Narrating Buddha’s life

Gamini Sumanasekera is justly regarded as one of the most important and consequential Sinhala journalists who specialises in matters pertaining to arts and letters. His latest book, Vandim Siduhath, is a re-telling of the life of the Buddha; this story has been told before, and I dare say, will continue to be told in years to come.

However what is interesting about these diverse narratives is that if the authors are gifted, the narratives invariably will reflect the individual genius of the respective authors. In the case of Gamini Sumanasekera this is clearly in evidence. This narrative bears the imprint of his distinctive sensibility and imagination. The selection of incidents to be reconfigured, the structure of the narration, the tropes deployed, the humanistic vision that is underlined, point to his distinctive virtues as a writer.

There are a number of dominant features that mark Sumanasekera’s effort. First, his language medium which is poetic, precise, full of energy, weighty and reflective is in perfect consonance with the theme that he wishes to expound. Second, the narrative is organised in such a way that it flows with effortless ease and beguiling smoothness.

Episodes

It is only a writer of indubitable talent who will be able to accomplish this. Third, and this relates closely to the earlier point, the author has succeeded in selecting incidents and episodes from the life of the Buddha in a way that allows for unperturbed unfolding as well as achieved coherence. Fourth, Sumanasera has structured his story around a number of dominant and radiant tropes that lend cohesion to the narrative and serve to introduce to us another layer of meaning.

Fifth, his ability to capture the emotional density of a given situation adds immensely to the power of the narrative discourse. This is an area in which Sumanasekera displays a great deal of talent.

Like a skilled film director who uses a mix of close-ups, medium shots and long shots to re-create vividly a situation of his or her choice, Sumanasekera captures for us dramatically incidents, episodes from the biography of the Buddha with remarkable sensitivity. For example, in the opening sequence of the book, the author depicts contrapuntally the calmness, the tranquillity, the natural beauty of the Buddha’s newly found sylvan surroundings and contrasts that with the extravagant courtly life style, the sheer hedonism that he left.

Enlightenment

Similarly, the second chapter captures the joy of enlightenment, the vanquishing of the forces of the Mara, in a metaphorical rich poetic style. Again the tranquillity and the spiritual contentment that marks the occasion is contrasted with the struggle the Buddha had to launch in order to vanquish the adversarial forces.

The author’s ability to enter into these diverse situations and imaginatively and verbally represent them to us is an important facet of his narrative gift.

Indeed, this is not the first time that Sumanasekera has displayed this ability of his to good effect. For example, in his earlier work, the Therini Katha, we observe how this skill has served to energize the stories he has selected for presentation.

The Therini Katha constitutes a re-telling of the life-stories that lie behind the Pali Buddhist confessional poems gathered in the Therigatha. This book contains eighteen of these life-stories of Buddhist nuns from diverse social origins who opted to give up worldly life and attain the spiritual enlightenment.

The author re-tells the life histories of such well known Buddhist nuns as Ambapali, Kisagothami, Bhadra Kunadalakeshi, Vimala and Sumedha in a way increasingly deepens the involvement of his readers. Again, the success of the life-stories of the Buddhist nuns recounted in this book is attributable in large measure to Gamini Sumanasekera’s ability to enter into the crucial episodes of their life with great empathy and present them a rich and vibrant descriptive language.

Reading Vandim Siduhath, and the earlier work Therani Katha, one is left with the impression that one of Sumanasekera’s intention is to re-ignite an interest in classical works. He views with alarm the growing neglect, and at times ill tempered and ill-informed hostility to them.

Heritage

They are a vital part of our cultural heritage that have a contemporary relevance. It is my understanding that Gamini Sumanasekera has laboured to establish this fact directly and obliquely in his writings. The content of these books are based on Pali and Sinhala classics; at the same time, the language medium he has fashioned for his narrations is clearly reminiscent of the Sinhala classics.

This is indeed an important desideratum. When we examine the writings of some of our most illustrious stylists like Martin Wickremasinghe, Ediriweera Sarachchandra and Gunadasa Amarasekera, we begin to see how significantly their styles were shaped by the seductive voices of classical texts such as the Buthsarana, Guttilya Kavya and Selalihini Sandeshaya.

The question of human values is another area that has engaged the deepest interests of Sumanasekera. We are living through a period in which there is a marked confusion about values and humanism is being increasingly degraded. Indeed, humanism has been distorted and reduced (even caricatured) into a term of utter disparagement.

Consequently, there is a clear need to examine the relevance and resilience of humanism and to foreground the importance of human values to contemporary society. It seems to me that one of the aims of the author in writing Vandim Siduhath and Therani Katha is to focus on the idea of Buddhist humanism.

Gamini Sumanasekera, I am persuaded, is seeking to demonstrate the relevance and vibrancy of Buddhist humanism and the constellations of values that flow from it into modern society. His argument seems to be that there is not one humanism, but many and that we need to understand the nature of Buddhist humanism on its own terms, rather than forcing it into the straitjacket of European humanism.

Both Vandim Siduhath and Therani Katha are exercises in re-narration. Hence the idea of narration is central to Sumanaselera’s project. This idea, therefore, needs to be examined more fully as a way of comprehending the ambitions and interests of the author. The concept of narration, which is a very capacious one, figures very prominently in modern literary studies, history, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, even in legal studies.

This is hardly surprising in view of the fact that the idea of narrative is central to the way we make sense of the world and impose a sense of order and cohesion on the flow of events connected to everyday life. What we consider to be real is shaped by the narrative frames that we bring to bear on the understanding of life.

Modern anthropologists have demonstrated that cultures have a way of relying on codes and conventions associated with narratives to maintain a sense of coherence and guide the men and women who inhabit them. Narratives function as important instruments through which values, beliefs, norms of the past are handed down by cultures to later generations.

It is fair to assume that narratives and the ability of people to construct them and respond to them becomes a vital condition for living productively in a given culture. Consequently, it is important that we explore such questions as what is meant by a narrative? What functions does it perform in human communities? What role does it play in our day to day life? These and related questions begin to assume a compelling presence as one reads Sumanasekera’s re-narrations.

Scholars

Psychologically-oriented scholars such as Jerome Bruner have wondered, quite rightly in my view, whether our narrative capacity provides us with a necessary condition for living and functioning effectively in the cultures that we inhabit. And they have come to the conclusion that narratives indeed perform that function. It is their considered judgment that it is not only the gift of language that makes culturally-mediated life a possibility, but also the forms of narrative in which we display our linguistic inheritance and endowment. Moreover, it has also being argued that narrative capacity, like language itself, grows out of a profoundly innate base. This makes the focus on narrative that much more important and compelling.

In this regard, the following remark by Jerome Bruner, who has devoted much time and energy to this topic, merits serious consideration. ‘It is not simply that all of us, as it were, live in a culture and live mostly within its limits. There is another crucial matter that needs underlining. All cultures, however, presumably well-structures, are fraught with ambiguities and virtually irresoluble possibilities, notably so in the particulars of daily life. Life in culture is perpetually open to improvisation. And story making, I shall try to demonstrate, provides us with an exquisite instrument for taking into account "even justifying" real life ambiguities and multiple demands. for narrative also provides us with the means of going beyond the culturally ordinary – even in the law, where we involve the off beat by pleading mitigating circumstances.’ This comment underlines the vital relationship that exists between narrative and culture, and as we read Sumanasekera’s re-telling of the life of the Buddha and Buddhist nuns, we are reminded of this fact.

Narrative

One of the most stimulating and thought-provoking books on the subject of narrative is Time and Narrative by the famous French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. In it he argues persuasively that narrative should not be understood only as a way of creating life like structures but also as a way of understanding the world, by deploying the challenging question how we know time as his point of departure, Ricoeur says that, ‘I see in the plots we invent the privileged means by which we re-configure our confused, unformed ,and at the limit of mute temporal experience.

