[INDOLOGY] Lamentations

[Matthew Kapstein]

Dear all,

The thread that Charlie began is beginning to confuse me. His word choice - 'lamentations' - was
perhaps inexact, but he did state clearly that what he wanted information about concerned
the criticism of present mores as "degradations of ancient practices,"  which is not at all
the same thing as the laments of Yasodhara, etc. (Or, for that matter, lamentation as we find it in the Psalm:
"By the rivers of Babylon, where we wept when we remembered Zion....")

What is at stake seems not weeping and wailing due to personal misfortune, but rather a sense of world-weariness on observing the present bad state of things relative to past glories. I'm not sure that
we have a single term for this, and 'lamentation' seems to invite misinterpretation here.

In any case, Buddhism has had much to say about the decline in time  of life, mores, and intelligence, and,
though this is, of course, related to more general Indian theories of temporal cycles, I think sometimes
we find elements here of the kind that prompted Charlie's query. Though a neo-Confucian author like
Zhu Xi certainly had plenty of purely Chinese models to draw on, it is possible too, that
Chinese Buddhist 'decline of the doctrine' - mofa -- discourse also motivated him. In any case,
a good place to begin would be with Jan Nattier's fine book, Once Upon a Future Time, which
deals with the Indian Buddhist antecedents for all this and aspects of their legacy in China.

Certainly in Tibet, discourses of the type that Charlie mentions emerged by about the 11th or 12th c. For
example, the famous lament attributed to Rong zom Chos bzang concerning the great virtues of
past translators and the degeneration of those at present (see, e.g., Sources of Tibetan Tradition, 186-188).

The theory of the ages of the Dharma promulgated in the 14th c. by Dol po pa is also of interest here,
as it explicitly traces a degeneration of Buddhist commentarial traditions. As Dol po pa's
inspiration is derived from the KAlacakratantra and its commentaries, there may well
be Indian precedents. (I discuss this in my The Tibetan Assimilation of Buddhism, pp. 106-119; for more
on Dol po pa, see Cyrus Stearns' Buddha from Dolpo.)

In sum, though the Indian sources may have been presented in a generalized framework of kalpas and yugas,
they seem to have provoked, in China and Tibet, the kind of very specific lament Charlie sees in Zhu Xi.
Outside of Buddhism, I would imagine that later medieval and early modern material on kingship,
specifically in connection with the idealization of RAma, might have also produced critical reflections
on the degenerate present. Perhaps others will be able to fill in here.

Matthew

Matthew Kapstein
Directeur d'études,
Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes

Numata Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies,
The University of Chicago
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