Podcast

[bell dings]

LEAH CHASE: In a meditative context, mindfulness is often referred to as an ability to concentrate without forgetfulness or distraction. It may require complete and utter silence to maintain this concentration, which is why Buddhist monasteries often opt for secluded areas like forests or mountains. But in the Bay Area, a region whose population has nearly doubled over the past fifty years, distraction is inevitable. How, in this sprawling urban landscape of multimillion dollar tech companies and global research universities is one expected to concentrate, to be “mindful”?

Enter: the Insight Meditation Center. It’s a rather unassuming two-story building on the corner of a quiet residential street in Redwood City. Once a church belonging to the First Christian Assembly, it is now a non-denominational meditation center for those interested in the study and practice of Buddhist ideals without distraction. But walk a couple blocks, and you’ll find yourself amid the scores of distractions that make up Redwood City’s downtown district. Movie theaters, museums, restaurants, banks, mid-rise apartments, corporate offices: a perpetual stream of traffic flows through this concentrated hub of urban leisure. The Caltrain, ferrying thousands of passengers every week, stops at a station just half a mile from the Center.

This episode is the first in our new Travelogue series. I’m your host, Leah Chase, and I’ll be taking you on a slightly different journey, stepping outside of the library and into the many Buddhist organizations and communities in the California Bay Area. The relentless, all-consuming work culture of Silicon Valley and Stanford University may seem at odds with the relatively serene Insight Meditation Center, and yet, the synthesis of these institutions yields a surprising result: it is precisely because of this combination of urbanity, intellectualism, and desire for spiritual liberation that the Insight Meditation Center exists.

The Center has gone through many iterations across the past few decades, from a small sitting group in 1986 to a non-profit organization replete with silent meditation retreats, free online classes, and affinity and support groups, all supported by a broader culture of community care and generosity. This is thanks to Gil Fronsdal, the founder of the Insight Meditation Center and our guest today. Ordained as a Soto Zen priest and a Theravada monk, Gil is also an alumnus of the Stanford Religious Studies PhD program, and it was his grand vision that planted the seeds for the Center as it stands today.

[music]

GIL FRONSDAL: When I went to college in 1972, there was still a draft for going to Vietnam, fighting in Vietnam.

[gunfire, planes flying]

And so there was a big potential—all of us freshmen males could get drafted. We were waiting for our draw—you know, to know what our lottery number would be. And so there was a lot of intense conversations in the dorms late at night about war and peace. And I was always the person on the extreme pacifist, extreme nonviolent, civil disobedience kind of camp. But I knew that I was— I was afraid to die. And I had this idea that I had to address my suffering in some way. And so when I was a sophomore, I started practicing, meditating twice a day, and—and that—then that just became the flow that I entered into and never left.

Well, after two years in college, I dropped out, which was kind of a normal thing to do back then. And I went hitchhiking around and traveling around the country. And I ended up in—visiting a farm. It was called The Farm. It was America's largest hippie commune.

LEAH CHASE: The Farm was founded by Stephen Gaskin in the early 1970s after he and approximately 60 caravans set out from San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury on a four-month cross-country tour. By the time Gil encountered them, they had settled in Louis County, Tennessee with nearly 700 residents. The community espoused a kind of spiritual practice rooted in the concept of right livelihood, following principles of nonviolence, veganism, and organic farming.

GIL FRONSDAL: Suddenly the spiritual—what was spiritual became interesting for me. And I was so impressed by people could be so honest. They had—they were wise about how they worked through things. They had all—there was conflict. They would spend sometimes hours talking about it until they found a way through. They—some of them, you could see the people had been doing it for a long time, had gotten really skilled at it. And all they had to do was kind of wink at each other, and they all understood what was happening. And they’d all calm down.

LEAH CHASE: This was in part because The Farm had a seminal text around which its philosophies were constructed: “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” by Shunryū Suzuki, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center.

GIL FRONSDAL: That book was such an amazing experience to read because I couldn't stop reading it. But I had the feeling that I couldn’t—that I knew everything that he said in the book. I just didn't know I knew it. I was like, “Oh, yes, this makes sense. This is right.” And so the first chance I had, I went to the San Francisco Zen Center to check it out. And I thought—I was there for two weeks—“This is what I want to do. This is the right thing for me.”

And so by the end of those two years of sitting there, it became really important for me what was happening for me in meditation. And it wasn't that I wanted to meditate more. I wanted a way to find the integrity that I felt in meditation. I wanted to find how to do it in daily life.

[one voice chanting]

LEAH CHASE: Gil joined the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, an American monastery off the coast of Big Sur. It was founded by Shunryū Suzuki in 1967 as one of three Sōtō Zen practice communities that comprise the San Francisco Zen Center...

[group chanting]

... the other two being the City Center in San Francisco and the Green Gulch Farm in Marin County. Secluded in the remote wilderness amongst mountain valleys and natural hot springs, Tassajara was an ideal haven for aspiring monks training in the Sōtō Zen tradition.

GIL FRONSDAL: So I went there in January, middle of the winter. I think I was really happy to go. At first I was a bit intimidated by it, and I thought they were really strict. So then the first time I overslept one morning, I thought—I thought they were going to kick me out. I thought I really had broken the major rule. And to my surprise, no one ever said anything to me.

But I loved the lifestyle. For me, I felt that monastic life was the perfect lifestyle. I was totally into it. I felt absorbed. I loved all the meditation. I loved the work, I loved the community. I didn't need a lot of community, but in the monastery you have just enough. It's like a village. And so I felt well held by a community, and I had teachings, and I got to do wonderful hikes in the wilderness on my days off. So I was really happy there. Other people there have all kinds of challenges, but I was kind of tailor-made for that kind of life.

And then after a year in the monastery, I decided that the way I want to address the suffering of the world is through Buddhism.

LEAH CHASE: Gil was eventually ordained as a Sōtō Zen priest through the San Francisco Zen Center in 1982. Around the same time, he was invited to study and practice Zen Buddhism at a monastery in Japan. But first he had to get a visa in Bangkok.

GIL FRONSDAL: So I had a ticket to Bangkok to get the visa and coincidentally had the address of a meditation monastery outside of Bangkok that did vipassanā. I didn't know what that was for anything. And I wasn't interested in Theravāda, but I was interested in seeing what they did there. So I showed up and said, “I'm waiting for my visa. Can I stay here until the visa comes and do a retreat?” And the Abbot gave me a little hut kind of on the edge of the monastery, and I was supposed to meditate all day long, and then each day come and see him. And it took me ten weeks to realize that the visa wasn't coming.

And so my first introduction to vipassanā meditation was a ten-week silent retreat. And I needed that. That got my attention because I got more concentrated, more still inside than I ever had in Zen. Because the longest you sit in Zen is one week at a time. And I touched something inside that was so important for me that I felt like there was nothing else that mattered anymore in the world but to touch that place again.

LEAH CHASE: It was around this time in the early 80s, while studying with the Burmese teacher in Nepal, that Gil met American students Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg. These two, along with Jack Kornfield, were inspired by their Theravāda teachers in Asia to start a meditation retreat center in the U.S. In 1976, they purchased a Catholic novitiate in Massachusetts as a venue for their study and practice. This was the Insight Meditation Society. Today, the IMS is credited as one of the first institutions to popularize vipassanā meditation in the West.

After receiving ordination as a Theravāda monk in 1985, Gil returned to the United States. From there he moved around a bit, spending time at the San Francisco Zen Center, the Insight Meditation Society, even returning to Tassajara to serve as a senior monk.

GIL FRONSDAL: And when I finished that, I had done ten years of intensive monastic life. And I'd finished something— something had finished with me. And it didn't feel like it was appropriate to go back into a monastery again. But I had no career. I had nothing to do.

So I went to the University of Hawaiʻi and got a masters, and it was like a kid in a candy store. I hadn't actually—hadn't done much studying in all those ten years. And there I got kind of introduced to the texts, to the basic ideas of the tradition. It was really fun.

LEAH CHASE: This newfound interest in academic study led him to apply to the Religious Studies PhD program at Stanford. He was accepted, and in the fall of 1990, he officially enrolled.

GIL FRONSDAL: Yeah, I was using partly that time at Stanford to try to understand better what had happened to me, especially in the monasteries. To understand what we were doing there, how it worked, the role of the rituals, the role of the teachings, the way that people got transformed, how faith worked, how blind faith worked, how the teachings worked and the relationship between what's being taught, and the difference between the rhetoric— what's being taught—and what people actually do. These were all kind of very interesting topics that helped me understand what had happened in those ten years. So Stanford was kind of— helped me with a lot of self-reflection.

LEAH CHASE: There was one thing in particular that Gil learned from his time at Stanford that would form the basis for his dissertation: the difference between rhetoric and practice.

GIL FRONSDAL: In Burma, the rhetoric was, “We just do mindfulness. We don't do concentration.” But the whole monastic environment was set up to help people build their concentration. And it turns out that concentration is very important for people doing insight. But they don't say that in their rhetoric. So I also saw that there is a tendency to overemphasize the rhetoric, overemphasize the spoken or written teaching as like, “That's where it's at.” But actually a lot of what's really happening is not in the teachings but is in the practice environment, the lived life, the relationship between people and what people actually do.

LEAH CHASE: This shift from a regimented monastic order to an individualized heuristic approach to meditation practice is one of the defining characteristics of the American vipassanā movement. Before 1970, vipassanā meditation was rarely taught in the United States. Instead, interested students traveled to Asia to study under Buddhist teachers like Mahasi Sayadaw and S. N. Goenka, and upon their return to the States, established their own institutions focused on meditation and silent retreats. Removed from its Southeast Asian religious, cultural, and social contexts, vipassanā meditation adopted a uniquely Western structure organized around values of freedom and individualism, something more spiritual than religious.

With the founding of the Insight Meditation Society in 1976 and its West Coast sister location, Spirit Rock, in 1981, vipassanā meditation’s popularity rose to new heights. There was no longer such a big push to uproot oneself and travel to Asia to receive a spiritual education. Now, the next generation of vipassanā teachers were being trained right here in America. Gil was one such teacher, training under Jack Kornfield at Spirit Rock.

GIL FRONSDAL: When I started at Stanford in 1990, there was a small sitting group in Palo Alto that maybe 12, 15 people came on Monday nights to meditate together and listen on cassette tapes some Dharma talk that they had. And because I was in the teacher training with Jack Kornfield, I was asked to come and be the teacher for the group and to give the talks live.

And so I remember the first thing I thought, “Well, let's have a half-day retreat.” And so we did it at, in the fourth floor of the—back then, the Aerodynamics building at Stanford—in a conference room there. We got it for free from someone. And then, “Let's do a day-long. Let's do a class on Buddhist, like on the precepts. Let's do a class on loving-kindness.” It just kind of—this is how these people can expand and grow. So at some point, I realized there was a little bit of surprise, after many years that, in my role as a kind of a leader, a teacher of a group, part of my job was to have vision. And so I became kind of a visionary. And then as it grew, the visions got bigger and bigger.

LEAH CHASE: Over the course of the next six years, Gil helped expand the group in Palo Alto, with attendance growing from 12 to 15 people in 1990 to 40 people in 1993. Eventually, they held their first residential retreat in 1994 at the Jikoji Zen Center in the Santa Cruz Mountains. A host of new programs were implemented, including mindfulness meditation classes, loving-kindness and sutta study, and youth programs.

Then in 1997, two very important things happened. First, the group, officially named the Insight Meditation Center and colloquially known as the IMC, was incorporated as a nonprofit organization. This would lay the groundwork for the purchase of a meditation center in Redwood City, the building we know as the IMC today.

The second was Gil's dissertation defense. Titled, “The Dawn of the Bodhisattva Path: Studies in a Religious Ideal of Ancient Indian Buddhists With Particular Emphasis on the Earliest Extant ‘Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra,’” it examined the scholarly emphasison the philosophical side of the “Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra” versus what it revealed about the historical community that composed it.

He writes, “The bifurcation of Buddhism into faith versus philosophy has resulted in the scholarly neglect, not only of the devotional dimension of the early bodhisattva movement, but also of the affective tone of the bodhisattva’s way of life. It is unlikely that Indian Buddhists bifurcated the devotional and philosophical dimensions of their religion in the same way that many modern scholars have done. In order to understand the movement as a whole, we must include in our study its devotional elements, its relationship to Buddhas of the past, present and future, its relationships with texts and stories, the role of merit, the religious differentiations among its participants, the immediate and final religious goals for the bodhisattva practitioner, and the various normative religious practices within the movement.”

This call to investigate the relationship between the devotional and the philosophical mirrored the spiritual and scholarly pursuits in Gil's own life.

GIL FRONSDAL: So I had these two tracks parallel in Palo Alto. And so that represents kind of how these two streams of my life, they both have been important for me. I felt that they—they're in conversation with each other. They're an important part of each other. And I didn't want to have people only do practice because then it— it's too easy to become lopsided. And I didn't want to only do study because that's also lopsided. But I saw the possibility of having both together And so there was I had this vision of, of an integrated, holistic, Buddhist world culture that we were creating—we were trying to create, so we can meet people and support them in all aspects of their life.

LEAH CHASE: In addition to the IMC’s incorporation as a nonprofit and Gil's dissertation defense, there was one more important event that would significantly impact Gil's practice and teachings.

GIL FRONSDAL: So in 1998, I also had—my wife and I had our first child. And that was a big sea change for me in my understanding because, as I said earlier, monastic life was relatively easy for me. Parenting was not. And so I began to—I had to look at my attachments, my sufferings in a whole new way in these challenges of parenting and family life.

Before I had kids, I thought the answer to everything was just let go. And after I had kids, I thought, “That's naive.” You have to meet the situation. There's complex—complexity, psychological, family dynamics. There's so much going on there. And so, as I started being a parent in the years—the early years of being a parent, I had no time to prepare talks. I just was tired a lot. It was challenging. And I thought that my talks were getting worse and worse. People liked them more and more because they were more relatable. They were—they—I was talking about what was going on with family life and kids and and people felt, “Now, now Gil's talking about my life too.”

LEAH CHASE: In 2002, the IMC bought a church in Redwood City which had once belonged to the First Christian Assembly. You can still see traces of its Christian aesthetics in the Center's architecture. The tall windows in the meditation hall, for instance, used to be fitted with vibrant stained glass. The rapid growth of institutions like the IMC clearly demonstrates a mounting interest in eastern spirituality in the West. But the question still remains: what exactly is it that brings people here?

GIL FRONSDAL: Well kind of what brings everyone to Buddhism, I think, I mean the simple—simplistically it’s because they're suffering. That's the—somewhere, somewhere in there, that's the reason people come to it. Why people come here might be because it's kind of Buddhism lite here. So we don't hold— it's not a heavy duty Buddhism. It’s not like a lot of devotion or dedication to faith, or you have to believe something. There's not like you have to have a particular relationship with a teacher, and I’m not wearing robes. I’m not asking people to chant. So it's very accessible and very open. And I'm very cognizant we're in an urban area where people's lives are busy and challenged in all kinds of ways.

Well, one of—and one of the big aspects that’s changed from Theravāda Buddhism is we’re kind of a religious tradition now, a religious spiritual group or something that's lay-centered. And for Theravāda Buddhism, that's relatively rare.

LEAH CHASE: Theravāda Buddhism has been imported to the United States in a variety of different forms, and not all of them are necessarily lay. According to Gil, there were over 1150 Theravāda temples servicing migrant communities of Thai, Lao, Cambodian, Burmese, and Sri Lankan practitioners as of 1998. Unlike Western vipassanā centers like the IMC, these Theravāda temples have monks and nuns who provide teachings and rituals for the laity in their native language. On the other hand, vipassanā teachers like Gil are lay teachers, who invite practitioners to engage in meditation on their own terms, acting only as guides. For Western practitioners, vipassanā meditation is central; for Theravāda temples, it is but one of many practices.

Additionally, Theravāda, as it has manifested in Western lay communities, has taken on a distinctly secular expression, engaging with the vipassanā meditation as a therapeutic practice rather than a religious one. The Theravāda doctrinal framework, with its tenets on rebirth and monastic renunciation, is therefore de-emphasized in favor of four basic principles: mindfulness, loving-kindness, ethics, and generosity. This secularization affords practitioners of the IMC with greater flexibility, allowing them to approach Buddhist practice and philosophy without renouncing any preexisting political, religious, cultural, or material affiliations.

GIL FRONSDAL: Westerners in California and in the United States are—we're living in a psycholo— psychologized culture. So that's the domain. That's the way people talk, the way they understand each other. So one of the strengths of the insight movement as it developed was how much psychological understanding that they could incorporate into them. It's also the weakness. And so it tends to reinforce some of the unfortunate side of the psychological self that has developed in the West, and in some ways, in some ways, at times even accentuated, the very hyper-individualism that people can have because of the individual focus.

I think it's useful to distinguish between secular mindfulness and Theravāda mindfulness because secular mindfulness has a lot of benefit, but there, in some ways, it's almost being used to reinforce some dysfunctional Western values or reinforce a dysfunctional Western kind of idea of self.

LEAH CHASE: Regardless of the pros and cons, the popularity of vipassanā in Western society, for all its preoccupations with wellness and self-improvement, is undeniable. Psychotherapists espouse the many benefits of mindfulness for treating clinical depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues. Self-help authors write guidebooks on mindfulness in the workplace, mindful parenting, stress management, addiction, relationships, money, and the many trappings of our modern reality. Software developers create apps that offer guided meditation, and AI therapists conduct personalized sessions from your phone, laptop, or even your car. In pursuit of living in the moment, people have turned to this secularized practice as a refuge from suffering in their daily lives.

GIL FRONSDAL: So there's pluses and minuses in all kinds of ways of practicing, but our plus and minus is, is to give people a lot of space and ability to tailor-make their practice. How much they practice, how they, you know, how they practice, how they sit. People, they—not today, but sometimes people will lay down here because that's the only way they can meditate.

LEAH CHASE: In 2010, Gil published “A Monastery Within: Tales from the Buddhist Path,” a collection of vignettes inspired by his monastic life that reflect and instruct on spiritual living. “After ten years, I discovered that the essence of monastic life is not found at the monastery itself, but rather in the qualities of kindness, clarity, and wisdom cultivated through that life. When a person has adequately developed these qualities so that they become guides to further spiritual growth, then we say that he or she has created ‘a monastery within.’”

GIL FRONSDAL: What I like to teach here is we're supposed to all become our own teacher. So when I—when I teach, I have that in mind. I'm trying to help people become their own teacher. So they're not requiring a teacher. They're not requiring the group in order to find where that practice is. They carry it with them.

I think that my general wish is for this place to offer something for everybody. And so you—that's impossible to do, but the idea is to try to make people who want to come and practice, to find a way to accommodate and hold everyone. So it's very satisfying that we have people who are brand new and new who come—never been meditating. And we have people here who are Buddhist monks, you know, who have been serious— practicing for decades. And they all find a way here.

But it also requires having a lot of different programs. So we have programs for experienced students. We have meditation retreats for really experienced students. We have things for new people. And so to have the full range and variety, and that’s our, kind of our wonderful good fortune is we've been able to build up this big curriculum and opportunities for people that a lot of people can find what they need here. And as they grow and change over the years, they just switch from one part of IMC to another.

LEAH CHASE: The IMC is the first of three institutions that Gil has founded. The others, the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies and the Insight Retreat Center, were established in 1996 and 2012, respectively. Together, these independent yet mutually supportive institutions constitute what Gil calls a “balanced Buddhist culture.”

This culture and the institutions supporting it reflect the foundational Buddhist principle of the Three Treasures. Based in Santa Cruz, the Insight Retreat Center represents the Buddha, emphasizing simplicity, renunciation, and realization through silent meditation retreats ranging from one day to one month. The Sati Center for Buddhist Studies represents the Dharma. Much like a seminary or graduate program, it offers a variety of curricula for study and reflection on the Dharma, from online courses to one year chaplaincy programs. The Insight Meditation Center represents the Saṅgha for its commitment to community, service, and practice in daily life.

GIL FRONSDAL: We do—all kinds of people come here. There was this old, sweet, probably homeless woman who came, would sit here on the floor to meditate with us. But she would have con—quiet conversations with her friend that was sitting on top of her shoulder out loud. And I made it clear that we just hold this person. That's okay. Our practice can include that as part of our mindfulness, not tell her to go or tell her to shut up. She's come to a safe place. So we opened—we're just going to include her too.

Sometimes we have—I tell people who have newborn babies, “You can bring your baby here.” If there's babies crying a little bit, that just opens people's hearts. If it's sobbing and the floor is shaking, maybe take it outside. And then some people here will complain, “There's this baby making baby sounds there, and cooing or crying, and this is terrible.” Our practice is to be open and practice with what's here, not—and be inclusive—not to have to have pristine conditions for it.

For many years, we met at the Friends Meeting House in Palo Alto. I loved it there. When you're in it, it doesn't draw any attention to itself. It has no photographs or paintings. It has no statues or crosses. It's very plain and simple. It's not ugly, but it doesn't draw attention to itself.

LEAH CHASE: In Buddhist temples, the main halls are generally adorned with prominent religious iconography: altars with various offerings, candles, and incense burners. But the IMC is different.

GIL FRONSDAL: So it makes sense in the—in that religiosity to have the Buddha, you know, such a big Buddha. Probably the comparable thing for us is freedom. And so what do you use to represent freedom? Maybe nothing. But nothing is a difficult teacher.

[music]

[Prologue]

MILES OSGOOD: Welcome to “The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford” podcast. Come join us by the tree.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar]

Should we be asking more of the pills that we take? There’s a dark-red pill you can get for free, and in bulk, that, according to its distributor, will protect you from SARS and COVID-19 just by wearing it around your neck. If you ingest one, one of these pills may purge you completely from the inside. Another may induce a psychoactive vision of gnostic knowledge that dwells within you. And one study claims that the taste alone is enough to liberate you from this world.

The distributor promising these miracles is the Office of the Dalai Lama. The study comes from the eleventh century, out of the Nyingma School in Tibet. And the medicine in question is the maṇi (or “jewel”) pill, an edible pellet consecrated through tantric liturgy and distributed throughout the world to this day in little plastic bags.

Depending on which century of commentaries you search through for the recipe, the maṇi pill is a compound made from the flesh of a body that has been reborn seven times as a Brahmin, or from the essence of the compassionate activity of Avalokiteśvara himself, or even from the excretions of the living Dalai Lama. 

For the scholar, the maṇi pill also mixes other materials that we otherwise tend to keep at arm’s length. It is both a tributary gift and religious relic, a political symbol and a spiritual talisman. Its history entangles the material and the philosophical, re-combining what academics sometimes divide as the “culture” of religion and the “core.” 

That may be why scholars haven’t closely studied these pills—at least until our guest today first held them in his hand.

JAMES GENTRY: “The pills often receive very little explanation. So that’s something—I mean, the opacity of what this is, to me, or my lack of understanding of what that is, really compelled me to figure out, ‘Why am I receiving these? What do these do?’ And so you can see that this, kind of, has flowered into a whole lifelong study actually—this kind of curiosity.”

On the podcast today, we’ll hear about the results of that study, and the book that sprang from that curiosity.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]

We’re recording from the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford, and I’m your host, Miles Osgood. 

My guest today is James Gentry, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies here at Stanford, and a specialist in Tibetan Buddhism and its Tantric traditions. 

James was previously on the faculty of the University of Virginia and an instructor at the Rangjung Yeshe Institute’s Centre for Buddhist Studies at Kathmandu University, where he was director of its MA program in Translation, Textual Interpretation, and Philology. From 2015 to 2019, he was also editor-in-chief of the project 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha.

James received his PhD from Harvard in 2014 with a dissertation on “Objects of Power” in 16th-century Tibet, and subsequently published Power Objects in Tibetan Buddhism: The Life, Writings, and Legacy of Sokdokpa Lodrö Gyeltsen with Brill in 2017. In 2019, he was the editor of a special edition of the Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines (the Tibetan Studies Review journal) on “Tibetan Religion and the Senses.” 

More recently, James’s study of Himalayan material culture and intellectual history has produced articles on sacred amulets and their boxes, the “Cannibal King” Kalmāṣapāda, and the “color” of Buddhahood in “Great Perfection” theory, in venues that include the Journal of Contemplative Studies, the Rubin Museum of Art, the Routledge Handbook of Religion and the Body, and the Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. 

We’re here today to talk about his forthcoming monograph, The Bodhisattva’s Body in a Pill, which will be published by University of Virginia Press this coming spring. 

So with that, let’s head into the library.

[bell chimes]

MILES OSGOOD: My guest today is James Duncan Gentry, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies here at Stanford and a specialist in Tibetan Buddhism and its tantric tradition. James was previously on the faculty of University of Virginia and the Rangjung Yeshe Institute's Centre for Buddhist Studies at Kathmandu University where he was director of the MA program in Translation, Textual Interpretation, and Philology. From 2015 to 2019, he was Editor-in-Chief of the project "84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha." James received his PhD from Harvard in 2014 with a dissertation on "Objects of Power" in 16th-century Tibet, and subsequently published "Power Objects in Tibetan Buddhism" with Brill in 2017. In 2019, he was editor of a special edition of the "Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines" (the "Tibetan Studies Review Journal") on "Tibetan Religion and the Senses." And more recently, James's study of Himalayan material culture and intellectual history has produced articles on sacred amulets and their boxes, the Cannibal King Kalmāṣapāda, the "color" of Buddhahood in "Great Perfection" theory, in venues including "The Journal of Contemplative Studies," "The Rubin Museum of Art," "The Routledge Handbook of Religion and the Body," and "The Journal of the International Association of—Association of Buddhist Studies." And we are here today to talk about James's forthcoming monograph, the cover of which you can see here, "The Bodhisattva's Body in a Pill: The Material and Spiritual History of a Buddhist Relic Tradition," which is coming out with the University of Virginia this coming spring. So welcome, James. 

JAMES GENTRY: Thank you so much, Miles, for having me. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, we're very excited about this. So I've gotten the chance to read the introduction to the book, which is exciting to get that preview, and it opens with a nice detail about a contemporary ritual that continues to be practiced by the Office of the Dalai Lama, where little baggies of red maṇi pills are distributed to—to Tibetan Buddhists. And that's an origin point or a starting point for the book, but it sounds like it's also been an origin point and starting point for your own Buddhist Studies, your own research: that there was a point where you were traveling and researching where you were handed one of these bags and had to think about what that meant over the years. So could you take us back to that moment as a way of introducing yourself, and tell us about why you were there, what you were interested in, and how that maybe pushed you into the research direction you found yourself in? 

