SUNY series in Asian Studies Development

Traditions, Transmissions, and Transformations

Nicholas S. Brasovan, Micheline M. Soong, Nicholas S. Brasovan, Micheline M. Soong

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781438475868
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

Over its long history, Buddhism has never been a simple monolithic phenomenon, but rather a complex living tradition—or better, a family of traditions—continually shaped by and shaping a vast array of social, economic, political, literary, and aesthetic contexts across East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Written by undergraduate educators, Buddhisms in Asia offers a guide to Buddhism's rich variety of traditions and cultural expressions for educators who would like to include Buddhism in their undergraduate courses. It introduces fundamental yet often underrepresented Buddhist texts, concepts, and material in their historical contexts; presents the major "ecologies" of Buddhist belief, practice, and cultural expression; and provides methodological insights regarding how best to infuse Buddhist content into undergraduate courses in the humanities and social sciences. The text aims to represent "Buddhisms" by approaching the subject from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives, including art history, anthropology, history, literature, philosophy, religious studies, and pedagogy.

1

The Buddhist Canon and the
Liberal Arts Classroom

ANDY ALEXANDER DAVIS

The textual canon for Western liberal arts education is fairly well established and contains many examples of complete works (dialogues, plays, autobiographies, treatises, scientific works, letters, novels, etc.) that can be read and discussed profitably in an undergraduate setting with minimal or no historical context or expert lecture. Because liberal arts teaching involves immediate engagement with fundamental questions, it pairs well with self-contained texts.

There is, however, little established consensus concerning what we might call a “classroom canon” for Asian traditions of thought. As a result, teachers are much more reliant on textbooks and anthologies. Anthologies typically contain excerpted texts that are not meant to stand alone but rather to exhibit certain themes that will be a subject of lecture and, perhaps, some discussion. Yet by definition liberal education aims to make students free or educationally self-reliant.1 Those familiar with the Pāli suttas will recognize that Buddha often insists on and aims to bring about a similar condition.2

Liberal arts teaching requires that the books we read be carefully composed and generative of dialogue. “Buddhism” names a set of traditions that may seem unsuited for liberal arts seminars due to the nature of the textual corpus. Buddhist texts present a number of challenges:

1)Quantity of texts: The Pāli canon alone fills the equivalent of some fifty-odd printed volumes. This means that even the earliest textual canon is so dauntingly large that a teacher would be justifiably at a loss as to where to begin. And this is only one of three major canons. The Chinese and the Tibetan canons are significantly larger.

2)Length of texts: Add to this that many important Buddhist texts are so long as to be unteachable as whole texts. For example, Avataṃsaka Sutra comprises nearly two thousand pages; Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga is about eight hundred pages.

3)Orality: Add to this that due to the oral nature of transmission, much of the Pāli canon was not designed for engaging reading. The Tipiṭaka is full of repetition and lists.

4)Shifting sacred value: Buddhism is the largest global religious tradition without a central revealed text. This means, among other things, that the sacred value of text is not uniformly established in the tradition. What texts are venerated and how is often a local arrangement.

5)Authenticity: For several hundred years, Buddhist teaching was transmitted orally with no substantial written record at all. We have some evidence of early redaction of suttas and some indications about the reliability of oral transmission, but the complete canons are late productions (eighteenth century and after).

6)Elitism: Add to this that beginning at least with Gregory Schopen’s work,3 some scholars have become increasingly concerned that the canons (and books in general) were productions by elites for elites, and therefore they tell us relatively little about Buddhism as it was actually practiced by the majority of practitioners.

In light of these problems, the obvious choice for the teacher of Buddhism would seem to be an anthology that selects excerpts of primary source texts combined with contextualizing lectures, which express the teacher’s take on the issues presented in the textbook. Books such as John Strong’s Experience of Buddhism or Donald Lopez’s Buddhist Scripture often fit the bill for the lecturer aiming to use primary sources as a supplement to lecture. Without looking at recent scholarship and offering contextualizing lectures, teachers would, it seems, only be presenting elite, idealized, or lopsided Buddhism, a mere shadow of complex historical and contemporary practices. Is it even possible to “teach Buddhism” as a liberal art, that is, through seminar discussion with minimal authoritative framing of content from the teacher?

