Richard Gombrich: “Who was Aṅgulimāla?”

As is widely known among Buddhologists, and by now probably itself notorious, the interpreta-tion of the ‘notorious robber’ Aṅgulimāla was presented by Richard Gombrich in an essay with

567 Cp. n. 542 above.

568 MN II 104,19: Atha kho āyasmā Aṅgulimālo rahogato patisallīno⁵⁶⁸ vimuttisukhaṃ paṭisaṃvedī tāyaṃ velāyaṃ imaṃ udānaṃ udānesi. Cp. CPD, s.v. udāna: “a solemn utterance, mostly, but not necessarily, in met-rical form, inspired by intense emotion and made without regard to any listeners.”

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the title “Who was Aṅgulimāla?”, first published in 1996.⁵⁶⁹ In this essay Gombrich treats only part I) of the Aṅgulimāla Sutta, which narrates his conversion. He compares the commentaries on the Theragāthā, the Paramattha-dīpanī, with the MN-commentary, the Papañcasūdanī, and con-cludes that both are incoherent and useless for answering the question of the identity of Aṅgu-limāla, which is his objective. He then systematically examines the canonical text itself and espe-cially the verses ascribed to Aṅgulimāla from the Theragāthā, and formulates the hypothesis that Aṅgulimāla must have been an early prototype, as it were, of a Śaiva-vratin. Gombrich accom-plishes this by a simple but momentous conjecture, by which he changes a ‘seer’ (mahesi) into Śiva (maheso), which – almost literally with one stroke of the pen – turns Aṅgulimāla into a proto-Śaiva/Śākta.⁵⁷⁰ His conjecture, and his restoring metrically what he deems a corrupt verse (= Th 868), solves a problem posed by the first pāda of Th 868 (MN II 100,1) with regard to the plot of the story in connection with the intertwined verses. (A closer look at the linguistic aspect will be inspected again later on.)

His thesis has met with severe criticism by Alexis Sanderson and others, who mainly find fault with the lack of evidence for related cults at such an early date.⁵⁷¹ However, Gombrich, not deviating from his view in the face of this criticism, bases his argument on an interesting obser-vation regarding the representation of persons in the Sutta Piṭaka. Gombrich writes:

“[...] For the most part he [the Buddha] interacts with, and in particular preaches to, human beings, and they seem to be realistically portrayed by our modern criteria of realism [...] none of the Buddha’s interlocutors seem to do anything which, to our way of thinking, they could not possibly have

done.”⁵⁷²

Moreover (ibid. p. 143):

569 Henceforth = Gombrich 2006a.

570 See Gombrich 2006a: 151.

571 Cp. Gombrich 2006: 152, especially n. 7 in which Gombrich cites parts of a private correspondence between him and Sanderson, in which Sanderson severely criticises Gombrich’s ideas as wrong and unverifiable; there had been no sanguinary vows or rites in connection with Śiva at any time, and the vows in connection with the Goddess (Kālī) or Bhairava would rather be classed as mortuary rites, and there was no evidence whatsoever of the adherents being enjoined to wear the severed body parts of their victims; cp. also Zin 2006: 111, where she cites the criticism on this view by Maithrimurthi and von Rospatt, who basically seem to find fault with the fact that certain sanguinary vows in connection with the goddess (Kālī) appear much later (ca. 1000 years later).

572 Gombrich 2006a: 142.

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“One can go further, once one has defined what would have struck the Buddha's followers as a realis-tic account. They accepted that by ascerealis-tic or meditative pracrealis-tices people could attain certain super-normal powers called iddhi or iddhi-pāṭihāriya.”

