Mastering Tradition: Desire and Overcoming in the Diamond Sūtra and the Gospel of Mark

This essay compares the Buddhist classic the Diamond Sūtra to the oldest Christian gospel, the Gospel of Mark, in order to argue that both texts work up complex “theaters of conversion” in order to encourage readers to discard previous convictions about tradition (Buddhist or Jewish/proto-Christian) so as to take the text itself, and its narrative, as the solution to all religious problems. In short, both texts appear to be knowingly designed to function as the centers of new (and rather aggressive) forms of tradition. And, in either case, it is the reader’s desire for the fullest version of tradition that is handily used to draw him or her into imagining radically revised relations with tradition and its authority figures via the reading experience. In a basic sense, then, both texts appear as portable, tradition-making machines, carrying within themselves all that is needed to reinvent tradition.