Breaking the Textual Fourth Wall: On Paratextuality and Self-Referentiality in Mahāyāna Sūtra Literature

A prominent feature of many Mahāyāna sūtras is the presence of self-referential passages, where texts refer to themselves by title, praising and recommending themselves for worship. Unlike paratexts, which influence how readers approach a text through external commentaries or notes, these self-referential passages are integrated into the body of the text itself. This talk will outline various types of self-referential passages, such as those encouraging the practice, preservation, and propagation of the text, suggesting a tentative taxonomy of motifs in Mahāyāna sūtra literature. The presentation also explores to what extent such passages are unique to Mahāyāna literature, suggesting their particular significance in promoting new texts and doctrines within early Mahāyāna communities while also touching upon possible parallels in the non-Buddhist purāṇa literature. Regarding applications and use cases for the identification and tracking of self-referentiality in sūtra literature, the talk presents the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā as one such use case, where self-referentiality appears to provide insights into the structure and development of the sūtra. Alexander James O'Neill is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at SOAS University of London. He completed his PhD in Religion from the University of Toronto in 2022, receiving the Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship and the Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai Canada Graduate Scholarship. Specialising in Sanskrit Buddhist texts from South Asia and contemporary Buddhist practices in the Kathmandu Valley, he is preparing a monograph on the topic of Buddhist book worship. At SOAS, his research focuses on egophoricity in Newar and developing natural language processing (NLP) solutions to Newar language research, such as handwritten text recognition (HTR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR).