offer himself as a meal to a visiting holy man. As a deer, he offers his own life to the king in order to save that of a pregnant doe. As a monkey, he makes his body into a bridge to save his troop from attack, losing his life in the process. He is the exception that proves the rule that animals can only act according to instinct, or to put it another way, he is subject to different rules altogether. This is because, as we already noted, you don't become a buddha in a single lifetime. It takes far more dedication than that. The Buddha of our time begins his quest at the feet of a previous buddha, vowing to pursue the various qualities required for buddhahood across the many lifetimes such a path requires. In his human rebirths, too, he repeatedly sacrifices his life, leads others to better forms of living and demonstrates his superior wisdom. In thinking about these heroic tales, there is often some debate about how an audience member is supposed to respond. Should a Buddhist hearing tales of the extraordinary deeds of the Buddha in his past lives try to emulate these actions? Or do such stories seek to set the Buddha apart as incomparable in his greatness? Take the story of King Shibi as an example. According to a famous Jataka, the Buddha was once born as the generous King Shibi. He gave without hesitation and was famed for his commitment to giving. One day, a blind man approached and asked the king for his eyes, and the king gave them. This is far from a simple exemplary tale. Should we really celebrate this gift, which makes a noble and virtuous king blind for no apparent benefit to the recipient? Or would we like the courtiers in the story, be appalled at the idea that this is an appropriate deed. How far is it, though from shock to awe and from awe to faith? Stories, especially those expressed in what we might call literary forms, commonly make use of emotional responses to prompt reflections and actions? In terms of actions prompted by the story, few are likely to rush out and find a blind person to give their eyes to, I suspect. But weaker forms of emulation are common. As a general principle, generosity is highly praised in the Buddhist tradition. In parts of the Theravada Buddhist world, stories of the Buddha's bodily gift giving are explicitly referenced in calls for blood donation and organ donation. Sri Lanka, where the Shibi story is particularly popular, is a major exporter of donated corneas. Shibi is a hero known outside of Buddhist narrative, too, with Hindu and Jain tales of the extraordinary generosity of this great king or royal lineage. His association with giving away parts of his body is played with in different ways in these different traditions, emphasising different virtues. As we saw in the story of the Frog God, a shared narrative tradition enables different groups to articulate what makes them distinctive. And so another reason to tell stories might be to give one's own take on a common question. While Shibi helps to answer questions about the limits of generosity, another shared king or royal lineage helps to explore the question of whether or not it is necessary to renounce worldly life in order to achieve liberation. It is worth noting perhaps that this is one of the biggest debates in early Indian religious traditions with Buddhist and Jain monastic and ascetic tendencies competing with a Vedic and Brahmanical Hindu focus on ritual and social duty. The King of Videha, often called Janaka, rules in his opulent capital city of Mithila, and appears many times in the Hindu epic Mahabharata, in discussions of whether or not renunciation is truly required for liberation. Meanwhile, a famous Buddhist story tells of how Janaka, in this case, of course, identified as the Buddha in a past life, had to go to extraordinary efforts to regain his rightful kingship, dramatically surviving shipwreck, which is the most popular scene for illustration, only to have to go to even more extraordinary lengths to then give up his kingdom altogether in order to pursue a life of renunciation. In a famous verse shared between this Jataka and a parallel story in the Jain Uttarajjhaya, as well as a closely related verse in the Mahabharata, the king declares: We live happily, we who have nothing. Though Mithila may be on fire, nothing of mine is burning. The association of this king with renunciation is also found in a related cluster of stories about prompts for realising the need to leave normal life. In these stories, the king of Videha is sometimes called Nimi or Nami, as well as Janaka, and renounces after having some powerful experience of impermanence, or witnessing something that captures the importance of solitude. So in some stories, he leaves his kingdom for the life of a forest renouncer after seeing his first grey grey hair a scene depicted here. If I followed that, and I would have had to have renounced in my early 20s. In some other stories, he encounters a woman pounding sandalwood paste and notices how two bracelets on one arm jangle about and make a racket, while the solitary bracelet on the other arm is silent. And I'm wearing a bracelet today purely for the purposes of illustrating that this makes no noise. Solitude and silence, he reflects are more desirable than the tumultuous life of a king. In these clusters of related tales about kings of Videha who are tempted to renounce, It is interesting that the king always ensures the continuation of his family line before disappearing off into the forest, even in the more strongly monastic traditions of Jainism and Buddhism. This enables the King of Videha, whatever he is called, to be a lineage, a series of kings, each signifying that core question that concerned early Indian religious traditions so much. Should one seek to live righteously in the world or leave worldly life altogether to pursue liberation. A shared character or lineage of characters, shared motifs, and even shared verses. Allow each tradition to express and challenge different answers to that question in dialogue with one another. Indeed, as Brian Black has shown through his work on the Mahabharata and other texts, the concept of dialogue is key to understanding how stories of this kind work in at least two different senses. Firstly, the diological form is prominent. Janaka explores questions about renunciation in conversation. With religious teachers, with his wife, and in his most famous scene in the Mahabharata, in conversation with a female ascetic who uses her yogic powers to swap bodies with him, much to his consternation. Secondly, different stories about the Kings of Videha are in dialogue with one another. Responding to shared concerns and offering different but not necessarily contradictory perspectives in an expansiveness that is in itself, best viewed as a philosophical choice. As should be clear by now, intertextuality is key to understanding the rich narrative universe of Early India. In addition to tapping into familiar stories or stock characters, including those shared across religious boundaries, early Indian religious narrative often speaks to other broader frames of reference, including metaphorical or doctrinal frameworks, thereby enriching the audience's understanding of complex ideas. In the story of the ferryman, the Buddha and some of his senior disciples are travelling on foot, and they reach a river that they need to cross. They ask the ferrymen to help, but the ferrymen demand a fee, which the Buddha does not have. The Buddha responds. I've also been a ferryman. I carried across Nanda, who had fallen in the river of passion, Angulimala, who had fallen in the flood of hatred. The proud, young Manastabdha, who had fallen in the stream of pride, and Uruvilva Kasyapa, who had fallen in the flood of delusion. And I never asked for a ferry fee. Now, it's clear that understanding this retort requires some intertextual awareness. All four of the people mentioned would be known to the audience as liberated monks, arhats, who had been led to the ultimate achievement of nirvana by the Buddha. Nanda, it will help to know, was famous for struggling with his passion for his gorgeous wife after being accidentally tricked into becoming a monk. In another famous work of Buddhist literature, we hear about how the Buddha cured this. He showed Nanda an emaciated monkey and asked how this compared to Nanda's wife. Nanda, of course, said, well, my wife is incomparable to this emaciated monkey. She's far more beautiful. Then the Buddha showed Nanda celestial nymphs and asked the same question. Nanda, of course, realised that these were far more beautiful than his wife and began to take more care with his religious practice. Initially, we are led to believe in the desire to achieve a heavenly rebirth and access to these divine beauties. But as he advanced in his practice, he overcame his passion altogether and eventually achieved the Buddhist goal of liberation from rebirth or nirvana. Angulimala, is another of the most storied followers of the Buddha. He was a famous serial killer, who sought to kill 100 people and had a rather gruesome habit of cutting a finger off each of his victims and threading these into a necklace. His name literally means gland or necklace of fingers. He, we are told, sought to add the Buddha to his count, chasing him, yet never managing to quite catch him up, although the Buddha never seemed to increase his steady, slow walk. When Angulimala in frustration shouted out, Stop, the Buddha replied, I have stopped, a reference to his achievement of nirvana. Converted by his encounter with the Buddha, Angulimala went on to become a monk and to achieve nirvana himself. He later became famous for protecting women in childbirth, due to another story, but I don't have time to pull on that thread just now. Perhaps slightly less well known, but still well known in the Buddhist tradition are the stories of Manastabdha, who wouldn't bow to his parents or teachers, but was humbled by the Buddha. And Uruvilva Kasyapa, an ascetic, who believed himself to already be liberated before a display of miracles by the Buddha converted not only him, but his very large group of disciples. It's easy to see that these four figures represent four bad qualities, passion, pride, hatred, and delusion, that Buddhist teachings seek to eliminate. From a very unpromising starting point, particularly with Angulimala, each of these characters is transformed by an encounter with the Buddha, the miracle performing all powerful teacher who helps them to become liberated not only from their negative tendencies, and the terrifying and inevitable karmic consequences thereof, but also from the cycle of rebirth altogether. Now we understand the allusion contained in these names, but in what sense has the Buddha ferried these four men across the flood? This idea makes sense to the audience because they know that the cycle of rebirth and re death is frequently compared to a flooded river or later to an ocean, with its turbulent waters throwing you around from birth to birth and preventing your escape. The further shore, in this metaphorical framework, is likened to nirvana, the escape from rebirth. The Buddha is frequently said to have carried others across the flood to the further shore. His teaching, too, is famously compared to a raft. This idea is played with further in what happens next in the story. After the Buddha's retort, one of the ferryman agrees to transport the Buddha and his monks across the river. But while the monks are busy boarding the boat, the Buddha disappears from the near shore and reappears on the far shore. This is a visual reminder that while the monks are dependent on others, the Buddha is certainly not. Humbled by this display, the ferryman listens to a teaching and becomes an arhat or liberated disciple himself. A second ferryman feels remorse at refusing to help the Buddha and offers food to the monastic community. The Buddha then smiles, and his magnificent light emitting smile indicates his readiness to make a prediction. He predicts that this second ferryman will achieve liberation in a future rebirth. This smile is yet another trope that crosses between texts, and it offers us yet another window into the power of stories. In narrative literature of the type to which the ferryman story belongs, when the Buddha smiles, coloured rays of light emerge from his mouth and travel through the cosmos. First, they travel through each of the hell realms, making the hot hells cooler and the cold hells warmer, and they project an image of the Buddha that inspires faith in the hearts of the hell inhabitants, such that they are immediately reborn in better circumstances. The rays of light then travel through each of the heavenly realms and shout out, Suffering, impermanent, empty, not self, in an attempt to rouse the gods from their indulgence by pointing out the true nature of our experience. Even the gods, we should note, are set to benefit from Buddhist teachings, since even they are subject to the cycle of rebirth, though they are generally not portrayed as being very receptive to Buddhist teachings while enjoying their lovely happy time and extraordinarily long lifespan. After travelling through the cosmos in this way, the rays of light reassemble behind the Buddha's body and then re enter it. The place in which they re enter determines the type of attainment he is about to predict. The Buddha's body, of course, is not an ordinary body. It has several physical features, including a protuberance on the top of his head and a mark between his eyebrows that indicate his special nature. These two places receive the light rays when he is to predict the highest forms of attainment, liberation of different kinds. And so this smile described multiple times in great detail in a variety of stories, shows us the Buddha's influence moving through the cosmos because of his superhuman nature. It's a very visual description and full of mnemonic features. The likelihood is that it would have been chanted. An important reminder, perhaps that texts in this setting were rarely read in the way that you and I would read literature nowadays. Narrative in this context is also performance. Visualisation can be ritual and transformative. The text prompts us to ask certain questions such as, do the monks who chant the text simply describe the Buddha's influence permeating the cosmos in the past? Or do they make it so in the present through their performance? Or is the fact that the Buddha's smile rays reach the heavens and hells in the imaginative world of the text enough? Does the communal visualisation have transformative power for the audience purely as an imaginative experience? Setting aside what is and is not happening external to the text. It is clear that meeting the Buddha through the text is beneficial to the audience, even if it is in their heads. The Buddha in many Buddhist narratives inspires positive mental states akin to faith because he's such an awesome being. This faith, we're told, again and again in the stories, transforms the people or indeed animals that he encounters. So too, can positive mental states generated by the text's external audience transform them. Crucially, the Buddha is not a historical figure who is dead and gone. He lives in the stories. Natalie Gummer has argued recently that certain Mahayana Buddhist texts take this further by literally cooking their audiences into Buddhas through their rhetorical power, which is modelled on Vedic sacrificial frameworks. The Buddha in these texts is as real as any other, acting on his audience as a living buddha with spectacular results. Now, the sense that an imaginative encounter can have transformative effects is not, of course, unique to Indian traditions. After all, meeting Dumbledore inside his head helps Harry Potter to work out how best to act. Meeting Anne of Green Gables inside my head, when I was a child, maybe embrace the more playful aspects of my own imagination. Doubtless, many of you can think of a character that you have met in a novel, play, film or TV series, who has had a lasting impact on your thinking or behaviour. But while this is in part a universal human experience, there is a particularly strong Indian tradition of celebrating the power of the imagination of mentally generated experiences that are at least as powerful as anything we might materially experience. As David Shulman's field- defining work reminds us, Indian religious literature often tends to assume that what happens in the imagination is brought into being in a way that is more than real. Certainly, narrative literature offers a way to have an encounter with a person or place that is as transformative as any encounter in real life. Let's take an example from the Hindu epic Mahabharata, to illustrate this. An example explored by my former colleague James Hegarty. When the heroes of this epic, the Pandava princes and their wife Draupadi are in exile, they tour a series of sacred fords or pilgrimage sites, described at length in the text. As their tour guides, great Brahmin, sages declare, this sacred pilgrimage is actually equal in merit to carrying out great Vadic sacrifices. Now, this in itself is quite a claim, offering up a religious practice of equal value to the ultimate ritual act. But the text goes further, telling us that hearing about the Pandavas touring the sites is as valuable as touring them ourselves. Therefore, by implication, hearing about this episode in the Mahabharata is also as good as carrying out great Vedic sacrifices. An imaginary pilgrimage or a literary pilgrimage is therefore of extraordinary power, and one might add considerably easier not to mention cheaper than either a real pilgrimage or sponsoring a Vedic ritual. Whenever the Pandava princes reach a sacred pilgrimage site, or whenever we reach that site in our minds by following the text, the place is enlivened by the telling of stories. Tales of great sages who lived there, great Vedic rites, or feats of asceticism that are the reason for the site being considered worth visiting. That is another role of stories. Stories create and enliven sacred places, sometimes transforming them in the process. A favourite example of this is the Sri Pada Mountain in central Sri Lanka, which features a footprint on its peak. Early on, this was considered the site of the Buddha's footprint, left during one of his miraculous visits to Sri Lanka. Hindus, however, say that it is the footprint of the monkey god Hanuman from when he landed on the island as part of his mission to rescue Sita as recounted in the epic Ramayana. Muslim residents and later still, various Christian colonial powers restoried it as the footprint of Adam, and the site got caught up in the story of the Book of Genesis. The narrative association spread. The nearby mountain temple of Mulgirigala was identified for a time as Adam's tomb. A great statue of the Buddha reclining as he entered his final nirvana was restoried as Adam on his deathbed. As John Strong noted in a recent study of this site, it's very likely that Buddhist monks participated in this restorying as a way to protect the site from the Portuguese destruction of Buddhist iconography. Seen in this light, the restorying of John Knox as Albus Dumbledore by some enterprising Edinburgh tour guides doesn't seem quite so unusual. Rather, it is part of a long history of adapting characters and places to suit the changing needs of their audiences. Something done incredibly well through stories. We've come quite a long way from the monkey gardeners. The riches of Indian religious narrative have given us fables, karmic consequence tales, stories of great renunciation, and of miraculous and powerful encounters. We've seen how stories can help not only to communicate ideas, but also to create, explore, and challenge them. Stories are used to establish identities and boundaries between religious groups, including through establishing particular teachers as masterful storytellers. They explore different answers to overlapping questions, especially those of common interest, such as how karma operates, and whether or not one must renounce the world to achieve liberation. We have seen how stories transform audiences through offering them potent imaginative encounters with sacred places or people. Stories provoke emotional and intellectual responses, exploring complex, ethical and philosophical ideas in a form that is relatable and very often entertaining, as well as memorable. I hope you've enjoyed my selection of greatest hits of my favourite stories. No doubt, I could have offered more answers to the question, what are stories for, and indeed, I'm conscious that I've not had time to talk much about the visual and material lives of these stories, some evidence of which has been on show during this lecture. Have you been transformed simply by sitting here allowing the stories to play through your mind. Perhaps one lecture is insufficient for this, but I've certainly been transformed by them over the years. Inside my head, in the stories that I sit with in my research, I've revelled in the beauty of poetry, been swept up by the emotions of characters, puzzled over the moral choices of protagonists, seen the unfolding of complex doctrine in narrative form, and been imaginatively transported to worlds that are at once very different to my own, and yet also strangely the same. I don't imagine that I will run out of questions to ponder as I seek to understand the riches of Indian religious narrative. And while a big part of my love of these stories is the way they reveal and explore their specific context, part of my appreciation is also just a basic human love of stories. Stories, after all, are widely recognised as fundamental to who we are as human beings. If I may be permitted to close my lecture by updating a short parable from the great narratologist A. K. Ramanujan, just imagine typing into a chat bot: Will AI ever think like a human being? And receiving the answer, that reminds me of a story. Thank you very much. Oct 24 2024 17.15 - 19.15 Professor Naomi Appleton's Inaugural Lecture Professor Naomi Appleton (Professor of Buddhist Studies and Indian Religions) delivers her Inaugural Lecture 'What are Stories For? Answers from the Buddha and Beyond'.
Professor Naomi Appleton's Inaugural Lecture Recording of Professor Naomi Appleton's Inaugural Lecture View media transcript Good evening to everybody, and welcome to this very special event in a wonderful Playfair Library location. It's great to see you all here. My name is Professor Jeremy Carrette. I'm head of the School of Divinity, and it is my pleasure to welcome you all here to this inaugural lecture for Professor Naomi Appleton in honour of her appointment to the Chair of Buddhist Studies and Indian Religions. It's great to see everybody here, and on this occasion of distinguished recognition it is a particular delight to welcome the family and friends of Professor Appleton who join us here this evening. Welcome to you all. It's also great to welcome those friends and colleagues from across Edinburgh and also from across the country, and for all of you who are joining us here this evening. Inaugural lectures, are moments of celebration. A celebration of an academic achievement in the appointment to the professorial status at the University of Edinburgh. A recognition of international scholarship and leadership in academic life. It is therefore, my pleasure as part of the tradition of inaugural lectures to say a few words before handing over to Professor Appleton for her lecture this evening. Professor Appleton was born in London, but largely grew up in Lancaster. She holds a first degree in Religious and Theological Studies from the University of Cardiff, an MPhil from the same institution in 2004 and a DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2008. After a year teaching at a Liberal Arts College in Portland, Oregon, she took up the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship back at the University of Cardiff 2009-2012. She has been in Edinburgh since 2012 and joined the university as a Chancellor's fellow in Religious Studies. She was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2015 and appointed to Personal Chair of Buddhist Studies and Indian Religions in August 2023, which we celebrate this evening. Professor Appleton's research focuses on the role of stories in the creation, communication, and challenge of religious ideas in ancient India, with a particular focus on Buddhist literature in Sanskrit, and Pali. She is best known for her work on jataka stories of the Buddhist past lives, which form an important genre of Buddhist narrative. She has also worked on Hindu and Jain narrative literature, exploring questions of karma and rebirth, liberation, ethics, and the transmission of religious ideas. It is striking for all her single authored works to note, as all seasoned readers of Professor Appleton will know, that they each begin with the words once upon a time. Which powerfully signals not only the continuity of her research focus, as well as the theme of this evening's lecture, but the way her work focuses upon a whole array of questions in narrative purpose. As she says in her first work, Jataka Stories in Theravada Buddhism, Ashgate 2010, there is a power of texts, a power of words, a power of genre, and the power of truth. The first text explored the ways in which the stories of the Buddhas past lives, participated in developing notions of a path to Buddhahood, and in doing so, shows, as she states at the end