Interpreting Primary Texts in the Classroom

Two styles of interpretation have formed centers of hermeneutic gravity for Buddhist studies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The first could be called “modern” or “colonial.” The modernist focuses on classical Buddhist canons and tends to seek a single uniform teaching in the canon, weeding out rather than emphasizing conflicts. The problematic goal here is to find the “essence” of Buddhism, often ignoring evidence of diversity. In many cases, modern European scholars aimed to distill Buddhism so that it could be compared to Christianity. The second hermeneutic approach, which we might call “postmodern” or “postcolonial,” often turns away from the canon and emphasizes marginalized or overlooked texts, communities, and practices. The problematic goal here is to emphasize plurality, diversity, and practice even when a hypothesis of univocity would promote deeper inquiry into and further dialogue between the various traditions and texts.

The first approach has given us some anthologies based on canonical lists of suttas and sutras that have met Western scholars’ needs to understand various Buddhist teachings as a single coherent argument. John Holder’s Early Buddhist Discourses is a good example of a book that meets this demand in an economical way. The second approach has given rise to newer collections (such as Donald Lopez’s Buddhism in Practice) that emphasize diverse practices over unified interpretations. The first approach is limiting in the classroom because it interprets Buddhism too narrowly. The second approach is limiting in the classroom because it often obstructs or delays critical evaluation and close reading. The implicit premise in many of the most up-to-date classrooms is that American students are in no position to critically evaluate Buddhist traditions because they will simply impose orientalist norms. The classroom then becomes a site promoting cultural awareness more than critical engagement. This certainly has its value, but it does not promote liberal education.

Oliver Freiberger’s “The Buddhist Canon and the Canon of Buddhist Studies” responds to these approaches as they have impacted Buddhist studies and classroom teaching. Freiberger aims to offer something of a middle path.4 He suggests that we embrace the diversity already present in canonical Buddhist sources. In part, Freiberger’s call to return to the canon is a response to what he takes to be a problematic “free rein” given to teachers by the postmodern critique of the canon.5 Freiberger notes that in addition to emphasizing a “vertical complexity” we should also emphasize “horizontal complexity.”6 This means that showing the diversity and changes across time and place (vertical complexity) could be accompanied by more attention to the complexity of canonical source texts themselves (horizontal complexity). Freiberger’s example here is that the Pāli suttas offer several different pictures of the laity. Some suttas show the laity as supporters of monks with no hope of personal salvation in this life; others show the laity as working toward a parallel salvation.7 If we pick good texts, students will experience such complexity firsthand through close reading and discussion.

I suggest we take Freiberger’s “horizontal” complexity still further by expanding our classroom study of classical Buddhist texts beyond suttas to other historically important Buddhist textual genres such as vinayas, pilgrimage stories, poems, and more. Reading across multiple genres will help students develop through conversation with the Buddhist world and will help them become close readers capable of attending to differences of form. In this way we might avoid the narrow colonial narrative while still engaging classical texts that demand students hone their hermeneutic chops rather than appreciate diversity from a distance. Some students may incline toward a univocal reading of Buddhism, some may incline toward a pluralist reading, and these two camps can come into fruitful dialogue over the varied source texts. In the end, students should read both sympathetically and critically.

The goal of a good seminar is to let the books frame themselves through thoughtful discussion that typically begins with a clear textual problem or question, usually posed by an experienced reader. Seminars cannot succeed with open-ended “So, what did you think?” questions, nor with leading questions that strongly suggest a single answer. Seminar discussion requires a clearly posed, yet open and rich textual problem or question that allows comments to be interactive and developmental rather than merely agglutinative. It is perfectly acceptable for seminars to end in confusion or perplexity if the perplexity is spurred by an awareness of competing and conflicting interpretations. In fact, this perplexed awareness of competing claims is itself...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Buddhist Canon and the Liberal Arts Classroom
• 2. Awakening in the Hongzhou School of Chan Buddhism: Reading a Gongan/Koan Comparatively
• 3. Seeking the Pure Land (in the Classroom)
• 4. The Representation and Transformation of Nāgas, Dragons, and Dragon Kings in Chinese Painting
• 5. Trials of Devotion: Orphaned Children and the Boundaries of Horror in Japanese Buddhist Fiction
• 6. The Buddhist Gift: Merit-Making, Donations, and the Ambivalence of Reward
• 7. The Puzzle of the Socially Engaged Buddhist Agent and a Thai Buddhist Philosophical Response
• 8. Five Themes toward Teaching the History of Vietnamese Buddhism
• 9. Not Knowing Is Most Intimate: Introducing Buddhism into a Humanities Course
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover