Guide for Readers

How the Sanghata Affects its Readers (continued)
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We come now to our second question, what does this text do? We have seen that the Sanghata continually frustrates our attempts to find any ground from which to exclude it, preventing us from refuting the claims it makes about the tremendous power it has over those who encounter it. In the process, the Sanghata is forcing us to try to come to terms with what it is doing to its readers. The Sanghata does this by pushing us as its readers to become what Umberto Eco calls ‘model readers of the second-level,’ that is, readers interested in watching how the text does what it does, as opposed to first-level readers enjoying it as it flows by. Indeed, the Sanghata’s first-level reading seems precisely aimed at turning us into second-level readers. The Sanghata seems to be training its readers to examine their own experiences.

We can watch this training happening in the way that the Buddha and Sarvashura appear to point out from within the Sanghata to us readers in the world in front of the text by discussing, again and again, what it does to the people hearing, or reading, it—that is, to us. Its impact on its audience is in fact a dominant and recurring theme within the Sanghata. This thematization of the condition of the reader situates us readers both in the world in front of the text as witnesses, and in the world inside the text where we appear as objects of discussion and concern, and there seems no way to keep these two worlds apart. This is another instance in which the text seems to be blurring its own boundaries, but here the effect of that blurring is to problematize the location of us readers in relation to the text.

To put this slightly differently, the world that the Sanghata Sutra is perhaps most interested in describing is the world receiving the text—copying it, reciting it or even hearing its name mentioned. Since we as readers occupy that very world—at the very least because we are encountering the name Sanghata right here—we are encouraged to wonder how to situate ourselves in relation to the world that the text describes around itself. That is, the Sanghata Sutra is openly inviting us to think about what it does to its readers.

Within the text, most of the impact that the Sanghata presents itself as having on living beings is invisible and latent, coming in the form of positive merit that will ripen in future lives or as the elimination of negative karma from past actions. Obviously, this makes it hard for us to perceive the way the text is acting on us. However, we do have a number of episodes within the Sanghata depicting how it effects those who come before it. And here, one advantage of having a text as its own main character is that the interactions between the readers within the text and the text can serve as a sort of model for how the text imagines itself as interacting with its readers outside the text, that is with us.

In one such sub-story, a group of non-believers pays a visit to the Buddha. They show him all the common signs of courtesy, much as we ourselves might. But in response, the Buddha tells them they are foolish and should not expect happiness—messages that the text is sending us as well, as we’ll see in a moment. After dazzling them with displays of his powers, the Buddha gives a brief teaching on suffering in which suffering is presented as fear about the future:

By listing the potential harms that threaten all those who are born, this teaching seems designed to generate the experience of fear that it describes. Indeed, we are told that those who heard these words of the Buddha became ‘utterly terrified.’ That is, the Buddha points out all there is to fear and thinking of this brings on fear.

The Sanghata in this section works to transform its listeners into people looking ahead with concern to their own futures, even as they recognize that the immediate cause of that fear lies in birth, that is, in something that has already happened. The last fear, the fear of the actions one has done, links directly to the teachings of karma that state that one’s own actions are the cause of the experiences one will have. This teaching on karma takes fear, ordinarily a forward-looking emotion, and inverts its temporal dimension, making of it a fear of what is already done but still lingering on in latent form, as uncompleted karma. Fear understood as an orientation towards the future may lead to action to transform that pending future. But fear understood as an orientation towards the past leads nowhere but self-recrimination and guilt, and so can be disabling, as we see in the examples of the king and the man taught by the sage, both of whom are debilitated by anxiety and remorse over actions they have done in the past. In short, knowledge of the theory of karma itself seems to be causing suffering, and so appears to be a problem and not merely a solution.

If we grant that the text is creating for itself a community of readers who have been made painfully aware of the potential that they have stores of negative karma waiting to explode into experience, then those readers effectively are placed in the position occupied by the man who had come before the sage full of anxiety over that pending explosion.

The sage’s treatment of the man then demonstrates the form of relief that the Sanghata offers. And this brings us to our third and final question, that of the sort of power that the text posits for itself.

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