JAMES GENTRY: Yeah, absolutely, Miles, thanks so much for the question. Yes, I guess it goes back to a little over 30 years ago, if you can believe that, when I became very interested in Buddhism and especially meditation. So for me, my interest in Buddhism started really as somebody who wanted to learn how to meditate and to really get into the tradition that way rather than through a sort of scholarly approach. So, you know, not knowing that there were Buddhist centers—I mean, that was pre-internet really, in a way. And not knowing that there were Buddhist centers in my neighborhood, I thought I had to travel all the way to Asia actually to— (laughing) to meet meditation masters. So I did that, and I backpacked around Asia and, you know, met Tibetan lamas. And when sort of getting introduction to meditative practices—and especially in the tradition of the "Great Perfection," where the emphasis is really on mind and the nature of mind—I was struck by something that happened always in those encounters, those teaching encounters, that after getting all of these really quite impactful meditation instructions that I could then go and, you know, take with me and start practicing, I would be given an amulet or a little baggie of pills and wasn't told much about them. But the same lama who gave me the meditation instructions then said, "You should take these pills or you should wear this amulet, and these are very, very important." And so this kind of struck me at first as something that was maybe part of a cultural tradition, which it is of course, of Tibetan Buddhist culture. But I really was struck by "Why?" I mean, I just couldn't understand why I needed to take a pill or wear an amulet and how that had anything to do with the mind instructions that I was given. So that sort of drove me to think through the relationship—and I mean decades later that really resulted in trying to peer into how embedded they are with one another and looking into the textual tradition and the history of these traditions, seeing that was in fact the case. So it was—kind of set me off on a journey, I suppose, and trying to figure out what those material cultural elements had anything to do with the Buddhist tradition as I had kind of, you know, construed it or thought to appreciate it. 

MILES OSGOOD: ... understood up to that point. Yeah, that makes sense. So I think we'll probably spend a good deal of this conversation answering that question "Why?" by way of your various research. It sounds like that's been the animating question, but I wonder if maybe we should stop and pause on the "What?" first of all. Sort of: what are these objects? They, you know, fill out the book "Power Objects in Tibetan Buddhism." You talk about stone cairns, you talk about sand maṇḍalas, you talk about text amulets, and I know you've brought some things in for us today that you've collected that you can maybe describe, talk about, and show for us a little bit. So yeah, can you tell us about the "what-ness" of these various physical objects that were handed to you or that are handed to other adherents? And maybe what they might indicate about a history? 

JAMES GENTRY: Yes, yeah, absolutely. I guess I'll start with the very first peculiar, at the time, object that I was confronted with, and I'll just reach down here and get it because this is actually it. Back in 1994, as I was leaving Hilltop Hermitage in Kathmandu, that was owned I suppose you could say by a really famous Tibetan lama who's since passed away. We were all—everyone in attendance was given this little booklet. So what this is is—it's the—it's called the "Only Child of the Buddhas Tantra," and it's an actual tantra, a tantric scripture that's, you know, been printed in—it was printed in Hong Kong, and in gold on blue paper, as stipulated by the tradition that goes all the way back to the 12th, 13th century, and distributed to everybody in the audience after receiving these "Great Perfection" or "Dzogchen" mind instructions. And so we were all told, “Okay, well this is really the encapsulation of the teaching that we had received, and we should just wear this.” We weren't taught about it per se, or told to recite it, but in researching it, I learned that there is a tradition of reciting it and even hanging it on the bodies of the deceased. And there's funerary practice associated with it. And it describes the path of—the contemplative path of what's known as the "Heart Essence" or "Nyingthig" tradition of Buddhism... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... which is about eliciting visionary experiences of indwelling wisdom in order to reach Buddhahood. So there's a lot more to it. But that's part of another study that I'm doing at the moment: the history of this and other things like it. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, fascinating. So it sounds at some level that even if that wasn't explained to you, you'd be able to intuitively figure out, "Okay, I'm carrying a scripture around with me, tantric scripture, something I could recite, something that I could imagine conferring blessings by nature of having some sort of content." Are there other things that require more, kind of, conceptual, abstract, (laughing) artistic interpretation to make sense of? 

JAMES GENTRY: Yes, very good question. That would be these kinds of things in here. I don't know if you can see the tiny little pills there, but—and really getting no instruction whatsoever on what these are—but this is one of the, I suppose you could say, units of—gift units that you would receive when meeting a Tibetan lama in a traditional context, or even maybe here in California actually. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: So go and meet a lama and ask a question, and you might get a little baggie of pills... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... and a string to tie around the neck or the wrist, some kind of—and the string is often described as, "Okay, this is protection." The pills often receive very little explanation. 

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm. 

JAMES GENTRY: So that's something—I mean, the opacity of what this is to me or the—my lack of understanding of what that is really compelled me to figure out, "Why am I receiving these?" "What do these do?" 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: And so you can see that this kind of has flowered into a whole lifelong study actually (laughing), this kind of curiosity. 

MILES OSGOOD: And is your sense that, that gen... that people living in Tibet who, you know—maybe their, you know, parents and ancestors would have also been familiar with this ritual—kind of have an intuitive sense or a cultural sense of what the pills are? Or is there a kind of deliberate sense of mystery withheld from the giver to the receiver? 

JAMES GENTRY: It's both. There is a sense that people know what they are, that they're sacred pills. They're "dutsi" in Tibetan or they're "damdzé," which means “sacred substance” or even kind of “binding substance.” There's sort of two meanings to that term. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: So there is a sense culturally that... It's highly valued. And there's a sense that they are coming from the lamas. Now the sense given to that—whether that's literally, you know, the bodily products of the lamas... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... or that's something that lamas are producing, is somewhat murky...

MILES OSGOOD: Okay. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... and it's not always known. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, yeah, and partly the reason that I ask is that one thing that I was really struck by when I was reading "Power Objects," and I think this comes up as well in the new book, is that it seems as though the kind of religious or cultural prestige or esteem that these objects have has also waxed and waned a little bit within Tibet. That, you know, you talk about Guru Chöwang in the—in the 13th century, you know, creating the sort of maṇi pill tradition out of a, out of kind of a hybrid of multiple different sources— and we can get into that— and then being criticized by trans-sectarian scholars in the following centuries. Or Sokdokpa Lodrö Gyeltsen in the 16th century, then being disclaimed fully as a “charlatan” by the fifth Dalai Lama after having done this kind of ritual master practice. So I wonder, you know, has the knowledge been gained and lost over generations or reclaimed and revived as Tibetans themselves have kind of had varying attitudes towards this practice? 

JAMES GENTRY: Yeah, yeah, thanks for that. I would say that the actual practice of producing pills and distributing them, you know, among wider audiences and consuming them has been fairly constant over the centuries. But who is perceived as the purveyor and the producer of the most potent pills... 

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... and the ways in which those pills are produced... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... the valences given to them, the practice associated with their production: those kinds of things have been hotly contested over the centuries by different sectarian groups or individuals who want to be perceived as producing the most potent pills. 

MILES OSGOOD: Oh, I see. 

JAMES GENTRY: Or, you know, those doctrinal elites who use Buddhist doctrine to kind of critique what they regard to be as excessive promises or claims of soteriology connected with those pills. Like, for example, the idea that you could just consume one and be delivered to a Pure Land. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: Or put one into the mouth of an animal or a deceased person, and they could reach awakening in the next lifetime, or what have you. So these kinds of claims have been contested doctrinally, but really I think everyone was really—they were quite... I don't know, negotiating with one another over, you know: who could be perceived as having the most powerful pills and which institution could be in charge of producing those and distributing those. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: So in that sense, it's been fairly constant, but there have been many shifts historically because of these, I don't know, contestations. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, I’m curious about the doctrinal side of it. I mean, certainly that aspect of sort of, you know, power games and, you know, who gets institutional esteem, where the religious hierarchy lies: that all makes sense. The reason the doctrinal side of it, and the sort of philosophical side of it, is of interest to me is because I know you've wrestled a little bit with other critics who also worry that this kind of fixation is maybe at odds with the sort of more philosophical, intellectual way that we might approach Buddhist Studies more generally. That this, that this—all this kind of attention to material culture or to, you know, power objects with their, you know, supposed karmic or magic, you know, possibilities are in some way less rigorous or less "core" to what the religion really offers for meditation practices, for philosophical awakening. And it seems like this is a battle you've had to fight with contemporary scholars— like this is maybe a battle that has existed in Tibet in some form or another among the scholars of the living practice, but I—but it seems like maybe in the academic world it exists as well. Is that right? 

JAMES GENTRY: Yes, I would say absolutely. In terms of the role we should give them as scholars... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... whether to take them seriously as deserving of scholarly attention and— or whether we should kind of divert our attention or sort of focus more on what are considered to be, you know, the real "meat" of it, sort of the doctrinal issues, these kind of, whatever, big ideas. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, so what is the status now of sort of the study of material culture and the study of philosophical culture and what they have to say to each other in maybe Buddhist Studies in the last 10 or 20 years, or the time that you've been studying? 

JAMES GENTRY: Major shift has taken place really. And I would say over the last 30 years. So Buddhist Studies has really moved toward the material pole. And I guess that really inflects the larger sort of material turn in the study of religion that we're seeing across the study of religious traditions. 

MILES OSGOOD: Mm. Mm-hmm. 

JAMES GENTRY: But there's been a renewed interest in Buddhist Studies, you know, in studying things like the body and relics and places, pilgrimage places... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... and different kinds of material practices. But there's still— and I would say there's still a kind of shadow of bifurcation between the so-called "elite studies"— which are still on—ongoing—you know, philosophical studies, doctrinal studies—and the study of material culture and artistic production and so forth. And there's little effort to kind of bring these together or integrate them... 

MILES OSGOOD: Right. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... holistically. I mean, it's still the case that when I tell some colleagues who are old friends—and I value their work in philosophical studies—that I'm going to give a paper on an—on an amulet, for example, in a Buddhist philosophy panel, that they roll their eyes and sort of say—oh, you know, they stop themselves short of saying "Not this," you know? "I can't believe it." Like it's a sort of sign of the degenerate age or something that we're talking about that. 

MILES OSGOOD: So one answer to that seems to be to say that, "Okay, the shift is—the shift is already happening, "and it's not just happening in Buddhist Studies, "but generally we've realized "that this is a neglected feature "of religions around the world that is just important." But it sounds like you're also saying that there's some value here in terms of integrating how we should understand what we have treated as purely intellectual or philosophical or spiritual with material practices that have always been tied up in them to begin with. I mean, we go back to your original story and say: you go on a pilgrimage, you go meditate, and you get handed this object. They are part of the same event, and they seem to be about the continuation of the work that you're doing that is spiritual or meditative. Is that right? So what do the "materialists," as it were (laughing), have to say, you know, back to the sort of philosophical side of religious studies in terms of what benefit this is to them? 

JAMES GENTRY: Often, I think at least, the two uncritically accept that bifurcation and say, "Okay, well we're doing something "completely different, "so now we're really going to pay attention "to the material side of things and how important that is, and the cultural and the social and so forth and so on." And rather than kind of push back against the dichotomy and, you know, take a step back and rethink the dichotomy between the elite and the popular, the doctrinal and the material, and these kinds of... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... these kinds of dyads that sort of mark the field. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: So I think there's, there's still room to sort of push back on that—on that bifurcation. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, interesting. And you mentioned the elite and the popular there. So it sounds like once you start to take bits away from one dividing line, there are other axes as well that feel a little bit less rigid, a little less rigid, or a little less... yeah, severe. 

JAMES GENTRY: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, one of the things that comes out of my study— because I study these things textually and not ethnographically, I think— is that I see that the... the great luminaries of the tradition actually were absolutely concerned with these things and writing a lot about them. So it's not that they're sort of somewhere in the corner in the tradition. They're front and center concerns for the main figures that are also studied philosophically and doctrinally. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, so this material culture is already a philosophical, scholarly culture in its own, in its own time. Yeah, that makes sense. 

JAMES GENTRY: Absolutely. 

MILES OSGOOD: So all this— all this leads really nicely into "The Bodhisattva's Body in a Pill," where you're thinking about a thousand-year history of an object, but also a thousand-year cultural, intellectual, philosophical history as well. What was it that motivated you, having already talked about, a little bit, the "seven-times-born Brahmin" idea and "flesh pills" a little bit in "Power Objects," that this particular object and this particular tradition needed—needed a new book, (laughing) and not maybe the pages you'd already sort of touched on it or approached it in your earlier work. 

JAMES GENTRY: Yeah, that really, it came out of Sokdokpa: so, this figure that I studied for my first book, for my dissertation. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, tell us about him a little bit. 

JAMES GENTRY: Really fascinating figure. And in that period that he lived, in the late 16th, early 17th century, there were a lot of crises going on institutionally, and you could say in terms of sectarian strife. So there was a sense in which history became a focal point. So figures like Sokdokpa and others were writing a lot about tradition and trying to kind of reconfigure what it means going forward. So then writings from that period—not just Sokdokpa, but others—are really incredible lenses through which to kind of look to the past. So they give us a lot of source material, and they actually historicized the past themselves. So it was really following the leads of Sokdokpa Lodrö Gyeltsen and others of his time period, like the fifth Dalai Lama and other figures who were maybe not in agreement all the time, that sort of led toward thinking— rethinking, "Oh, well, does it go back the way they say? "And can it be, is it sourced? "Are these traditions sourced in other kind of earlier traditions and where does it go?" And sort of just following the threads basically and kind of pulling at them... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... led to a sort of, I don't know, a kind of revelation after revelation in terms of where the pill tradition started and how far it could be traced back. And I had no vision of it at all as something that you could really tie together... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... as a sort of discrete set of traditions or even a discrete tradition... 

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... that could be historically traced. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, so by way of one scholar, you get the invitation to go look at a thousand years of history and see how well interconnected it is. And so, you know, I wonder about the slant that— you mentioned he historicizes it in a particular way— and the slant that he gives it. And then what, you know—the ways in which you feel you have to go through the scriptures and correct the record or just establish kind of what that history was. Because the other thing that Sokdokpa, you mention, is fixated on, at a moment of crisis, is protecting borders in various ways... 

JAMES GENTRY: Yes. 

MILES OSGOOD: ... personal borders, spiritual borders, but also political borders. Does that inflect the way he thinks about what the pills are doing in his time? And then do you have to round out other things the pills meant at different times? 

JAMES GENTRY: Absolutely, absolutely, because in his time, the valence, the main valence of the pill for him was about power and, you know, martial power essentially. 

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm. 

JAMES GENTRY: So one of his gurus was said to be a seven-times-born Brahmin, you know, whose flesh would be efficacious in turning back Mongol armies... 

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... if a—if a stūpa with his body interred were created at a particular geomantic juncture, you know. So that didn't happen. And so he attributes the Mongol invasions to that, that issue, that his students instead took his body to Bhutan. 

MILES OSGOOD: Oh, okay, so, "You didn't follow my advice and therefore..." (laughing) 

JAMES GENTRY: Yeah. 

MILES OSGOOD: "... and see, I was right."

JAMES GENTRY: Yeah, yeah. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: So then I had to look to other periods of time and what the pill uniquely meant in those other time periods for different individuals, you know, struggling with different issues. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, so could you take us through what were some of those things? What did it mean at different moments? 

JAMES GENTRY: Yeah, for—well, the pill tradition, as we know it today, really started in earnest in the 13th century with a figure named Guru Chökyi Wangchuk, or Guru Chöwang, that— a lot of people know of him as one of the great treasure revealers of Tibetan history. And he was contending with, also with Mongol invasions actually. So that was the—really the rise of the Mongol period... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... the Yuan dynasty and the Mongol invasions in the 13th century. But with that came sectarian strife as different Tibetan institutions were trying to play off different Mongol factions to further their institutional prestige. And that, you know, at the same time period, there were epidemics, there were natural disasters and basically social fragmentation. So his perception of the time period was one of decay... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... moral, ecological, political, and religious. And so for him, as far as I see it, the pill was about bringing people together, essentially. So he created temples at, you know, marketplaces and popular pilgrimage places and sponsored mass pill production and consecration rituals to which he invited not just Tibetans of all walks of life, but also Chinese and Mongolians and other people. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: And yeah, different sectarian persuasions, and men and women, children, the infirm, everybody. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, and so maybe this is the point to ask: why a pill? And like what is it about a pill in particular? So you mention decay and you mention epidemics, and from our modern perspective, we think therefore, "Okay, yes, a medicine." But you also mention sort of political danger and invasions and whatnot. A pill doesn't seem necessarily the most obvious (laughing), you know, solution to all of that. So what is it—what is this object supposed to be? 

JAMES GENTRY: Well, the 13th century, I think— an important context for this ... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... is the 13th century was also the period when Tibetan medicine became much more pervasive across the plateau. So it's with the rise of Tibetan medicine and pill production overall... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... was something that, you know, people were quite aware of. And with Mongol invasion and a lot of traffic through Tibet, there were epidemics. So a lot of people were experimenting with different remedies and things like that. But a lot of people were dying. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: So this particular pill, the maṇi pill, is not so much for physical healing, but for access to Avalokiteśvara's Pure Land. 

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm. 

JAMES GENTRY: So the way that the ritual looks is thousands of people gathered saying the mantra actually, and not just "Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐," but with "hrīḥ" added to it. That was his special innovation to add a "hrīḥ" to the six-syllable mantra to create the seven-syllable mantra… 

MILES OSGOOD: ... which means altogether? 

JAMES GENTRY: Oh, it's—"Oṃ maṇi padme hūm hrīḥ"? It has a meaning. But I mean, I guess roughly you could say that "maṇi padme hūm" just... "Oṃ" is sort of just, I guess you could say beginning the mantra... 

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm. Right. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... and has so much meaning that we could really go on forever about it. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: But "maṇi" means "jewel." 

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm. 

JAMES GENTRY: "Pema" or "padme" means "lotus" and "Oṃ maṇi padme hūm," the "hūm" is just another capstone mantra that has—that's loaded with meaning. 

MILES OSGOOD: Right. 

JAMES GENTRY: And the "hrīḥ" again— and these are things that— they're "seed syllables," the "Oṃ," the "hūm," and the "hrīḥ" connected with particular deities. 

MILES OSGOOD: I see. 

JAMES GENTRY: So the "hrīḥ" is considered to be linked with a particular form of Avalokiteśvara. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: And so it doesn't really have any sort of Tibetan meaning, but Tibetans wouldn't really necessarily appreciate it as having any discursive meaning. 

MILES OSGOOD: Got it. But adding extra emphasis or doing kind of what the "Oṃ" and the "hūm" were doing at some level... 

JAMES GENTRY: Yes. 

MILES OSGOOD: ... with something added, yeah. Okay, so, okay, so we have this pill that gives us some kind of access to Avalokiteśvara and the Pure Land that is not just a medicine, but some kind of grander protection and grander, maybe, soteriological salvation. Then—and that's in the 13th century. What is the fate of the pill going forward? What are other key moments for it? 

JAMES GENTRY: Well, one of the aspects of the pill that Guru Chöwang developed is that he combined medicinal substances with it that would've had purgative effects. 

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm. 

JAMES GENTRY: So we're talking mass rituals, people taking the pill at the culmination of the ritual together, and either having an induced vomiting or diarrhea experience basically that would be— would be indexing karmic purification. So you can imagine a kind of scene and this vulnerability that we create and kind of tantric commitments that would be received at that— so binding people together in that sense. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: So moving forward to the 14th and 15th century, some of those elements change. The purgative medicinal element was toned down, and it entered the monastic sphere basically. So we have it operating as a kind of interface between monasteries and the wider laity. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: And that enabled it to cross sectarian boundaries and also kind of regional boundaries. 

MILES OSGOOD: And this seems like a big part of the thesis of your book, right? Is that we might imagine that when you have the experience, as you had, of going on your own meditation practice, looking for something personal and being handed these pills, that fundamentally what they are offering you is something personal and individual about your own meditative practice, about your own karmic salvation— however you want to think about it. But what you're seeing throughout history seems to be something that is more social, more about—more political, maybe even more geopolitical— about the ways these pills bring people together. Is there—is there something— is there some way that—like what would we say about that in the contemporary moment? What social role does it seem to be playing now? 

JAMES GENTRY: Hmm, yeah, I think a really important one for Tibetans in diaspora... 

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... and in Tibet still... 

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... because this is a tradition actually that the 14th Dalai Lama, the current Dalai Lama, started to do again in exile. So it was revived, essentially. And it was something that was done in Tibet, but then there was a kind of cleavage. And so it was reintroduced in the diasporic context not that long ago, a few decades ago, to... I mean, you could say for doing a lot of things. But one of the—I mean, it's, they're highly valued by Tibetans, basically. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: So Tibetans in Tibet are not really permitted to carry photographs of His Holiness, for example. So maṇi pills function as a kind of surrogate for representations of his presence, his photographic representations, because they're consecrated by him. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: So they're in a sense, considered a concentrate of his salvific, beneficial power. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: So, I mean, you can go on eBay actually, and they're being sold, but the Dalai Lama gives them away for free. So they're produced annually in the month of "Saka Dawa," the Tibetan, the fourth month, which celebrates the awakening of the Buddha basically and other things. But then they're distributed free of charge, and there's just hundreds of thousands of them. And so people line up, and you can actually see, there's footage available on YouTube of the event when they're first made available. And they are truly some of the most prized items that you can bring friends when you visit China, Tibetan friends who want them, or Tibetan friends who live in Toronto or Tibetan friends anywhere around the world. So to me, they have this function of, kind of, in the absence of any actual state authority, sort of reviving in a sense the, you know, the traditional prerogative of the state... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... in extending the blessing of the Dalai Lama... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... healing, blessing of the Dalai Lama to the Tibetan people. 

MILES OSGOOD: So it sounds like in fact, you're invited or at least welcome to gift the pills further forward, and thereby kind of extend the social reach of who is in this community together, tracing their— tracing back to the compassion of Avalokiteśvara or back to the body of the Dalai Lama, and thereby having some kind of node in common from which—from where these pills came. Is that right? 

JAMES GENTRY: Absolutely, absolutely. So it's a kind of social network that's created through that. But then I think that's rooted in, you know— you can sort of think back historically to these big consecration events... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... some of which were attended by, you know, thousands and thousands of people actually, and lay people and people from all walks of life in Tibet. And they would culminate with actually ingesting the pill together. So you can see—I mean, this kind of commensality that that is, in a sense. And then the—just the tantric commitment that would be bestowed upon them that they share. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: And so it's this kind of a global extension of that, I would say. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, yeah, what a new life for that to take: to have, you know, the ability to disperse itself around the world, not only as pills, but almost as seeds, as opposed to the thing that you take a pilgrimage for to go and ingest and leave there, as it were— so different than the way that we often think of relics and reliquaries and maybe stūpas, where you have to go to a particular place and worship it there, and therefore join the community there, but rather, yeah, to allow something to spread outward. 

JAMES GENTRY: Absolutely, yeah, the portability of it is— it really transformed the way that— the kind of function that it can have, I think. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, wow, okay. So an ongoing life and an ongoing set of mutations of meanings, it sounds like. Well, one thing that I wanted to close on was to ask you a little bit about where your own research is heading and mutating. You mentioned when we talked before that, you know, as part of your work kind of combing through these archives, overseeing perhaps as an editor translations that are happening, participating in your own translations, you just get deep into the records of Tibetan Buddhist scripture that maybe, you know— some of which maybe have gone lost. And, you know, I'll let you tell this story and this research a little bit more for yourself, but just to tease it a little bit: that there's long been a consensus, you know, against the sort of snooping curiosity of the West, maybe, that, "Oh no, Tibetan Buddhist or Buddhists generally "didn't have an interest "in the kinds of meditative experiences that maybe, you know, "Americans were trying to combine with psychoactive drugs "in the 60s and beyond. "That's just something we're projecting backward and imagining that they might have done." But no, it turns out: actually maybe there are attempts to have tried and experimented with those kinds of experiences dating to the 13th and 14th century. So could you tell us a little bit about what you found and where you're headed with that research?

JAMES GENTRY: Yeah, thanks very much for that. I just presented on this actually at a conference at University of Virginia this last weekend. So it's, yeah, very exciting. You know, funny—it's that, it's a commentary on this tantra. 

MILES OSGOOD: Hm. 

JAMES GENTRY: So the tantra that's in this amulet. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: There's a commentary on it that's attributed to a figure named Garab Dorje, who can be dated to quite early: sixth, seventh century. But I'm pretty sure it's actually from the 13th, 14th century from text internal evidence. And there you have pill recipes for— the way it's put is to eradicate attachment to the senses by disrupting ordinary sensory experience. So the way that these pill recipes go is that you gather together ingredients, bury them until fungi form, and then cultivate that fungi and form pills out of them and take them with the expectation that your field of vision transforms. Yeah, so there's—there’s considerable evidence that contemporary meditators or modern meditators have taken psychoactive substances that are available, you know, on the Tibetan plateau or in India to kind of test their realization, the stability of their realization. And so we find this in biographical and autobiographical materials from the current age, but there's been this idea, yeah, that nobody did that as an integral part of the Buddhist path actually, that that's something that we're, yeah, imposing, as you said, from our vantage point: it's a kind of anachronism. But yeah, the text, this— the commentary on this “Only Child of the Buddhas Tantra”... 

MILES OSGOOD: The amulet we were looking at before. 

JAMES GENTRY: Yeah, the amulet that we were looking at, this blue and gold amulet, stipulates precisely that we are to, you know, gradually induce visionary experiences that lead to sort of grander visionary experiences that index an indwelling gnosis within our bodies. But that as a preparatory phase, we can cultivate fungi and form them into pills and take them. And it's quite interesting because the visionary experiences to be induced from the fungi map to the ten "kasiṇas" of the Pali tradition. So this is sort of ten, you could say, concentration practices where you take one or another object as a focal point— like earth and water— and the elements are there, or certain examples of the elements and colors— and focus on them until your entire field of vision is transformed into that as a kind of way of gaining mastery in concentration meditation. So these sort of psychedelic versions of it that we find in Tibet, map quite closely to those in the details. But you're using a fungi to kind of elicit the experience rather. And it's—and you're not supposed to stop there necessarily, but this is where, as the text puts it, gradually kind of training oneself or cultivating oneself in the visionary experiences that index a kind of indwelling wisdom towards awakening. So they're framed as precisely integral to the Buddhist path... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: ... in ways that we thought were just not present in the traditions. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. But it sounds like it's another way of training yourself or opening yourself up to different kinds of mentalities as opposed to something that you return to over and over again. You're not doing the fungi-based pills every time to reattain the same experience. Is that right? It's more to get a glimpse. 

JAMES GENTRY: Yes, yeah, that's exactly how it's framed as something that you know, that you do as a preliminary. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JAMES GENTRY: If it's difficult to elicit the visions without them, you can do it to kind of get a glimpse into what's possible. 