of that work, the various levels on which Buddhist doctrine and practice operate. A defining feature of Professor Appleton's work is offering us insights into the importance of interactions, dialogues, and encounters, both within a tradition through patterns, repetitions, and cycles, but also across different traditions. For example, her second major project brought Jain narratives into conversation with Buddhist ones. Exploring how the understanding of karma and rebirth were articulated through multi life stories. This resulted in her second monograph Narrating Karma and Rebirth: Buddhist and Jain Multi-life Stories, Cambridge University Press 2014. Her aim in this text, as she points out, was not so much to identify the direct influence of one tradition on the other, but as she states, to expose what each tradition considers important or rather takes for granted. It is, as she argues, the divergences and the reasons behind them that become significant and on which she insightfully explores. The exploration of interactions, dialogues, and encounters continues in her third major project, funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which explored heroic characters, mainly gods and kings, that shared between Buddhist Jain and Brahmanical Hindu traditions, and how these characters shed light on competing social and religious ideals. The resulting monograph was Shared Characters in Hindu Jain and Buddhist Narrative, Routledge 2017. And it drew attention, as she states, to the common features of characters, roles, and motifs, and whole stories in Hindu Buddhist and Jain narratives. Professor Appleton in this work is able to understand what is shared and how boundaries are constituted, revealing the importance that all of these have to the establishment of the early history of Indian religions. In this way, it is illuminating how her scholarship from that initial frame of once upon a time, weaves across multiple levels of thinking across text, history, meaning, and purpose. In 2017, she was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, which enabled her to realise a long standing ambition to create a database of Jataka stories. It also funded work on the intersection of textual and visual narratives, resulting in an edited volume Narrative Visions and Visual Narratives in Indian Buddhism published by Equinox in 2022. Meanwhile, in 2020, she had an AHRC grant to allow her to work with collaborator Christopher Jones on the role of narrative literature in Mahayana developments in the understanding of Buddhood. And from this project, there is a collected volume in press and a co- authored monograph nearing completion. Alongside these various projects, she also engages in translation work, seeking to make Buddhist texts available to a wider audience. With Sarah Shaw in 2015, she published a translation from Pali of the ten longest and most popular Jataka stories. In 2020, she published a translation and study of 40 Sanskrit stories of past lives that explore the nature of Buddhahood. It is clear how Professor Appleton has added new depth and layers to her research field and inspired an international audience of scholars. But she has also shown and continues to show, for which I remain indebted, incredible service and support to the School of Divinity over many years. Within the school, she has shown and continues to demonstrate outstanding leadership. She first served as director of EDI, leading to a successful application for the Silver Athena Swan Award in 2018, and was Director of Teaching 2020-2023. And she is currently Director of Research, aided by the experience gained from the Theology and Religious Studies subpanel at the national Research Excellence Framework in 2021. She has also been instrumental in the growing of Buddhist studies at the University of Edinburgh, co founding and co directing the Edinburgh Buddhist Studies network with Dr Halle O'Neal of the Edinburgh College of Art. The network has grown to include 30 members and arranges academic events, school outreach work, and other forms of public engagement. The network's collaboration across different schools in the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Science, has made it possible to launch a new multidisciplinary masters programme in Buddhist Studies and return Sanskrit to teaching in the University. She has served on the board of the UK Association of Buddhist Studies, 2005-2014, and convened the Spalding symposium on Indian religions 2014-2020. And she was elected to the Board of International Association of Buddhist Studies in 2023. She is an active part of this international scholarly community and has been invited to speak in a whole variety of different places, including Bangkok, Paris, Heidelberg, Yale, Vancouver, and Vienna. And in addition to these international engagements and the creativity of her thinking in her work, she enjoys the creativity of sewing, knitting, gardening, and playing the piano, and, of course, spending time with family and friends. I hope as this overview shows that Professor Appleton has been transformative in her research field, and she has enriched the School of Divinity in many ways across the research, teaching, and academic life. It is recognition of all these achievements that I am delighted this evening to welcome Professor Appleton to give her inaugural lecture: What are stories for? Answers from the Buddha and Beyond. Would you all welcome to the platform for her inaugural lecture, Professor Naomi Appleton, Chair of Buddhist Studies and Indian Religions. Thank you so much for that very kind introduction. And thank you all for taking the time to be here. I especially want to thank my wonderful colleagues in the School of Divinity in Edinburgh Buddhist Studies, and in the wider university and field who have made and continued to make my working life so rewarding. And I'm also hugely grateful to family and friends who've come to celebrate with me today and whose support has also been integral to my academic success. As every self respecting Edinburgh tour guide, will tell you... - my colleagues are anticipating this joke because they've heard them - this statue, standing proudly in the New College Quad is of Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, late headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Since I walk past his statue daily on my way to the office, it seems only appropriate to begin my inaugural professorial lecture with a quotation from the Great Wizard. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry is knocked into a dream like state and has a very helpful and revealing conversation with Dumbledore despite the latter having been dead for some time. Understandably perplexed, Harry asks, Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head? To which Dumbledore replies, Of course, it is happening inside your head, Harry. But why on earth should that mean that it is not real? This lecture is a defence of seeing what goes on in our heads as being as valuable, if not more so than what goes on in the real world, external to us. Now, as an audience of intellectuals, I may well be preaching to the choir here. We all live inside our heads to a certain extent, perhaps more than is healthy, and we like to believe that this is a value to ourselves and even to society. More specifically, this lecture is a defence of the role of the imagination, particularly imaginative experiences prompted through engagement with narrative literature, in forming and transforming us as human beings. Taking a different angle. It is an explanation, at least in part of why stories have so often been at the heart of religious traditions. Now, it's often assumed that religious stories primarily exist to make claims about something historically true, an actual prophet that walked the earth, for example, or a miracle that actually happened. My approach is rather different, treating religious stories as narrative first and only history in as much as they offer us windows into the development of religious ideas and practices. To borrow the terminology of my long standing mentor and role model, John Strong, I focus on the storical rather than historical dimensions of narrative. I argue that stories have the capacity to change us to help us understand things better, remember things better, feel things better, live better, and that that is why they are so popular in religious settings. The particular religious setting that I will be talking about is South Asia or India as a somewhat