Reginald Ray
Reginald "Reggie" Ray is a leading
Buddhist academic. Since 1974 he has been chair of the Religious Studies Department at the Naropa Institute. Ray is a disciple of
Chögyam Trungpa.
His scholarly work includes:
- Buddhist Saints in India.
- Indestructible Truth describes the exoteric traditions of Tibetan Buddhism.
- Secret of the Vajra World explores the esoteric and tantric aspects of Tibetan Buddhism, focusing on the Vajrayana.
Buddhist Saints in India is a very sginificant contribution to understanding the dynamics of Buddhist groups. The book looks at paradigms of
sainthood in the
Buddhist tradition, and Buddhist practice and practitioners in Buddhist
India. Ray uses the hagiography of the Buddha to establish a basic
paradigm of sainthood. A pattern is established which includes more than 30 themes over the lifetime of the Buddha. However one theme that stands out is his "forest renunciant" character - the paradigmatic Buddhist saint is not typically a monk living in a monastery (what Ray calls a 'settled monastic', but an
ascetic living a solitary existence in some out of the way place, practicing meditation. He then compares various figures (Mahakasappa, Upagupta, Sariputta, Devedatta for instance) with this paradigm and shows that to a large extent they do conform to the basic model. Where they differ there is often seen to be a monastic bias in the telling of the story - this is established by comparing various early scriptures inclusing the
Pali Canon and what has survived of the Dharmagupta, Sarvastivadin, and Mahasamgika canons. What emerges is a picture in which the original ideal was the forest renunciant, but with the rise of settled monasticism the renunciants began to be occluded in Buddhist texts which were preserved by the settled monastics. The practice of meditation, and therefore the realisation of
Nirvana, was sidelined in favour of ethical observance and scriptural study. Settled monastics provided a focus for the lay community who relied on the merit gained by supporting monks to bring about a fortunate rebirth in the next life - as such the ethical conduct of the settled monastics is of primary importance since the merit gained is proportional to the purity of the monks. Ray even suggests that reputation of Devadatta as an evil person, a fallen saint in the Pali Canon, may be the demonisation of a forest renunciant by a group of settled monastics.
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