MILES OSGOOD: I see, and you talk about other experiments too that are related to this, right, in terms of using sensory deprivation. Maybe these are other access— other ways of kind of playing with the visual. So what other things have you discovered there? 

JAMES GENTRY: Yeah, that is kind of part of the mainstream tradition, as it were, of the “Heart Essence,” of the "Great Perfection" where you would—and sort of the fungi cultivation and ingestion is framed as something as a preliminary to these sorts of visionary experiences— where what you do is you do sky gazing, sort of at oblique angles to the sun and manipulating, you know, your eyes and using masks and so forth. Or complete sensory deprivation where you just stare into the pitch-black darkness in a special enclosure in order to elicit the same visions. And sometimes you can alternate between these or create sort of gray rooms that are sort of dappled light in order to manipulate light sources to create visual effects. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. Yeah, wow. And one more way in which the pill has been used and conceived—and things you could put into the pill it sounds like that I hadn't even realized. Well, that's fascinating. So it sounds like from power objects to the pill and then on to this, there is more to this history to be uncovered, there are more to these texts to be uncovered. And so we all look forward to hearing about that, to seeing how that talk evolves into more published work. Well, thanks so much, James, for doing this conversation with us and sharing all your research. It's great to have you with us and to have you around Stanford. 

JAMES GENTRY: Thanks so much, Miles. I really appreciate it.

[Epilogue]

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

Thanks again to James Gentry for joining the show. You can now pre-order The Bodhisattva’s Body in a Pill from University of Virginia Press online. And check out the first few minutes of the video of this interview on YouTube if you want to see close-ups of the maṇi pills and the text amulet.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]

We always close with Ani Choying Drolma’s chant of “Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐,” as recorded at Stanford in 2017, but today maybe you’ll listen to it and imagine a seventh syllable, the “hrih” that James mentioned. 

As you heard, that seventh syllable was the addition of Guru Chöwang, to invoke Avalokiteśvara and the seven-times-reborn Brahmins, for the mass pill consecration rituals of the 13th century.

Until next time, this has been “The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford” podcast.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]

[Prologue]

Welcome to “The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford” podcast. Come join us by the tree.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar]

One of the primary fixations of many Mahāyāna sūtras is how they will spread, and who will spread them. From the first to the sixth century CE, a title for the ideal teacher begins to repeat itself: the dharmabhāṇaka, or “dharma-preacher.” 

Eloquent and creative, skilled as a performer and an exegete, authorized by Buddhas and protected by gods, the dharmabhāṇaka appears almost mythical—so much so that scholars who study dharmabhāṇakas wonder whether these are even real historical figures. But that question itself might be holding us back.

RALPH CRAIG: So I said, “Well, what if we stopped asking a purely historical question and start to think more thematically, and we start to take seriously what Mahāyāna sūtras say about those idealized figures, who would convey them: right, dharmabhāṇakas.” But then I needed language for that. I needed a way to think through these figures. I needed traditions that have a sustained history of studying figures of religious authority, of studying preachers, have language for studying sermons, homilies, right, etc. And that is why I started to look further afield.” 

“Further afield” might mean comparing the Buddhist dharmabhāṇaka with the evangelical Christian preacher. But it also might mean leaving the temple or the church altogether, and joining the congregation of a different arena. If the ideal “dharma-preachers” are those dynamic, commanding performers who propagate Buddhism to the biggest crowds, then one of the star dharmabhāṇakas of our time—or, as you might put it, “simply the best”—was Tina Turner, the “Queen of Rock & Roll.”

RALPH CRAIG: Tina Turner spoke about, and considered her life’s mission—from her own words, right? She considered herself to be a dharmabhāṇaka. You know, she didn’t use the language, but she considered herself to be somebody who was using her life and career to spread Buddhism. 

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]

We’re recording from the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford. 

I’m your host, Miles Osgood. 

My guest today is Ralph H. Craig III, Assistant Professor of Religion at Whitman College in Washington State. Ralph started his academic studies at the New School in New York, majoring in Global Studies at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, before completing his B.A. at Loyola Marymount University in Theological Studies. He came here to Stanford to do his doctoral work in Religious Studies, with an interdisciplinary focus on South Asian Buddhism and American Buddhism. In 2023, he defended his dissertation: “Preachers of the Great Way: The Dharmabhāṇaka in Mahāyāna Buddhist Sūtras.” This will be the subject of his forthcoming monograph.

Ralph is a rarity among scholars in that he also completed a first book during his PhD: a “spiritual biography” on the Buddhist conversion and teachings of Tina Turner, titled Dancing in My Dreams (published by Eerdmans in 2023). So we’ll be talking about both that book and the thesis in the conversation to come.

On these topics and others, Ralph has published articles in Buddhist-Christian Studies, American Religion, and the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, with public essays in Lion’s Roar and Tricycle magazines. Prior to his current position at Whitman, he was a Lecturer at Dartmouth College, and next year he’ll be a Numata Visiting Scholar at Princeton, where he is also a member of “The Crossroads Project” on “Black Religious Histories, Communities, and Cultures.”

For now, we’re glad to have him back at Stanford, and at the Ho Center. 

So let’s head into the library.

(bell dinging) 

Welcome back and thanks so much for being here.

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Thank you. It's good to be back. And I want to thank you right off the bat for your thorough preparation. 

MILES OSGOOD: (laughs) 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: I'm very excited. 

MILES OSGOOD: Oh, good. Well, no, that's very nice of you, thanks. Well, all right, so let's get into it a little bit. The "dharmabhāṇaka" theme makes me want to ask, as you introduce yourself to our audience, about preachers and teachers, maybe, in your own background, that might have meant something to you on your path to religious studies, turning you on to this field, getting you prepared to be a speaker and teacher in your own right. Who stands out as models of instructors in your past?

RALPH H. CRAIG III: That is a very good question, and as I was thinking about this—I was thinking about, I'm from New Orleans, Louisiana. I was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, and New Orleans has a strong funeral—funerary culture. We have these big "second lines" and jazz funerals, and funerals are a big to-do. And so some of the first people that I was conscious of thinking about as teachers of a kind, as authority figures, as great orators, were actually not preachers but funeral directors. And there were a number of women who were funeral directors, and there were a number of men, and I would—they were just so dignified. And they would—you know that kind of small rows at a funeral in a church. They were kind of a master-of-ceremony kind of thing. And I was always impressed by that. And I wanted to be a mortician. That was my childhood dream. (Ralph laughs) I wanted to go into that. I wanted to—I just thought it was both poignant—I wouldn't have said that as a child. 

MILES OSGOOD: Sure. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: But I just—as I got older, I thought it was so poignant, but also a very dignified thing. Aside from that, I knew this pastor, Reverend Murphy, had a big impact on me. He was a very kind of slow preacher, you know? He was kind of methodical, and I was very into that kind of thing. But then there was the home. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Right, so there were all these people at home: my mom and... Some of them were educators: my nanny, Miss Blanton, she was an educator. And so these were people who, they would sit and they would do—read the Bible with you. Read, do math problems with you…

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: ...do all of these things. So, to me, I always saw religious authority,

preaching, teaching, as a part of the same kind of authoritative position holding. And that had a tremendous influence on me. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, it sounds like you're meeting folks who are doing exegetical work,

pedagogical work... 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: (nodding) 

MILES OSGOOD: ...ritual work of various kinds. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Yes. So you mentioned Reverend Murphy and the funerary rights.

What kinds of denominations were you witnessing, or what kinds of traditions were you witnessing, and were you already a comparativist at that moment saying, "Here's how this church does it. Here's how this denomination does it"?

RALPH H. CRAIG III: I like that way of putting it, a comparativist from the—Yes, because most people in New Orleans are—or many people in New Orleans are Black Catholics, and—but there is a strong, obviously Baptist contingent. And in my own family, the majority of my family is Catholic, but there's a strong missionary Baptist contingent to the family. And there are a few Black Pentecostals in my family as well. So I went to all of them. Whoever's house you were by, that's what church you went to. So you're by your cousins, and they were going to mass: that's where you were going. Or if they were over mass, and we were going to—to Sunday school, that's where we were going. And of course, I was noting the differences as a child. I don't—I wasn't so much thinking formally, comparatively, but I was thinking about the very real differences in the affect, and the actual behavior of congregations. What was acceptable? What—what does the—what is the ritual? What does the liturgy mean in this context? What's expected of me as a—or also my family—as a congregant in one kind of space versus another. In a Catholic setting where you're supposed to stand up, or there's a set ritual, and there is a bodily practice at play, where you stand at this time, and you sit at this time, and you do this and that. Whereas in a Baptist church, you're expected to respond. You know, think of like a "talk-back audience" or "call-and-response audience." So if you sit in a Baptist church, the way you do a Catholic  church, and just kind of quietly take it in, the preacher feels that they're doing—something's not right.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: So all of this I was paying attention to throughout much of my life.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, great. So not just the practices of whoever is at the pulpit, but the practices in the pews. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Right. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, absolutely. So tell us a little bit about how then your interest was piqued by Buddhism and maybe the Sōka Gakkai International in particular. How did that come into your view? 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Yeah, I was—I had read the Hermann Hesse novel, "Siddhartha," and that is very—that's an interesting text because it's not really—it's not about Buddhism.

It just uses the Buddha's life as a frame story. But I was very moved by it when I first read it. And the main character said—you know, Siddhartha said, "I can think, fast, and wait." And I was obsessed with that. I would run that line through my mind like a mantra. Anything I wanted, anything I thought about, I was like, "If I can think, fast, and wait, I can do it." Right? And so I went and told my mother, I want to be—I want to learn more about Buddhism. I want to study Buddhism. And my mother was like, "Okay, why not?" Right?

That was the beginning for me, and when I started to research different Buddhist communities in New Orleans, Sōka Gakkai was one of the most prominent. You know, it's pretty small. It's not hard to visit all the Buddhist communities... 

MILES OSGOOD: (laughing)

RALPH H. CRAIG III: ...in New Orleans. And Sōka Gakkai was one of them. So that's how I first started to go and learn what they were about. And then I discovered that they have this—this tradition of African American artists, practitioners, kind of major figures: Tina Turner, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, people like that. But then I also started to learn about this greater story beyond Sōka Gakkai, of Japanese Buddhist traditions in America. Some of the first Japanese—some of the first Buddhists in America, some of the first are Japanese Buddhists. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: And the establishment of these communities, both in Hawaii and then in San Francisco, et cetera. So I started to learn this kind of greater history, right? And then came to find out how these kinds of communities, these Japanese Buddhist communities, are often written out of the history of Western—or "Western" (air quotes)—Buddhism, American Buddhist traditions, et cetera, et cetera. They're often written out of these histories, and there are particular reasons for that. So all of this started to come together for me in my research. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, okay. Fascinating. So this makes me want to ask a little bit about the kind of continued presence of a kind of Christian theological understanding and background and Buddhists in your studies. Because as you were coming into graduate school, I understand, like, you had this publication that you were working on that ended up appearing in the "Christian Buddhist Studies Journal" where you're thinking about Nichiren and the "gongyō" and Christian liturgy together. Then you keep going in your dissertation work and you've got—you're using the medieval Catholic "artes praedicandi"... 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: ...as a way of thinking about what the "Lotus Sūtra" is then saying about the "dharmabhāṇaka." 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Yeah. 

MILES OSGOOD: And then you keep going, and you say that there's something about specifically the Afro-Protestant church and the exhortation to kind of "make it plain"... 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: ...that explains the exegetical work that's also being done by these Buddhist preachers back at the turn of the first millennium. And I'm mindful all of that, but also of the fact that early in your dissertation, you acknowledge that there's a potential worry there of a history, an Orientalist history, of kind of imposing a kind of understandable Western framework for Western audiences on an understanding of Buddhism that could persist even in sort of neocolonial projections.

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Yeah. 

MILES OSGOOD: So you're clearly thinking about that. You're open to worrying about it, and yet it has such a productive role, it seems... 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Yes.

MILES OSGOOD: ...in your published research, in your dissertation. So tell me a little bit about how you—how you thread that needle or think about the utility of that comparative glance. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Yeah, so with the Nichiren work, and in the work of Karl Rahner, which I was looking at in that first publication, I became struck by the idea that liturgy teaches you, right, how to be. That the liturgy tells you what to think, what to do, how to form yourself. So liturgy and self-formation go together, right? Liturgy and self-cultivation can go together. And so as I started to think through Rahner, I started to think about his theology of symbol, right? And I started to think of Nichiren along the same lines of like, "How does the practice of 'gongyō' as understood "in the Sōka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhist community, "how does that practice—"Is there a similar work of symbolism there? Does the liturgy function in the same way?"

MILES OSGOOD: Can you talk us through that a little bit? Like what are some of the symbols in both contexts? 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Right. So what, for example, Nichiren's inscribing of the calligraphic maṇḍala that is often called the "gohonzon" or the "honzon," right? Where "honzon" means like object of devotion. So in many Nichiren Buddhist traditions, not all, but in many lineages of Nichiren Buddhism, the "gohonzon" is a calligraphic scroll. So it's not necessarily a statue or something like that, or even a painted image. 

MILES OSGOOD: Got it.

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Like a thangka in Tibetan traditions, for example. It's not that: it's an inscribed—there's calligraphy with the "Daimoku," the title of the "Lotus Sūtra" down the center, and then other characters representing either Buddhas and bodhisattvas and this kind of thing. And so that, for Nichiren, is the embodiment of awakening: it both depicts a scene from the "Lotus Sūtra"—like the ceremony in the air in the "Lotus Sūtra"—was kind of a cosmic moment, where Śākyamuni and then "Many Treasures Buddha," you know, Prabhūtaratna, comes up and his stūpa comes up and the congregation gets lifted up, right,

and all of this. And Nichiren embod...he inscribes the "gohonzon" as a graphic representation of that, right? As that is the awakened state. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: So this as a symbol then of the awakened state: how does it function for Nichiren? That was like my driving question. And how out of this does Nichiren construct a con...a… an anthropology, right? How does Nichiren understand the human being in a liturgical context? That's what I was getting at there. But that work in Buddhist Studies, I found—the way that many have thought about, for example, Sādhanās in like Tibetan tantric traditions, rite practices or—studies of ritual texts and ritual manuals. No one was really asking the question that I was most interested in. Their work was touching on it, and I was drawing on the work of these phenomenal scholars in Buddhist Studies. But no one was really asking what I wanted to know right, in the way that I wanted to know it. 

MILES OSGOOD: Sorry, and so what was that—was that the relation between symbol and self, or...? 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Right. Between symbol, liturgy, and self-cultivation, and how a particular Buddhist tradition—in this case, Sōka Gakkai's understanding of Nichiren Daishōnin—how that tradition understands the person as being formed by the liturgy, right? So the way a liturgy is constructed is it tells you what is worth worshiping. What is worth saying? What is worth doing with your body? When the liturgy says, I pay homage to Nichiren, the Buddha of the latter day of the law, or the liturgist telling you how Nichiren is being conceived of, how you should think of him. And what should be your relationship to him, namely as a being as someone who pays homage to him? Liturgy does this work. Right? But in so doing, it also tells you something about how that tradition understands the human being, right. That the human being has a relationship between themself and the Buddha, for example, as mediated by the "Lotus Sūtra," in this case. So Nichiren says that every character—some 69,000 or so characters of the "Lotus Sūtra"—Nichiren says that every character is a Buddha, right? So when you pay homage to the sūtra, you pay homage to every character. That's telling you something. And these were the kinds of questions I wanted to ask.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, okay. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: But you're absolutely right, and I have this methodological discussion in my dissertation—there is a risk of taking… First of all, we have to think about Christianity and Buddhism are these two different traditions. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yep.

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Then some of the material I'm drawing on from Christian studies is from the late antique period, right? For Buddhist material, I'm talking about, you know, ear(ly)—the pre-modern period, the kind of turn of the Common Era and this kind of stuff. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: So is it appropriate to apply categories from one context to another? If we do it carefully, right, there can be something methodologically fruitful there, right? In Buddhist traditions, studies of religious authority, like of preaching—despite how many Mahāyāna sūtras talk about the figures who would disseminate these texts and exhort others to become bodhisattvas who spread the teachings—there are very few studies, right, based on Mahāyāna sūtras about figures like "dharmabhāṇakas." Now for some scholars, I think that the issue becomes: it is not clear the extent to which "dharmabhāṇakas"—what their historical social location was. Were these actual figures? Right? We have travelogues from Chinese pilgrims that do seem to have met some of the preaching scenes they described. Seem to match. But does that mean that these "dharmabhāṇakas" were actual historical figures? That question has hung up I think many a scholar. But this is where I think we have to bring in the work of a scholar like Jan Nattier who says, "One thing that we know, we may say that these texts are normative texts." And she has done phenomenal work to show the kind of normative claims that are being made in these texts, and how those claims actually present a very different Mahāyāna than many people think... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: ...than like popular conception. At the same time, what Jan Nattier points out is that one thing we know these Buddhists did was construct normative depictions, right? So whether, even if it's only a normative depiction... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: ...and was never maybe actually done—

MILES OSGOOD: Like an ideal individual? 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Right. These texts created those ideas. Real people created those ideas. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

RALPH H. CRAIG III: So what I—the work that I was doing in the dissertation was to leave the historical question aside, I think there have been many dissertations—

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Well, not that many actually, but a few key dissertations that have kind of looked at this history and kind of thought through this history. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. So I say, "Well, what if we stop asking "a purely historical question "and we start to think more thematically, "and we try to take seriously "what Mahāyāna sūtras say about "those idealized figures "who would convey them: 'dharmabhāṇakas.'" But then I needed language for that. I needed a way to think through these figures. I needed traditions that have a sustained history of studying figures of religious authority, of studying preachers, have language for studying sermons, homilies, et cetera. And that is why I started to look for further afield. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: And I was inspired in this work by a scholar named Stephen Teiser, "Buzzy" Teiser, who's at Princeton, who had an article come out in AAR's religious studies "Journal of the American Academy of Religion," on prayer. And why—is prayer an appropriate term to use for Buddhist practices? And he makes an argument for why even with the baggage of a term like prayer, it can be appropriate to use. He makes an argument for why that is. And in my dissertation, I sought to do something similar, right? To make an argument for why we should understand "dharmabhāṇakas" as preachers and think through them using categories and language... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

RALPH H. CRAIG III: ...drawn from traditions that have studied preachers. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, so, in a moment, we should just hear more from you about what the sūtras internally tell us about those preachers, you know, ideal or historical. But while we're on this question of sort of what other religions and their traditions of looking at this kind of category can do for us, I am curious about the fact that you cite, I think Natalie Gummer saying like, yeah, perhaps these "dharmabhāṇakas" are like the evangelical Christian priest. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Yeah. 

MILES OSGOOD: Does that seem right to you? 

RALPH H. CRAIG: (smiling) Yeah. 

MILES OSGOOD: Or would you refine that definition? Or how do you think about that comparison?

RALPH H. CRAIG III: I think that that's true. I think that the sūtras, many Mahāyāna sūtras imagine their "dharmabhāṇakas" as these charismatic figures who spread the dharma. Now my, some of the arguments that I make are different from the kinds of arguments Natalie Gummer makes. She's interested in different sets of questions. But we share this concern with "dharmabhāṇakas" and taking sūtra seriously when they talk about these figures. And I think that it—yeah, I think that she's right that there are ways in which they can be fruitfully compared to evangelical preachers, insofar as there is a concern with exhortation, a concern with evangelizing, a concern with spreading. I mean, many Mahāyāna sūtras, if they're concerned with anything, it's their own spreading, and then the figures who would do that spreading, right? Something I became fascinated with—and my advisor when I was at Stanford was Paul Harrison—something I became interested in that Paul Harrison has written about, that Natalie Gummer has written about, and other scholars, this self-referential quality of Mahāyāna sūtras that then makes it so that when the sūtras talk about these figures, when they talk about themselves being preached, and you read that... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

RALPH H. CRAIG III: ...or even speak it aloud or even read it, you are participating

and you are becoming a "dharmabhāṇaka" by definition, right? You are by definition doing what the sūtra has asked. And when the sūtra says, you know, "In 500 or a thousand years or whatever, that this message will be disseminated," here I am: I'm a professor in a college classroom (laughing) disseminating these sūtras. So I find that a very interesting thing. You know, when the sūtra says in the 500-year period of the last days, you know, after the Buddha's passing and this and that... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: ...the dharma will be spread. It's like, yes! 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: We're doing it! 

MILES OSGOOD: So we're going to come back to that. So there's the analog of the preacher, but then the analog of the professor and of professing in that respect. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: (nodding) Yeah. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, it does seem really—it does seem really interesting. So, okay, let's dig a little bit more into what you learned from within the sūtras themselves about the "dharmabhāṇaka," and you know, and then what you could take on yourself. So what was important to you to add to the discussion that you were seeing out there about these figures? What were you noticing in the selection of sūtras—Mahāyāna sūtras that you took on?

RALPH H. CRAIG III: The first problem, right, is what does "bhāṇaka" mean? This is heavily debated in the literature. It's clear grammatically what it means, right? Comes from a root, that just means "to speak." 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: "To recite," "to say." So there's nothing strange about that. So "bhāṇaka," one who speaks, recites, or says. The question though is, were "dharmabhāṇakas," historically, were they figures who merely recited the dharma? Literally recited the words of the sūtra? Are they, as some scholars have asked, are they figures who created the sūtras, right? Maybe through inspired revelation, maybe in some other way. But are they the actual authors of the sūtras? Or were they actual exegetes? Did they actually preach about the sūtras? In other words, not just recite the words of the sūtra, but expound on those words. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

RALPH H. CRAIG III: What I discovered what the sūtras themselves, often imagine, right—so I'm thinking particularly, for example, of the "Saddharma Puṇḍarīka Sūtra," the "Lotus Sūtra," right? So called "Lotus Sūtra." The Sūtra envisions more of its "dharmabhāṇaka" than simply reciting the text. It speaks of the "dharmabhāṇaka" giving sweet sermons, and it speaks of what their disposition should be and how they should take their seat before the crowd. Right. Many of these descriptions seem to imply that, at least from the standpoint of the authors of the sūtra—anonymous though they may be—at least from their standpoint, this is a figure that is imagined not as simply reciting the dharma, but preaching about it, expounding on it. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Now, preaching or expounding upon the dharma is but one of five or six practices in the standard list, right? Copying out the sūtras, reciting the sūtras, sometimes actually carrying the physical—bearing the sūtra, memorizing the sūtra, et cetera. So my argument is not that preaching is—in the dissertation anyway—the argument was not that preaching is like the sole activity described in these sūtras. One of the fascinating things about Mahāyāna sūtras is that they're almost these—and I say this in the dissertation, right—that they're, as a genre, they are almost these encyclopedic works that… It's like a "greatest hits." Almost as if to say, if you only had the "Lotus Sūtra," you only had the "Aṣṭasāhasrikā," "The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight (Thousand) Lines" or something like that. If you only had that manuscript on you or memorized, you would have the entirety of the Buddha's dharma. So there's material in Mahāyāna sūtras that reads like Vinaya text. There's material, you know, like monastic literature. 

MILES OSGOOD: Right. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: There is material in Mahāyāna sūtras that are basically jataka tales. These are past-life birth stories of the Buddha. There's material in Mahāyāna sūtras that read like "avadānas." These are kind of narratives that usually pull out some kind of karmic connection about the character that the Buddha is talking about. All of this in any given Mahāyāna sūtra. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

RALPH H. CRAIG III: So my claim is not that these sūtras are only about preaching, but just as people have centered—I'm thinking of the work of somebody like Bryan Lowe who wrote the book, "Ritualized Writing"—just as people have centered how sūtras exhort the copying of them... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: ...sūtras also exhort the preaching of them. And we should take that seriously. 

MILES OSGOOD: And it sounds like the preaching elements of these sūtras must be of a kind of preeminent importance, insofar as this is how that sūtra is going to get out into the world. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Right. 

MILES OSGOOD: This is how to think about it. This is how to properly expound upon... 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Right. 

MILES OSGOOD: ...how to read it, and then become maybe a "dharmabhāṇaka" in turn. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Right. 

MILES OSGOOD: Is that right? Yeah.

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Yeah. 

MILES OSGOOD: So it's playing this sort of, you know, metatextual role of allowing the importance of this text to grow. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Right. And the Buddhist tradition, I mean, many texts, not just Mahāyāna sūtras, it's about its own spreading, you know, the narratives of how Buddhism goes to Southeast Asia, how it goes into Central Asia, how it goes into East Asia, how it goes, you know, and then new chapters of that being written even today as diaspora communities, right, of Asian Buddhist diaspora communities that move around the world, and converts and all kinds of things like that. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Right. 

MILES OSGOOD: Sorry. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: So yeah. So this spreading...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG: ...right, is key. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: This spreading is key. So we should think through the labor of the figures who do that spreading. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, absolutely. Well, so you've used the phrase "greatest hits" in passing. [Ralph laughs] So I have to seize on that now and ask you about the other project that you were doing concurrently with writing this thesis. And it seems to be very much still on your mind, even as you're now moving to a book, which is "Dancing in My Dreams," the Tina Turner book. What was it that prompted you to take on this insane undertaking [Ralph laughs] of two books in one go in the same graduate student years, and did they complement one another? Or did you have to kind of go to different sides of your brain and different sides of your calendar to make it possible to write both?

RALPH H. CRAIG III: They complemented each other for me. So the one thing I want to say, you know—and this is a podcast for the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: I think my project—the two projects that I did were possible because I was at Stanford. And that is because there is a—when I was in the program at Stanford, there's a focus on doing the best work that you can, whatever direction that takes you. And so, in many ways, I feel that having been at the Ho Center at Stanford, you know, in Buddhist Studies at Stanford—and in the American Religion subfield as well—but in the Buddhist Studies subfield at Stanford: being encouraged to do actual humanistic work, to do research, right? And to see where that research goes. And so I could not have done the two projects, I think, if I weren't at Stanford. Being at Stanford then, right, it did not require two different parts of my brain. What it required was taking the research skills developed—so I read almost every year in Sanskrit, almost every year, and then, you know, other languages along the way. And so for any grad students out there watching this, take language classes every year, even when coursework is overlaying. Taking those same skills—for example, in other classes as well, but I'm talking specifically about language courses—that same skill, where you pick up a primary source and you learn to read it line by line. Close reading. You learn as a methodology, line by line, inside and out, interrogate it, ask questions of it

ask questions of the questions you've asked, you know, and pursuing that line, by line, by line to take that same methodology and to close read a person: in this case, Tina Turner's life from the perspective of religion. Analyze every interview, right, every writing of hers, everything: where is religion here? What does she mean by religion, right? How is religion functioning for her? What role is it playing in her career? She's also a business, right? Any icon—any figure like Tina Turner is also a commercial entity, right? So for her fans to go see her live, to buy her material, and she's talking about Buddhism in some of that material, right? Then that means Buddhism becomes a part of her commercial business. So how do we think through that? How do I understand that? It's the same skill.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Right. Just applied to now a different set of primary sources. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, wonderful. And then, you know, while you're doing that, there's the skill of poring over those texts and those materials and doing so in the classroom, perhaps. But you're also going on separate grant-funded trips, right? 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Yeah. 