anachronistic shorthand, in the fifth century BCE to the fifth century CE, what I jokingly refer to as the long fifth century. This was a time and place in which different religious groups sought to establish and develop alongside one another, groups that became what we call the Hindu Jain and Buddhist religions. Stories from simple fables to elaborate epic poems were one of the key ways in which these religious groups explored and expressed their ideas about the world and the place of us humans within it. It's probably time we had a story, and I will begin with a story said to have been told by the Buddha. Once upon a time, in the great North Indian city of Varanasi, the king had a gardener to attend to his palace grounds. This gardener, however, wanted to leave his garden unattended for a few days in order to take part in a festival. He asked a troop of monkeys that lived in the palace garden to look after the plants in his absence. The monkeys were certainly willing, but they were uncertain how best to ensure that the plants had sufficient water without wasting any of this very precious resource. In the end, they decided that the best thing to do was to pull up each of the plants in turn, measure their roots and decide how much water to give them on that basis. A man who was passing by saw this and remarked in the verse that forms the scriptural heart of the story: Assistance from a fool does not lead to happiness. A fool fails, just like the monkey gardener. Now, not only is this a story told by the Buddha, but in it, the Buddha tells us that the passer by within the story was himself in a past life. Stories of the Buddha's past lives, usually understood to have been told by the Buddha to his followers, are known as Jataka stories, and as you've already heard, these form, a particular interest of mine. It's important to note that the Buddha is not a name, but an epithet, meaning awakened one, hence, officially only applied to the Buddha after he achieves awakening. That is to say, the attainment that enables him not only to escape the cycle of rebirth himself, but also to teach others to do so as well. Until that time, he is referred to as the Bodhisattva instead, or I prefer the term Buddha-to-be because the term bodhisattva has some different connotations in different branches of Buddhism. Achieving Buddhahood, you should understand takes many many lifetimes. And so we have many many stories of things the Buddha-to-be did and situations he encountered during his long travels to that destination. Many of the most famous Jataka stories concern the Buddha-to-be's great acts of heroism or self sacrifice. Qualities he honed on the long path to the great destination of buddhahood, and we will come to some of those later in this lecture. But some Jataka stories, such as that of the monkey gardeners, are just good moral fables. Here, the Buddha-to-be is wise enough to laugh at the monkeys, but the chuckles in the room a moment ago suggest that we could have all managed that much ourselves. In other words, there's nothing particularly Buddhist about the content of this story. As a fable, it's about animal protagonists who mirror human traits, helping humans to see their behaviours more clearly from a distance. In the Jataka genre, other favourites of this kind include the story of two otters who argue over who should get the bigger share of a fish that they've caught collaboratively. They eventually ask a jackal to adjudicate, and the jackal gives one the head and the other the tail and takes the main part of the fish as his fee. Lawyers eh. Or there is the story of the talkative tortoise who persuades two geese to take him with them when they migrate because he's worried he'll get lonely left behind with nobody to talk to. They hold a stick between them and he holds on with his mouth. Except that being a talkative tortoise, he cannot keep his mouth shut and so falls to the ground. While these stories are found in Jataka collections, by definition told by the Buddha about things he did or witnessed in his past lives. They are also found in other story collections, often with different emphases or moral teachings attached. Indeed, the story of the tortoise and the birds reach Europe via Persian translations of the broadly Hindu Pancatantra collection, known in Europe, therefore, as the tales of Bidpai or of Pilpai, and related stories are found in Aesopic fables as well. Animal fables often embody a very general morality and play on human traits that go well beyond Indian cultural or religious norms, and this is evident in their ability to travel. However, in recognising them as part of common folk tale or fable stock, we must not forget the implications of each time a story is framed and retold, to teach and to entertain a specific audience and often to glorify a specific teller of tales. Each time a story is retold, it tells us something about the needs and desires of its new community. While these may be common stories, they are often told by uncommon storytellers. In other words, the fact that these stories are Jataka stories is important to our reading of them, even if they also crop up in other story collections. The Buddha, in the telling of Jatakas, is presented as a prolific storyteller with many hundreds of stories attributed to him. Why does the Buddha tell stories? He always seems to know exactly what tale his audience needs at any moment to help them to reflect on their behaviour or circumstances. It's not hard to see that the story of a talkative tortoise might well persuade somebody who's a little bit too keen on the sound of their own voice to keep quiet, or that the story of the otters could be used to stop people from being quarrelsome. The Buddha in these texts appears to appreciate the universal human appeal of a good story as well as their value in exploring morality and wisdom. But the question, why does the Buddha tell stories is not quite the right question to ask. The Buddha himself is in the stories, revealing his past lives to audiences within the text. In many ways, the Buddha himself is best viewed as a literary character. After all, we lack any historical evidence for him as a person, but his presence in a wide variety of texts forms a rich picture of him. Perhaps we should instead ask, why do Buddhists tell stories of the Buddha telling stories. Several answers are already apparent: because they demonstrate his vision, which penetrates even his distant past lives, as well as his teaching prowess and perhaps even his humanity and sense of humour. Stories like that of the monkey gardeners, the squabbling otters, and the talkative tortoise are not really stories about what it is like to be an animal. They are stories about basic human foibles illustrated through animals, and that is perhaps why they have such broad cross cultural appeal. However, not all Indian animal stories function in this way. Some are about animals as animals. Remembering that for most early Indian religious traditions, animals are considered to be part of the cycle of rebirth. That is to say, humans can be reborn as animals and vice versa, as all beings move through different realms of rebirth, which also include heavenly and hellish realms. As such, animals are our fellow sufferers, stuck in this apparently endless wandering on from birth to birth with rebirth determined by one's actions or karma. Multi-life stories, illustrating the workings of karma are common in Indian traditions, especially Buddhism and Jainism. One feature of stories is that they can help us to navigate complex abstract ideas in a way that is relatable because they are explored through embodied characters, encountering specific circumstances. There are also often memorable ways to recall the virtues of certain behaviours or the dangers of others. To put it another way, it's one thing to tell someone that bad deeds lead to rebirth as an animal, and good deeds lead to rebirth as a deity, and quite another to tell them a story. There was once a frog present at a sermon given by the Buddha. Through the potency of the Buddha's presence and teaching, this frog felt a great sense of clarity and peace, even faith, a common response for any being who encounters the Buddha. Unfortunately, an inattentive human audience member accidentally squashed the frog to death. But because of the frog's positive state of mind, he was immediately reborn as a god in a heavenly realm. Gods are born spontaneously, independently, and fully grown, unlike humans, and they also have the ability