What then is time asks Augustine. I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.’ What this comment underscores is the fact that it is narrative that possesses the power to produce even duration. Narration, for Paul Ricoeur, is an informed re-description of the world.

To be sure, Paul Ricoeur is the most useful guide to our understanding of the nature of narrative. He has underlined the significance of understanding life as a way of tracing its forward trajectory upon a narrative thread; it is indeed this thread that serves to combine diverse events and occurrences into a perceived unity and give them a sense of address, direction and destiny. Hence the idea of narration is central to Ricoeur’s understanding of the world and the place of human beings in it.

The narrative impulse is a vital component of the human experience. As he observed, ‘the ability to follow a story constitutes a very sophisticated form of understanding. The question of human identity is indissolubly linked to narrative. As Ricoeur astutely pointed out, ‘our own existence cannot be separated from the account we can give of ourselves. It is in telling our own stories that we give ourselves an identity. We recognise ourselves in the stories that we tell about ourselves. It makes very little difference whether these stories are true or false, fiction as well as verifiable history provides us with an identity.’

The relationship between narrative and knowledge is close and it is one that invites close study. One of the objectives of narrative, whatever form it assumes, it seems to me, is to produce knowledge. In other words the art of narration is inseparably linked to the production of knowledge. That is why narrative has performed an important role in human society from its very beginning.

Interestingly, the word narrative cones from the Latin ‘narrare’, meaning to tell, and has a close connection with the Latin word gnanus, meaning knowing; both words are derived from the Indo-European root gna to know. (The Sanskrit/Sinhala word ‘gnana’ is derived from this root). It is important to bear in mind the fact that as with most words, the etymology of ‘narrative; too suggests to us an important facts about the growth of this word and its dual focus on story-telling and knowledge production.

To be sure, questions of narration and knowing are at the center of many theoretical discussions on the art of narrative. This story-telling aspect and knowledge-producing aspect are extremely important in the project that Gamini Sumanasekera has undertaken.

What is interesting about Gamini Sumanaselera;s project in Vandim Siduhath is that he is re-telling a story that is reasonably well-known to his potential readers. Therefore, the interest of the narrative lies for them in what he has selected for representation and emphasis. This relationship between the writer, text and audience is extremely important for the science of narrative – narratology. The expectations aroused by the text, the common codes, schemes, conventions and frames adopted by the writer so as to elicit ready responses from the audience become subjects of intense scrutiny. Hence the way narratologists study this issue deserves careful consideration.

Orientation

Narratology, as it has developed during the last three decades or so, is largely text-centered, with the focus of attention being on the elements of the text and how they have been out together. In other words, the dominant orientation has been one that favored structuralism. The writings of such pioneers in this field as Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes, Gerard Genette, Seymour Chatman, for example, foreground this approach from their diverse vantage points. While recognising the importance of their work, it has also to be conceded that this approach shortchanges the importance and validity of the audiences and the contexts of reception. It is here that the work of narratologists who broadly adopt a contextualist approach becomes important. Many of them, though by no means all, are drawn towards some form of speech act theory that was popularized by philosophers such as J.L. Austin and John Searle.

Those who favour this broad contextualist approach raise such important questions as the following. What are the fundamental ingredients that go to form the narrative act? In what way does the realisation that a text is a narrative determine the response of the audience? What is the nature of the interaction between text and reader? These questions, to be sure, raise productive lines of inquiry. They underscore the importance of the context in verbal interaction and serve to focus on what scholars refer to as the situational context.

In other words, those theorists of narrative who are inclined to adopt a broad contextualist approach seek to examine narrative from the vantage point of the socially constituted actions that are performed. Hence, narrative is both saying and doing; that is why speech act theory, which also emphasizes telling and doing, becomes a useful analytical tool for understanding the phenomenon of narrative.

Strategy

What speech-act theory does is to furnish us with the strategy for describing and explaining the nature if the interaction between text and reader. This approach, while not ignoring the story elements, has a way of granting more prominence to the discourse elements in a narrative. About thirty years ago, the eminent American literary scholar Jonathan Culler wrote that any approach to narrative ‘must take account of the process of reading so that….it provides some explanation of the way in which the plots are built up from the actions and incidents that the reader encounters.’