MILES OSGOOD: You're going to Puna, India. You're going to Tennessee. Is the other project still kind of percolating in the back while you're kind of ostensibly, "I'm just here to study Sanskrit," or, "I'm just here to go into the census records, [Ralph laughs] you know, of Tina's family." Yeah, what's the process there? 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Yes. With the research trips, you know, I feel like one of the joys of being a scholar, you're always thinking and always jotting down little ideas. So things would strike me when I was in the archive you know, doing the research for "Dancing in My Dreams." Things would strike me, and I would say to myself, "I should read—I should look at—"now that I'm thinking about Tina Turner in this way, "I should re-look at how I'm reading chapter 10 of the 'Lotus Sūtra,' right?" And so, to give you an example of how these two projects overlap, chapter 10 of the "Lotus Sūtra" is called the "Dharmabhāṇaka-parivarta," the "Dharmabhāṇaka Chapter," the "Dharma-preacher Chapter." That chapter kind of describes what the preacher is like. But it has this very interesting moment that many scholars have written about where it says that these—those who come to—who preach the dharma, right, in the kind of final dharma age, if you will

final period of the world—that they actually are high-ranking bodhisattvas, who have the karma, the propensities, have done, have built the good merit, right, the good fortune to actually be born in other world systems, better world systems. Now, for those listening, our world system's called the "Sahā" world, the difficult world, [laughter] the question mark world, right? The world where everything is hard, right? But there are these other world systems, according to Buddhist cosmology—or Mahāyāna Buddhist cosmology. There are these other world systems where things aren't so hard, and things are much better. So the question becomes, why are these bodhisattvas in the "Sahā" world? If they've propitiated millions and trillions of Buddhas and carried out all of this practice, why aren't they in the good place, right? The "Lotus Sūtra," this chapter, chapter 10, provides an answer to this question. It says, "They, these beings who have come to preach the dharma, they've actually forsaken, they've given up the good fortune that they've built, right? They've forsaken the reward due them, and they've come to this Sahā world to do the work in the text says, "You should know "that they are the envoy of the Buddha. They carry out the Buddha's work." I also think that's very interesting. So as I started to think about Tina Turner and I started to think about the way she talks about her own life, right? What karma in past lives—I talk about this in chapter four of "Dancing in my Dreams," right? In chapter four, I talk about what karma as a notion and what past lives as a notion does for Tina Turner and her understanding of interpersonal dynamics and social connections, right, social, kind of sociality, the social sphere. And so I started to think that is actually very interesting that the way that Turner talks about, right, her relationship with Ike Turner. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: And what that relationship was, and why it was so difficult, and why she went through that, and from her perspective. 

MILES OSGOOD: Right. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: And thinking of this alongside chapter 10 of the "Lotus Sūtra," where it says, "These figures have built the merit "to be born in better circumstances, "but they have chosen to be born "to carry out in these harder circumstances...

MILES OSGOOD: Yes. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: "...to carry out the Buddha's work." So that's just one example of how projects overlap for me.

MILES OSGOOD: No, that's terrific. And so I'm going to pinpoint another one of those moments where the overlap is really explicit. Because in the acknowledgements to your dissertation, you have this really lovely final line where you dedicate the work to Tina, to Tina Turner, and you call her a "'dharmabhāṇaka' of the highest caliber." [Ralph chuckles]

And I imagine you don't use that kind of phrase and that term lightly. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Right. 

MILES OSGOOD: So what's the case? Like what should we see in her life that would merit that kind of title?

RALPH H. CRAIG III: That Tina Turner spoke about and considered her life's mission—from her own words, right—she considered herself to be a "dharmabhāṇaka." She didn't use the language, but she considered herself to be somebody who was using her life and career to spread Buddhism.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Right? Even when she wasn't talking about Buddhism. So there's a difference. There's a great scholar, Scott Mitchell, his book, "The Making of American Buddhism," right? He talks in chapter four, a little bit in five as well, about this, like, distinction that he draws from another scholar between "speaking about" and—oh, I shouldn't even brought up. I can't remember. But it's the difference between "speaking for" and "speaking about." And so even when Turner wasn't speaking, wasn't explicitly talking about Buddhism, she saw herself as talking about Buddhism, right? What if we take that seriously? And I think a lot of my work is driven by—again, back to what I was talking about—these reading classes. A lot of my work is driven by that training and that impulse to take seriously what's in front of me. You know, it's a very interesting thing. This is a bit of a tangent, but go with me on this. It's very interesting to me that there are many scholars—there are many who don't do this—but there are many scholars who actually read the material in front of them almost by not reading that material, right? By reading what's on the page and seeing what's there. And then said, "Well, that can't be, you know, this doesn't make it."

MILES OSGOOD: That doesn't fit with my theory or the thesis that I've devised. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Right. It doesn't fit with how I see it, that way. But I was trained to engage in close reading. I was engaged to—before you jump off the page—to start to read that page well. Every phrase. So I'll give you an example, right. In the phrase "evaṃ," right?

What is "evaṃ," right? Does it refer to what's coming next? Or does it refer to—so "evaṃ" means basically "thus," "as follows" or "as followed," right? Does it refer to what just came does it—or does it refer to what's coming next, right? Now you say, well, okay, well this is an adverb. Like it's okay, let's just let it go. But I was trained: no, you don't let it go. What is—If a sūtra starts with "Evaṃ mayā śrūtam": "The following was heard by me," "I heard the following." What is "evaṃ"? What is "māyā"? What is "śrūtam"? You think you know. But investigate, right? That's what's on the page. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: And you do that word by word, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, line by line, until you know what the page says. Then you can go off page. So my work, a lot of my work, whether it's on Tina Turner and religion and popular culture, and Buddhism and popular culture, on pre-modern Mahāyāna sūtras, it's the same process for me. And being in the archive, looking at kind of figures of American religions in an archive or looking at Buddhist manuscripts or something: the same question. I'm asking the same question. How can I see more carefully what is here? And then how can I understand what is here? 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, so I imagine that kind of close reading and then re-reading must be part of the project of now turning this work on "dharmabhāṇakas" into a book, right? Of going back over your own writing, going back over the sources of that writing. So in that process, are you finding that there is a new story to be told, new arguments to be made, new cases to be refined? [Ralph laughs] Where are you at in that process? 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Deep in the mud of that process. [both laugh] I'm finding—I think the overall arguments I made, I feel that those hold up. I think I am in the process now of more carefully ironing out some of the sub-arguments, right? So I have certain arguments in chapter two about aesthetics, about preaching traditions, how to understand this notion of—and we were talking about this before doing this podcast—"pratisaṃvid," you know, these kinds of—it's a technical term, right? What exactly—how to translate that exactly. I'm in the process of rethinking that. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. These four qualities that... 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Yeah, these four qualities. 

MILES OSGOOD: ..."dharmabhāṇakas" are supposed to have... 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Right. 

MILES OSGOOD: ...and how to  translate that or articulate that. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Right. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: How to accurately understand—again, we're that close, like what is, what's it actually trying to say? 

MILES OSGOOD: Do you want to give a try at it now? Is there a way you would describe those four qualities now to kind of lay listener? 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Yeah, for the lay listeners, it's fundamentally talking about the skills when we talk about preaching, you know. So, it's not only "dharmabhāṇakas" that are thought to have these skills, right? 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: But in my project, when "dharmabhāṇakas" are said to have these skills, they are essentially a set of skills, pedagogical skills, that enables a "dharmabhāṇaka"

to, in brief, understand the dharma and communicate that understanding effectively. Now, that's the simple version. But to actually unpack these descriptions to actually accurately translate them. And that's a kind of ongoing process. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, fair enough.

RALPH H. CRAIG III: It was never really satisfied. 

MILES OSGOOD: Well, okay, but I'm glad we've gotten to pedagogical skills, because I think the thing that I'd love to close with is just asking you a little bit, from prospective mortician now to assistant professor, [Ralph laughs] and as someone who's studying the work of, you know, exegetically and passionately and charismatically conveying knowledge, how this maybe has influenced your own teaching or how you reflect on your own time in front of a classroom? What there is useful? What's different in the circumstance of a university classroom that can't fit this model that you've been researching historically? Where do they align or disalign? 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Well, sometimes it feels like universities and colleges are designed to prevent the things that they want to see. But I think that they—I think any good—I think in many ways pedagogy is pedagogy, right? How do you speak and convey information in a way that your listener can understand? Sometimes on multiple levels at the same time. And definitely in the college classroom, like a congregation. So studying the—so studying the historiography, right? Especially the research I was doing for this Tina book, something I'm very interested—and this is true of any of many religious communities that I've had the opportunity to engage with, to encounter, to study. Everybody's there for a different reason, you know. Some people are there because they love the philosophy, right? Or there's this phenomenon of like "dharma talks," you know, at like Buddhist centers and things like that. Some people are there because they love the dharma, they hear philosophy. Some people are there for community. They don't really care about the dharma, you know? Some people just like, they just like, it's something to do: something that seems wholesome to do. Some people, they're there because their life needs to change. Definitely in the Sōka Gakkai Buddhist community. Like when I interviewed people who were there at some of their earliest meetings that Tina Turner attended. And I interviewed some of these people. So some of their stories are in chapter three and five—three, four and five of the book. They, you know, they describe how she came and she just, she sat in the back—it was very quiet—and just took it in, you know, and turned that into "Tina Turner," right? To from where she was when she left her ex-husband Ike Turner and the kind of, the disarray that her life was in and all this stuff. To becoming "Tina Turner," right? That's what she was getting out of this. Somebody else was going through something different. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that that's also true of the college classroom. There are students who were there—maybe few these days—who love the material, right? They signed up because they love it and they saw it was a class, an "Intro to Buddhism" class and they're taking it. "Buddhism and Pop Culture" class: they're taking it. Some students, it fulfills the distribution requirement, [Miles laughs] and it's the last class they could get into. Some students, they heard that you don't have any papers due at the end of it. Some heard that you have papers to due at the end of it and they know that they write well. Right? Some, none of the above. Some are straight-A students. Some are hovering somewhere around C and its cousins, right? [Miles chuckles] But they're all there. So how do you work to all of them being there? How do you teach all of them, right? Now, it is not—I do not consider it, as a teacher, I do not consider it my responsibility to reach everybody. I consider it my responsibility to reach anybody, right? So how do I teach in a way that that can happen? That something can happen. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: I think that is much the same work of—that any teacher, any preacher, anybody who's interested in their message being conveyed. And I just, I think, close with tying this, you know, back to even the Tina Turner project. As a Buddhist—Tina Turner once said, or is recorded as saying that, "I play to whoever's there. "If a hundred people are there, "if a hundred thousand people are there, "it's the same show, and I am the same Tina." Right? That, I think, is what a teacher is trying to do. And in many different settings, you know—as I researched for the book—in many different settings, Tina Turner tried to do—disseminate her understanding of Buddhism in ways that were germane to the person listening to her, but also germane to—also accurate to how she understood it. And in the same way, I am trying to convey that when I'm teaching, you know, my "Intro to Buddhism" class and my "this" class and my "that" class, I am trying to accurately convey to the best of my ability what I understand Mahāyāna sūtras, for example, to be saying, where I see that to fit in global histories of knowledge production and literary production. Right? And if I'm lucky, if I'm lucky, to also say a little something about what I think that can do for a student. What I think that learning this kind of literature and the religio-literary traditions of South Asia and East Asia and so on, what I think that can do, right, in their own self-formation.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. Well that's a perfect note to end on. What a story and parable: not only Tina's, of being the student at the back to the perfect teacher filling the stadium, but then what that means for you as a mission. Just, yeah, lovely, and so beautifully put. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Thank you. 

MILES OSGOOD: Thanks so much Ralph for doing this, for coming back to Stanford, for talking to us, for being on the show and for sharing that wisdom on all fronts. 

RALPH H. CRAIG III: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. And I want to say thank you to the Ho Center: Irene, Paul, John, James, Stephanie, everybody, you know. Thank you. I thank you for preparing so well for this. And we'll do it again. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, we'll do it again. That's for sure.

[Epilogue]

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

{video info}

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

Thanks again to Ralph Craig for coming on the show. 

If you want to learn more about Tina Turner’s Buddhist conversion, I highly recommend reading Ralph’s Dancing in My Dreams. We’ll be waiting for his forthcoming book on the dharmabhāṇakas, and we’ll be keeping an eye out, too, for an upcoming documentary reader on Black Buddhism, co-edited with fellow Stanford and Ho Center alum Adeana McNicholl. We’ll share more information about these titles when the details come out.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]

As always, the music for this episode is a recording from Ani Choying Drolma’s “Buddhist Chants and Songs,” performed at Stanford’s Memorial Church in 2017. 

Until next time, this has been “The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford” podcast.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]

[Prologue]

Welcome to “The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford” podcast. Come join us by the tree.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar]

In 8th-century China, Chan Buddhism had been on the rise for some two hundred years, but its core ideas and its sphere of influence were still in flux. 

What most distinguished the Chan tradition from other Buddhist beliefs was its apparent rejection of scholasticism and study in favor of embodied practice and the possibility of sudden enlightenment. And yet Chan monks also produced, paradoxically, Chinese Buddhism’s largest corpus of philosophical literature.

The beliefs and the texts of this new school were put to the test from 792 to 794, at the Samyé debate, when the Chan monk Moheyan challenged Indian traditions to decide the future of Tibetan Buddhism. Defending the “suddenist” Chan principle of immediate, internal enlightenment, Moheyan wrote his case against the “gradualist” Indian monk Kamalaśīla. The stakes were not just philosophical; they were geopolitical.

ALLAN DING: The larger issue is that, at that point, the Tibetans had established a large empire. And then they started to look to the east, and then look to the west, to try to figure out how they’re going to incorporate Buddhism as part of state-sponsored religion. Then the question is: “Which form of Buddhism? Can we actually utilize Chinese Buddhism as the foundation, or should we actually turn to Indian Buddhism and the search for the lamas, the experts, and the texts from there?” 

At home, Chan Buddhists also had to reckon with competing cultural traditions within China: particularly around the observance of liturgical rituals. Here, again, Moheyan played a major combative role, arguing that such rituals were only for those “of dull and inferior faculties,” since true Buddhist practice was internal. In essence, rituals exemplified precisely the “gradualist” approach toward Buddhist practice that Moheyan had fought in the Samyé Debate.

Curiously, though, as Chan became more and more established in China, its antipathy toward ritual was edited out of earlier scriptures, revised, in the Song Dynasty, to be more ambivalent or even affirmative. Increasingly, by the 11th century, ritual practices experienced a resurgence in China around gatherings like the zhāi feast, aligning the goals of laypeople and monastics or monastics and ministers.

ALLAN DING: From a Chinese perspective, this goes all the way back to Confucius. So ritual always includes an internal dimension. It’s about sincerity. It’s about how you imagine you’re interacting with deities or ancestors. So in that sense the Chan emphasis on the internal elements of ritual is actually part of the cultural norm.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and flute]

We’re recording from the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford. 

I’m your host, Miles Osgood. My guest today is Allan Ding, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at DePaul University in Chicago. Allan received his bachelor’s degree from Fudan University in Shanghai, his master’s from Harvard University, and a PhD here at Stanford with his 2020 dissertation, “Divine Transactions: The Transformation of Buddhist Public Liturgies at Dunhuang (8th-10th Centuries).”

Since moving from Stanford to DePaul, Allan has published articles in Buddhist Studies Review, the Journal of the American Oriental Society, Tang Studies, the BuddhistRoad Paper, and History of Religions, continuing his work on liturgical practices and the links they reveal between Chinese Buddhism and the traditions in India and Tibet. 

It’s those liturgical practices, and specifically the zhāi feast in Tang Dynasty China, that will be the subject of his first book, and it’s the subject that brought him to campus, for the Ho Center’s “Workshop on Food in Chinese Religion.” 

As you’ll hear at the end of our conversation, food turns out to be a fruitful topic for all kinds of religious ideas, both material and spiritual: for the rituals of the meal, the social relationships of the table, the cultivation of aesthetic taste, and the imaginative transformation of physical goods into metaphysical ones.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, singing]

So let’s not delay our own gathering any longer: it’s time to head into the library.

[bell chime]

MILES OSGOOD: Thanks so much for being with us here today, Allan, and welcome back to Stanford.  

ALLAN DING: Thank you. 

MILES OSGOOD: It's great to have you.  So, as I was going through your research, one thing that really struck me is, while you have this precise area of study that is going to be your emphasis in the book and something that you keep coming back to— namely Tang Dynasty China and Chan Buddhism in the eighth to 10th centuries—there is this consistent interest throughout all your work,  going back to your dissertation it seems, in what are the Indian and Tibetan sources of the ritual practices, liturgical practices of that period, of that region. And so I guess what I wanted to ask you, first of all —as a way of introducing yourself and talking about the course of your research—is, from going from Fudan to Harvard to Stanford to DePaul and then last year being at the Ghent Centre for Buddhist Studies, how do you keep a balance between these two regional interests? How have you found your footing in these different areas? Could you tell us a little bit about how you've kept these different tracks of your research going together? 

ALLAN DING: Well, thank you for your observation. That kind of brings back a lot of memories stretching all the way back to almost 15 years ago. But when I was an undergraduate student, I started—I was interested in actually in Mongolian studies and I realized that the Mongolians—the Mongols— had a lot of connections with the Tibetan lamas, and that they were influenced by Tibetan cultures. Then I have to get to know Tibetan Buddhism at least a little bit. Then I realized that there's a whole world of Sanskrit literature behind Tibetan Buddhism. And at the time we had a quite good Sanskrit teacher— Sanskritist—working at Fudan University. So then that got me started. And then so I bring all the same kind of interests from Fudan to Harvard and spent two years at Harvard. Then I moved to Stanford, where I can find a lot of resources supporting what I'm interested in, and I was allowed to do whatever I'm planning to pursue. And eventually I think what's actually interesting to me is that both ritual and Zen Buddhism are in cross-tradition and international phenomena. So if you—from my perspective— if I work on either of them or both of them, I get to use Sanskrit material, I get to use the Tibetan material, which would be kind of at least interesting for me.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, that makes sense. So that's great that you go from Mongolia to Tibet, and then from Tibet back to Sanskrit. Does Mongolia continue to show up at all in your research, or is there—can you draw us the link between Mongolia and China, I guess?

ALLAN DING: So, for example, the formation of a Tibetan Buddhist cannon actually was under the influence of the compilation of a catalog that took place during the Mongolian era. So there's still something I want to go back and to revisit even after so many years.

MILES OSGOOD: So there will be a chance to go back full circle there. So I mean, I think one thing we will end up talking about is the ways in which there are real harmonies and points of overlap between these traditions. But I was taking note— you know, just to stir the pot a little bit— I was taking note in a couple of your recent articles that you seem to interested in  at least one point of contention, or one historical point where at least scholars have  emphasized the contention, which is the "Samyé Debate." So could you tell us—our listeners— a little bit about how that debate's been covered in the past? You know, whether it's even  a debate in the first place? And then maybe we can work our way to thinking about more complex and comprehensive ways of thinking about it. 

ALLAN DING: Good. Good. So scholars have been thinking this is probably one of the most important— one of the several most important debates in the history of Buddhism. However, I think in the last two or three decades, we realized that there was probably no in-person debate. So, whatever happened would probably be something similar to a written exchange between the two parties. So the larger issue is that at that point the Tibetans had established a large empire and then they started to look to the east and then look to the west to trying to figure out how are we going to incorporate Buddhism into the—as part of a state-sponsored religion. And then the question is, "Which form of Buddhism?" "Can we actually utilize Chinese Buddhism as the foundation, "or should we actually turn to Indian Buddhism and search for the lamas, the experts, and the texts from there?" So the "Samyé Debate" kind of reflects—it's an inflection point. And from there the Tibetans decided it's actually easier for us to actually lean towards the Indian Buddhism, which I think is actually a wise choice. But at some point they have to figure out what's the difference between Chinese Buddhism and Indian Buddhism. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. So why was that a wise choice potentially to lean towards Indian  Buddhism, politically or philosophically? 

ALLAN DING: So part of it has something to do with geopolitics, right? Because there is an empire in China— or there was a tradition of empire-building in China—whereas India—the Indian cultural area— does not necessarily tend to produce large, overstretching empires. But the most important part is that it is very difficult to absorb Chinese Buddhism and build upon it if you're not using Chinese characters. So only—so if we think about the Japanese Buddhism, Korean Buddhism, Vietnam(ese) Buddhism: these are part of the so-called "Sinitic Cultural Circle" and they use—so they can just simply take over the canon and start to build on the the  existing Chinese Buddhist canon.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

ALLAN DING: But the Tibetans have   their own writing system, and the language is quite different from Chinese. So it's a little bit harder I think, and they have—and at the same time they have a lot of access to Indian masters. And they can actually bring in very knowledgeable Indian masters, and they were very willing to work with the Tibetans. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, that's fascinating. So it kind of comes down ultimately to shared culture and linguistic practicalities, perhaps more than philosophical distinctions. Is that right?

ALLAN DING: Exactly. 

MILES OSGOOD: So, because, as I was learning about the "Samyé Debate" and reading your research, I was sort of taken with this  philosophical distinction, right, that it's often summarized as this "gradualist" versus "suddenist" attitude towards the pace at which enlightenment happens. And it feels as though: is that a question that empires would be interested in? Is that a political question? And are you saying that, in fact, that's right that in that question is kind of beside the point for the decision that ultimately ends up being made, or it does it play a factor somehow? 

ALLAN DING: So, my observation—and I try to work it out in my papers— is that once the Chinese— the representative of Chinese Buddhism, which would be just one figure called Moheyan— once he started to debate or  have a some kind of exchange with the  Indian side or the Indo-Tibetan sides, actually, it appears to me at least quite clear that they both are part of Buddhism.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm. 

ALLAN DING: And they have a lot of common ground with each other. And both parties liked one of the most important sūtra: for both parties was the "Laṅkāvatāra." And the "Laṅkāvatāra" had a syncretic position, and therefore they all have a sympathetic to syncretic position, which means they can—they want to input— they want to incorporate most parts of Buddhism and do not really want to exclude any existing important component of Buddhism. So in that sense, they can actually talk with each other: that actually says something about—they belong to the same tradition in the—under a larger umbrella term. So the difference for— so this is also a historical moment for Chinese Buddhism because this is on the cusp of the rise of Zen Buddhism, or Chan Buddhism in China. So because of the existing— existence of the common ground—so both parties actually agree that nonconceptuality is important or a state of mind that can be categorized as nonconceptuality is important and is the one of the most important goals of meditation. So they agree about that. What they don't agree with each other is: "How are we going to arrive at nonconceptuality?" So this is where—so the Chan position is that if we are talking about nonconceptuality, then we need to get rid of all the concepts. Therefore, doctrine doesn't matter. You can get rid of all the doctrines, sūtras, or theories. But for the Indian position, that's just the wrong approach, because without the doctrine, and without the proper foundation, you'll never get the correct door into nonconceptuality to begin with. 

MILES OSGOOD: Mm. Mm-hmm. 

ALLAN DING: So, therefore, for them still the traditional training and the doctrinal foundation is important.vYou have to build an elaborate foundation before you can try to meditate—start to meditate—and enter—try to enter the  state of nonconceptuality. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

ALLAN DING: So they agree about almost a large portion of what Buddhism was. They only have a tiny bit difference I think.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, in terms  of process. Okay, great. Well so that makes me just want to ask a little bit again about sort of differences and similarities with regard to liturgical practices between these two traditions because this is something you've worked on for quite a while, and I gather it's going to influence the book that's coming out next year. So, specifically, one of the things that you're really interested in is kind of merit-making rituals and feast rituals and the "zhāi" feast in China. But before we get there, could we talk a little bit about what would have been the analogues in India and Tibet and like how different are they, or how influential are they? If we, as it were, either turn back the clock or just move west, what kinds of similar rituals do we see in those regions?

ALLAN DING: So I think— so one of my premises is that the so-called "zhāi" rituals—so there are several different aspects to it, and you can actually claim their different rituals can be categorized as "zhāi." But my claim is that—or my thesis is—everything can actually go back to India. 

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm. 

ALLAN DING: So you can find similar elements in Indian Buddhism and similar dynamics and similar principles in Indian Buddhism. And that approach enables me to bring in Pali materials and Tibetan materials. 

MILES OSGOOD: So what are some of those basic shared principles?

ALLAN DING: So one of the most— and this is not even a Buddhist principle, it's just an Indian custom— as a householder you want to cater to, or you want to hold a feast that includes the religious experts. It could be Brahmans. It could be all kinds of the so-called "wanderers." And the Buddhist tradition produced one kind of wanderer. And that dynamic was imported into China, so the lay people would constantly hold feasts and invite Buddhist monks and nuns to to participate. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. So is this for the spiritual benefit largely of the lay people, or is the merit-making that's happening shared between the clergy and lay people, in terms of who's benefiting spiritually from this gathering? 

ALLAN DING: Yes. So for one—of course  the donors, the so-called "dānapati,"  they receive the meritorious rewards, or karmic rewards, but also it's a chance to feed everyone. So you can't be mad at the food. (both laugh) 

MILES OSGOOD: So different kinds of benefits: spiritual and material benefits. A sort of exchange, perhaps, of those of those two categories. That makes sense. So one of the pieces that you wrote about in 2023 talks about the sort of erosion or alteration of Chan attitudes towards these kinds of rituals, specifically merit-making rituals. You mentioned that there's kind of an initial resistance and that over time maybe we approach more— approach something more like  ambivalence or acceptance. What accounts for the resistance initially among Chan Buddhists to maybe this kind of liturgical practice or this kind of lay clerical meeting?

ALLAN DING: Yes. So coming back to the point earlier I was trying to make that if you think nonconceptuality is important, then you should lend less credence to any kind of concepts, which  would include merit feasts. They are just man-made—to a certain degree, constructed—concepts. So they—so on a rhetorical level, they would argue, ultimately, merit is not that important. Ultimately, ritual is just a constructed human interaction—forms of human interaction. However, of course, the interesting part for me at least is if you look into what they were actually doing on a daily basis, it's all all about rituals. And they also participate in all kinds of feasts. They actually invent different forms of—invented different forms of feasts. So it's not that they're rejecting ritual on the practical level. It's just rhetorically they think they have ways to transcend functioning as mere ritual masters.

MILES OSGOOD: So rituals are already happening, and they're a practical part of clerical life,  and yet they don't— they initially don't need to be part of a kind of philosophical system, of approaching nonconceptuality or meditation practices. That could be more personal or internal and not rely on this kind  of social interdependence? 

ALLAN DING: And that's actually a good observation because from a Chinese perspective, this goes all the way back to Confucius. So ritual always includes an internal dimension. It's about sincerity. It's about how you imagine you're interacting with the deities or ancestors. So, in that sense, the Chan emphasis on the internal elements of ritual is actually part of the cultural norm.

MILES OSGOOD: Ah, I see. So  there's a way in which it kind of aligns with other Chinese practices— other Chinese religious practices. So that—yeah that leads me to ask you a little bit about sort of what is the diversity of these practices in Tang China? You talk about there not being necessarily just kind of one programmatic system of the "zhāi" feast but there—but kind of tracking through the literature different ways this might have manifested itself. How varied are these events?

ALLAN DING: So in my book, half of it talks about observances, half of it talks about feasts. So it just happened. It's a coincidence that they use the same word to translate both feast and observances. There's no really philosophical reason for doing that. This is a linguistic choice they made. Then if you combine both observances, which include actually half-day fast and a feast, then almost you can use this word as a synonym for liturgy, or just a ritual, because it already includes so many things. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, that's wild. So asking about the range of what these practices could look like, from fast to feast, you might—almost diametrical opposites. And then I suppose I want to know: you're looking at a very particular period where these things are happening. Does the term start to mean something else going forward? Does it just die out of practice?  Are there other kinds of practices that take over? Why would we stop looking at the 10th century, or what should we look at next if we kind of keep going in history? 

ALLAN DING: Yes, so the importance of the traditional style of feasts started to decline during the 10th century. They're still practiced even nowadays. The observances and the feasts, they are still practiced but in a more elaborated form. Of course the details have evolved. So the 10th century is a kind of a— and the 10th century witnessed the rise of Chan Buddhism, which has started to build its own ritual repertoire. And then—so the same dynamic can be observed from or reemerge in different  forms. So from—in terms of continuity, the 10th century might be a good good place to stop. 

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm. Okay. Makes sense. But then you do mention that there's versions of this re-elaborated today. Have you witnessed anything like this or gotten accounts of what those might look like or where would one—where would one look if one wanted to see the legacy of this eighth to 10th-century practice in 2025? 

ALLAN DING: So if you— so when I visit monasteries, I tend to linger in the vegetarian restaurants because that's where you can see the donors still bring monastics to the restaurant to buy them food as a form of offering. So the same dynamic goes way all the way back to the beginning of Buddhism.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. So this very basic cooperation and charity and support has some kind of bearing on that history? 

ALLAN DING: (nodding) Mm-hmm. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. Well so you mentioned Confucius in passing, and so that—this leads me to ask about the workshop that we just had here this weekend, the "Workshop on Food and Chinese Religion." We had such a wide variety of scholars who are working on very different things from you: topics like contemporary urban Chinese cuisine, food safety systems in Guangdong and Yunnan, the politics of meat-eating and vegetarianism, even sort of a comparativist perspective on food offerings in the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. What unites you all around food? What makes food a potentially interesting way of thinking about religion and Chinese religion in particular? 

ALLAN DING: Good, good. So I think this is a—we all need to eat. (Miles laughs) That's one dimension of it. Even the participants of the workshop had to eat. And then if you think about eating, of course, it's a—it provides a venue for cultural exchange and prevents—provides a venue for insisting cultural paradigm. Like you have— you would want to exclude certain kinds of food or consume certain kinds of food in the correct manner. So it's all coded in a certain way. Not only food is—or food-related practices are coded, but also they always involve imagination. Especially in a religious setting, you would have to imagine certain spirits or certain kinds of existence partake in the feast or the food together with the rest of the visible, invisible audience members. And also you would imagine the food is not just food. Imagine it's—it has some kind of a sacred quality. It cures your disease, or it quenches your spiritual thirst, or in a certain way, it gives you a karmic connection with other people. So food always includes the dimension of imagination. So that's—and religion is... also part of religion is imagination.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

ALLAN DING: So food participates— everyone participates in religious imagination one way or another when we consume food in a religious setting. And the other component, or another side of the story, is that food always reflects a social structure and a social relationship. For example, if I'm a donor, and I bring food to the monks, to the monastics—so I'm actually from— I can perform the ritual from a higher position because I'm the one who has the economic means to actually bring in nutritious food. But on the spiritual level, I'm the disciple of the masters. I need to be grate(ful). I need to actually act as an inferior in this relationship. So there's a lot of dynamics, and it's never... And one thing I realized is that the dynamics change over time and can be recaptured in a different set of symbols or coded system. So that's actually interesting to talk about with specialists in other fields, and they have their own insight into the system or the dynamics.

MILES OSGOOD: Is there something that became particularly clear to you about your area? Looking at these universal facts about food and their relationship not just to kind of material and social hierarchy, but as you say, to spirituality, to imagination. I think that's really a wonderful way of thinking about food, not just as a kind of cultural and and essential material reality, but of having all these symbolic qualities to it as well. So is there something that became a light bulb moment for you about Chan Buddhism in the last couple days where you sort of realized, "Oh, this is one of our symbols "that might have disappeared if not for food kind of rendering continuous"? Or, you know, "This is a way in which food is "more than just material and social relations, but is about our obligations to one another, our potential to imagine." What's going in your— what's going through your mind now? 

ALLAN DING: So one thing I want to figure out is that: how is it possible food that generates— or people would associate certain kinds of food with aesthetics. So there must be some very elaborate social processes that enabled the people to use food as a way of expressing their preferences, their hierarchy— different kinds of hierarchy.   Eventually we agree this certain kind of food would be associated, for example, with Zen aesthetics, however modern it is. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

ALLAN DING: So that's something I'm still thinking about. 

MILES OSGOOD: So quite—yeah, quite literally linking food to taste, in the sense of cultural taste and aesthetic taste. Is there a particular food item or food ritual that in the Chinese context, in the Chan context, comes to mind in terms of, "Oh, this is particular to this region "or is particular to this culture where we can see an aesthetic preference"? 

ALLAN DING: So part—for example, tea is always important in the Chinese tradition, and that's how China actually expresses itself. It brings the tea culture to other East Asian areas, and they invent certain tea ceremonies. So this is clearly—and you can— you can say tea absolutely gives you some kind of a—it's a—drinking tea is an aesthetic choice,  because it's not just a sweet that appeals to our brain directly.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

ALLAN DING: You have to cultivate yourself to be able to appreciate a certain kind of tea.

MILES OSGOOD: It's an acquired taste. 

ALLAN DING: Acquired taste. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. And then does tea have a particular meaning specific... So certainly within China, but then within Chinese Buddhism in particular, does it have—is it about— is it about that acquisition of an appreciation, or is there something about mental-state selection, community around tea, that is even more particular to Buddhism?

ALLAN DING: So part of it is— this is where it gets more and more complicated if you delve into the primary sources, because tea could be a euphemism for medicine, and medicine could be a euphemism for food or even meals. So there are different  levels of symbol, symbolism working.  So there—a lot of work could be done in this area.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. Okay. Great. Well, final question. I loved going through your bibliography and just noting the fun you seem to be having in teasing your readers with these intrigues around exciting titles around esoteric topics. You write about "Ornamenting Liturgies" on the scripts for the "zhāi" feast. You write about "Telling Infelicities on Hidden Intelligibility," and "The Compatible and the Comparable," on the "Samyé Debate" that we talked about already. And we mentioned in passing "Antipathy, Ambivalence, and Acceptance" as a title on Chan attitudes  towards merit-making rituals. These are lovely main titles before the colon, before we get into the weeds of the academic work that you're doing. Do you have in mind— it sounds like maybe if you're at the—if you're past the editing stage, do you have in mind a title for the book that's coming? And what is it that you have to pack into that title to make it both intriguing and intelligible? 

ALLAN DING: Yeah, thank you for the question. So my book title is "Observances, Feasts, and Scripts: The Varieties of 'Zhāi' in Medieval China (Chinese Buddhism from the Second to the Tenth Century)," so quite bland. (Miles laughs) So that—so whatever titles we're using, ultimately, it's a matter of taste but also matter of a market: who you are marketing to or what kind of preferences the press has. So, but for me, it's a— of course I want to use the title to express some kind of a structure. So either it is the— is the structure of the paper or it's some kind of a structure we can find in the topic. So I think it's better the title reflects something structural, and at the same time, the title is not—it's not immediately transparent. 

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm. 

ALLAN DING: So the reader can actually be puzzled, or trying to… It piques their interest. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

ALLAN DING: That would be the best. 

MILES OSGOOD: Does that mean we're going to go roughly through observances, scripts, and feasts, or is it that we need those three terms to understand "zhāi" as something more than just a single definition?

ALLAN DING: So this actually goes back to why I started to work on ritual is I realize those scripts, written scripts, are not actually blow-by-blow records of the ritual scene, and they just—they reflect certain elements that took—take place in the ritual— in the ritual process. So what I have to do is not only reconstruct what happened but also imagine—try very hard to imagine— the social relationships and the logistics and  the temporal elements and all elements but not actually reflected in the feasts or in the scripts. So I think if you—ritual study actually includes a lot of imagination, and, of course, so what I want to do in my book is first establish the Indian precedence and trace the development from India to China, and then use the scripts as a vehicle for generating more imagination about what happened. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, that's lovely. And it makes sense. I mean that if you think  about a theatrical script,   you have to take the same kind of imaginative approach. You have to think about, "Okay, what was actually the blocking on stage? "What were the props? How was this line delivered? How might a director have altered something that happened here?" If I think about the literary tradition, but, you know, just lovely to kind of come full  circle in this conversation and say there are acts of imagination that are happening around food it sounds like at—or around fasting, around other kinds of observances— at these gatherings. But then there's also an act of imagination that the scholar has to take on to sort of figure out what was really happening besides a blow-by-blow, a play-by-play, that would be unnecessarily simplistic and reductive. Well I think that that's a great teaser. So I hope folks are very excited for this book to come out and get your imaginations on what happened in this particular phase of history. It sounds like there's a lot to unpack, a lot to conjure, a lot to create. So we'll be looking forward to all of that. 

ALLAN DING: Thank you. Thank you. 

MILES OSGOOD: Thanks, Allan. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for coming back to Stanford. It was great to meet you and talk to you.

[Epilogue]

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

{video info}

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

Thanks again to Allan Ding for joining the show. Allan’s book, Observances, Feasts, and Scripts: The Varieties of Zhāi in Chinese Buddhism from the Second to the Tenth Century, will be published by University of Hawaii Press just a few months from now, in February 2026. You can register online on the press’s website today to get on the waitlist.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]

As always, the music for this episode is a recording from Ani Choying Drolma’s “Buddhist Chants and Songs,” performed at Stanford’s Memorial Church in 2017. 

Until next time, this has been “The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford” podcast.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]

MILES OSGOOD (00:05):

Welcome to "The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford" podcast. Come join us by the tree.

(00:17):

If Buddhist Studies is a field that takes a unique interest in the workings of the mind, through the study of Abhidharma texts and meditation practices, and one that prizes the work of the philologist, who can understand the subtleties of ancient languages, what should we make of intelligence that is "artificial" and language models that are "large"? Are AIs and LLMs simply new tools for transcription and translation, like other writing technologies that Buddhist scribes and scholars have adopted in the past?

MARCUS BINGENHEIMER (00:45):

It seems to me that Buddhists have always been early adopters of information technologies, right? In India, the earliest Indian epigraphy mentions Buddhism and Buddhist texts, the "Aśokan Inscriptions." The earliest Indian fragments of written material are Buddhist texts, and then the "Diamond Sūtra" is the first dated printed book from the ninth century—and now in the British Library.

MILES OSGOOD (01:17):

Another possibility: is the AI chatbot instead, a kind of interlocutor for the researcher, a software update on the ancient prophets?

MARCUS BINGENHEIMER (01:26):

They're vastly improvement over the old oracles. I mean, the old oracles: you had to take some tokens from a feature space, and then you have these gnomic instructions. Or you have people in trance who sing some songs. And now you have to do a lot of hermeneutical reading into these gnomic messages. And now you get much easier answers from these machines.

MILES OSGOOD (01:51):

Today: peering into the future of Buddhist Studies and the Digital Humanities. I'm your host, Miles Osgood, recording from The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford.

(02:02):

My guest today is Marcus Bingenheimer, Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Temple University in Philadelphia. Professor Bingenheimer received his DPhil from Würzburg University in his native Germany and an MA in Communications from Nagoya University in Japan before teaching Buddhism and Digital Humanities at Dharma Drum in Taiwan for six years. With other academic appointments around the world—in Korea, Japan, Thailand, France, and Singapore—it is fitting that Professor Bingenheimer joined us at Stanford to talk about mapping Buddhism's geographies and networks.

(02:36):

This is ordinarily the point where I dive into the articles and monographs that our guest has published, and there are some great books to mention, including "Island of Guanyin: Mount Putuo and its Gazetteers" (from Oxford University Press in 2016), "Studies in Āgama Literature" (from the Dharma Drum Buddhist College Series in 2006), and an array of Chinese Buddhist translation projects.

(02:58):

But insofar as Professor Bingenheimer is an authority in the Digital Humanities and the digitization of Buddhist culture, there is also an entire second library of scholarship that we need to attend to: one that is virtual, online, and interactive. This side of Bingenheimer's scholarship includes searchable maps of the Chinese Buddhist temples that have spread across Southeast Asia, digital editions of medieval Chinese texts and multi-layered visualizations of Buddhist biographies. You can interact with these tools and databases yourself at mbingenheimer.net.

(03:33):

There's one other piece of Marcus's recent work that I should share with you, and that's a slide deck. Over the last few years with the rise of ChatGPT and other generative large language models, Marcus has been presenting to fellow scholars on possible outcomes of the AI revolution in Buddhist studies. And before our interview, he shared those slides with me. In the next 25 years or so, Marcus predicts, "All ancient texts for which there is enough training data can and will be translated."

(04:03):

This is what Marcus calls a future of "total translation," where the most obscure texts in the most obscure languages will become available to readers all around the world: not just translated into English or Chinese, but in hundreds of living languages too.

(04:18):

Marcus has noticed three kinds of reactions to this prediction, two of which are skeptical, and the last one, a bit more sanguine. The first and most common is the defensive response on the part of Buddhist scholars. Something along the lines of, "There goes my superpower." The languages that they trained for decades to read will now no longer stand after all as the same barrier to others. But Marcus argues knowledge of those languages will still matter. Scholars will shift from translators to evaluators as curators of the new digital corpus, or as Marcus puts it, as "gleaners and cleaners."

(04:51):

A second more general criticism questions the unregulated acceleration of AI more fundamentally, asking why the current control of this technology seems to serve the greed of corporations or the interest of surveillance states, stripping down existing intellectual property and limited energy resources for private or political gain. And that is a more substantial worry. As you'll see, Marcus adds other concerns of his own. Nevertheless, he insists that humanities scholars and especially younger scholars starting out, can't merely close their eyes and ears and ignore a technology that is already here.

(05:23):

Finally, there is a rare third more optimistic view. For scholars devoted to Buddhist ideas, there can be something exciting about a new age of scriptural circulation. As Marcus puts it, "The 'buddhavacana' is going to be available in all languages in different registers. Everybody can now read and listen to the Dharma in her own language."

(05:46):

So with that, let's turn to the interview and you can decide for yourself where you land.

(05:50):

(bell dinging)

(05:55):

Well, thank you very much, Marcus for joining us on this episode.

MARCUS BINGENHEIMER (05:59):

Thanks for having me.

MILES OSGOOD (06:01):

Yeah. I thought I'd start by going back a little bit to some of your more traditional research, your monograph, "Island of Guanyin," because I think one thing we're going to talk about today is the shape that research and scholarship takes and the structure that you give to a reader or an audience in different forms. And so when I was looking back at your work, I was really struck that in this book you're also thinking consciously and carefully about how to give form to a book that is itself about a very particular form of an object that you're studying: these gazettes in Guanyin. So could you tell us a little bit about that project, about how you came to the idea of how to go about your own research and your own articulation of what you were finding in this archive?

MARCUS BINGENHEIMER (06:49):

Yeah, sure. So these gazetteers—local chronicle collections of texts on a particular location—they are very important in Chinese historiography and they're a bit of a weird format. They're a little bit like a "TAR" file in computing and the old Unix systems, where you combine different files into one file. So actually it's not a genre in itself. It's more of a container format for other formats, for other genres like poetry or annals or lists of places or lists of biographies, lists of people. So when I understood I wanted to write about gazetteers, I thought, "How do I explain the structure to readers?" And the best way to do it I felt was to write a book, which in a way recreates the experience of the traditional readers of gazetteers where they would have parts on poetry and then there would be the biographies and then there would be illustrations and so on.

MILES OSGOOD (07:59):

Did you end up learning something about the logic of the gazette in the process of kind of structuring your own table of contents that way? Because I would imagine it might be frustrating at times to say, "Oh, I want to say this thing about the poems, but they come at the end of the gazette, so they're going to come at the end of my book, and the reader won't know that they're there until they arrive." Does that then tell you something like, "Oh, well that must be the experience of people in—"

MARCUS BINGENHEIMER (08:19):

Yeah, no, the order is flexible, right? I mean these gazetteers are not meant to be read in order in general. I mean there is a sort of logic in the sense that the first couple of chapters will have the maps or so—but or... and some introductory... there will be prefaces and there might be some text by the emperor or so. But generally whether the biographies come first or the poetry comes first, that is negotiable.

MILES OSGOOD (08:46):

I see.

MARCUS BINGENHEIMER (08:46):

And what I've learned was that—when I compared a lot of different gazetteers—that about the average size of these blocks... So for example, poetry and biographies are relatively large part of these gazetteers, more so than I had expected. And then topographical descriptions are comparatively shorter, more contained. So these are these minimal descriptions of places for people to look around. For us today they're very interesting because you can extract all kinds of data. So when you datify that, then you have lots of data points with very short descriptions, which is good for digitization really, for digitization purposes.

MILES OSGOOD (09:35):

Yeah, it's interesting the number of ways that now you're conceiving of this project—and maybe you conceived of this project at the time—as having these kind of digital analogues, as it were: that you're not only thinking about it in terms of a kind of compiled file structure, but also that you're thinking, "Well actually the way that readers of the scholarship are going to approach this is they are going to skip around from chapter to chapter according to their preferences," which of course now I'm realizing is how people read monographs anyway. So why not lean into that? Why not give it a form of organization that makes that easy? Is that something that then kind of informed your work moving into the Digital Humanities? Because I think this just lends an opening to me to think about form in that space, right, how you do scholarship in a novel way such that it can be interactive, maybe up to the reader or viewer in certain ways...

MARCUS BINGENHEIMER (10:30):

Yeah. The monograph is a bit of a dinosaur, really, right? I mean, it's a genre that is from an age of information scarcity in a way. And it's a difficult form, because I think it was actually meant to be read from cover to cover, right? From what you said, you read it like I do it. I read the introduction, then I read the chapters I'm interested in and not necessarily in order, and then perhaps I read the conclusion, but very few. I mean they have to be really right on the thing I'm just researching for me to read a monograph from cover to cover. But this is how they were designed originally. And in a way for the humanities, I see the humanities struggling, to move beyond the monograph and find a way to... It's still the coin of the realm, right? You have to publish a monograph in order to get tenure, get hired, get promoted, and so on—at least in some fields.

(11:26):

And I think we see sort of, this does not mesh very well with the way people will want to read these days, where we generally read for information, because you don't need to give the whole background story of a certain topic anymore within a chapter. You don't need to fill in people on everything like you used to have in the 19th century when you didn't have Wikipedia, right? You couldn't look things up. So it's really... Now when I tend to consume research and output research, I try to focus on the question, "Okay, so this is where we are. Here's my research question. Now what have we found out? What new things have we found out about this thing?" And this goes a little bit against the grain of publishing in the humanities where often overviews are given over things that are known already to contextualize the new.

MILES OSGOOD (12:20):

Yeah. Specifically within Buddhist Studies, what are the potential opportunities, challenges of doing digital work? I think about the prologue that you and your team wrote for the "Sutra2DNA" project, which I thought was... I mean just generally the research project was so fun and fascinating, but specifically the way that you framed it with this sort of self-aware irony, that there was something funny about taking an object, the "Diamond Sūtra," that had this kind of long history such that we think of it perhaps even as the first book, and then thinking, "Okay, can we reestablish that kind of permanence in some new form of encoding in particular by encoding it into DNA, something that seems like it could be reliably replicable and preservable?" and yet to think about the fact that the "Diamond Sūtra" itself is telling you about how all concepts and phenomena are momentary, not to be relied upon, the concept of "apratiṣṭha." There's a kind of fun irony there. Is there something about the content of Buddhist Studies that feels like it offers particular modes of reflection on this moment of changing scholarship?

MARCUS BINGENHEIMER (13:32):

It seems to me that Buddhists have always been early adopters of information technologies, right? In India, the earliest Indian epigraphy mentions Buddhism and Buddhist texts, the "Aśokan Inscriptions," the earliest Indian fragments of written material are Buddhist texts. And then as you said, the "Diamond Sūtra" is the first dated printed book from the ninth century—and now in the British Library. And also within the humanities, when I remember in the 90s and early 2000s, it was also Buddhists who in East Asia for example, were among the first who digitized large corpora of texts. So they were very early on concerned with the task of say, "Okay, so we have our Buddhist canon, so how do we get this in the computer? And how do..." At that time it was very difficult because East Asian, Chinese character encoding was a difficult problem until Unicode then came out as the solution for it.

(14:49):

But in the 80s and 90s before Unicode was widely used, this was tricky, but people tried it and there were various communities who digitized the Buddhist canon as soon as they could basically. And so within Buddhism, I think this is just a big great openness. And also traditionally we're not bound... Like for example in Islam, if I understand this right, it's really important to have the "Quran," the sacred book in the original, in Arabic. And I think for Buddhism in the Buddhist tradition, this is not a major concern. You can translate, you can add to the canon, right? The canon is fairly open in various ways, at least the Tibetan and the Chinese canon. And yeah, so this is an easy in for Buddhism.

MILES OSGOOD (15:48):

Yeah, that's great. And so in your work in particular, you've done a lot with Buddhist biographies, right? Like one of the things you are speaking about at Stanford has to do with what we can learn about social networks of particular Buddhist monks and the like. And it seems like you're pushing there the opportunities of what different kind of media or different kind of layers of visualization of textual biographical material could offer us. Could you tell us about how you went about that project, what you saw as being your motivation for finding these different digital forms and maybe what the precedent was in that particular thread?

MARCUS BINGENHEIMER (16:33):

Yeah, I'm interested in computational methods, right? I try to find out what kind of questions can we ask now that much of our textual data is digitized, what kind of questions can we now ask and answer that we couldn't before? Network analysis, it's a field of information science that is very widely applicable. So it's used from physics to chemistry to biology and math and graph theory or so—graph theory is an underlying paradigm, which is very important.

(17:15):

And then you basically try to find how can these formal networks—where I just try to abstract from reality and say all people are nodes and when they meet and they have a connection between them—if I model my reality in that way, then is there anything I see when I visualize it or is there any metric, network analysis metric that I can calculate, which then tells me something about the reality which is recognizable to me first? I mean to check whether that actually works, right? I mean, does it actually look like I expect it to look? And then when everything sort of looks like I think it looks, the question is then what new is there? What's the thing that I haven't seen before, I didn't know before, which now I can see and wasn't there before if you talk about visualization, and that's the challenge.

MILES OSGOOD (18:06):

Yeah, could we take those two principles kind of one by one? So first, this is kind of an early digital humanities dictum, right? That's sort of like, "Yes, maybe sometimes the digital analysis of a text or of a network shows us something that we kind of already knew intuitively about a history or about an author or what have you, but now we truly know it," would be the argument. Were there moments like that with regard to this corpus?

MARCUS BINGENHEIMER (18:36):

Yes, for sure. I mean, if it doesn't look like anything you recognize, then something must be wrong, right? Something must have gone wrong. You must have made a mistake in digitization or in just in the visualization process or whatever. I mean it must reflect... We're not going to totally rewrite the history of Buddhist, of Chinese Buddhism, right, just because you have data abstracted from texts on which these previous histories are being based. So we're still using the same kind of text. We just add a layer of abstraction to it and then we can do new inquiries and then these new inquiries sometimes turn up interesting things. I mean, for example, in the case of Chinese Buddhism, we knew that Dao'an, Huiyuan, and Kumārajīva were important players in their time, but it was not clear to me how absolutely important they were in the social transmission of Chinese Buddhism.

(19:29):

The network view turned out to really strongly emphasize, depict, of how little before this triangle actually connects to the later parts of the network without going through the triangle. So basically everything before 400 or so somehow has to move through Dao'an, Huiyuan, Kumārajīva, and their students to then sort of, as an information flow, to flow into the fifth century then. And that was something which I didn't expect in the same way before I saw it. And then there are other things like for example, in network analysis, then you can ask questions. Okay, you have these three important players, tell me the people who knew all three of them, right? And that's a question that if you are in a computational environment, you can ask that questions and answer it in five minutes. And if you want to do this in a text, if you want to, you have to read all these biographies and then you have to make notes and it takes you three months, right?

MILES OSGOOD (20:31):

Yeah.

MARCUS BINGENHEIMER (20:32):

So there are questions which you can ask quickly which are meaningful to telling the story about what happened at that time, which datafication and particular toolsets of computational methods then afford you.

MILES OSGOOD (20:45):

That's a sort of natural segue for me to ask a little bit about... Yeah, a number of your projects have had to do with translation, and I think as you look a little bit at AI and give presentations on the potential of this new technology, it seems like this is one of the major areas of interest, that this field has always cared a great deal about producing and analyzing translations of various kinds. It seems like a real opportunity now to be able to go into more languages to digitize and render accessible more texts and to do so through large language model AIs. Right. And it sounds like when you've been taking this idea around and trying to get people excited about the prospects of it, you sometimes encounter some resistance, right? I mean, this is a new technology, it's hard for folks to understand.

(21:36):

In some cases people feel like we are handing over the keys to a particular castle that we have guarded as scholars, in terms of having the authority and expertise to be the translators. What kinds of concerns there do you take seriously? Which ones do you think are misguided? How do you address folks who are nervous or otherwise maybe resistant to where scholarship might be going with AI?