to see their past lives. This frog god immediately knew what had happened to him and returned to pay the Buddha a visit and offer his praise. This brief tale demonstrates karma in action. It highlights the importance of mental state, especially a death to what one experiences next, and emphasises the likelihood that proximity to the Buddha helps generate the right sort of mental state. It also shows how even the lowliest of animals can enjoy a significant improvement in rebirth state. How much more so we might well reflect, should a human audience member be rejoicing in their encounter with the Buddha. But it is not only Buddhists who told a story of a frog reborn as a god. A similar story is found in an early Jain narrative collection, too. The Jain version is a little more elaborate and starts a lifetime before the frog is a frog. The frog to be, we learn was a human lay follower of the Jain founding teacher Mahavira, who's an equivalent figure to the Buddha for Jains. He was responsible for building a great water tank for travellers, along with gardens, rest houses, and other facilities, which was a very kind thing to do and should have been generative of positive karma. But he also got rather attached to his creations, so much so that when he died, he was reborn as a frog in his own tank. Hearing people around the tank, praising his former self, he realised what had happened and felt great remorse. Despite being a frog, he took on the five Jain lay vows. Hearing that Mahavira was giving a talk nearby, he resolved to go and hear it. He climbed out of the tank and began to hop along the road towards the venue. But en route, he was squashed by a horse carrying a human audience member. As he lay at the side of the road with his entrails beside him, he took on the five ascetic vows normally reserved for Jain monastics, and directed his mind towards the omniscient jinas. As a result, he was reborn in a heavenly realm. As is generally the case when looking at two related stories, the differences are very revealing. Buddhist and Jain karma theory is closely related, but there are also important differences. As this story suggests, in the Jain narrative universe, animals tend to have more agency, able under the right circumstances to see their past lives and take on ascetic practices. While Buddhist animals are quite passive and can only really experience positive mental states as a result of encountering the Buddha or another faith inducing great being. I feel I should apologise at this point to any of my colleagues who've been here long enough to remember what I talked about in my job talk 12 years ago, which was precisely this set of stories of frogs becoming gods. It's a favourite. The uniqueness of the Buddha is a theme to which we will keep returning, and this extends to when the Buddha himself is born as an animal. The Buddha-to-be is never an ordinary animal caught up in the world of violence and instinct. As a great elephant, he pulls his own tusks out to give to a hunter. As a hare, he jumps into a fire in order to offer himself as a meal to a visiting holy man. As a deer, he offers his own life to the king in order to save that of a pregnant doe. As a monkey, he makes his body into a bridge to save his troop from attack, losing his life in the process. He is the exception that proves the rule that animals can only act according to instinct, or to put it another way, he is subject to different rules altogether. This is because, as we already noted, you don't become a buddha in a single lifetime. It takes far more dedication than that. The Buddha of our time begins his quest at the feet of a previous buddha, vowing to pursue the various qualities required for buddhahood across the many lifetimes such a path requires. In his human rebirths, too, he repeatedly sacrifices his life, leads others to better forms of living and demonstrates his superior wisdom. In thinking about these heroic tales, there is often some debate about how an audience member is supposed to respond. Should a Buddhist hearing tales of the extraordinary deeds of the Buddha in his past lives try to emulate these actions? Or do such stories seek to set the Buddha apart as incomparable in his greatness? Take the story of King Shibi as an example. According to a famous Jataka, the Buddha was once born as the generous King Shibi. He gave without hesitation and was famed for his commitment to giving. One day, a blind man approached and asked the king for his eyes, and the king gave them. This is far from a simple exemplary tale. Should we really celebrate this gift, which makes a noble and virtuous king blind for no apparent benefit to the recipient? Or would we like the courtiers in the story, be appalled at the idea that this is an appropriate deed. How far is it, though from shock to awe and from awe to faith? Stories, especially those expressed in what we might call literary forms, commonly make use of emotional responses to prompt reflections and actions? In terms of actions prompted by the story, few are likely to rush out and find a blind person to give their eyes to, I suspect. But weaker forms of emulation are common. As a general principle, generosity is highly praised in the Buddhist tradition. In parts of the Theravada Buddhist world, stories of the Buddha's bodily gift giving are explicitly referenced in calls for blood donation and organ donation. Sri Lanka, where the Shibi story is particularly popular, is a major exporter of donated corneas. Shibi is a hero known outside of Buddhist narrative, too, with Hindu and Jain tales of the extraordinary generosity of this great king or royal lineage. His association with giving away parts of his body is played with in different ways in these different traditions, emphasising different virtues. As we saw in the story of the Frog God, a shared narrative tradition enables different groups to articulate what makes them distinctive. And so another reason to tell stories might be to give one's own take on a common question. While Shibi helps to answer questions about the limits of generosity, another shared king or royal lineage helps to explore the question of whether or not it is necessary to renounce worldly life in order to achieve liberation. It is worth noting perhaps that this is one of the biggest debates in early Indian religious traditions with Buddhist and Jain monastic and ascetic tendencies competing with a Vedic and Brahmanical Hindu focus on ritual and social duty. The King of Videha, often called Janaka, rules in his opulent capital city of Mithila, and appears many times in the Hindu epic Mahabharata, in discussions of whether or not renunciation is truly required for liberation. Meanwhile, a famous Buddhist story tells of how Janaka, in this case, of course, identified as the Buddha in a past life, had to go to extraordinary efforts to regain his rightful kingship, dramatically surviving shipwreck, which is the most popular scene for illustration, only to have to go to even more extraordinary lengths to then give up his kingdom altogether in order to pursue a life of renunciation. In a famous verse shared between this Jataka and a parallel story in the Jain Uttarajjhaya, as well as a closely related verse in the Mahabharata, the king declares: We live happily, we who have nothing. Though Mithila may be on fire, nothing of mine is burning. The association of this king with renunciation is also found in a related cluster of stories about prompts for realising the need to leave normal life. In these stories, the king of Videha is sometimes called Nimi or Nami, as well as Janaka, and renounces after having some powerful experience of impermanence, or witnessing something that captures the importance of solitude. So in some stories, he leaves his kingdom for the life of a forest renouncer after seeing his first grey grey hair a scene depicted here. If I followed that, and I would have had to have renounced in my early 20s. In some other stories, he encounters a woman pounding sandalwood paste and notices how two bracelets on one arm jangle about and make a racket, while the solitary bracelet on the other arm is silent. And I'm wearing a bracelet today purely for the purposes of illustrating that this makes no noise. Solitude and silence, he reflects are more desirable than the tumultuous life of a king. In these clusters of related tales about kings of Videha who are tempted to renounce, It is interesting that the king always ensures the continuation of his family line before disappearing