On The Literariness Of Dirghagama-sutra

This paper takes the classic Buddhism Dirghagama-sutra as the research object. We found it rich of literariness through in-depth text analysis. But this literariness is not attentioned by the academia for a long term and its research is not concerned by scholars domestic and foreign. In response to this research situation, the paper talks a tentative step for the research for Buddhist literature, through connecting the contemporary Anglo-American narrative theories and other relevant social science theories.The literariness of Dirghagama-sutra lies in many aspects:using allegory and analogy for the elucidation of doctrines masterly, adopting "a series of plug-in" in the structure, having varieties of style and mixing with verse and prose. These features are also shared by other literary classics in India. It is regarded that the rich literariness of Dirghagama-sutra is expressed in the stories, discourse and the rhetoric of narration.Characters, events, and background are all part of the stories, Dirghagama-sutra shaped both the functional characters and the psychographic ones. The basic characteristics of the figures are the dual characters of both men and gods. Just like the exents mentioned in it, the repetitive events describe all the happiness and sadness in a life, the events in a roundabout way are mutully related, the main events transfer the theme ulteriorly, and the extraneous events highlight the ideology position of text in the obnious from. Its backgrounds are rich and complex. Imaginary space arts show unique characteristics. Philosophic space is solid philosophy and silently hints the way of thinking of ancient Indias. The mental space establishs its foundation on human poles of the good and the evil, thus builds two different personalities. In different power networks, the narrator has different control of discourses of characters. The narrator is controled by discourses of characters before temporal power and arch rival; but the contrary is the case before deities and general Brahman. Meanwhile, Dirghagama-sutra uses rhetorical narrations to express the ideological thoughts. In short, Dirghagama-sutra is rich of literariness and worthy of our attention and research.