Preacher and Audience Studies: Reading the Dharmabhāṇakaparivarta and Sukhavihāraparivarta of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka-sūtra as Homiletic Manuals

The study of homiletics, preachers, and their audiences constitutes an important subfield in Christian studies. In Buddhist studies, the study of preachers and homiletics is less common. Taking two chapters of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka-sūtra (Saddhp) as an exemplary case, I argue that, when read with a concern for preachers, their audiences, and homiletics, this sūtra contains a wealth of material about the identity, deportment, preaching, comportment, aesthetics, and imagined preacher-audience interactions of Buddhist preachers in their discussion of a figure of religious authority referred to as the dharmabhāṇaka, or dharma-preacher. This material is the primary concern of homiletic manuals. Thus, chapters of the Saddhp can fruitfully be read as homiletic manuals. I read these passages through rubrics provided by Mary Cunningham and Pauline Allen in their edited volume, Preacher and Audience: Studies in Early Christian and Byzantine Homiletics. I also draw on the scholarship of Claire Waters to understand the Saddhp’s chapters as homiletic manuals in the style of artes praedicandi. Beyond drawing on traditional scholarship in Christian studies that tends to focus solely on white European or white Euro-American preachers and homiletics, I also utilize Gerald Davis’s work on Afro-Protestant preacher-audience interaction and the aesthetics of Afro-Protestant homiletics.