Buddhist texts and scriptures, as part of the grand corpus of Buddhist literatures, were circulated ab initio in India through oral means, which later influenced the translation and dissemination of Buddhist literatures in China as well. Group recitation of Buddhist texts in ancient India was an essential part of textual transmission by the bhāṇakas [lit., “speakers” (McGovern 2019: 450); professional reciters] (Allon 2021: 1), who were responsible for maintaining and circulating the canons, which were edited and redacted (Skilling 2017: 276–277) by the saṃgītikāras [editors/compilers] (Galasek 2016: 204). Unlike the modern author-reader relationship, where the author and the reader are usually not present simultaneously in the same spatial or temporal context, the Indian reciter and the audience encountered each other vis-à-vis within a circulation field, which was more of an “intra-textual realm” (Galasek, ibid.: 56) that substituted for an “actual oral performance” (Anālayo 2020: 2720).

This method of oral performance later influenced the circulation of Buddhist texts in China in every aspect—from the initial stages of translating and interpreting Buddhist literatures, where reciters first needed to orally convey the content [Chi. 口出; 口傳], to the sinicization of Buddhist canons by appealing to indigenous audiences through the oral expounding of scriptures [講經] and adapting Buddhist literatures into forms of oral performance, such as chanting stories [唱導] and transforming texts [變文] into stage dramas, like the story of how Maudgalyāyana saved his mother. This oral tradition was not confined to China but also impacted other East Asian countries, such as Japan, where many Buddhist stories were propagated and preserved in setsuwa [説話] compilations, such as the Anthology of Tales Old and New [今昔物語集].

This study attempts to focus on the trans-regional and trans-spatial function of oral presenters across Asia and to examine how Buddhist literatures were transmitted and disseminated diachronically and synchronically through oral expounding.

Bibliography

1. Allon, Mark W. (2021). The Composition and Transmission of Early Buddhist Texts with Specific Reference to Sutras. Bochum: projektverlag.

2. Anālayo [Bhikkhu] (2020). “Early Buddhist Oral Transmission and the Problem of Accurate Source Monitoring”, Mindfulness, 11(12), pp. 2715–2724.

3. Galasek, Bruno (2016). On Presenting Characters and the Representation of Persons A Narratological Study of Characters in Narrative Suttas of the Majjhima Nikāya. Dissertation. Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn.

4. Mcgovern, Nathan (2019). “Protestant Presuppositions and the Study of the Early Buddhist Oral Tradition”, Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, 42, pp. 449-491.

5. Skilling, Peter (2017). “The Many Lives of Texts: the Pañcatraya and the Māyājāla Sūtras”, in Dhammadinnā (ed.) Research on the Madhyama-āgama. Taipei: Dharma Drum Publishing Corporation, pp. 269–326.

“sar-zamīn-e-hind par aqvām-e-ālam ke 'firāq' / qāfile baste gaye hindustāñ bantā gayā”

—Firaq Gorakhpuri

In this paper, I attempt to undertake a comparative reading of the lyric poetry written as part of the “Romantic” and “Progressive” literary movements in two modern Indian languages (MILs), Odia and Hindi, during the 1920s-1950s. It will be a historiographic study of the Chhayavaad-Sabuja Kavita and Pragativaad movements within the conceptual framework of plurality by tracing the formation and use of certain repertoires of signification through reception, interliterariness and intertextuality in the creation of the texts. Taking cue from Amiya Dev’s idea that Indian literature is not “a fixed or determinate entity but as an ongoing and interliterary process” and Ipshita Chanda’s assertion MIL literatures are “individual entities formed from a plural base and part of a plural system”, I attempt to write a history of these literary movements to understand how plurality informs the poetics of the entity called Indian literature.

