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    Renunciant Stories Across Traditions: A Novel Approach to the Acts of Thomas and the Buddhist Jātakas

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    Genre
    Thesis/Dissertation
    Date
    2018
    Author
    Kunu, Vishma
    Advisor
    Limberis, Vasiliki, 1954-
    Committee member
    Bingenheimer, Marcus
    Blankinship, Khalid Yahya
    Piera, Montserrat
    Department
    Religion
    Subject
    Religion
    Asian Studies
    Comparative Religion
    Acts of Thomas
    Indian Buddhism
    Indian Ocean Trade
    Jataka
    Renunciation
    Syriac Christianity
    Permanent link to this record
    http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12613/3149
    
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    DOI
    http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/3131
    Abstract
    This study brings excerpts from the Acts of Thomas (Act 1.11-16 and Act 3.30-33) together with two Buddhist jātakas (Udaya Jātaka - #458 and Visavanta Jātaka -#69) to consider how stories might have been transmitted in the early centuries of the common era in a milieu of mercantile exchange on the Indian Ocean. The Acts of Thomas is a 3rd century CE Syriac Christian text concerned with the apostle Thomas proselytizing in India. The jātakas are popular didactic narratives with a pronounced oral dimension that purport to be accounts of the Buddha’s previous lives. Syriac Christians possessed knowledge about Indian religious practices linked to renunciation, and it is plausible that they adapted Buddhist jātakas to convey Christian ideas in the account of Thomas journeying to India and converting people there. Epigraphic evidence from the western Deccan in India attests to yavana, or Greek, patronage of Buddhist institutions in cosmopolitan settings where ideas and commodities circulated. Against the grain in scholarship on early Christianity that tends to privilege Latin and Greek sources, this project moves the lens of analysis eastward to consider Indian influence on early Christianity as expressed in the Acts of Thomas. A literary comparison of the texts under consideration with reference to the historical and cultural context of exchange reveals similar models of renunciant practices in Buddhism and Christianity that establishes new grounds for consideration of interconnectivity across ‘East’ and ‘West.’
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