MARCUS BINGENHEIMER (22:06):

It's interesting to see. So for Buddhist studies, the first thing that comes to mind, basically in every article I wrote, in every book I wrote, basically there's always a piece of translation in there, something or the other has been translated and I quote something and I translate it. And now machines can translate much faster than I can and often they're accurate to a surprisingly high degree. So it's quite extraordinary how in the last two, three years these machines have been evolved, have been trained, to work with even low-resource languages like Chinese and Sanskrit and Pali and so on.

(22:49):

So this is quite extraordinary and we did not expect this 10 years ago. So here we are, and now the question is, "What are we going to do with this?" And you can say, "Oh, I don't care. I run out the clock." But if you are young, like say less than 60 or so, then you can't really sort of not say, "I'm never going to use LLMs," right? It's not happening because everybody, all the students are using it. And you have to make yourself at home in a world where LLMs are part of the knowledge landscape.

MILES OSGOOD (23:20):

Yeah. That makes sense. So when it comes to translation in particular, I was looking at examples of maybe how you would translate a 12th-century classical Chinese text or how they've been typically translated, and then what the LLM, what ChatGPT in particular gives you. I thought this was really fun as an overture to thinking about what might be possible with translation, but I also wonder if it raises new concerns about reliability and trust. So one example was... So I won't read the Chinese, but I'll read your translation first, which was—and I'm picking a row that felt particularly about Buddhist philosophy here... Your translation had said, "We worry about so many things, but when the last hour comes, all will be lost and gone. Even our own body turns to waste, not to mention everything else." And then the GPT version was, "All our concerns are rooted in our attachment to material things. However, when our time comes to an end, we must leave everything behind, including our bodies. All these possessions that we worked so hard to acquire are ultimately just temporary and fleeting."

(24:19):

And you underlined that first line, "All our concerns are rooted in our attachment to material things." And I was pondering that and of course I'm curious as to what you think about it. It felt a little like, there the GPT was almost not just doing a pure translation but was also drawing on a commentarial tradition that followed afterward by having a phrase like "attachment to material things," where your translation was much more neutral than that and wasn't assuming a whole phraseology of Buddhist Studies. Is that what's happening there? Is it because it's amalgamating different things or eating its own tail on other things it has said about Buddhism?

MARCUS BINGENHEIMER (24:56):

Yeah. So one thing is that it's really too early to say, so these translations are still getting better. Right. We haven't fully plateaued out. We are plateauing now, but we haven't plateaued out, so we don't really know where we end up with in that space. It's clear... One of the things about... One of the sort of "Translation Theory 101" or so, what you learn, is the indeterminability of translation. So there are an unfixed number, an undetermined number of possible correct translations of any sentence. So there is not "the" correct translation. And then there are other mistaken translations, things which are just wrong. And then there are things which people who know both languages can both be happy with, but then some people will have preferences for one or the other. So this I think will be replicated with these machines very easily. You can also ask an LLM to give you three different translations, right, and then you choose one of them or, so it's just what is impressive is the speed of it and the variability, right?

(26:10):

You can sort of say, "Okay, translate it like in an 18th century British idiom," or so, right? Or, "Translate it in a way that it is easy to understand for a 14-year-old," or so. So you can ask it to produce translations on a much broader spectrum than any individual translator, human translator could do it. The real issue is accuracy and how much you want to believe it and where the liability lies. So people who work on machine translation for modern texts, they say, "Well, there are, like, there are legal contracts which have to be translated, right, medical issues, diagnosis," and so on. And there you run on... So this is how these translations are used in the social environment. Who is going to sign off on them?

(27:08):

And for Buddhist Studies, and for scholarship I think in general, there is a similar problem. So who assumes responsibility for that translation, right? I don't read Tibetan, for example, if I ask it to translate a Tibetan text for me, which someone has identified as useful, or if I see in a machine-translated translation a passage which I think I could use in my article or so, then what do I do with it, right? Do I just say, "Okay, I don't know, Claude translated that for me and I don't actually know whether it's right or not." I mean, I can't: this doesn't sound right. Right. I have to somehow find a way to at least ask another specialist to check that or so and make sure that it's accurate. Whether it's stylistically nice or not is another issue, but I must somehow guarantee the accuracy of what I put into my scholarship.

(28:02):

So this is the part that is important when we talk about machine translation. Machine translation is basically there and it has a certain degree of accuracy like every human translator, right? There's no perfect human translator either. So the question is now how do we evaluate the output of different machines, for example? That's a really difficult question because... And machine translation, the field of computer science that does these machine translation studies: that's a vast subfield of machine translation, is evaluation.

(28:35):

So there are all kinds of interesting metrics which are really very ingeniously crafted, that have evolved over the last 20, 25 years or so where you try to... Using, sometimes using human reference translation to check whether the output is—how accurate it is, how good it is. And that's really... that's a field where I think we as Buddhist studies people can also come in because for that you need this domain knowledge. Otherwise, you can't contribute much to... I mean, we're not going to contribute to the development of LLMs, right, in Buddhist studies. We are not trained for that. This is not what we do in graduate school. But every field of scholarship I think can see how to evaluate what machines do on their domain and how we can encourage it or nudge it to help us producing new knowledge, which is what we are supposed to do, right?

MILES OSGOOD (29:41):

Yeah, because I was going to say, it sounds like maybe for a new generation of scholars there was going to be a period of transition of moving from the expectation of "I am the translator" to "I am merely the editor." But it sounds like you're arguing there's more continuity than that, that we have always been evaluators of a certain kinds of texts that requires a certain kind of conceptual knowledge of what the language means and what precise words ought to be rendered as. And actually, yes, certainly some work is now shifting from the human to the machine, but nevertheless, this kind of scholarly knowledge that allows us to select or edit the correct words is one that's always been there and it's just being applied in a different way. Is that right?

MARCUS BINGENHEIMER (30:25):

Yes. I think of it very much as a continuum of interests. I mean, what we get through using LLMs to translate is—and then also it's not only about translations, it's also about summary, right? So I can ask, what is this unknown text in Sanskrit about? Tell me in five minutes, right? And then you can decide whether you want to zoom in and then say, "Okay, give me an English translation." And then you have, "Okay, this is the interesting part for me, this is where it talks about what I'm researching." And then I say, "Okay, now show me the Sanskrit."

(30:58):

And then I'll see, "Okay, does this English and the Sanskrit... How does that work, right? Is this actually translated accurately?" This kind of back and forth, the dialogue between these models and our data is I think where we will be. This is I think how it's going to look like in the next 10, 20 years or so, that you keep asking these language models to show you what is already known, and then you try to push into areas where, yeah, they can't help you because they're not trained for that and they don't have the agency and the volition to sort of... the curiosity to do anything about it, right?

MILES OSGOOD (31:45):

Yeah.

MARCUS BINGENHEIMER (31:47):

So far we are providing the curiosity, right, and they provide knowledge to us.

MILES OSGOOD (31:51):

But it's like working with an all-powerful librarian who can take you to the one bit of microfilm that you need or to the bookshelf that you need and show you at different levels of scope what might be useful to you. And then you still have to do the work of the analysis between the lines, the translation of the particular word, what have you.

MARCUS BINGENHEIMER (32:10):

So far. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I often find myself surprised over the last year of how much knowledge there is encoded in these machines. Right. So they do sound a little bit, I mean, they're vastly improvement over the old oracles. I mean the old oracles, you had to take some tokens from a feature space, and then you have these gnomic instructions, and so. Or you have people in trance who sing some songs or so. And now you have to do a lot of hermeneutical reading into these gnomic messages. And now you get much easier answers from these machines. So I think we have much improved over divination now.

MILES OSGOOD (32:59):

(Laughing) I really like that analogy. Well, so I've talked in various ways about things that might provoke resistance, or ways we might be skeptical, or ways we might need to build trust in these machines, but there's an optimism to the presentations that you've given. And one way that you phrase that is the potential of "total translation." Can you say a little bit about that phrase and what you see as the possible future of the accessibility of Buddhist texts using these tools?

MARCUS BINGENHEIMER (33:25):

So when I started to go into Buddhist studies, the landscape was that you had to learn a lot of ancient difficult languages and then you were up against a vast ocean of untranslated texts. There were a certain number of texts which were translated, and the very few of them translated many times. But very generally, you were lucky if you had one translation and then much of the interesting stuff was not translated at all. And that will be probably gone within the next 10 years or so. You can always generate, you can quickly generate on the fly an okay translation of an ancient Sanskrit or Chinese text or so, as long as you have it in digital format. I mean things might take longer for Tangut or so. I mean, when you have, like there are I mean Tocharian or Khotanese. So there are super small niche languages which haven't been fully digitized yet, for which there might not be a fully Unicode encoding. Tangut has one, but there are a few languages for which there is no proper encoding. And of course they then can't be part of the training data for these machines, and so they can't deal with them very well.

(34:46):

But everything... I mean, talking about the larger languages that we are likely to encounter during our research, we will be able to have very decent translations on the fly from different machines and you can, compare them. And if you get really, really excited about a part, a passage, then you have to ascertain it somehow. You have to corroborate it by either consulting a specialist or by learning the language yourself. And that is "total translation."

(35:21):

So basically all the literary textual heritage of humanity is available in basically all languages. I mean, all of the large languages, like 99% of humans speak right now. I mean, of course I know there are 7,000 languages and some of them have 200 speakers. And it's important to preserve them and it's important to create spaces for those low-resource languages. It's very important. And actually the LLMs... I have seen papers now where people try to use LLMs to, say, model certain dialects which are on the verge of extinction of a language. And so there is indeed a hope that you will have virtual speakers of languages which have died out because they have been captured as an LLM in the 21st century...

MILES OSGOOD (36:22):

Yeah.

MARCUS BINGENHEIMER (36:23):

... but no human speaks that anymore. So this is a bit like the recordings that were made in the early 20th century of Indian languages or so, for which we now have no speakers anymore. So this is something that is a part of the research, but "total translation," the way I want to raise awareness for is that... Yeah, it used to be that if you couldn't read this book and there was no translation, you just couldn't read it. But now you can take your phone and run it over it and it appears in the language of your liking. And the great thing also is that we get away from an Anglocentric understanding of translation. English for 200 years or 150 years perhaps was the language into which everything was translated first and then from there into Arabic and Hindi and German or whatever.

(37:20):

And now you can actually directly go from one to the other, meaning you can, if you are a 14-year-old girl in Kenya, you can read the "Diamond Sūtra" in your own language of today on your phone if you choose to do so. And that is a big change globally. I think that people, wherever they are, as long as they have access to digital tools, have now access to all of humanity's textual heritage. Big deal, really. It hasn't quite sunk in yet, I think, but this is what we'll see over the next 10, 20 years.

MILES OSGOOD (38:05):

Yeah. And that's a wonderful note for us to end on. I think that what we have here is not just an opportunity for the future of scholarship, which needs to be disseminated and made accessible and made translatable, but for the original primary text themselves, right? That this was always kind of the purpose of these scriptures, right, was to be able to be spread, that they were open to translations, and open to new media over the centuries. And so an opportunity yet again to encourage that anew.

MARCUS BINGENHEIMER (38:34):

Yeah, well I mean, I don't want to sound too optimistic. I mean, it is quite possible that we are all going to die because of AI. Right. I mean, these are serious concerns, but I don't see how I, as a Buddhist scholar can do anything about it. So as long as I'm here, I'm going to play.

MILES OSGOOD (38:52):

As long as we fundamentally acknowledge the ultimate impermanence of things and... (laughing)

MARCUS BINGENHEIMER (38:57):

Yes, I mean, there are serious concerns. The alignment problem is... I mean a lot of people dream about AGI, about what happens if these machines become even more human-like intelligent, and what will happen then if they take off, kind of if they become basically a different conscious species, that... What would they do and would their interest be aligned with ours, or so? So these are science-fiction-like dreams. We don't know whether they would come true. A lot of people seem very concerned about it, and I sort of understand that, but I don't see how I, as a—I mean, this is about Buddhist studies and Buddhist scholarship, or so. We have to take these things as they appear on the horizon of humanity and then deal with it and try to...

MILES OSGOOD (39:46):

Yeah. It sounds like there's a whole separate conversation to have here about what it would be for AIs to gain consciousness specifically on a corpus of Buddhist texts, what that would mean for their understanding of themselves. (Laughing.) But maybe we'll leave that.

MARCUS BINGENHEIMER (40:03):

Yeah, I hope the ideas will somehow be useful to whatever comes after humans. I mean, I think of Buddhism as a supremely human thing to do, and I'm not sure how much whatever comes after homo sapiens on this planet is going to do with it, but if there is intelligence after us, after our civilization or so, I hope they can use the Buddhadharma as some kind of an inspiration or some of the things can be somehow salvaged.

MILES OSGOOD (40:34):

All right. Well, we've had a note of hope, a note of fear, and maybe a note of mystery there. But, well, just thank you so much, Marcus, for taking us through all of that, your own research, the future of the field as you see it, the opportunities and challenges of these tools. Really interesting and I think going to be very important clearly for scholars to reckon with if they haven't. So thanks again for taking the time to talk with us and yeah, have a lovely...

MARCUS BINGENHEIMER (41:04):

Thanks for having me on this program. It was fun. Take care, Miles.

Music (41:11):

Oṃ maṇi padme hūm. Oṃ maṇi padme hūm. Oṃ maṇi padme hūm. Oṃ maṇi padme hūm. Oṃ maṇi padme hūm…

MILES OSGOOD (41:28):

Thanks one more time to Marcus Bingenheimer for coming on the show. There's no video for this episode, but you can check out other interviews and podcasts on our website at buddhiststudies.stanford.edu. Again, if you want to interact more with Marcus's research head to mbingenheimer.net. There you'll find linked "Tools for Buddhist Studies," including some of the GIS maps, social network datasets, and digitized translations referenced in the interview, and a personal bibliography of publications both traditional and digital. I'll plug again the "Sutra2DNA" project, which bridges both forms of scholarship. This collaboration funded by a Temple University Presidential Humanities and Arts grant starts out by describing the unique material history of the "Diamond Sūtra" and then gives the text a new future, encoding it into DNA molecules. To bring tradition and innovation together once more and to find an appropriate home for the molecular scripture, the Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio at Temple Libraries organized a miniature stūpa 3D printing contest. The winner, Tom Leighton of Glenview, Illinois, crafted 20 gold stūpas, each topped with a printed double-helix and diamond, linked to one another via an online repository and distributed out into the world of Buddhism.

Music (42:42):

Oṃ maṇi padme hūm.

MILES OSGOOD (42:47):

As always, the music for this episode is a recording from Ani Choying Drolma's "Buddhist Chants and Songs," performed at Stanford's Memorial Church in 2017. Until next time, this has been The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford Podcast.

Music (43:01):

Oṃ maṇi padme hūm.

(43:11):

Oṃ maṇi padme hūm.

(43:11):

Oṃ maṇi padme hūm

(43:11):

Oṃ maṇi padme hūm.

[Prologue]

MILES OSGOOD: Welcome to “The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford” podcast. Come join us by the tree.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar]

The third chapter of the Lotus Sūtra doesn’t begin how we might expect. Śariputra has just listened to a speech of the Buddha’s that upends everything he has learned before; in fact, according to these verses, all this previous teaching was only provisional. In this foundational Mahāyāna scripture, the Buddha reveals that the true dharma will disclose the “One Vehicle” and will bring all beings to buddhahood.

And so startling is this new doctrine to the assembly that five thousand listeners have already silently risen and departed, in prideful protest. 

Ahead of chapter three, that’s one kind of response you could readily imagine for Śariputra, whose privileged status and knowledge as an arhat is now thrown into question. Another kind of response, befitting Śariputra as a keen and curious questioner, would be that of the exegetical scholar: to puzzle over the conceptual consequences of this new teaching.

But instead, at the beginning of chapter three, we get the following: (quote) “At that time Śariputra’s mind danced with joy.” 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: “... there are ambiguities in the text that make them quite chewy for exegetes. Nevertheless, right, what I hope to draw attention to in the dissertation is that the way that the text performs these doctrinal revelations is so spectacular that we as the reader—I think that we’re invited to have specific kinds of feelings about them. And in fact the text tells us what kinds of feelings we should be having about them by having its own characters respond.”

MILES OSGOOD: Up ahead: why the Lotus Sūtra insists on these moments of wonder, joy, and feeling.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and flute]

I’m your host, Miles Osgood. 

This introduction is a special one, because I get to welcome Dr. Julian Butterfield, who earned that title when he defended his dissertation the day before our interview. Julian completed his BA in Comparative Literature and Religious Studies and his MA in Religious Studies at the University of Toronto before undertaking his PhD here at Stanford. 

Julian is a specialist on the dissemination and development of Mahāyāna Buddhism in early medieval China, with early research on the textual history of the Huayan jing and the related development of bodhisattva ordination in the Chinese Pusa yingluo benye jing. His current work includes publications on Buddhism and modern music: specifically, Western composition and the tradition of the avant-garde from the nineteenth-century onward. 

Julian was the recipient of an ACLS Ho Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in 2024, and the resulting thesis that he just defended is titled, “Marveling at the Dharma: On the Roles of Rejoicing (anumodanā [in Sanskrit], suixi [in Chinese]) in the Lotus Sūtra and its Cult in Medieval China.”

Julian’s defense took place in our very own Buddhist Studies Library, and as I mentioned, our interview took place there the next morning. So let’s head back there now.

[Interview]

(bell dings) 

MILES OSGOOD: So, we're very happy to have Julian with us on the heels of a successful defense and to talk about his dissertation and his other work. Welcome, Julian. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Thank you so much. MILES OSGOOD So, this keyword in your dissertation, "anumodanā," is that... Tell us a little bit about what that term means, because in a moment I want to ask you about a version of that experience that maybe you might have had in your own introduction to Buddhist Studies.

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. "Anumodanā" is a word that appears throughout a huge array of Buddhist canonical texts, and labels a lot of different kinds of practices, that is very much current in the Buddhist world. It vaguely means to… Every translation is a little problematic, but: "to rejoice at," "to rejoice with." And there are many different kinds of terms in the Sanskrit language and other Buddhist languages for expressions of delight, but most often "anumodanā" refers to either the expression of joy when one hears the dharma being preached, or expressions of joy and delight when, for instance, a gift is made or some other kind of meritorious deed is committed. And I became especially interested in this when I discovered how pervasive it is in the "Lotus Sūtra." So, the basic pattern in that text is that the Buddha reveals some new and often fairly astonishing piece of doctrine, and his audience, who are depicted very richly in the text, respond with expressions of joy and delight. I also discovered that the Buddha, in that text, frequently talks about and even prescribes "anumodanā" as its own kind of salvific act, with its own powerful karmic charge. And so that was kind of— that was at the beginning of my dissertation research: was discovering this term, which previously I had been quite ignorant to, and slowly kind of piecing together the prominence that it holds in this one particular sūtra. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, lovely. Okay, great. So, we will circle back around to the thesis...

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Sure. 

MILES OSGOOD: ... and sort of where that concept and that joy surfaces. But now, as promised, I want to go back to your beginnings as a Buddhist Studies scholar. Were there particular moments of joy, wonder, excitement that got you hooked into this field that you can remember? 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Absolutely, yeah. I grew up, I suppose, around Buddhists. I was always very interested. I was lucky to grow up actually mostly around Asian art and so I had a kind of a background interest, I guess, in the religious traditions of Asia. When I was an undergrad at the University of Toronto, I took an "Intro to Buddhism" course, which blew my mind, basically, you know, twice a week for the entire year. I think it was a year-long course. Basic survey of Buddhist traditions and history. MILES OSGOOD: And that would have included the "Lotus Sūtra" at the time?

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: To tell you the truth, I can't remember if it did. And in fact, it's an interesting question of how the "Lotus" came to occupy me so much. At that time, I remember being exposed to enough kind of, like, Nikāya Buddhism, like background, you know, the kind of Indic, supposedly the kind of earlier tradition, to the extent that the first Buddhist language that I started to learn also at the University of Toronto was Pali. So, I spent a lot of time with the Pali Canon during those four years. And because you asked about my own experiences of wonder and joy: originally, those experiences for me came out of being exposed to overtly kind of philosophical texts. Texts about emptiness really kind of rocked my world. And it maybe seems a little odd to respond to that with joy...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: ... but in fact, I remember there's a text by Tsongkhapa that is translated in the textbook that we must have used, which is kind of like a hymn of praise to the Buddha, specifically for revealing the doctrine of 12 links of dependent origination. That just totally like... It's something that I like to teach with partly because, as an 18-year-old, it really kind of blew my mind.

MILES OSGOOD: Have you witnessed students have a similar reaction? 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: No, unfortunately, but I'm holding out hope that, you know, maybe one or two in the future. 

MILES OSGOOD: Maybe they'll come back to it. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Yeah, exactly. But, yeah, I spent some time— I spent most of my undergrad falteringly trying to learn Indic Buddhist languages. I studied Pali for a few years, I studied Sanskrit. Not that any of it really stuck that much. And because my primary kind of teacher-mentor during that time, Amanda Goodman, is a historian of medieval Chinese Buddhism, that gradually came to really occupy my interest. And she was extremely encouraging that I start learning Chinese, which I did, and ultimately did a master's in Buddhist Studies, where my focus was pretty much squarely in Chinese Buddhism. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, nice. So, let's talk a little bit about that master's and your graduate years here...

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD Sure. 

MILES OSGOOD: ... at Stanford: deepening in medieval Chinese literature, doing some travel, especially in Europe to various places where you could look at the Dunhuang manuscripts, at Chinese and Asian art more generally. What was the evolution of deepening a focus? 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: That's a good question. Focus is a problem in my life. And when I—in my defense yesterday, I wanted to speak with my committee about my process. Because the four of my committee members have been very important in urging me to have a focus. I suppose that already, you know, when I started a master's degree and began studying Chinese, that was the beginning of giving a kind of a shape to a research career, or some kind of parameters, I guess. That, everything… I mean, I knew by the end of my master's degree that I was basically very, very interested in the transmission of Buddhism in medieval China. And I was starting to gather the tools to do research in that field. When I started at Stanford, you know, I had that as my kind of default. But actually, things got complicated because I started my PhD here in 2019. And so, I was only on campus with—who became, you know, the profs who became my committee—for about six months before everything kind of fell apart. And so, I spent 18 months still studying full time, but not really in the environment

where I was, you know, spending most days with Buddhist Studies folks. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: And so, during that time, it was kind of a mixed bag because on one hand, I kind of spiraled outwards. I think just not being in the Stanford environment, I felt like freer rein to explore other interests.

MILES OSGOOD: Were there other particular topics that became especially tempting? 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Yeah, in fact, that's like the genesis of this project that I have on music. I started taking courses all over the place—I think to the chagrin of some of my teachers in Buddhist Studies. But they were very patient with me. I guess had faith that ultimately it would spiral back in. But yeah, I took courses in Music, I took courses in Theater and Performance Studies. I took some in Comp Lit, basically across the humanities. And it was a really rich time for me. But whatever focus I had kind of come into the doctorate with kind of went out the window for a period of time. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. But there must be some value to that, right? Of going out, getting some breadth, kind of seeing other points of comparison, of things you can study... 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Absolutely. 

MILES OSGOOD: ... and then understanding what's eccentrically interesting...

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Yes. 

MILES OSGOOD: ... about coming back to medieval Buddhism. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Yeah, and I should say that I'm extremely grateful, right? John Kieschnick, my advisor, as I say, is extremely patient. And I think that he saw that what I was kind of gathering from this kind of migratory, (Julian laughs) or like grazing across disciplines, was actually fueling some ideas that I had brought to the table in the study of Buddhism. And so, when everybody came back to campus, John and I started working together in person in a much more concentrated way. He encouraged me to add a bit more focus or emphasize a bit more what I had come here to do and study Chinese texts. And that's around the time that I started to discover what became the issues in my dissertation. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: So, in a way, it all kind of worked out.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, that's great. And so now you've mentioned one of our faculty directors, Professor Kieschnick. And it sounds like the other of our faculty directors, Professor Paul Harrison... 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Yeah. 

MILES OSGOOD: ... also had an influence textually, if not personally... 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Absolutely. 

MILES OSGOOD: ... on the direction this would go, insofar as he's somebody who kind of laid down a gauntlet for scholars for how to think about these kinds of Mahāyāna sūtra texts. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. Paul, I mean, I always knew that I wanted to study with both Paul and John. During my undergrad studies, I was introduced to Paul's work on Mahāyāna sūtra literature. And that, for me, is amazing. I mean, talk about moments of wonderment and joy. Discovering Paul's work on the "Pratyutpanna Samādhi Sūtra," which figures in my dissertation, was a very major moment for me. And this statement of Paul's that I reiterate in the dissertation, and hope that I kind of helped to address somewhat, that much of the kind of modern scholarship on Mahāyāna sūtras has focused perhaps inordinately on the rare kind of deposits of doctrine that we find in Mahāyāna sūtras, at the expense of or neglecting all of the other literary components of those texts that we need to appreciate in order to understand them as literary works, as religious objects. So that was kind of a watershed observation in my kind of thinking, and the development of my scholarship. 

MILES OSGOOD: Can we take that beat by beat, actually?

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. 

MILES OSGOOD: So, in the case of the "Lotus Sūtra," what would have been the tradition of the small mined bits of doctrine…

 JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Sure. 

MILES OSGOOD: ... that initially would have focused folks' gaze? 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Yeah. 

