The Precious Banner Sūtra (Skt. Mahāsaṃnipātaratnaketudhāraṇīsūtra, Ratnaketuparivarta; Tib. 'Dus pa chen po rin po che tog gi gzungs) has been known to scholarship for over a century, yet little attention has been paid to its riveting narrative of Māra’s failed yet incompletely quelled rebellion against the Buddha. Grounded in the history of religions and informed by affect theory, the sociology and history of emotions, and narratology, this dissertation argues that the Precious Banner contains what I call an affective regime—a set of feeling rules, disseminated in this case through religious narrative, that seeks to structure the affective orientation of its readers as well as to evoke in the reading present the emotions put forward as normative in the text through such literary strategies as focalization, analepsis and prolepsis, and self-reference. In so doing, I argue, the Precious Banner seeks to call into being a transhistorical religious community. Chapter One begins with a survey of the preservation and citation of the Precious Banner on the part of Buddhists, followed by a discussion of the methodological framework signaled by the phrase affective regime. Chapter Two then dives into the text. It first argues that Māra’s narrative is central to the sūtra, based on a general overview of the sūtra, and further shows that his affective orientation is central to his narrative through an analysis of the sūtra’s first chapter, which leaves Māra wallowing in his lamentation room in what can only be called a cliffhanger. Chapter Three then argues that though Māra is affectively misaligned in the sūtra—evidenced by his seemingly ever-increasing hostility, powerlessness, and isolation and his being bound by a fivefold fetter in the presence of a giant preaching lotus at the conclusion of the sūtra’s third chapter—he is not condemned to remain misaligned for the duration of his story, the end of which is intimated but never narrated. Based on a reading of a past-life story told in the sūtra’s second chapter, I argue that Māra has the capacity to free himself from his dilemma by affectively reorienting himself. Chapter Four then examines the feeling rules delivered to Māra, foregrounding Śākyamuni’s imperative that he ought to be happy, and the consequences Māra faces on account of his refusal to respond properly thereto. The feeling rules given to Māra, I argue, hang over readers—as do the consequences of refusing to respond properly—in part through the homologous relationship readers share with Māra with respect to the sūtra, itself effected by the sūtra’s strategic self-reference through the mouth of Śākyamuni. Chapter Five then moves away from Māra to consider the affective reorientation of other misaligned actants, as well as the affective course correction of actants who are properly aligned but are nevertheless told to feel differently than they do. With these surveys, I argue on the one hand that alignment has social consequences and, on the other hand, that the affective course correction in the narrative is a facet of the sūtra’s larger strategy to constitute itself as a source of joy for readers living in a buddha-less world. Chapter Six then returns to the world of scholarship. My reading of the Precious Banner, I argue, exemplifies the value of holistic reading as opposed to methods that privilege episodes taken out of context. Such a method, when grounded in sufficiently theorized foundations, promises to yield still richer dividends. With the methodological framework of affective regimes, I gesture toward a synthesis of the antithetical views of Bruce Lincoln and Donovan Schaefer regarding how religious discourse plays a role in the process of social formation by drawing on Sara Ahmed and Arlie Russell Hochschild. The Precious Banner, I suggest, is at once a tool of normative ideology and sentiment evocation. It seeks to structure how it will be received as it is being received. Insofar as it succeeds in its aims, it calls into being a transhistorical community with itself as the joyful object at its center. An instantiation of this, I suggest, can be glimpsed at Gilgit (and perhaps among my readers, too). The dissertation closes with reflections on avenues for further research.