Suchergebnisse

The starting point of this article is the observation that three Jataka narratives, the Visvantara-jataka, the Syama-jataka and the Ekasrnga-/Rsyasrnga-jataka, localized in the ancient northwest Indian region of Gandhara by the Chinese Buddhist travellers Faxian, Song Yun and Xuanzang, have parallels in the epic Ramayana (and the latter two in the Mahabharata). The article analyses the different version of these narratives in the Buddhist and Hindu sources and their possible relation, and reaches the cautious conclusion that the localization of the Buddhist Jatakas in the northwest may have been a reaction to the popularization of the Ramayana in a full and mature form which included the narratives corresponding to the Buddhist Syama-jataka and Rsyasrnga-jataka in the more central parts of India in the Gupta period.

Although the Buddhists, according to the logic of the life-story of the Buddha, could not claim a direct lineage of descent from the Exalted One himself—his only direct offspring, Rahula, having become a celibate monk—the family background of the Buddha could not escape the general temptation to create a family connection, as in the case of other important religious or cultural founding figures. This paper traces and discusses these attempts, expressed in and transformed into narratives, which are spread across a broad variety of Buddhist sources. It argues that the urge to create such (mostly incomplete) lineages resulted from another necessity: that of political and religious legitimation.

This article first traces the reception history of Xuanzang's 'Record of the Western Regions' (Xiyu ji). It shows how the text was translated and used by Western scholars in the nineteenth century and used as a source for the positivist discovery of India's Buddhist past, how it became romanticised and 'spiritualised', as it were, through popularisation. This seems to have parallels in East Asian history and in the modern reception in Asia. The problem with all these attempts of interpretation lies in a decontextualisation of the text, and the last part of the article attempts to show on the basis of three case studies how the Xiyu ji should be read in a broader and—I would claim—deeper contextualising way.