MILES OSGOOD: And what are the literary dimensions that people need to be aware of instead? 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: I mean, that's a great question because often— and I think that I've tried to kind of show this in the dissertation— is that they're so profoundly intertwined with one another that it's remarkable to me that anybody ever kind of teased them apart and really wanted to focus on doctrine. So, in the "Lotus," I think the major points are that everything the Buddha's taught up until this point has been kind of a strategic ruse, and the absolute teaching of the One Vehicle hasn't yet been revealed, or is now being revealed in the text itself. And then also that what we know as the Buddha, as Prince Siddhartha Gautama, or Śākyamuni, has also been kind of like a trick. And in fact, the Buddha remains in the world for longer than we can possibly imagine. Those are the two kind of— across most kind of traditions of interpretation—those are the big points in the text. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: And, you know, quite rightly so: they're fascinating to think about, think with, and there are ambiguities in the text that make them quite chewy for exegetes.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Nevertheless, right, what I've hoped to draw attention to in the dissertation is that the way that the text performs these doctrinal revelations is so spectacular that we, as the reader, I think that we're invited to have specific kinds of feelings about them. And in fact, the text tells us what kinds of feelings we should be having about them by having its own characters respond, often with "anumodanā," right, these performances of joy. And then, you know, at times Śākyamuni will pipe in and say, actually this is what we're supposed to be doing. Or this is what you're supposed to be doing when I tell you I'm, you know, sticking around in the world indefinitely... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: ... to rejoice. And so I think, you know, in these moments, as I say, it's like, it's hard for me to pull apart what is happening doctrinally in the text with these quite extraordinary literary performances... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: ... that call, I think, tacitly and also very explicitly for certain kinds of readerly response. But the other thing that strikes me is that another kind of element of scholarship— that I think Paul's statements that we just talked about are quite important for— has also done the important work of showing that, right, these texts, you know, the way that we in the modern West perhaps think about a religious text, as scripture, right—it's a book, you know, people read it, people study it, often silently, right, often in isolation or, you know, we have this idea of the text being its kind of own, like, hermetically sealed world—when we look at evidence about how Mahāyāna sūtras may have, you know, been circulated, certainly how they were received in medieval China, there is no reason to think that that's what people were doing with texts. In fact, there's a lot of evidence of people using the texts to preach with, people simply committing them to memory and reciting them aloud, right. That the whole kind of ritual world in which they're embedded is extremely vivid, embodied, alive...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: ... sensory, affective, right? And so, I think that it was easy for, say, late 19th- and 20th-century scholars in the West to imagine that, because this is a scripture, right, the point is that it involves these doctrines, these kind of ideas, when in the historical reality and, you know, even absolutely in the present, in Buddhist cultures, like, the scripture has an amazing and very full life of its own that involves all the senses, right? And so that's another kind of current this project is trying to recover, right: the text not merely as something that is just trying to say something to the reader, but the text which is really kind of already quite alive and in most contexts of its traditional use, made much more so...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: ... in, you know, acts of recitation and performance and so on. 

MILES OSGOOD: And it sounds like the text is giving you its own internal clues about that as well, right? It's not just emotional reactions, but the fact of a kind of congregational...

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Yeah. 

MILES OSGOOD: ... context, that we should remember is not the hermetic exegesis that we might ascribe to the reader. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Exactly. I know. I mean, it's amazing. (Julian laughs) It took me so long to realize this with "Lotus Sūtra," which is crazy to me because now it seems so obvious. But that it's just a series of, I mean, the whole—one way of looking at the text is a series of celebrations. But once I kind of snapped into focus, that way of looking at the text, it's exactly, yeah, exactly as I say, it's like the Buddha's word becomes this thing which is registered in so many ways beyond just, like, you know, a piece of doctrine... 

MILES OSGOOD: A principle. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: ... an abstract thought, a principle. Exactly. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, that makes sense. So, okay, in passing, you've also mentioned another context here, which is really key to the dissertation, which is specifically the fact that much of the history of the "Lotus Sūtra" that we seem to know has to do with its translation into Chinese, its reception into Medieval China, and that that's going to be your focus. And that also seems to allow you to say, "Well, insofar as we need to understand this particular text, "maybe there are other texts that "are playing a similar social "or religious role or that just "have similar literary dimensions that we can kind of play off as analogies or corollaries." 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Sure.

MILES OSGOOD: What does the miracle tale literature at least tell us? Because you've spent some time with that. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Sure, yeah. I have to say that, I mean, if this is not already obvious, I really, really love the Mahāyāna sūtra material. I really love medieval Chinese miracle tales. These are short, popular narratives, most probably originating as oral stories that circulated in social groups, a lot of lay people probably, but also monastics, from the 4th century CE onward in medieval China. I work with compilations of tales that were written down. The compilations that I'm looking at in the dissertation come from the 8th century. They often—not always, but often—tell of people who find themselves in trouble. I mean, the default is usually: somebody has a serious illness, somebody is beset by bandits, somebody, I don't know, their house catches on fire. Usually, the outlook that we start these tales off with is not so good. 

MILES OSGOOD: A miracle is needed. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Exactly. And so, what typically happens is that the character, the protagonist, either has devoted themselves to a Buddhist cult object— whether that be a sūtra or a particular bodhisattva or a relic—and as the reward for their devotion, some unseen, numinous Buddhist power intercedes on their behalf. Either they clear up the illness, they put out the fire, they keep the boat from sinking. So typically, they have a happy ending. And the things that interest me in this literature—I mean, that already interested me before I started working on the dissertation project—is just how they're often very short, but they include a kind of a roller coaster of affect, at least in my reading. I was struck when I was first introduced to these texts by how fleshy they are. This is particularly so in tales about illness. They're often really gross. (both laugh) They involve... And it was clear to me as I was kind of translating, I was first translating some miracle tales, right that's, in some cases, they're trying to gross you out. In some cases, they're trying to terrify you, make you really anxious. And then, of course, as they resolve with the intercession of a Buddhist holy being or of a text, that all transforms into the experience of wonderment and joy. And so, what I started to notice as I was thinking about the dissertation project is that much like the "Lotus Sūtra" itself, the tales will often tell you exactly how to feel. Either they will show you people who witnessed the miracle, responding to it with wonderment and joy, or otherwise, one thing that really interests me, sometimes they'll just say, "People wept," which is often kind of ambiguous whether that's from joy or whether it's from pity. Or… But in any case, they're quite full of these really rich affective cues. And what that suggested to me is that the way that people in medieval China are talking about the objects of devotion...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: ... in Buddhist culture is really shot through with affect. In other words, it's not— I mean, I guess the default would be to say they're reverential or something like that—but actually there's a lot more going on, a lot more vivid affective stuff happening. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: On one hand, right, life is grisly and brutal, and in medieval China it often was. On the other hand, the Buddhist sūtras, the bodhisattvas have this power to save that causes some pretty intense emotional reactions. And so, if the dissertation accomplishes anything, my hope is that it demonstrates that, at least for the kind of milieu that shared and ultimately wrote down miracle tales, that Buddhist life involved emotions, some pretty strong emotions, as a very important part of its being.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, so it makes me wonder a little bit about my own academic training in ways that maybe suppress what feel like sentimental reactions to literature. So, it's great to have this corrective and this way of rounding out the experience of all kinds of literature. When you say something like the text is telling you how to emote or how to react... 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Right. 

MILES OSGOOD: ... You can feel, or I can feel at least, my defenses...

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Yes. 

MILES OSGOOD: ... rising up against that... 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Absolutely. 

MILES OSGOOD: ... against being manipulated or against a kind of easy, empathetic reaction, as opposed to a more academic and analytical one. So I think two ways of maybe breaking through this...

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Yeah. 

MILES OSGOOD: ... in our conversation would be: one, to talk to you a little bit about other analogies or examples for this kind of feeling you can have in respect…

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Sure, yeah. 

MILES OSGOOD: ... to a kind of cultural performance or religious rite, and then maybe after that to get to what have been some of these moments for you personally.

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Oh, sure, yeah. 

MILES OSGOOD: So first, because you open your dissertation with this really lovely example that would be, I think, very unexpected, but fun for that reason—and I'll let you describe it in more detail. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Sure.

MILES OSGOOD: But going from there, from—I'll just tease this— the "Monterey Pop Festival" and the film thereof of 1968 and the experience of Californians hearing Ravi Shankar in North America for the first time...

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Yeah. 

MILES OSGOOD: What other analogies have you come up with for, "No, this is a way where you give "yourself over to this feeling, and it's part of the intended experience." 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Yeah. So, it's a really rich series of questions, and I guess what I want to start with is this idea… In the dissertation, I put myself in the position of what I call the text's ideal reader. That is to say, I'm looking for exactly, as you say, the ways that at least the "Lotus Sūtra" and then the miracle tales about it from medieval China… I'm experimenting. I'm trying to think always when I'm reading, "Okay, what does the text want me to feel?" And fortunately, it's very explicit a lot of the time, so it's not too difficult to put yourself in that position. And for me, that's quite fun, and maybe it's easy for me because I already have those kinds of feelings.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: So, for instance—there are so many moments, even before I became aware of this whole kind of current in the "Lotus Sūtra" of the text trying to determine readerly response. Even before that, in reading it, episodes in the text like when the jeweled stūpa emerges out of the ground and a voice emerges from within it— which is really not supposed to happen in Buddhism. Whatever's in there is not supposed to talk. And certainly, there aren't supposed to be two Buddhas in the world at one time. You know, similarly, moments… Actually, in that same episode, all of these emanated Buddhas from all parts of the cosmos want to come and witness what's happening, and so the Buddha expands the world so that they can all have their own seat. Just these kind of aesthetic pyrotechnics in the text: I'm very vulnerable to those already as a reader. So, for me, it's not really that much of a jump to put myself in the position of then saying, okay, reading the Buddha saying it's correct to feel joy at this. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Right. Nevertheless, I'm acutely aware of the fact that it's not everybody's experience with the text. In fact, yesterday during my defense, I think at a certain point, boredom came up. The "Lotus Sūtra" involves a lot of repetition. I've been in seminar rooms where people from Buddhist Studies are reading the text and just like, "Come on, again?" So, there are dimensions. As you say, that's either because you're bored or because you're resistant to the strategy of the text or from wanting to be critical in certain ways. There are all kinds of things that can happen in the reading of the text where what I think is the intended response is resisted.

MILES OSGOOD: Right. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: But that brings me to maybe give some examples of the text's strategies for nevertheless encouraging its reader to be joyful. 

MILES OSGOOD: Right.

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: And as you mentioned, I have a couple of analogies for this. Maybe the most straightforward one is a laugh track, right? So, when you're watching a sitcom, none of the jokes are actually that funny, but the producers have included a laugh track that tells you as the viewer what's funny, how funny it is... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: ... what kind of laugh is right. Are we going for a big guffaw?

Is it kind of like a nervous titter? There's actually a lot of information that's packed into that that's not necessa— literal information. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: But as the viewer right, it kind of, it has an effect. Often you find yourself laughing at jokes that are not funny. These are ways of grooming or massaging the viewer into having some kinds of responses. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: The example that I open the dissertation with, as you mentioned: in the film of "Monterey Pop," the festival where Ravi Shankar performed in America—I believe it was the first time, at least for a rock music audience—there's this beautiful 20-minute sequence where the audience is not really sure what they're listening to. Maybe they've heard Indian music, classical music before, but certainly they've never been in the performance space. Right? It's unfamiliar. They've been rocking out all weekend, right? And the camera pays very, very close attention to the reactions of the audience. This is kind of a trope, I guess, in all concert film media, right, that it's important to show the audience enjoying themselves or something. But what I love so much about this one example is that the camera really captures the audience transitioning from not really knowing what they're listening to...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: You know, this kind of suspended wonderment at what's going on.

MILES OSGOOD: Potentially boredom or confusion. Potentially, exactly. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Yeah, exactly. To, as the raga picks up, a completely rapt and euphoric experience of music. And as the viewer of the film, right, you get to participate in that. Not only are you hearing the music yourself and then ultimately seeing the performers, but also, and very importantly, you're getting this kind of vision and you're having certain responses suggested to you. There are these incredible close-up shots of audience members. There's at one point, you see Jimi Hendrix really briefly, and he's just kind of like agog at what's happening. And so that's been really helpful for me as an analogy for what I see in the "Lotus Sūtra," right? The Buddha performs in some way, something happens, he reveals something, you know, which often is so much more than him actually speaking. Things happen around him, right? And the whole time, we also get these characters: Maitreya often is the focal point.

MILES OSGOOD: The equivalent of the Jimi Hendrix. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Yeah, exactly. Literally, that's a precise analogy, right? He's sitting, watching the guru and just experiencing a kind of—importantly in the "Lotus Sūtra," it's often a transition between wonderment and possibly doubt because nobody's sure what the Buddha really means to say. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, it seems to be undoing other things he said.

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Exactly, into when they finally get it, locking into this kind of experience of joy. So those are fun, those are nice little analogies that help me both talk about the "Lotus Sūtra" and then, I think, in a general way, talk about the ways that media suggests, right, ideal emotional responses... 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: ... or states. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Yeah. 

MILES OSGOOD: And sometimes, in the case of a really good director, acknowledges the resistance as well as the acceptance. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is one thing that came up. I don't talk about this enough in the dissertation. Hopefully the book will have more about this.

I've focused a huge amount on all these really good feelings. 

MILES OSGOOD: Right. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: The "Lotus Sūtra" also involves some bad feelings. There are some people in the audience who do not agree. 

MILES OSGOOD: Right. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: And they don't see it. They don't want to participate. At one point, 5,000 people get up and leave, which is shocking. You're not supposed to do that to the Buddha.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, yeah. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: That's crazy. And then, again, in a few episodes in the text, you have to confront these people who don't agree. And it gets a little nasty at points. And so, those are some things that I have to think about in developing this project a little bit more. Similarly, in the Chinese miracle tales and certainly other literary genres, there's a huge amount of suggested and sometimes very explicit competition with other religious groups, be they indigenous Chinese religious groups, Daoists... 

MILES OSGOOD: Right.

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: ... or other Buddhist communities, for whom, for instance, the "Lotus Sūtra" isn't "the text."

MILES OSGOOD: Right, yeah.

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: So that's the kind of underbelly, I guess.

MILES OSGOOD: That's great. So, this is where we're going to wrap. But in terms of these analogies of film and concert experience and the laugh track— which I think maybe we should even go further back and we should go to the live studio audience as a model,

because it seems... 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Totally. 

MILES OSGOOD: ... to be about you getting to participate in a collective experience that you weren't present for. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Right. 

MILES OSGOOD: But because you can imagine the collective being

so awestruck…

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Yes. 

MILES OSGOOD: ... or so happy, you want to be a part of that. And it's more contagious. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: Now I want to kind of spin that around and say, well, insofar as Pennebaker gives us those close-ups, insofar as the "Lotus Sūtra" gives us those close-ups of individuals having particular reactions... 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: ... could you finish us up by telling us about an individual moment? I mean, you've mentioned some along the way...

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Sure. 

MILES OSGOOD: ... but an individual moment in the "Lotus Sūtra" that individually for you had an affective impact?

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Yeah. I mean, I'll go back to when the stūpa emerges out of the earth. It has all this really splendid visual description. It itself is gigantic. It's covered in precious substances. The fact that it just emerges kind of out of the ground all of a sudden. It's shocking. But the moment that for me is— I keep coming back to it, and I haven't written about it so much in the dissertation, but I really hope to, perhaps in a separate piece. There's a moment when the door into the stūpa, into the kind of recess where the Buddha, Prabhūtaratna, is sitting, the door unlatches. And the text suddenly shifts from very visual description to a description of the sound that the latch makes, and then the voice of Prabhūtaratna coming out of it. And that transition from this already kind of astonishing literary performance that is so cued to vision, right, to all of a sudden have this very vivid evocation of a sound. That's not ultimately that, I mean, it's quite a... it has… There's an element of fear, or maybe something is going on that we're not totally sure what's going to happen. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Right. And certainly everybody is already kind of on their toes. But that's the moment that I keep coming back to. It's like something, there's, you know.

MILES OSGOOD: Because of the feeling of awe and suspense. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Exactly, yeah. And just, I mean, the text is so skillful with its management of our imaginations. You know so much of that, so much is just accomplished by references to sense, mostly vision. And it's like, but in this case that sudden snap into the sound. Yeah, really does it for me. (Julian laughs) 

MILES OSGOOD: That's great. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: But there are a lot. I could go on and on and on. 

MILES OSGOOD: That's a great one to end on. I'm going to have to either find the perfect sound effect or just a reading of that passage... 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: It's tempting. I always think about it.

MILES OSGOOD: ... to close on. Okay, well, thank you so much, Julian, or I should say Dr. Butterfield, for this conversation. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Thank you.

MILES OSGOOD: Hopefully reinvigorates lots of folks' readings of the "Lotus Sūtra" and how they think about it, and more importantly maybe how they feel about it.

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Sure, thank you. 

MILES OSGOOD: So, wonderful, great. 

JULIAN BUTTERFIELD: Thanks.

[Epilogue]

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

MILES OSGOOD: As promised, here’s an excerpt from Chapter 11 of the Lotus Sūtra where we hear the sound of the latch that Julian described at the end of our conversation. This is Burton Watson’s translation.

“Shakyamuni Buddha with the fingers of his right hand then opened the door of the tower of seven treasures. A loud sound issued from it, like the sound of a lock and crossbar being removed from a great city gate, and at once all the members of the assembly caught sight of Many Treasures Thus Come One seated on a lion seat inside the treasure tower, his body whole and unimpaired, sitting as though engaged in meditation. And they heard him say, ‘Excellent, excellent, Shakyamuni Buddha! You have preached this Lotus Sutra in a spirited manner. I have come here in order that I may hear this sutra.’”

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

Thanks again to Julian for joining the show. To watch a video recording of the conversation you just heard, head to our YouTube Channel, @thehocenterforbuddhiststudies (all one word), or visit our website: buddhiststudies.stanford.edu.

On our site, you’ll also find information about other current students and alumni.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]

As usual, the music for this episode is a recording from Ani Choying Drolma’s “Buddhist Chants and Songs,” performed at Stanford’s Memorial Church in 2017. 

Until next time, this has been “The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford” podcast.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]

[Prologue]

MILES OSGOOD: Welcome to “The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford” podcast. Come join us by the tree.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar]

In the West of the Indian subcontinent, during the first millennium of the Common Era, Buddhist monasteries took a peculiar shape. Here, where waterways eroded the edges of the Deccan Plateau and pooled into merchant harbors in the western basin of the Indian Ocean, monks, too, carved out their own communities of refuge into the basaltic cliffs: a network of thousands of caves, combining vihara residences, chaitya worship halls, and internal waterworks, all cut out of rock. 

To explain what we find inside these sacred sites—walking over the rich black cotton soil, passing under a giant arch and through rows of columns into an interior apse, following the life of the Buddha in friezes arranged as a series of theatrical stages, and then arriving at a sculpture of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, protector of travelers—we need a unique guide. We need an art historian who is also an archaeologist, a medieval economist, an all-around speleologist: someone who can shine a light into the more remote historical corners of these caves.

PIA BRANCACCIO: “I was also looking at the kind of, sort of economic stimuli that might have led a monastery in the middle of the Deccan Plateau to boom in the 5th century. I mean—it just, you know—we go from like two viharas to twenty. So it’s like an enormous monastic occupation. There must have been some sustenance.”

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and flute]

MILES OSGOOD: I’m your host, Miles Osgood. 

My guest today is Pia Brancaccio, Professor of Indian Art and Archaeology at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” and at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Professor Brancaccio, who has previously held research appointments at the Getty and the Met, is an expert on the Buddhist art of ancient Gandhara and South Asia, and in particular on the rock-cave monasteries of the Deccan Plateau. On that subject, she is the author of The Buddhist Caves of Aurangabad (2010) and the editor of Living Rock: Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain Cave Temples in the Western Deccan (2013). 

She’s here at Stanford this week to speak to us about the cave complex at Kanheri outside Mumbai, and her digital archaeology initiative “Mapping Ancient Kṛṣṇagiri” (or the “MAK Project”).

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, singing]

On the subject of maps, let me lay out a little of the geography of this episode. Professor Brancaccio’s current research takes her to Western India in Maharashtra, around Mumbai, but as she points out, what’s exciting about this region in the years 200 BCE to 1000 CE is that it’s a nexus amid the surrounding civilizations. The art and inscriptions we find in the caves reveal a trade network that Brancaccio calls the “Cotton Road,” connecting Western Deccan to Gujarat, Sindh, and Gandhāra to the north, Karnataka to the south, and Egypt and Europe even, across the Western Indian Ocean.

As for making maps on the monastic scale, we can look up close at a single cave complex like Kanheri. Two thousand years ago, Kanheri would have participated in this cross-continental exchange through an estuary of the Ulhas River, such that boats could arrive near the caves by canal. That commerce and infrastructure supported the work of excavating one hundred local rock-cut rooms and their internal waterworks—most likely engineered by mining experts, but serving a community of monks. The monks lived in squared-off cells and gathered in a larger apse around a stupa: a hall where we find giant sculptures of Buddha, inscribed pillars, and flat walls once painted with murals. One cave, number 12, may even have been a library—perhaps one cited by the travelers Faxian and Xuanzang. Overlooking the miniature city, across the river and up a hill to the west, there once stood a temple, now destroyed.

The story of how this all came about, and how it ended, is up next. 

Let’s head into the library.

[bell chime]

[Epilogue]

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

To see some of Professor Brancaccio’s photographs of Kanheri, check out the video recording of this interview on our YouTube Channel, @thehocenterforbuddhiststudies. You can start with a good cluster of images right around the 25-minute mark.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

Pia Brancaccio’s full Stanford lecture on the Kanheri caves is also available on the YouTube Channel. And if you want to learn more about upcoming events and speakers, head to our website: buddhiststudies.stanford.edu.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]

As always, the music for this episode is a recording from Ani Choying Drolma’s “Buddhist Chants and Songs,” performed at Stanford’s Memorial Church in 2017. 

Until next time, this has been “The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford” podcast.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]

[Prologue]

MILES OSGOOD: Welcome to “The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford” podcast. Come join us by the tree.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar]

In the 2nd century C.E., two religions converged in China, and by the 6th century, each was utterly transformed. Daoism grew from an esoteric line of recluses into a religion with an extensive library, formal rituals, and a professional priesthood. Meanwhile, from the west, a foreign religion brought in a new system of monasteries and developed its first major written canon.

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: “I would argue that the arrival of Buddhism in China is an amazing moment in history, on the level of the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman empire.”

MILES OSGOOD: One story long told is that Buddhism “conquered” Daoism over these four centuries, by filling in gaps in the local religion’s cosmology and providing a model of institutional structure. But is that really what happened? 

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: “One of the factors that I’m quite convinced about is that the Daoists have done more—almost more—to spread Buddhism in China during the 4th and 5th and 6th centuries than Buddhist priests were able to do.”

MILES OSGOOD: Up ahead: a closer look at the first encounter of Daoism and Buddhism, and how that history might change Daoist and Buddhist Studies today.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and flute]

We’re recording from the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford. 

I’m your host, Miles Osgood. 

Today, in our second episode, I’ll be talking to Stephen Bokenkamp, Regents’ Professor at Arizona State University and an award-winning translator and writer. Professor Bokenkamp is the author of two major translation projects: the anthology Early Daoist Scriptures and A Fourth-Century Daoist Family: The Zhen’gao, or Declarations from the Perfected, for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In between, in 2007, Bokenkamp published Ancestors and Anxiety: Daoism and the Birth of Rebirth in China, which uses the scriptures of Yang Xi and the Lingbao School from the other two volumes to narrate, analyze, and ultimately re-imagine the first encounter between Daoism and Buddhism in China.

Professor Bokenkamp has taught at Indiana, Beijing, Princeton, Sichuan, and Fudan Universities, as well as here at Stanford. The Regents’ Professorship he holds at ASU is the school’s highest faculty honor. He’s here with us to give this year’s Evans-Wentz Lecture.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, singing]

As you’ll discover in the conversation to come, Stephen Bokenkamp has got stories to tell. Some of these are personal: there are his seven years working as a cryptographer for the Army Security Agency, where he first learned Chinese; or there’s his first visit to the Chinese countryside, to meet Buddhist and Daoist priests who had survived the Cultural Revolution. Then there are historical stories: against the “prevailing scholarly notion that Buddhist ideas easily swept all before them in a sort of ‘Buddhist conquest of China’” (as Bokenkamp writes at the end of Ancestors and Anxiety), Bokenkamp argues that we need a narrative rounded out with other voices, to understand that Daoism was always “a shape-shifting religion… that did not organize itself around unalterable doctrine or creed in the ways we at first imagined” (quoting, this time, from the beginning of A Fourth-Century Daoist Family).

Like all good storytellers, Professor Bokenkamp knows how to set a scene. Ancestors and Anxiety starts at a hut beside a grave, where a son praises the worth of his late mother by writing about the pear tree with two trunks that has grown out of the tomb. We then jump three hundred years, to the winter rituals of the Retreat of Mud and Ash, where disciples of Lu Xiujing throw themselves on the ground to save their parents from the torments of hell. Surveying these two scenes, Bokenkamp points out that, in the second century, “Cai Yong describes his ancestors as providers of grace,” but in the fifth century, “Lu Xiujing imagines his [ancestors] to be in need of grace.” And so, we realize, something must have changed these Daoist practices in the interceding years.

In keeping with that storytelling style, it seems only fitting for me to set our own scene briefly before you. In the corner of the Buddhist Studies Library where we conduct our interviews, behind our chairs, there’s a wall of red and green hardcover spines, embossed in gold: the definitive edition of the Chinese Buddhist Canon, the Taishō Tripiṭaka, with its supplementary texts: about 250 volumes in total. At the beginning of the conversation you’re about to hear, I had taken these books, and the written tradition they represented, for granted. By the end, I’d learned that their existence is itself a testament to the Daoist-Buddhist encounter. 

So, with that, let’s go into the library, and sit by those books.

[bell chime]

MILES OSGOOD: Today, in our second episode, I'll be talking to Stephen Bokenkamp, Regents Professor at Arizona State University and an award-winning translator and writer. Professor Bokenkamp is the author of two major translation projects, the anthology "Early Daoist Scriptures," and most recently, "A Fourth-Century Daoist Family: The Zhen-gao, or Declarations of the Perfected." In between, in 2007, he published "Ancestors and Anxiety: Daoism and the Birth of Rebirth in China," which uses the scriptures of Yang Xi and the Lingbao School, from the other two volumes to analyze, narrate, and ultimately re-imagine the first encounter between Daoism and Buddhism in China. Professor Bokenkamp has also taught at Indiana, Beijing, Princeton, Sichuan and Fudan universities, as well as here at Stanford. The Regents Professorship he holds at ASU is the school's highest faculty honor, and he's here to give this year's Evans-Wentz Lecture. So thank you so much, Professor Bokenkamp, for being here.

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: Thank you very much, Miles. That was a very kind introduction.

MILES OSGOOD: Of course, of course. Well, so I wanted to start off with a little bit of an opening or offering for you to tell us the story of how you came to this field and became interested in the intersection of Daoism and Buddhism, and what that looked like on the ground when you were doing your field work. And the reason I'm asking that is, I think one thing that's really striking to me

when I read in particular the opening pages of "Ancestors and Anxiety" and "A Fourth-Century Daoist Family," is I see you making that move: kind of putting us on the ground,

giving us a setting to think about, giving us a story to think about, whether that's Cai Yong and Lu Xiujing, at different points in history, thinking about their ancestors and the afterlife in different ways and therefore how to account for the transition from one to the other, or taking us into Yang Xi's mountain meditation chamber and showing us the paucity of that and how as a result, we need to go even further in, into his imagination to really think about what was happening there. So this is just an opening to say, is there an opening scene you can take us to in your own research or your own scholarship when you were getting into this field that would put us on the scene, as it were? 

