TANTRIC BUDDHISM (INCLUDING CHINA AND JAPAN)ways. Thus we read in the Dialogues of Saint Gregory the Great (Gardner n.d.:
223 ff.) that
God of his great and bountiful mercy so disposeth, that some after their
death do straightaways return again to life, that having seen the tor-
ments of hell, which before when they heard they would not believe,
they may now at least tremble at, after they with their eyes beheld
them.In Asian classical literature similar themes are widespread. Journeys to and
descriptions of hell are recorded in such sources at the Vendldad of the Zend-
A vesta (Darmestetter 1898), the story of Arda Viraf (West, et a!. 1872), the
story of Naciketas in the Katha Upani!jad, and so forth.^2 In traditional China, it
has been remarked, the simple peasant does not have "very clear or extensive
conceptions of salvation except in terms of the picture furnished him by hell
temples where future punishments are vividly depicted in relief' (Day 1940:
117), and that the 'judgement of the soul in the courts of hell is by far the
dominant feature of the peasant concept of what will happen to him after he
dies" (ibid.: 118).
As Reynolds and Waugh (1977) have observed, death creates both a new
experience and language which articulates many kinds of experience (ibid: 1)
and death's presence "negates ordinary life structures ...... until all the normal
meanings of an individual's life are regarded as having no ultimate worth"
(ibid.: 6). Death, as a literary and an experiential motif, gains its metaphoric
power in that it can act as a "paradigmatic model for passage to the superior"
which transcends worldly dualities (Eliade 1977: 18, 21). Setting the stage of the
'das-log biographies in the interstices of life and death, then, permits the retool-
ing to the 'das-log's creative potential as a religious figure to occur.
Indeed, the major social and didactic function of the 'das-log literature is just
this: to teach or to remind an audience of laymen who either may have never
known or had been accustomed to forget that the dogmas of Buddhism really
work. The biographies of the 'das-log stress three things: suffering and imper-
manence, the vicissitudes of karma, and how these may be overcome. As such,
they are concordant with the basic teachings of the sutras and the vast commen-
tarial literature of Tibet. The 'das-log, however, is more than just a teller of
tales. He himself becomes a source of religious authority and an object of
popular worship.
A question I wish to address here is how does an ordinary person become
extraordinary, charismatic and invested with moral authority? How does the
'das-log fit into a scheme of things vis-a-vis other types of charismatic religious
authorities such as saints, lamas and founders of traditions on the one hand, and
shamans on the other? The 'das-log is a minor kind of prophet. In his formula-
tion of the ideal type, Weber (1967: xxxiii-vi, 46ff.) notes that the prophet need
not be a founder of a tradition, but a renewer of an already founded one.