Medieval Buddhist of the Day

[Twitter, 9/6/19] Medieval Buddhists of the Day: Wang Luohou 王羅侯 and his younger brother (Wang) Luowen 羅文, who dedicated a gilt-bronze image of Sakyamuni and Prabhutaratna for their deceased parents in 606, during the late Sui dynasty. It is now in the Tianjin Museum of Art. The inscription reads …王羅侯、弟羅文，為過亡阿耶，見存阿娘，敬造多寶像一軀。It’s quite straightforward: “…Wang Luohou and his younger brother Luowen reverently made an image of Prabhutaratna for their deceased dad and their living mom.”

The key here is “dad” and “mom.” I’m translating them that way deliberately because the terms used, 阿耶 and 阿娘, are less descriptive terms and more terms of direct address, with a certain informality and therefore intimacy. 阿 is a common first character in personal names, but it has no meaning on its own. It’s more like a kind of endearing diminutive, but what it diminishes is not the size or the age of the bearer, but the formality of address. I don’t know how to test how much this was also true during the Sui, but 阿耶 turns up in the Song of Mulan with much the same sense: The line is 阿耶無大兒，木蘭無長兄 “Papa has no eldest son; I have no eldest brother.” Again, it’s really personal.

We’ve seen other ways to refer to parents that are more common, 父母 for living parents or 考妣 for deceased ones, but both of those are simply descriptive. So there’s something surprisingly and endearingly personal about the Wang brothers’ dedication. It’s like that sense that comes embedded in ancestral worship, that human relationships don’t end in death. Why stop addressing your father as “Dad,” just because he’s gone?