"Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood" is the first comprehensive study
of a central narrative theme in premodern South Asian Buddhist
literature: the Buddha's bodily self-sacrifice during his previous
lives as a bodhisattva. Conducting close readings of stories from
Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, and Tibetan literature written between the
third century B.C.E. and the late medieval period, Reiko Ohnuma
argues that this theme has had a major impact on the development of
Buddhist philosophy and culture.
Whether he takes the form of king, prince, ascetic, elephant,
hare, serpent, or god, the bodhisattva repeatedly gives his body or
parts of his flesh to others. He leaps into fires, drowns himself
in the ocean, rips out his tusks, gouges out his eyes, and lets
mosquitoes drink from his blood, always out of selflessness and
compassion and to achieve the highest state of Buddhahood.
Ohnuma places these stories into a discrete subgenre of South
Asian Buddhist literature and approaches them like case studies,
analyzing their plots, characterizations, and rhetoric. She then
relates the theme of the Buddha's bodily self-sacrifice to major
conceptual discourses in the history of Buddhism and South Asian
religions, such as the categories of the gift, the body (both
ordinary and extraordinary), kingship, sacrifice, ritual offering,
and death.
"Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood" reveals a very sophisticated and
influential perception of the body in South Asian Buddhist
literature and highlights the way in which these stories have
provided an important cultural resource for Buddhists. Combined
with her rich and careful translations of classic texts, Ohnuma
introduces a whole new understanding of a vital concept in
Buddhists studies.
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