Rafal Felbur: "In the Great Vehicle Down Roads Less Traveled: Reflections on the Study of Marginal Mahāyāna Texts Based on the *Sūrata-sūtra"

Abstract:

From around the beginning of the Common Era up to roughly 600 CE, the fertile ground of Indian Buddhism gave rise to several hundreds of Mahāyāna sūtras. Given the sheer scale of this body of literature, it is hardly surprising that still only a fraction of it has undergone careful examination. The texts that have garnered attention so far have been mainly those felt to resonate with Western philosophical sensibilities; those especially salient in living Buddhist traditions; and those for which there happens to be surviving Sanskrit evidence. Most of the others still await their turn. What, if anything, can we learn from such marginal Mahāyāna sūtras?

In this talk, I highlight one such work, a mid-length text titled *Sūrata-sūtra, surviving in Chinese (Xulai jing 須賴經 [T. 329]) and Tibetan (Des pas zhus pa [D71]) translations. By exploring several of its distinctive doctrinal positions, I consider the potential of such marginal texts to illuminate central themes in Mahāyāna studies.

Bio:

Rafal Felbur, PhD (Stanford University, 2018), is Akademischer Assistent to the Chair of Buddhist Studies at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He works on the intellectual, cultural, and social dynamics of the encounter between India and China in the first millennium CE. Trained as a philologist and historian, he specializes in the textual evidence for these processes: translations of Indic Buddhist scriptures into Chinese, commentaries, bibliographic works, polemical and exegetical tracts, and official documents. Long interested in the Chinese reception of Indian Madhyamaka ideas, he has published an English translation of Sengzhao’s Zhao lun within the Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai’s English Tripiṭaka Series. Before joining Heidelberg, as a post-doctoral researcher in the Open Philology project at Leiden University, Netherlands, he prepared a monograph on the Sūrata-paripṛcchā, a Mahāyāna sūtra hitherto neglected in modern scholarship, from Tibetan and Chinese sources.