Visions of the Buddha

Creative Dimensions of Early Buddhist Scripture

What this book really is

Visions of the Buddha is a book about the nature of Buddhist scripture, but it is also about the nature of scripture in a broader sense. Shulman’s opening claim is simple and forceful: the early Buddhist discourses are no less a creative act of Buddhist imagination than an attempt to preserve the Buddha’s words or relate historical events. That means the book begins by questioning one of the most familiar assumptions in Buddhist studies: that the early texts are best treated as records waiting to be cleaned up and historically decoded.

This is what makes the book interesting. It does not deny that the texts preserve doctrine or memory. It argues that preservation is only part of what is happening. The discourses are also literature, storytelling, contemplation, performance, emotional engagement, and tradition speaking to itself through inherited forms.

The book’s larger argument

The central argument is that early Buddhist scripture should be read as a creative constitutive act. The texts do not only describe reality. They help found, envision, and animate religious reality. In the preface, Shulman repeatedly rejects the old oppositions between essence and form, truth and fantasy, historical fact and literary beauty. He insists that scripture works through all of these together. That is why the book is not simply literary criticism and not simply Buddhist history. It is trying to describe a richer mode of textual life.

One of the strongest consequences of this argument is that the Buddha in the texts is not just the Buddha of history. He is also the Buddha as imagined, remembered, beautified, and emotionally activated by tradition. Shulman’s phrase “visions of the Buddha” is therefore exact. The texts search for the Buddha and create him anew at the same time.

The structure and why it works

The book’s structure is very strong. Part One develops the literary approach to the early discourses. Part Two moves inward and outward, into contemplative devotion on one side and public folklore and performance on the other. Part Three then turns to the theory of composition through the play of formulas and ends with reflections on meditative practice. This progression is effective because it moves from method, to reading examples, to a broader theory of how the texts are made.

It also means the book is not trapped in abstraction. Shulman keeps returning to specific suttas and narrative situations, which lets the theory stay tied to real textual reading.

Early-book strength: literary reading against flat textual models

The first major strength of the book is its attack on what Shulman sees as a flat concept of text. In the opening chapter, he says scholarship still tends to assume that Buddhist scripture mainly conveys informational content and that formulas are primarily a technology of preservation. Against this, he argues that formulas and narrative structures have aesthetic, rhetorical, and imaginative force. The result is that a discourse should not be read merely as a documentary object.

This is important because it changes the level at which interpretation begins. Instead of starting with the question “what historical event lies behind this passage?”, Shulman encourages the reader to ask “what kind of text is being made here, and by what creative means?” That is a much more fertile question for this corpus.

The contemplative middle: the Buddha as presence

One of the most beautiful-looking parts of the book is Chapter 3 on mindfulness of the Buddha in the Mahāparinibbāna-sutta. Here Shulman connects textuality with contemplative practice. He argues that the early discourses do not only tell about the Buddha; they help create an encounter with him. Drawing on the idea of Buddha-anussati or mindfulness of the Buddha, he suggests that texts are designed to produce vivid, emotionally charged, almost visual contact with the master.

This is one of the most original and persuasive parts of the book’s vision. It makes early scripture feel less like a storehouse of data and more like an active practice of presence, memory, and devotion. The text becomes not only narrative but an exercise in bringing the Buddha to mind.

Another middle strength: folklore and performance

Chapter 4 turns in a different direction and asks how the discourses participate in public entertainment, storytelling, and folklore. Shulman says the exact performance contexts are hard to reconstruct, but he still argues that some texts clearly have theatrical, humorous, and dramatic dimensions. That is important because it breaks the image of early Buddhist discourse as something solemn and static.

This part of the argument also helps broaden the meaning of “scripture.” Texts are not simply recited faithfully; they circulate in performance, in communal memory, and in acts of retelling. This makes the Buddhist textual tradition feel more alive and socially embedded.

The key concept: the play of formulas

The conceptual center of the book is Chapter 5 and the theory of the play of formulas. This is probably the most important idea in the whole study. Shulman argues that formulas are not just mnemonic units used to preserve teaching word for word. They are expressive, suggestive, aesthetically charged units that can be combined creatively. Discourses, then, are not primary in themselves. They are built from formulaic materials that can be reapplied in new ways.

This is a powerful idea because it explains how Buddhist tradition can be both conservative and innovative at once. The formulas keep the tradition recognizable and authoritative, but their combination allows new literary versions, new emphases, and new doctrinal or emotional force. Shulman sees this as a balance between preservation and creativity.

The phrase “play” matters here. It suggests that the tradition is not mechanical. It has freedom, artistry, and responsiveness, even within fixed boundaries. That is one of the book’s strongest challenges to overly defensive or museum-like approaches to Buddhist texts.

The enlightenment chapter and why it matters

The chapter on retelling the Buddha’s enlightenment in the Majjhima Nikāya is one of the best tests of Shulman’s theory. Enlightenment narratives are often treated as especially important doctrinal or biographical sources. But Shulman argues that even these are creative retellings shaped by literary concerns. He shows that different texts use familiar formulas to present different versions of awakening, each with its own narrative emphasis.

This is an especially important claim because it shows that literary composition does not happen only at the margins of Buddhist thought. It reaches right into the center, even into stories of awakening itself. In other words, doctrine and storytelling cannot be cleanly separated.

The conclusion and larger implications

The conclusion gathers the whole argument into a broader claim: early Buddhist scripture is literature in the strong sense. It is deliberate, aesthetic, emotionally charged, formulaic, and contemplative. It may preserve doctrine and memory, but it also activates the imagination, shapes devotion, and produces new versions of the Buddha and his significance.

What makes the ending strong is that it does not reduce everything to literary play. Shulman still leaves room for history, but only after the literary dimension is properly appreciated. This seems to be one of his deepest points: historical analysis that ignores textual creativity becomes fantasy of its own.

Final judgment

My judgment is clearly positive. Visions of the Buddha looks like a serious, original, and elegant intervention in Buddhist studies. Its strongest achievement is that it makes early Buddhist scripture feel richer, stranger, and more alive than the usual preservation model allows. It does not just reinterpret a set of texts. It changes the reader’s sense of what scripture can be.

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