The following questions, while originally written as guidelines to reading narrative literature, provide ways of approaching the close reading of any text. When you read a passage closely, consider the “three worlds” of the text: the world “inside” the text, the world “behind” the text, and the world “in front of” the text.

1. The world inside the text
We can read texts as works that imagine—and create—worlds. What are the salient characteristics of these imagined worlds? How are they different from the world(s) in which we imagine/believe ourselves to be living? What assumptions underlie the world “inside” the text? The following questions may be helpful in examining these issues with regard to a given passage.

1. a)Form

Situation: Is this passage part of a larger work? If so, how does its location within this work shape the way that we read it? What comes before and after? What is the larger narrative to which it contributes?

Genre: What genre is the passage drawing upon, and what conventions of that genre can you identify that dictate the form of the text? How do these shape the reader’s expectations? Are certain conventions subverted, and if so, how does it change the meaning of the text?

Formal qualities: Do prose and/or verse function to structure the text in particular ways? How? How is the passage displayed on the page? How do its visual qualities (including any images that may accompany the passage) affect your reading of it?

Frames: Is there a larger frame narrative in which this passage is situated? If so, how does it shape the interpretation of the passage?

Structure: How might you identify discrete segments of the text? How do these relate to each other—e.g., are there close causal or thematic relationships? Or do the relationships seem more loosely juxtaposed? How do these relationships between segments function to structure the interpretation of the text?

Figurative Language: What figurative language (e.g., metaphor, metonymy, antithesis, hyperbole, irony, personification, repetition) is employed? When? How do particular figures of speech work in the text? What different elements do they hold together, and how do they contribute to the overall movement of the text?

Voice: How is the “voice” of the narrator constructed, and how does that voice affect your reading of the passage? Are there markers in tone that correspond to distinctions in gender, status, sub-genres, and so forth?

1. b) Content

Character, Setting: Who are the characters, and how do they relate to one another? What is the setting (or settings), and how does it shape the narrative? What events or episodes occur? How do they relate to one another? How do they contribute to the larger movement of the narrative (e.g., setting, problem, climax, resolution)?

Narration: Is there content outside of the core plot of the narrative (for instance, a narrator’s reflection on issues or events) and, if so, what does it contribute to the narrative? How does it change the way you read the narrative?

Rhetoric: Is there a disjuncture between what the narrative says and what it does to you as a reader, how it makes you feel? Is the “meaning” of the narrative located in its literal content, or is it also to be found in the way it uses content to produce certain effects? In other words, how might the conceptions, actions and experiences of the characters influence the conceptions, actions and experiences of the audience? How does content (who does what to whom for what reason in what place, etc.) relate to the “work” of the text—what it might do to its audience, how it might make them feel or act? (We can talk about this in terms of the rhetorical devices or strategies that are used in the narrative to achieve certain effects in certain audiences.) How is the content of the text used in rhetorical ways, if at all?

2. The world behind the text

The world “behind” the text refers to the cultural context in which a narrative was originally produced and functioned. While examining the “world inside the text” entails reading texts as producing a world, texts can also be read—and veryfrequently have been read—as the products of a world, as reflective of their historical context of production.

Context: In what historical and cultural context was this text produced? What direct or indirect relationships are there to other texts produced in other contexts? What does the text suggest to us about the context in which and for which it was produced?

“Work”: What do you think this text was intended to “do”—e.g., entertain, edify, create and/or shape relationships between the audience and the figures in the book? In other words, what might the motives or intentions be—explicit and/or implicit—by reason of which this text was produced? Can you identify aspects of the text and/or its historical and cultural context that illuminate such intentions?

Producers: Do we know anything about its authorship/compilation/transmission? Is there a disjuncture between the modern academic historical understanding of this question and traditional understandings? If so, what problems and possibilities do you see in this disjuncture?

Assumptions: What assumptions would one have to bring to this text in order for it to be convincing? How might such assumptions contrast with our own assumptions about texts and their purposes?

Practices: Does the text speak explicitly about how its audiences should interact with it? If so, how do we decide whether such statements are prescriptive and/or descriptive of practices in Buddhist communities?

3. The world in front of the text

The reader and his/her assumptions are crucial to the construction of meaning and to a reader’s experience of a text. To consider the world “in front of” the text is to ask how and why different historical audiences—ourselves included—have frequently interpreted a given text quite differently.

Contexts: In what historical and cultural contexts did (and does) this text function? Do we have social-historical evidence that might illuminate the ways in which it has been interpreted or used? Who has read it? Who has listened to it? Was it/is it widely circulated? Have its interpretations/uses/popularity changed through time, or as it was transmitted from one cultural context to another?

Audience: Can you identify aspects of the text that seem to appeal to particular audiences, eg. people of a certain cultural background, status in society, gender? Does it presume particular kinds of knowledge? Does it appeal to the interests of lay or monastic communities, or both? Might different audiences have different interpretations? Do we have any social-historical materials that might shed light on such questions?

Conceptions of Life and World: Given an awareness of different audiences and interpretations, how might this text have contributed to people’s conceptions of the world and of their own place within it? An exercise: imagine yourself in the position of various auditors/readers in a particular Buddhist community. What does this text make you hope, desire, aspire to, fear, loathe, revere? How does it make you feel about characters in the narrative? Who do you identify with, and who do you judge? Why and how does the text make you feel this way? How does it make you feel about other people in your own community?—about yourself in relation to various figures (i.e., how might it attempt to shape your subjectivity, how you conceive of yourself in relation to the world? Who stands to gain from your feeling this way? Does anybody/anything lose? Can you identify who/what? What might your speculations regarding these questions suggest about the way the text might function for particular listeners?

Your Response: Finally: how, if at all, does the consideration of these kinds of questions change your response to this narrative as a modern academic reader? What was your initial response, and has it shifted through your close reading? You, too, are part of the reception history of this text.

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