ABSTRACT
The death of the founder presents a crisis of authority for all religious traditions. When the Buddha was asked who should succeed him after his passing, he is said to have responded that his teachings, the Dharma, would serve as the source of authority in his absence. The sutra is the literary form of such teachings: sacred texts containing discourses attributed to or inspired by the Buddha. The early sutra literature was first preserved orally and was only committed to writing around the turn of the millennium. Mahayana Buddhist traditions, movements that developed in India during the first centuries of the Common Era, place an increased emphasis on the materiality of such sacred texts. Mahayana sutras enjoin and celebrate their own veneration and reserve the highest praise for those who hear, recite, copy, and preserve them. Indeed, many Mahayana sutras claim an equivalency between the sacred text and the Buddha himself. In asserting that a sacred text is equal to or greater than a relic of the Buddha, Mahayana Buddhist traditions, employing a new theory of embodiment, equate or replace the Buddha’s corporal relic with his textual corpus. The Buddha’s word, rather than the Buddha’s relic, is recognized as the central object of veneration and, as such, is to be enshrined in a stupa, a reliquary previously reserved for the remains of a Buddha. 1
