Literatini

I’ve been working on the anthropology of literacy, especially in Himalayan Buddhism, since 1989 – my first significant paper at Chicago was on the relationship between manuscript rituals and scholastic practice in classical Indian Madhyamika. It’s not an easy subject to locate; I’ve offered papers in a wide range of contexts – the Western AAR in 1991, the 2001 Rema(r)king the Text conference at St. Andrews, the 2004 conference in honour of Richard Gombrich – but I was only able to publish this material this year, as a chapter in Die Textualisierung de Religionen ed. J Schaper. At the CRASSH conference it turns out that Hildegard Diemberger and Steve Hugh-Jones were giving a paper on the anthropology of digitizing Tibetan manuscripts. Our two papers segued nicely; I gave a brief account of the argument from ritual origins for the nature of Mahāyāna literacy, then looked at the Hyakumanto Dharani and Thunder Peak Pagoda, then went on to look at digital prayer wheels and hacking code for VR constructs to include mantras.

There are other people working on this problem. Kristina Myrvold at Lund works on the Ādi Guru Granth Sahīb among Sikhs, and organized a conference on manuscript rituals that I had to drop out of. That will, I hope, become a book. The Schaper volume includes comparable studies on Judeo-Christian textual practices, and I certainly remember Mary Douglas’ visit to Aberdeen in which she talked about an intricate pattern in the Old Testament.

Actually, it’s at least four problems just within Mahāyāna Buddhism. There’s the early material; there’s the Newar material; the Tibetan material; and the East Asian material. All the practices are related and distinct. Gregory Schopen and Paul Harrison have both written about the links between Mahāyāna and literacy, and I refer to their work in my piece. David Gellner published a careful study of the recitation practices at Kvaḥ Bāhal in the 90’s at the same time I was surveying all the different recitation cults around Nepāl Maṇḍala. Tibetan practices are fundamentally different to Newar or Indian, and alongside Diemberger and Hugh-Jones, one should probably look at Yael Bentor’s articles on consecration. Apparently T Barrett has been writing on the Chinese materials, which then should be put alongside Glenn Dudbridge’s articles as well as L. Carrington Goodrich in the 40s and the useful piece in Architectural History by Guo (1999) on the construction of rotating libraries.

I really should put a bibliography up somewhere.