| Focusing on the Buddhist Sanskrit text the Lalitavistara, a biography of the Buddha dated by scholars after the second and before the seventh century, this dissertation explores the literary aesthetics and religious emotions in the text. While existing scholarship on the Lalitavistara studied closely its textual history, its doctrinal relevance to Buddhism, and its importance to the biographical process, little attention has been paid to how the religious values and emotions are textualized and articulated in the narrative. By analyzing the aesthetic components and specific emotions that these components constitute, this dissertation argues that the Lalitavistara contributes to the Sanskrit literary tradition while also elucidating the intimate relationship between form and religious emotion.;Chapter 1 examines the title lalita-vistara, its genre, and other general topics in relation to this text in order to provide the broad context in which the aesthetic and religious peculiarities of the text can be understood. Chapter 2 concentrates on how the Lalitavistara transforms familiar Buddha biographical materials into a well-organized structure, which consistently thematizes and accentuates tensions or paradoxes in the Buddha's life stories in such a way that they endow the narrative with unity, coherence, and significant meaning. Chapter 3 shows how the Lalitavistara deploys the syntactic, figurative, and repetitive devices in descriptions to portray the characters, objects, and surroundings. In the last chapter, I take the literary and narrative devices in the Lalitavistara as a whole and reexamine several examples from chapters two and three. I pay close attention to how the main emotions, namely, delight, joy, and gratitude, are articulated, highlighted, and evoked in the text. I argue that the literary forms not only constitute the aesthetic and religious emotions, but also very often are in and of themselves part of these emotions that encourage and delight the audience. |