off into the forest, even in the more strongly monastic traditions of Jainism and Buddhism. This enables the King of Videha, whatever he is called, to be a lineage, a series of kings, each signifying that core question that concerned early Indian religious traditions so much. Should one seek to live righteously in the world or leave worldly life altogether to pursue liberation. A shared character or lineage of characters, shared motifs, and even shared verses. Allow each tradition to express and challenge different answers to that question in dialogue with one another. Indeed, as Brian Black has shown through his work on the Mahabharata and other texts, the concept of dialogue is key to understanding how stories of this kind work in at least two different senses. Firstly, the diological form is prominent. Janaka explores questions about renunciation in conversation. With religious teachers, with his wife, and in his most famous scene in the Mahabharata, in conversation with a female ascetic who uses her yogic powers to swap bodies with him, much to his consternation. Secondly, different stories about the Kings of Videha are in dialogue with one another. Responding to shared concerns and offering different but not necessarily contradictory perspectives in an expansiveness that is in itself, best viewed as a philosophical choice. As should be clear by now, intertextuality is key to understanding the rich narrative universe of Early India. In addition to tapping into familiar stories or stock characters, including those shared across religious boundaries, early Indian religious narrative often speaks to other broader frames of reference, including metaphorical or doctrinal frameworks, thereby enriching the audience's understanding of complex ideas. In the story of the ferryman, the Buddha and some of his senior disciples are travelling on foot, and they reach a river that they need to cross. They ask the ferrymen to help, but the ferrymen demand a fee, which the Buddha does not have. The Buddha responds. I've also been a ferryman. I carried across Nanda, who had fallen in the river of passion, Angulimala, who had fallen in the flood of hatred. The proud, young Manastabdha, who had fallen in the stream of pride, and Uruvilva Kasyapa, who had fallen in the flood of delusion. And I never asked for a ferry fee. Now, it's clear that understanding this retort requires some intertextual awareness. All four of the people mentioned would be known to the audience as liberated monks, arhats, who had been led to the ultimate achievement of nirvana by the Buddha. Nanda, it will help to know, was famous for struggling with his passion for his gorgeous wife after being accidentally tricked into becoming a monk. In another famous work of Buddhist literature, we hear about how the Buddha cured this. He showed Nanda an emaciated monkey and asked how this compared to Nanda's wife. Nanda, of course, said, well, my wife is incomparable to this emaciated monkey. She's far more beautiful. Then the Buddha showed Nanda celestial nymphs and asked the same question. Nanda, of course, realised that these were far more beautiful than his wife and began to take more care with his religious practice. Initially, we are led to believe in the desire to achieve a heavenly rebirth and access to these divine beauties. But as he advanced in his practice, he overcame his passion altogether and eventually achieved the Buddhist goal of liberation from rebirth or nirvana. Angulimala, is another of the most storied followers of the Buddha. He was a famous serial killer, who sought to kill 100 people and had a rather gruesome habit of cutting a finger off each of his victims and threading these into a necklace. His name literally means gland or necklace of fingers. He, we are told, sought to add the Buddha to his count, chasing him, yet never managing to quite catch him up, although the Buddha never seemed to increase his steady, slow walk. When Angulimala in frustration shouted out, Stop, the Buddha replied, I have stopped, a reference to his achievement of nirvana. Converted by his encounter with the Buddha, Angulimala went on to become a monk and to achieve nirvana himself. He later became famous for protecting women in childbirth, due to another story, but I don't have time to pull on that thread just now. Perhaps slightly less well known, but still well known in the Buddhist tradition are the stories of Manastabdha, who wouldn't bow to his parents or teachers, but was humbled by the Buddha. And Uruvilva Kasyapa, an ascetic, who believed himself to already be liberated before a display of miracles by the Buddha converted not only him, but his very large group of disciples. It's easy to see that these four figures represent four bad qualities, passion, pride, hatred, and delusion, that Buddhist teachings seek to eliminate. From a very unpromising starting point, particularly with Angulimala, each of these characters is transformed by an encounter with the Buddha, the miracle performing all powerful teacher who helps them to become liberated not only from their negative tendencies, and the terrifying and inevitable karmic consequences thereof, but also from the cycle of rebirth altogether. Now we understand the allusion contained in these names, but in what sense has the Buddha ferried these four men across the flood? This idea makes sense to the audience because they know that the cycle of rebirth and re death is frequently compared to a flooded river or later to an ocean, with its turbulent waters throwing you around from birth to birth and preventing your escape. The further shore, in this metaphorical framework, is likened to nirvana, the escape from rebirth. The Buddha is frequently said to have carried others across the flood to the further shore. His teaching, too, is famously compared to a raft. This idea is played with further in what happens next in the story. After the Buddha's retort, one of the ferryman agrees to transport the Buddha and his monks across the river. But while the monks are busy boarding the boat, the Buddha disappears from the near shore and reappears on the far shore. This is a visual reminder that while the monks are dependent on others, the Buddha is certainly not. Humbled by this display, the ferryman listens to a teaching and becomes an arhat or liberated disciple himself. A second ferryman feels remorse at refusing to help the Buddha and offers food to the monastic community. The Buddha then smiles, and his magnificent light emitting smile indicates his readiness to make a prediction. He predicts that this second ferryman will achieve liberation in a future rebirth. This smile is yet another trope that crosses between texts, and it offers us yet another window into the power of stories. In narrative literature of the type to which the ferryman story belongs, when the Buddha smiles, coloured rays of light emerge from his mouth and travel through the cosmos. First, they travel through each of the hell realms, making the hot hells cooler and the cold hells warmer, and they project an image of the Buddha that inspires faith in the hearts of the hell inhabitants, such that they are immediately reborn in better circumstances. The rays of light then travel through each of the heavenly realms and shout out, Suffering, impermanent, empty, not self, in an attempt to rouse the gods from their indulgence by pointing out the true nature of our experience. Even the gods, we should note, are set to benefit from Buddhist teachings, since even they are subject to the cycle of rebirth, though they are generally not portrayed as being very receptive to Buddhist teachings while enjoying their lovely happy time and extraordinarily long lifespan. After travelling through the cosmos in this way, the rays of light reassemble behind the Buddha's body and then re enter it. The place in which they re enter determines the type of attainment he is about to predict. The Buddha's body, of course, is not an ordinary body. It has several physical features, including a protuberance on the top of his head and a mark between his eyebrows that indicate his special nature. These two places receive the light rays when he is to predict the highest forms of attainment, liberation of different kinds. And so this smile described multiple times in great detail in a variety of stories, shows us the Buddha's influence moving through the cosmos because of his superhuman nature. It's a very visual description and full of mnemonic features. The likelihood is that it would have been