Unfortunate Destiny focuses on the roles played by nonhuman animals
within the imaginative thought-world of Indian Buddhism, as
reflected in pre-modern South Asian Buddhist literature. These
roles are multifaceted, diverse, and often contradictory: In
Buddhist doctrine and cosmology, the animal rebirth is a most
"unfortunate destiny" (durgati), won through negative karma and
characterized by a lack of intelligence, moral agency, and
spiritual potential. In stories about the Buddha's previous lives,
on the other hand, we find highly anthropomorphized animals who are
wise, virtuous, endowed with human speech, and often critical of
the moral shortcomings of humankind. In the life-story of the
Buddha, certain animal characters serve as "doubles" of the Buddha,
illuminating his nature through identification, contrast or
parallelism with an animal "other." Relations between human beings
and animals likewise range all the way from support, friendship,
and near-equality to rampant exploitation, cruelty, and abuse.
Perhaps the only commonality among these various strands of thought
is a persistent impulse to use animals to clarify the nature of
humanity itself-whether through similarity, contrast, or
counterpoint. Buddhism is a profoundly human-centered religious
tradition, yet it relies upon a dexterous use of the animal other
to help clarify the human self. This book seeks to make sense of
this process through a wide-ranging-exploration of animal imagery,
animal discourse, and specific animal characters in South Asian
Buddhist texts.
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