Prof. Robert Sharf - "The Dao of Ānanda"

Ānanda gets a bum rap. Despite his celebrated role in the transmission of the buddhavacana, he is often depicted as a hapless buffoon and blamed for a host of calamities that befell the early community, including the untimely death of the Buddha, later schism within the saṃgha, and the foreshortening of the buddhaśāsana. I will argue that Ānanda plays a more complex role in the early narratives, and embodies a kind of prophetic wisdom—he captures a self-reflexive and self-critical strand of the early Buddhist teachings that anticipates later developments such as Madhyamaka and Chan. Key to my argument is the Cūllavagga account of Ānanda’s awakening and the light that it sheds on the nature of Buddhist awakening writ large.

Robert Sharf is D. H. Chen Distinguished Professor of Buddhist Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as Chair of Berkeley's Numata Center for Buddhist Studies. He works primarily on medieval Chinese Buddhism, but has also published in the areas of Japanese Buddhism, Buddhist art and archaeology, Buddhist modernism, Buddhist philosophy, and methodological issues in the study of religion. He is author of Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism: A Reading of the Treasure Store Treatise (2002); What Can’t Be Said: Contradiction and Paradox in East Asian Thought (coauthored with Yasuo Deguchi, Jay Garfield, and Graham Priest, 2021); How to Lose Yourself: An Ancient Guide to Letting Go (coauthored with Jay Garfield and Maria Heim, 2025), and co-editor (with Elizabeth Horton Sharf) of Living Images: Japanese Buddhist Icons in Context (2001).

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