This contextual approach has given rise to what some literary scholars refer to as rhetorical narratology. The relationship that a writer establishes with his audience can be usefully examined through some form of rhetorical narratology; some have called this contextualist narratology.

One of the most insightful studies on the relationship between literature and speech-act theory is by Mary Louise Pratt’s Towards a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse. In it she argues that literature is a context in which rules and conventions that both writers and readers are aware of and value highly are operative. As she observes, ‘Speech act theory provides a way of talking about utterances not only in terms of their surface grammatical properties but also in terms of the context in which they are made, the intentions, attitudes, and expectations of the participants, the relationship existing between participants, and generally, the unspoken rules and conventions that are understood to be in play when an utterance is made and received.’

Here Pratt provides us with a useful frame through which we could purposefully examine the functional relationship between Sumanasekera and his readers as he re-tells a story that is broadly known to most of his audience in one form or another.

Mary Louise Pratt goes on to underline the importance of the dynamic context that is created through the interaction of writer, text and reader. ’In making an assertion whose relevance is tellability, a speaker is not only reporting but also verbally displaying a state of affairs, inviting his addresses to join him in contemplating it, evaluating it, and responding to it.

His point is to produce in his hearers not only belief but also an imaginative and affective involvement in the state of affairs he is representing and an evaluative stance towards it. He intends them to share his wonder, amusement, terror or admiration of the event. Ultimately, it would seem, what he is after is an interpretation of the problematic event, an assignment of meaning and value supported by the consensus of himself and his hearers.’

Buddha

These comments of Pratt are extremely relevant to a proper understanding of the project of re-narrating the life of the Buddha undertaken by Gamini Sumanasekera in Vandim Siduhath. The way he generates an interest in the readers in telling a story that they partially know to them is through the careful selection of events, points of emphases, the distinctiveness of the verbal fabric of the narrative, how he works with and through accepted codes and conventions.

His task has been to produce in his readers the imaginative and affective involvement that Mary Louise Pratt referred to as well inviting them to contemplate, reflect on and evaluate the narrative he is presenting to them. Let us consider a representative episode from Vandim Siduhath.

The episode dealing with the meeting of the Buddha with his son Rahula is a case in point. The characters of the Buddha, Yasodhara, Rahula and King Suddhodana are well known to the Sinhala readers. They can identify readily and imaginatively with these exemplary characters. What the reader is looking for is the distinctive way in which the author has chosen to depict the interaction among these four characters. What aspects does he emphasise? Is he able to enter into their inner words with conviction? Is he offering the reader a newer interpretation of the events? The most complex character in this episode as reconfigured by Sumanasekera is Yasodhara.

Intimacy

She is touched by the easy familiarity and ready intimacy displayed by son Rahula; she is fully aware of the dedication and the significance of the path chosen by the Buddha; she understands the worries of King Suddhodana; she is torn between conflicting emotions. Sumanasekera captures this situation well, and the readers familiar with this episode would give high marks to him for the way he has handled the interaction. As he narrates this episode dealing with conflicting emotions, the author has been able to introduce the elements of reflection and evaluation that Mary Louise Pratt prized so highly.

I have chosen to examine various aspects of contemporary narrative theory because Gamini Sumanasekera’s work inclines to focus on them suggestively. The interplay between writer and audience is central to the art of narrative. Ross Chambers is surely right when he remarks that, ‘the relevance we perceive in a story such as story teller and hearer are slots without which a story cannot exist (it would literally be pointless) but which equally the story gives substance to by coming into existence as an event.’

However, there is a tendency in his writings to regard texts as self-contained sign systems, which clearly needs modification. One of the positive outcomes of Sumanasekera’s re-narration of the life of the Buddha is that it has succeeded in provoking us to grapple with some significant theoretical issues related to the art of narrative like the ones discussed above.