Using Sisir Kumar Das’s tools of prophane/early assimilation and metaphane/later assimilation, one can see literary movements with similar sensibilities across MILs during the 20th century. I propose the category of ‘supra-linguistic assemblages’ to read these movements (modifying Claudio Guillen’s “supranational assemblages”) which are informed not only by Indian poetic systems derived from Sanskrit, Tamil, Pali and Prakrit but also from European ones like the German and English literary traditions and West-Asian poetic systems especially the Perso-Arabic poetic systems which have come here through reception and contact. For this case study, I will be looking at the works of two poets each from both of the languages—Sumitranandan Pant, Nagarjun, Mayadhar Mansingh and Rabi Singh—with a focus on the period of transition between the two movements to historically locate and understand how the processes of intra-systemic and inter-systemic contacts manifested in the literary creation in these languages. The broader aim of this paper is to make a case for how a plural literary history accommodating many languages can and should be written for literatures produced in multi-lingual/cultural societies like India.

Hideo Levy’s literature offers a compelling lens to reexamine comparative literature from an East Asian perspective. Born in the United States and partly raised in Taiwan, Levy writes in Japanese yet continually engages with multiple locales—Japan, Taiwan, and mainland China—revealing the fluid nature of identity in modern societies. His narratives challenge the long-standing assumption that language, people, and nation naturally cohere, proposing instead that any notion of “home” is shaped by dynamic, overlapping histories.

This research focuses on Levy’s I-novel form, which combines personal experiences with broader regional realities. In many of his works, protagonists navigate the complexities of mainland China’s rapid modernization, grappling with the disparities between official languages (like Mandarin) and local dialects. Through encounters in underdeveloped regions like villages in Henan Province, Levy foregrounds those excluded from dominant national narratives—echoing his childhood memories in Taiwan, where American diplomats, mainland Chinese communities, and local Taiwanese cultures coexist uneasily. By portraying these diverse, often marginalized voices, Levy underscores how political and economic paradigms can silently marginalize people who do not “fit” prevailing notions of progress.

The study explores how Levy’s border-crossing narratives introduce new possibilities for comparative literary discourse, particularly from the standpoint of East Asia’s intricate colonial and postcolonial histories. By situating Levy alongside writers like Abe Kobo and Oe Kenzaburo, we see how Japan’s trajectory of modernity—shaped by war, empire, and the formation of a national literature—can be re-envisioned through interlinked yet distinct cultural identities in East Asia. Levy’s updates to the I-novel question the idea of a singular, unified “Japanese literature” and illuminate how personal subjectivity connects with the histories of people in Taiwan, mainland China, and beyond.

Ultimately, Levy’s works invite us to think about comparative literature in a way that embraces movement, translation, and partial belonging. His approach—inherited from and yet expanding upon the creative legacies of Abe and Oe—troubles the boundary between self and Other, pushing us to reconsider modern literary formations through the lens of shared yet variegated East Asian experiences. In doing so, Levy’s fiction points to alternative routes for comparative literature that foreground regional multiplicities, personal histories, and new forms of collective imagination.

Chinese script word 世界 as the world are commonly used in east Asian languages（it is pronounced 'shìjiè' in Chinese, 'sekai' in Japanese and 'se:ge' in Korean）. This is originally a Chinese translation of Buddhist term loka-dhātu, a key word of Buddhist worldview, in which our human world is localized as one India-centered continent on the sea outside Mt Sumeru as the axis of one of a billion universes.

My presentation will trace a brief history of this borrowed word (世界 sekai) in early and premodern Japanese literary texts.

The oldest extant historiographies of the early eighth century Japan described the emergence and completion of the world reigned by the grandson of the sun goddess succeeded by his descendant emperors without using the word 'sekai'. However, the usage of the term 'sekai' in the prose narratives of the early tenth century Japan enabled them to relativize the established image of the imperial entire world. And the presence of that Buddhist term as the world in the historical treatise on Japanese emperor’s rule in the mid fourteenth century reflected the reformation of Japanese’s worldview to recognize virtual Asian area from Persia to Japan as one world. Moreover, after Western missionaries came to East Asia with their knowledge about and the map of the global world in the late sixteenth century, we witness the process of bleaching out the Buddhist sense from the word 'sekai.'

Following the history of adoption of this Buddhist term into Japanese literary texts in early and premodern times as a case study, we will have an opportunity to rethink how the image of modern Asia was constructed.