[Buddha-l] To whom should teachings be given

[Stephen Hodge]

Jon Weaver wroet:

> Why  would monastics undermine their own authority by advocating the 
> superior wisdom of
> lay people like Vimalakirti? {snip} It seems  that tensions about the 
> position of lay people
> and women contributed to  the Mahayana
Joseph Walser in his recent "Nagarjuna in Context" suggests a plausible 
hypothesis.  Basically it goes like this:  in the early days of Mahayana, 
there was a struggle to keep Mahayana texts in circulation -- book needed to 
be re-copied regularly because of their fragility in the Indian environment. 
In a vihara where Mahayana followers were in a minority, they would probably 
have encountered various obstructions in gaining access to writing 
materials, the time and man-power etc to copy their texts.  One way around 
this was to have lay-people commission and donate manuscripts copies to the 
vihara.  It then became incumbent up the vihara to take care of the book and 
to copy it, so as not to deprive the donor of his or her due merit -- this 
was taken very seriously.  Given this scenario, one would imagine that lay 
donors would offer to the vihara texts that appealed to them -- such as 
texts like the Vimalakirti-nirdesa.

Best wishes,
Stephen Hodge