Buddha Bodies and the Benefits of Relic Establishment: Insights from a Digital Framework for the Analysis of Formulaic Sequences in Gāndhārī Relic Inscriptions

Abstract

The practice of relic establishment was the most significant element of Buddhist religious culture in Gandhāra from the second century BCE to the second century CE. The ritual architecture encapsulated in relic inscriptions pivots around ontological identifications which instantiate the relics as a body of the Buddha which has beneficial efficacy.

The research proposition—that new insights might be accessible through pattern analysis of formulaic sequences—indicated an ambitious infrastructure proposition. The dissertation is a cascading program of projects to develop the foundational models, supporting platforms and enabling methodologies required to implement formulae structures and formula analysis across the corpus. The dissertation arc returns, equipped with that infrastructure, to the characterisation of the ritual architecture of relic inscriptions.

The design and development of a platform of the scale of READ—the philological platform developed in consortium—required the deployment of a research consulting framework. The methodologies, toolkits, and defining role of a research consultant, were exercised in a suite of consulting solutions and corpus projects.

The inherent constraints of a conventional centralised architecture necessitated the design of a corpus development framework. The encapsulation of the TextBase methodology in READ Workbench—an Open SaaS portal—crystalizes a sustainable solution architecture for collaborative corpus development in the philological domain.

The infrastructure suite was deployed in the development of a reconstituted relic inscriptions corpus, and the implementation of a synthesized syntactic and semantic formula ontology. The detailed analysis of formulae type, alignment and inflection produced new translations of critical passages, a ritual architecture hypothesis and a novel view of the ontological status of relics and bodies of the Buddha grounded in Gandhāran Buddhism.