In these quotes, Gombrich makes two most interesting statements in connection with our study of the presentation of characters in Buddhist narrative texts. One might even go so far to call his remark narratological: He offers a description or analysis of some of the rules of the nar-rated world (the story-world) and thereby “defines” the role or the necessary abilities of a real historical reader/recipient. This approach, however, is at the same time highly problematic from a narratological perspective because it confounds two instances on the recipient’s side of the nar-rative communication, namely the addressee and the actual recipient.⁵⁷³ This is simply because of the fact that we have no data that would enable one to know what part of the story in particular, and how exactly, a historical listener/reader might have received the narrative when hear-ing/reading a sutta. What one can deduct strictly on the basis of the words of a given text is the intended real addressee of the respective text. Although this distinction may seem insignificant at first, it is absolutely necessary. The problem basically boils down to this: While one probably can, as Gombrich does, deduce Cultural Codes prevalent during Buddha’s time from the Pāli texts, one cannot tell whether these facts of the story-world were also accepted as facts in the real world as experienced in the mind of a recipient at Buddha’s times. In other words, Gombrich does not distinguish ontologically between the story-world and the world of history of ancient India at the time of the Buddha – for him as for many other scholars of early Buddhism – they are just the same. This is, of course, not a criticism in and by itself. It simply identifies the view of the suttas lying at the basis of his method to be what Jonathan Walters has called the ‘histori-cal source mode’.⁵⁷⁴

I argue that an ontological difference must be made between Cultural Codes of a given epoch and a certain place – which are reflected in literature (fictional or not) – and the lived real-ity of people. All human beings share the same physical universe – except maybe for a few more

573 See Schmid 2008: 43: “Der Empfänger zerfällt nämlich in zwei Instanzen, die funktional oder intensional zu scheiden sind, auch wenn sie material oder extensional zusammenfallen: den Adressaten und den Rezipienten.

Der Adressat ist der vom Sender unterstellte oder intendierte Empfänger […], der Rezipient ist der faktische Empfänger.”

574 Cp. Walters 1999.

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technical amenities –, as much then as we do now. (How this universe is perceived and ex-plained, of course, can be very different!). That the people living in the ancient Indian civilisa-tion would have inhabited a different universe, in which it was quite common to fly up to the sky to have a chat with Sakka, king of the gods, can hardly be accepted as a physical fact. However, that a historical audience perhaps firmly believed that it was possible and that Sakka existed may be true, but still, this discussion concerns Cultural Codes as reflected in literature and not about physical facts. As Jannidis has convincingly argued by means of the example of the human dis-position to attribute intentionality to the actions of their fellow human beings and the transfer of this disposition to the human-like figures in literature⁵⁷⁵, a narrative text, fictional as well as non-fictional, reflects the human perception of the world, not the world itself (Ger. “Abbild”). Thus, there are elements in narratives that people may have believed in at a certain time and place, or explanations of phenomena, which were common currency in a certain culture, and which at a later time may not make sense or be intelligible any longer because they have been replaced by other beliefs and views on reality.

Having said that, I cannot agree with Gombrich’s assessment that, “[…] none of the Buddha’s interlocutors seem to do anything which, to our way of thinking, they could not possi-bly have done”. On the contrary, the Pāli Canon abounds in the description of things that people ordinarily cannot do, and which thus for a contemporary reader primarily count among the rules of the story-world, not the real world (though they may nevertheless reflect Cultural Codes!).

Yet, people are interestingly nevertheless ready to accept the characters in the Pāli suttas as

‘plausible persons’, despite the fact they obviously often elude the narratological criteria of, as Gombrich states, “[being] realistically portrayed by our modern criteria of realism”.

575 Cp. Part II, ch. 3.1 above; Jannidis 2004: 128: “So steht hinter der Figurenkategorie ‚Fähigkeit zum intenti-onalen Handeln‘ nicht dieselbe Kategorie auf der persintenti-onalen Ebene, sondern vielmehr – so zumindest der heu-tige Kenntnisstand der Psychologie – eine angeborene Disposition, sich und anderen intentionales Handeln zuzuschreiben. Nicht diese Disposition geht in die Regeln der fiktionalen Welten und des Basistypus ein, son-dern das vollendete Faktum. In der aktualen Welt gibt es eine vererbte Tendenz, sich und anderen Intentionen zuzuschreiben und damit die psychische Realität von Intentionen. Daraus wird in fiktionalen Welten eine ob-jektive Tatsache. In der erzählten Welt haben Figuren Intentionen, da diese Welten ja nicht analog zur aktua-len Welt gestaltet sind, sondern immer nur analog zur menschlichen Wahrnehmung der Welt.”

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In his analysis, Gombrich does not make this distinction and seems to take it for granted that all the “people” occurring in the Pali Canon must be historical and, by implication, their ac-tions historical facts.⁵⁷⁶ In contrast, the argument could possibly have been made acceptable even for a narratologist by saying that it is highly probable that there are “real-life” accounts in the suttas for the simple reason that the characters and, for example, the environment in the suttas are never, unlike in the realistic novel, described in realistic detail (the physical appearance of people is never described, as is the landscape), and that this suggests the conclusion that the au-thors of the suttas presupposed the details to be known by their audience (or that they did not re-gard them essential to their aims). However, it is surprising that the Buddha should have con-verted a dreaded notorious killer by a rather simple play on words.⁵⁷⁷ This does not strike me as a very realistic or even plausible account.

Be that as it may, his main argument against Sanderson’s critique is that also elsewhere in the Pāli Canon a series of very strange ascetic practices are described, for which also no other-wise confirmed historical records exist. As an example, he cites the samaṇa Seniya of the Kukku-ravatika Sutta (MN 57), whose ascetic practice consisted in the imitation of the behaviour of dogs. Gombrich writes, “What I’m trying to show is that, unless the AS [= Aṅgulimāla Sutta] is unique, Aṅgulimāla must have been a recognizable type of person in the environment of his day”.⁵⁷⁸

576 Cp. the discussion in Jannidis 2004: 151ff. Already the “New Critics” have argued, on the basis of their ad-vocacy for strictly text-based methods, against an interpretation of characters in texts as real people. An espe-cially interesting remark in this connection was formulated by Marvin Mudrick in 1961 (cited in Jannidis 2004: 152, n. 2): “One of the recurrent anxieties of literary critics concerns the way in which a character in drama or fiction may be said to exist. The ›purist‹ argument – in the ascendancy nowadays among critics – points out that characters do not exist at all except insofar as they are part of the images and events which bear and move them, that any effort to extract them from their context and to discuss them as if they are real human beings is a sentimental misunderstanding of the nature of literature. The ›realistic‹ argument – on the defensive nowadays – insists that characters acquire, in the course of an action, a kind of independence from the events in which they live, and that they can be usefully discussed at some distance from their context.”

577 Gombrich 2006a: 135: “The Buddha converts Aṅgulimāla by one of the commonest of his skillful means:

playing upon words.” And on p. 154 he states: “It only remains to point out that the first three verses would make sense as a summary account of Aṅgulimāla’s conversion without positing the miraculous element that he was running fast but could not catch the walking Buddha. That piece of the story could have arisen as a mere over-interpretation of the word-play [= ṭhito—aṭṭhito].”

578 Gombrich 2006a: 144.

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The conversion of criminals or bad characters, however, is a common theme in religious literature, throughout history and in many cultures.⁵⁷⁹

It is questionable whether anyone will ever be able to pinpoint Aṅgulimāla’s historical identity to any degree of satisfaction by employing a ‘historical-source mode’ reading of the sut-tas. The question that interests me altogether more, therefore, is whether a definite answer to this question is necessary for an understanding of the communicative structure of the text itself and its intended effect on the listener/reader. Furthermore, the question of Aṅgulimāla’s ‘real’ iden-tity does not seem to be so important when looking upon the suttas as (religious) narrative litera-ture. Historical questions, namely the attitude of historical as the only questions worth asking of the suttas, express the historical-critical interest of the ones who ask them, which presupposes that a layer of historical reality lies in the suttas that is possible to lay open by merely eliminating all the mythical and magical “stuff”. At least, this seems to have been the idea of great 19^th -cen-tury Buddhologists like Herman Oldenberg.⁵⁸⁰