[Buddha-l] A Different Take on Devadatta

[jkirk]

Hi all,

Katherine's offering of Hocart's thought-provoking article raises
some interesting questions. Hocart's article reflects the state
of anthropological kinship studies of his time, studies which
soon developed more intensively and continued to do so as time
went on. Male cross-cousin marriage, where found in north India
of 500 BCE, let's say,  could be viewed as a competition among
cousin-brothers within a bride-seeking group of kin. 

The Buddha's wife Yashodharaa was his cross-cousin. Thus, while
her husband was away seeking enlightenment, the Buddha's
cousin-brother Devadatta lusted after her, according to an
intriguing article (based on the Bhadrakalpaavadaana, a text
"composed in Nepal as late as the 16th c.") , by Joel Tatelman
(_Buddhist Studies Review_, 15:1,1998: 3-43), of which I have a
reprint kindly sent me by Dr. Tatelman, whose article is based on
his translation of the text. (Ironically, Hocart couldn't have
known of this text in his time, because as Tatelman says, "for
more than a century Western scholarship has largely ignored" it.)


This article is an entertaining must-read if one enjoys, as I do,
the soap-opera qualities of folk literature. It also makes an
important literary point, in that here Yashodharaa is not just
the passive recipient of antagonistic cultural forces but,
atypically of much folklore, "if not an independent heroine, a
least the central character in her own extended narrative".(4)
The folkloric motifs associated with this tale of the
vicissitudes of Yashodharaa's life while her husband is away is
"reminiscent of many stories from many cultures in which the
faithful wife, left behind by the questing husband, undergoes her
own series of trials..." (4) 

Perhaps the lusting Devadatta wrinkle to the story could be
construed partly as a consequence of his being the Buddha's
cross-cousin and therefore, "theoretically," in competition for
the hand of Yashodharaa, a hand he didn't get. But the story has
him lusting after Yashodharaa mainly to make her his wife and
seize the throne, then he plans to kill her so as to have the
throne to himself, having deceived and replaced the grieving
near-dead father-figure of the King, Shuddhodhana. He's basically
after power and glory. I find this aspect support for the reading
that Devadatta is an exemplar of the Cain/Abel theme rather than
libidinous joking relations between male cousins.  The story is
replete with the relentless intrigues of Devadatta against
Yashodharaa, Shuddhodhana, and Raahula. Too bad Freud or Jung
didn't know of this tale. Claude Levi-Strauss (with his binary
oppositions) would have had fun with it, too.

The "joking relationships" (a standard anthropology concept)
between cousin-brothers as discussed by Hocart are one thing;
ascribing these as cause to Devadatta's obsessive-envy
competitive-hostility to the Buddha, his family and works,
strikes me as going too far. The sibling rivalry-Cain/Abel
construction works much better in this case, since joking
relations are not based on deep hostility; instead, they are
informal ritualistic tension-relieving behaviors allowed within
formal kinship behavior. We also do not have sufficient textual
evidence (any other kind of evidence being impossible for that
period) about the interfamilial relationships surrounding the
Buddha, Devadatta, and Yashodharaa that would enable us to reach
conclusive kinship inferences a la Hocart. The Devadatta-Buddha
opposition, with due respect to Hocart, perhaps more surely
represents a variation on the ancient theme of sibling rivalry.
Thus, a cousin-brother isn't all that different from a brother.

In north India over the centuries, however, spousal preferences
became defined according to shastric legal systems which
prevented cross-cousin marriage, requiring marriage outside of 6
or more degrees of relationship in both maternal and paternal
lines (depending on the texts favored by particular groups).
Apparently this wasn't the case in the social culture of the
Buddha's period.

There's a huge literature on Indian kinship and marriage
preferences, but I don't have time to cite any of it here.
However, Hocart's anthropology was soon dated by more intensive
ethnographic research.  His attempts at comparative kinship were
like comparing apples and oranges, to some extent. In any case,
cross-cousin marriage stopped being practiced in north India
among higher castes.  It strikes me as more productive when
analysing Buddha stories to consider their folklore motif aspects
first, rather than jumping to kinship analysis, as Hocart tried
to do in the absence of sufficient ethnographic evidence for, in
this case, the Buddha's historical culture and period.

Cheers, Joanna