chanted. An important reminder, perhaps that texts in this setting were rarely read in the way that you and I would read literature nowadays. Narrative in this context is also performance. Visualisation can be ritual and transformative. The text prompts us to ask certain questions such as, do the monks who chant the text simply describe the Buddha's influence permeating the cosmos in the past? Or do they make it so in the present through their performance? Or is the fact that the Buddha's smile rays reach the heavens and hells in the imaginative world of the text enough? Does the communal visualisation have transformative power for the audience purely as an imaginative experience? Setting aside what is and is not happening external to the text. It is clear that meeting the Buddha through the text is beneficial to the audience, even if it is in their heads. The Buddha in many Buddhist narratives inspires positive mental states akin to faith because he's such an awesome being. This faith, we're told, again and again in the stories, transforms the people or indeed animals that he encounters. So too, can positive mental states generated by the text's external audience transform them. Crucially, the Buddha is not a historical figure who is dead and gone. He lives in the stories. Natalie Gummer has argued recently that certain Mahayana Buddhist texts take this further by literally cooking their audiences into Buddhas through their rhetorical power, which is modelled on Vedic sacrificial frameworks. The Buddha in these texts is as real as any other, acting on his audience as a living buddha with spectacular results. Now, the sense that an imaginative encounter can have transformative effects is not, of course, unique to Indian traditions. After all, meeting Dumbledore inside his head helps Harry Potter to work out how best to act. Meeting Anne of Green Gables inside my head, when I was a child, maybe embrace the more playful aspects of my own imagination. Doubtless, many of you can think of a character that you have met in a novel, play, film or TV series, who has had a lasting impact on your thinking or behaviour. But while this is in part a universal human experience, there is a particularly strong Indian tradition of celebrating the power of the imagination of mentally generated experiences that are at least as powerful as anything we might materially experience. As David Shulman's field- defining work reminds us, Indian religious literature often tends to assume that what happens in the imagination is brought into being in a way that is more than real. Certainly, narrative literature offers a way to have an encounter with a person or place that is as transformative as any encounter in real life. Let's take an example from the Hindu epic Mahabharata, to illustrate this. An example explored by my former colleague James Hegarty. When the heroes of this epic, the Pandava princes and their wife Draupadi are in exile, they tour a series of sacred fords or pilgrimage sites, described at length in the text. As their tour guides, great Brahmin, sages declare, this sacred pilgrimage is actually equal in merit to carrying out great Vadic sacrifices. Now, this in itself is quite a claim, offering up a religious practice of equal value to the ultimate ritual act. But the text goes further, telling us that hearing about the Pandavas touring the sites is as valuable as touring them ourselves. Therefore, by implication, hearing about this episode in the Mahabharata is also as good as carrying out great Vedic sacrifices. An imaginary pilgrimage or a literary pilgrimage is therefore of extraordinary power, and one might add considerably easier not to mention cheaper than either a real pilgrimage or sponsoring a Vedic ritual. Whenever the Pandava princes reach a sacred pilgrimage site, or whenever we reach that site in our minds by following the text, the place is enlivened by the telling of stories. Tales of great sages who lived there, great Vedic rites, or feats of asceticism that are the reason for the site being considered worth visiting. That is another role of stories. Stories create and enliven sacred places, sometimes transforming them in the process. A favourite example of this is the Sri Pada Mountain in central Sri Lanka, which features a footprint on its peak. Early on, this was considered the site of the Buddha's footprint, left during one of his miraculous visits to Sri Lanka. Hindus, however, say that it is the footprint of the monkey god Hanuman from when he landed on the island as part of his mission to rescue Sita as recounted in the epic Ramayana. Muslim residents and later still, various Christian colonial powers restoried it as the footprint of Adam, and the site got caught up in the story of the Book of Genesis. The narrative association spread. The nearby mountain temple of Mulgirigala was identified for a time as Adam's tomb. A great statue of the Buddha reclining as he entered his final nirvana was restoried as Adam on his deathbed. As John Strong noted in a recent study of this site, it's very likely that Buddhist monks participated in this restorying as a way to protect the site from the Portuguese destruction of Buddhist iconography. Seen in this light, the restorying of John Knox as Albus Dumbledore by some enterprising Edinburgh tour guides doesn't seem quite so unusual. Rather, it is part of a long history of adapting characters and places to suit the changing needs of their audiences. Something done incredibly well through stories. We've come quite a long way from the monkey gardeners. The riches of Indian religious narrative have given us fables, karmic consequence tales, stories of great renunciation, and of miraculous and powerful encounters. We've seen how stories can help not only to communicate ideas, but also to create, explore, and challenge them. Stories are used to establish identities and boundaries between religious groups, including through establishing particular teachers as masterful storytellers. They explore different answers to overlapping questions, especially those of common interest, such as how karma operates, and whether or not one must renounce the world to achieve liberation. We have seen how stories transform audiences through offering them potent imaginative encounters with sacred places or people. Stories provoke emotional and intellectual responses, exploring complex, ethical and philosophical ideas in a form that is relatable and very often entertaining, as well as memorable. I hope you've enjoyed my selection of greatest hits of my favourite stories. No doubt, I could have offered more answers to the question, what are stories for, and indeed, I'm conscious that I've not had time to talk much about the visual and material lives of these stories, some evidence of which has been on show during this lecture. Have you been transformed simply by sitting here allowing the stories to play through your mind. Perhaps one lecture is insufficient for this, but I've certainly been transformed by them over the years. Inside my head, in the stories that I sit with in my research, I've revelled in the beauty of poetry, been swept up by the emotions of characters, puzzled over the moral choices of protagonists, seen the unfolding of complex doctrine in narrative form, and been imaginatively transported to worlds that are at once very different to my own, and yet also strangely the same. I don't imagine that I will run out of questions to ponder as I seek to understand the riches of Indian religious narrative. And while a big part of my love of these stories is the way they reveal and explore their specific context, part of my appreciation is also just a basic human love of stories. Stories, after all, are widely recognised as fundamental to who we are as human beings. If I may be permitted to close my lecture by updating a short parable from the great narratologist A. K. Ramanujan, just imagine typing into a chat bot: Will AI ever think like a human being? And receiving the answer, that reminds me of a story. Thank you very much. Oct 24 2024 17.15 - 19.15 Professor Naomi Appleton's Inaugural Lecture Professor Naomi Appleton (Professor of Buddhist Studies and Indian Religions) delivers her Inaugural Lecture 'What are Stories For? Answers from the Buddha and Beyond'.
Oct 24 2024 17.15 - 19.15 Professor Naomi Appleton's Inaugural Lecture Professor Naomi Appleton (Professor of Buddhist Studies and Indian Religions) delivers her Inaugural Lecture 'What are Stories For? Answers from the Buddha and Beyond'.