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: I think that's a wonderful question and I thank you for asking it. I can do that. I think when I began, of course, I came out of the Army where I was an analyst for the National Security Agency and didn't work with people. Then I went to Berkeley and I got to a Chinese-speaking country just as soon as I could. I went to Taiwan, just a year after I got out of the Army. And it turned out to not a very good year to go because it was when we—the United States, I mean— established relationships with the People's Republic of China and disestablished relationships with Taiwan. And so that—I mean, I met some wonderful people in Daoist studies. But I think what really brought about the moments in my writing that you referred to were when I finally got to mainland China, and this was in Chengdu in the mid-eighties. And I had put together a project that would take me out to the countryside. And so I met a lot of Buddhist and Daoist priests

and had a wonderful time talking with them and hearing their stories. These were men and women who had spent the Cultural Revolution hiding their religion, burying their religious statuary.

MILES OSGOOD: Right.

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: The saddest case is the name, I think his name was (indistinct), who was a— had been ordained during the PRC, but during the Cultural Revolution, he had to hide everything.

MILES OSGOOD: Wow. 

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: I have a picture which I would like to share with you, of him holding the Bagua water container and a broken hairpin, which were the only remnants of his ordination.

MILES OSGOOD: Oh, wow.

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: And so it was really— it was moments like that when speaking with actual religious practitioners in China who in the face of great odds had continued to do work in religion. And this particular person had been forced to marry. He was a Quanzhen Daoist. And so he brought his elderly wife back to the temple with him and was a little bit diffident about how one would talk about that because it wasn't a decision that he wanted to make, that he couldn't leave her.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: So it would just, it was scenes like that that led me to want—

even though I worked with Six Dynasties Daoism, and getting into private lives is very, very difficult—to focus wherever I could on finding out what religion was actually like on the ground,

in China, during what I think was one of the most remarkable changes in the history of world religion. In the talk I'll be giving tomorrow, I liken it to the arrival of Christianity in the Roman Empire.

MILES OSGOOD: Oh, wow. Yeah, so you mentioned the project that you set out to take on when you were there in the eighties. Is that already a project of trying to work your way back to this period that you're going to be talking about tomorrow—the first to the fifth century, say—or did you set out to have these kinds of contemporary encounters and get your bearing? Or was it somehow the two together?

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: At that time, I was—in the mid-eighties—I was funded by the National Science Foundation, and it was the result of an exchange of scholars between Mao Zedong and Richard Nixon. And so the project—I was one of the few humanities people who actually— 

MILES OSGOOD: Had a National Science Foundation grant.

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: Yes. And at the time, what I put together was both to look, if I could, for what kind of archeological and physical remains there would be of the original 24 parishes of Celestial Master Daoism throughout Sichuan—which is of course where Daoism started— but also to look for the remnants of religion. I mean, I really wanted to get out into the countryside. And Sichuan at that time had the very first Daoist studies center in the country, Zhang Jiyu and Qing Shitai laoshi decided to put it in Sichuan rather than in Beijing for political reasons. And so this was actually sparked by the Tateshina Conference in Daoism. And they had seen foreigners studying Daoism and thought, "Well, this is our national religion, in a certain sort of way, and we should study it as well."

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, so you have live encounters then with practitioners and, it sounds like, scholarly encounters with a budding new Daoism research center. What about working your way to—what about those remnants? What were you able to find that gave you a kind of longer sense of the history there? 

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: It was very sparse. I mean, there'd been a lot of change and the 24 parishes were a short-lived sort of institution anyway, but there were some amazing operating temples in China, mountain caves: the rebuilding project was just great.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, wonderful. So you also mentioned in passing there sort of ranking major moments in world history for religious change and for religious transformation and the intersection of religion and politics. And I gather that that's going to be kind of the subject of how you think about the relationship between Buddhism and Daoism, perhaps in those centuries: in the first-, second- to fifth-centuries CE. So could you tell us a little bit about how maybe those Daoist scholars in China, or how your Western colleagues thought about that in the seventies and eighties? What was the narrative people were telling about what Daoism's relationship to Buddhism had been when they first met?

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: I found, interestingly enough, that the narrative was—the master narrative was very much the same in mainland China and in the United States, with the addition that in mainland China, of course—because of the government there and the notion of history there,

which is a Marxist notion of history, the idea that religion was "the opiate of the masses" was also kind of added across the top of people's thinking. However, basically I think the narrative is the one articulated best by Erik Zürcher, and the idea is that there were soft areas in Chinese thought that were shored up or somehow filled by Buddhism. And so he did this remarkable work, which is—he's been my interlocutor, I think for decades now on the Buddhist influence on early Daoism.

This was at the time that Erik Zürcher had put together the "Projet Tao-tsang" to study the Daoist Canon, which resulted in those conferences in Japan and then again in Italy and Tateshina, and then Bellagio, which were international conferences on Daoism following the discovery of the Daoist Canon. And Schipper's project was funded by the E.U., so I was unable to participate as much as I wanted to do so. I was unable to because I was not a European citizen. But, at that time,

Zürcher was given the task of trying to date Daoist texts by the level of Buddhist influence found in the scriptures. We could all see that there were Buddhist elements in Daoist texts. But that turned out to be a false hope, as I show in the study of the "Zhen-gao" that you made reference to.

The text is no longer as it was written. The Buddhist elements have been scrubbed, particularly from Shangqing scriptures— been done rather thoroughly. And so the narrative then basically was

that Daoism had just kind of passively adopted Buddhism. Chinese—and particularly in those areas,

you mentioned rebirth. I've written a lengthy hypothesis. "Ancestors and Anxiety" is really no more than a lengthy hypothesis. But I've written on the question of rebirth. The idea was that there was nothing in China. And somehow—so the idea of rebirth was sold rather easily. And it is quite true that when I started studying Daoist texts, the Lingbao scriptures, suddenly—right, at the end of the fourth century, early fifth century— there was like a light switch that turned on. Rebirth is everywhere in those scriptures. Well, I subsequently found out that the mid-fourth-century scriptures had been sanitized.

MILES OSGOOD: Ah, I see.

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: And it always seemed to me a very strange idea that Daoism—or, that China had no idea about the afterlife. Why in the world did they spend so much time and effort building those tombs? You know, if there was no idea? There must have been some idea that we're not understanding. And so I've continued to work on it: parts of "Ancestors and Anxiety" I would now like to rewrite.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm. Would you say a little bit about that? So, well, I guess there's a couple questions that maybe we should come to, to kind of explain what you just went through. So one is this notion, I guess, that maybe there was a pre-existing story that one of the supposed soft areas of Daoism was not having a fully articulated idea of the afterlife, but in fact, maybe that comes down more to certain things, certain elements of earlier texts being scrubbed or simply not available. And so therefore we have to revise that and give a sense that like, actually two different accounts of the afterlife are intermingling here, rather than one imposing itself on the other. Is that right? 

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: I don't think it's quite so simple as "two different," but in general terms, yes. I mean, I think there were many different ideas, and there were some dominant ones and less dominant ones, and we need to deal with that in both Buddhism as it moved into China and in the Chinese receiving system.

MILES OSGOOD: Okay, yeah, and then, so can you give your account a little bit of how you think the Daoist response is not merely an adoption, but perhaps a way of also correcting, clarifying things

that they see as potential contradictions or, as it were, reciprocal soft areas in Buddhism that could be open to new ideas? The first part—the first part of your question has to do with how the story has changed. At the end of "Ancestors and Anxiety," the very last chapter, I dealt with some very kind of cogent and moving elements of the Lingbao scriptures where they're talking about rebirth in particular. And so I came up with this notion that there was kind of a generalized rebirth and then a more particular rebirth, and that what the Lingbao scriptures had done was to buy into individual culpability for deeds and individual rebirth, whereas before there was no kind of generalized rebirth for everyone. That was now, in the Lingbao scriptures, general.

MILES OSGOOD: Okay, and that individual responsibility element we might take to be more Buddhist than Daoist coming in?

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: That's what I had originally thought. And I divided the Shangqing scriptures out as having rebirth only in special cases where they allowed certain elite people who were practitioners of the Shangqing meditation practices to direct their rebirth. But since then, I've discovered a passage in Dunhuang. And there's a book that I'll be talking about tomorrow,

which is called the "Dengzhen yinjue," "The Secret Instructions on the Ascent to Perfection," which has Tao Hongjing's— he's a sixth-century Daoist writing around 500—his commentary on all of the Shangqing scriptures. That book was originally 24 "juan," and now only three "juan" survive in the Daoist Canon, so that's an example of scrubbing. I've identified in Dunhuang, a portion of that text which actually deals—for the Shangqing scriptures, dated to 360s— which deals with the "atman." Yeah, the standard view of Buddhism is that that "anātman" is the principle that one should adhere to: there is no self, ultimately. Unfortunately, that was not the way the Chinese took it. Nor the way some early translators—Dharmarakśa, Zhi Qian, Kang Senghui—presented it, at least in the southern part of China. What I found in this Dunhuang text is fascinating evidence that these late fourth-century Daoists had come up with a way of taking the transmigrating soul that they'd newly learned about and introducing it to the rest of the spirits of the body in order to direct their rebirth.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. Okay, I see. So in broad terms, if we're thinking about general bigger moves in history and the relationship and the relative power perhaps of Buddhism in China, or its kind of relative popularity, what should we now understand about this kind of transitional encounter period? What have you revised for yourself? What would you offer as a revision to those narratives you were reading and hearing earlier on? What should we think about in general terms as far as the population itself is concerned?

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: I would say, first of all, if we really want to understand what happened in China, we need to understand religion in China better. And what I mean by that is that we've had all sorts of ideas about— oh, for instance, Zürcher, again, brought forth the idea of an "iceberg." That what we're looking at are three peaks that are separate: Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism. But in fact, they were joined at the base. But I don't—

MILES OSGOOD: Joined at the base by a common set of cultural practices?

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: Common set of cultural practices, common understanding, and, unfortunately—for the way that iceberg has been—by incomprehension—

MILES OSGOOD: I see.

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: —or only partial comprehension.

MILES OSGOOD: So actually it was a mystery even to the adherents themselves as to—

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: —as to what the actual distinctions were between Buddhism and Daoism. And I don't know that that model actually holds all that well. I think that there's actually, even at the elite level, where we can speak with most assurance, there tends to be an understanding of religion that we have not fully comprehended yet. And I've written several— I've started to look in that direction. And I think that that's one thing. The second thing I would say is that it was not the kind of field into which Buddhism was brought to play in China, and through which we try to look, in reading through Chinese characters to get back and see what texts might've arrived—you know, what they might have looked like. This field is much more complex than we tend to think it is,

and Daoism is a part of that. One of the factors that I'm quite convinced about is that the Daoists have done more— almost more to spread Buddhism in China during the fourth, and fifth, and sixth centuries than Daoist priests—I mean, Buddhist priests were able to do.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, and they did that by way of just spreading the ideas, or genuinely promoting Buddhism itself as a belief?

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: By spreading the ideas.

MILES OSGOOD: The ideas within their own system.

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: And by spreading a version of those ideas and texts in which those ideas were centered and incorporated. And then of course, Buddhists only had to come along and say, well, "The Buddha actually said..." (laughing)

MILES OSGOOD: So it was sort of an entry point for people to understand things that Buddhism might hold. But then if they wanted to know more, Buddhists were happy to clarify?

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: Happy to clarify.

MILES OSGOOD: Or correct, yeah.

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: And there is still a way in which the two religions are practiced hand-in-hand, even at the elite level, in Taiwan, and China.

MILES OSGOOD: By "elite level," you mean by the clergy?

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: Not by the clergy. The clergy is where they're separate. But I'm talking about practitioners who will, for instance, still, if you, you know, maybe Wenchang Dijun

is good to get your kid into college and you know, Guanyin would be a better deity to address if you had troubles in childbirth, or your daughter had troubles in childbirth.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, so I mean, I think it's a kind of contemporary cliché that for those of us who are outside this culture and outside this nation that we understand maybe the co-existence of these religions and belief-systems as being able to occupy these different desires and goals in one life, or maybe even different spheres activity in one life: that you could be a Buddhist, Daoist, or Confucian at different times of the day or different parts of the week, depending on your social, ethical interactions, maybe your sort of personal interior outlook, and your thoughts about cosmology or about the afterlife. Is there a continuity there across the centuries from the period that you're looking at historically and sort of how they might coexist for lay people today?

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: I can only speak to the Daoist part of that. But I would say there's definitely continuity. The key texts that were put together by Lu Xiujing in the fifth century in China: those texts are still used today. They're interpreted sometimes rather differently, but texts like the "Duren jing," right, are part of the liturgy today in China as well.

MILES OSGOOD: Okay, so there's continuity there, at least in terms of the scripture? 

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: That's right. And in terms of the ideas, there probably are cultural continuities that we're unaware of. But one I've kind of come to call is "polytheistic personhood"— the idea that your body is not a single machine inhabited by a soul, the old Cartesian notion, but instead is the collection of entities and forces that can be seen as spirits and visualized as spirits— is not quite as active in China as before, but the way that people conceive of self and their relationship to society—because this is all, of course, based on a correlative cosmology, where the cosmos is basically internalized: that has its nuances and consequences in Chinese thought today. Even in places where they've totally rejected religion.

MILES OSGOOD: Interesting. So this gets me into kind of another area that I'm just generally interested in, which is: where are the sticking points and the hard lines potentially between Daoism and Buddhism, right? You talk about afterlives and birth and rebirth, and we get the sense of Daoism being able to say, "Maybe we are more indebted to our ancestors or family members when it comes to that afterlife than Buddhists would think." Conversely, "Maybe we are interested in the Buddhist sense of individual responsibility when it comes to rebirth and karma." That was really fascinating to me. I wonder when you start to get into questions about the notion of the self, are there hard lines between Daoism and Buddhism? Or again, is it a matter of, "Oh, there's kind of some mutual borrowing happening in China" that allows for maybe a mysterious, but nevertheless coherent— now I'm going back to the iceberg— idea about what the self consists of, for instance. Or are there other dimensions where these religions would seem to be— would seem to have, you know, opposed views that are actually reconcilable or vice versa?

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: I mean, I think in a general sort of way, we can say that it is indeed true. Once we come to understand the role of religion in Chinese society and how these interactions between the elite and the practitioners of Buddhism and Daoism have worked down through the centuries, we will begin to understand a little bit more about interactions... that maybe, actually, dare I say, will help us deal with the modern world.

MILES OSGOOD: So potentially, the sort of power structure or historical changes to how these religions were organized might tell us something a little bit about how different belief systems were organized— 

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: About the habitus—

MILES OSGOOD: How different ideas actually crystallized?

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: The habitus of Chinese people. I'll give you a—I mean, while it's not my field: there was a survey done by Pew in which they asked this really stupid question of Chinese people, "Which religion do you believe in?" And of course— and they were aware that this was not a very good question. And so they said, "You can choose two." (Miles laughing) That's not really solving the problem. And of course, they found out that, and predicted right around the time of the Olympics, as a result of this study, that China would be a fully Christian country by 2050, because of course, Christians tend to know what that question means and answer it.

MILES OSGOOD: And to not pick a second option—

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: They would not.

MILES OSGOOD: —when offered a menu.

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: No, that's true. That's quite true. But interestingly, if you read that survey, they found that—and we're talking about mainland China now, where the Cultural Revolution happened, where religion is "the opiate of the masses" and is not favored today—over 70% of people tend to practice "Qingming," and do ancestral practices on that holiday, often going out to the grave, preparing food stuffs for their ancestors. So that argues for a perdurance of certain ideas that are really central to the way Buddhism and Daoism operated in China.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. That's great. So one other thing that I think will be interesting to our scholarly audience is to think a little bit about how you have experienced the differences

between approaches to Daoist studies in the United States, or generally in the West, and with your colleagues within China. Would you say that there are generally different outlooks on how to approach the religion, the assumptions that we come with, maybe even more specifically the relationship of Daoism to Buddhism?

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: Well, I think as a result of Schipper's project that I mentioned in the E.U. and those international conferences, which mainly involved the Japanese and French scholars, there was a time when Daoism looked like it was going to have a real revival. And it's certainly flourishing today in China. In China, every university has Daoist— almost every university has a Daoist specialist. There are large conferences held in Hong Kong, in various Daoist mountains. There's just way too much for me to even keep up with. It's amazing. However, in North America in particular, there's been a bit of a die-out in Europe and in Japan, in people interested in studying Daoism. In the United States, for financial and various other reasons, at present, there are maybe two places where you could do a PhD and have education in the history and practices and texts of Daoism. Only two places. And so one of the things that I've been doing as I'm nearing retirement myself is making people aware of this fact and that thinking that perhaps—suggesting maybe is a better word—that I'm suggesting that Daoist organizations in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and mainland China get together and focus some of their funding on building programs in the United States, like this wonderful center for the study of Buddhism. There is no such funding right now in the United States or in Canada for a similar sort of program. And there's, right now, I wouldn't— if people say were to read one of my books and become interested in this field, I would not know where to send them.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, that's a shame. And I guess, so that answers one part of the question, which is, you know, not just what are the relations between how Daoism is studied here and across the Pacific, but what could be done to, you know, have Asian colleagues strengthen the presence of Daoist studies in the United States and more generally? And then it sounds like there's another question that spins off of that, which is: what should be the relationship of Buddhist Studies centers

and Buddhist Studies departments or divisions within Religious Studies, which sound like they've been much stronger in this country, and Daoist studies, if Daoist studies were to make a resurgence. Is there an opportunity there for collaboration?

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: I would argue that the arrival of Buddhism in China is an amazing moment in history on the level of the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. And if you could be on the ground during that period and, say, live for a couple of hundred years, you would see a religion, mainly based on oral traditions and the memorization of long scriptures, coming to China, and suddenly becoming a written tradition. We're building libraries, writing massive numbers of texts, talking about the structure of the Sanskrit language. And, in order to fully understand what that meant and how that happened, I really think we should look at Chinese religion. Because it clearly did something. There were some changes taking place there,

just on a very fundamental level, to the Buddhist religion. And how those happened, the nuts and bolts of that, are things that we're starting to look at now. There's some scholars who are doing good work in this area. And I just hope that that can continue. Daoist studies is a part of that. Now we're still dealing with the case, when the Daoist Canon was released in, you know, 1921 to 26 or something, over a period of time in Shanghai, the original thought was that all this was all just made up by the Ming. "It's a 'Ming Daoist Canon' that we have today. And so, you know, there's nothing of historical interest there." It's taken us a long time to try to piece together, to start dating things. These scriptures are dated and we have AI now. We can do this in a much better way than we've done heretofore.

MILES OSGOOD: So there's opportunities for new textual studies that we wouldn't have had in previous decades.

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: We can start to study the language in which Buddhism became a written language.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, and it sounds like conversely there are age-old assumptions that we might have about Buddhism, being, as it were, always, perhaps, we might have imagined, a written tradition, which actually is very historically specific to its relationship to Daoism in China—

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: And Central Asia, of course. I mean, there's a whole process going on there. But one can't deny the number of Buddhist scriptures that are written in Chinese and that this language, we used to think, "Oh, it was shaped by Daoism, by which we meant Laozi and Zhuangzi."

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. Yeah, wonderful.

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: And that's really not the case.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, well, that sounds like a really strong pitch for the re-establishment of Daoist study centers and Daoist doctorates and all the rest of that, for its own sake and then for the sake of a better understanding of Buddhist transmission and Buddhist transcription. So, well, I hope that call-to-action is heard. And for now, just want to say thank you so much for coming to this interview, for being on our podcast and on our YouTube channel, and for joining us here at the Ho Center.

STEPHEN BOKENKAMP: Thank you, Miles. Very good questions and I enjoyed talking with you.

[Epilogue]

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

MILES OSGOOD: To watch a video recording of the conversation you just heard, and to see the photograph that Professor Bokenkamp mentioned, head to our YouTube Channel, @thehocenterforbuddhiststudies (all one word), or visit our website: buddhiststudies.stanford.edu.

On our site, you’ll also find information about future guests and events.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

Thanks again to Stephen Bokenkamp for coming on the show. His full lecture goes deeper into the philosophical negotiations between early Daoists and Buddhists, particularly around the notion of the self. 

One major question that arises, that you heard referenced in our conversation, is this: How did Chinese Daoists translate and adapt the Buddhist idea of a singular transmigrating soul, with their own belief in a “bodily cosmos” of many spirits or what Bokenkamp called “polytheistic personhood”? Head to our YouTube Channel to watch the talk and find out.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]

As always, the music for this episode is a recording from Ani Choying Drolma’s “Buddhist Chants and Songs,” performed at Stanford’s Memorial Church in 2017. 

Until next time, this has been “The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford” podcast.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]

[Prologue]

MILES OSGOOD: Welcome to The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford Podcast. Come join us by the tree.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar]

Where do the study and practice of Buddhism intersect? When there are centuries of traditions to learn, and a continent to cover, how do we find our way to a particular community or a particular archive? And in our current epistemological crisis–where we no longer feel we can trust the information around us, or even our own interpretation of that information–what help can be found amid Buddhism’s earliest texts and techniques?

Ven. Dhammadinnā: “The baseline practice of mindfulness shared by all Buddhist traditions definitely gives tools to pause and to self-reflect. So probably, this is one of the strongest, most powerful tools that can be adopted from the Buddhist perspective.” 

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and flute]

We’re recording from the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford, where we talk to the world’s leading Buddhist scholars about the history, philosophy, and practice of Buddhism.

I’m your host, Miles Osgood. Today, for our very first episode, I’ll be talking to Venerable Bhikkhunī Dhammadinnā, a major scholar of early Buddhist scriptures working in Italy and Taiwan who is also a Theravāda nun, ordained in Sri Lanka and serving the Italian government as a Buddhist Minister. Lucky for us, the Venerable Dhammadinnā is local to the Bay Area this spring: she’ll be joining us on Stanford campus at the Buddhist Studies Center’s Library from her current post at UC Berkeley, where she is a visiting professor this term.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

A running theme in the conversation that follows is how to integrate sides of this discipline that sometimes feel like opposite poles: universalism and historicity, the academic and the monastic, the ancient and the present. 

That’s because of the range of Venerable Dhammadinnā’s own research. Her thesis was about the Mahāyāna Book of Zambasta from the Central Asian kingdom of Khotan in the 5th century, but she always wanted to focus on early Buddhist scriptures, and that’s what she does now as co-founder and director of the Āgama Research Group. 

To give you a sense of the breadth of her publications, and to prepare you for some of the references in the conversation ahead, I want to mention two of her articles up front.

The first involves a famous recurring analogy in Buddhist philosophy between the self and a chariot. In 2020, Venerable Dhammadinnā wrote about the first recorded instance of this simile, in a debate between the god Māra and a fully awakened female disciple of the Buddha, Bhikṣunī Śailā. In the story, Māra tries to divert the nun’s study with philosophical questions about the nature of individual being, and Śailā responds by denying the existence of any such being. Just as a chariot is an impermanent assembly of different physical components, she argues, so is the self with regard to its mental components: its “aggregates” or skandhas.

This essay of Venerable Dhammadinnā’s only comes up briefly in the conversation, but it seems pertinent to her wider reflections for a few reasons: the case study shows us a nun inventing a foundational philosophical motif, and the analysis gets us to think about what it might mean to identify, separate, or integrate the different parts of oneself. 

The second piece is more of an outlier amid Venerable Dhammadinnā’s work–as she was keen to clarify–but I think it will be interesting to some of our listeners for that very reason. 

Earlier this year, Venerable Dhammadinnā co-wrote a “Letter to the Editors” of the neuroscience journal Brain Topography, in response to a study that claimed to have provided “neural data” on a meditation session, including a so-called “cessation” experience. The letter was an opportunity to clarify, in the pages of the scientific journal, how exactly this attainment–that is, the true cessation of craving–is assessed in the Theravāda tradition. 

What emerges is a kind of comparative cartography. In the pages of Brain Topography, Venerable Dhammadinnā alludes to a different map we could consider: (quote) “the Theravāda Buddhist mapping of the path to progress to the final goal of meditative practice.”

And with that, I think we have a sufficient map of our own to navigate the discussion ahead.

Let’s head into the library.

[bell chime]

We are honored to have you, Venerable Dhammadinnā. Thank you so much for being here. 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Thank you, Miles, for having me here.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. Of course. Well, as a way of starting our conversation, I wanted to give listeners just a quick sense

of the range of your work and where your vocation has taken you, geographically and historically. To me, I guess the question is, with all of this breadth—and especially this breadth early in your career, right—where you have Central Asia in play, you're doing language study in Sanskrit and Tibetan, you are traveling to East Asia, and Japan, and Taiwan, and then you're ordained in Sri Lanka—you're getting, surely, such a sense of the diversity and variety of Buddhist studies, and trying to figure out what your own specialization is going to be within that. So I wonder just how that informed your work at the time, how you look on it now as a specialist, and I just thought I would ask that first.

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Oh, thank you. Yeah. I mean, I guess, this is just like an organic or like a natural reflection of really, you know, the routes taken by the Buddhist transmission, and textual transmission, and institutional transmission. I mean, I just allowed myself to, you know, to kind of follow it through, in a way. It's not that—I mean, I don't know. I mean, I think Buddhist studies is inherently like this. I mean, so I don't see this kind of, you know, like my special case. But it was just like more coming from this recognition of the fact that you can't do Buddhist studies without really acknowledging this variety. And seeing diversity and also in all these text-historical developments. Yeah, I mean, ideally, of course, you know, you can have scholarship which is very detailed and vertical, and then you may have more breadth. I mean, hopefully, I mean, I don't end up being a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. (chuckles) That's kind of a risk too. But I think in a way, I mean, in the 21st century, we do need to face this. I mean, to confront this kind of breadth, and to have an overall sense of the direction for these traditions. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, and I really like the original insight, that there's something there about following a transmission history that is just part of the history of the religion. And I guess, I wonder about that: that, you know, I'd imagine in those various travels and in that scholarship, you're not always going chronologically, as it were, from, you know, the origins to its most contemporary manifestations. In some ways, in fact, at times it seems as though you're going backwards, right? You're starting in the middle period and then you're working your way back to early texts. Does that reading backward, as it were, or moving backward and forward in time, allow a certain perspective as you're working?

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Yeah. I mean, I have to say, I'm really impressed, you know, that like a non-specialist in Buddhist studies already has this perspective on the history of the discipline, of the field, and also moving through that. Yeah, I mean, personally, I do come—maybe this is also like in my Italian conditioning, or this kind of grammar-school background: you know, we get drilled in with this idea that you have to have a text-historical perspective. So, I think this is also part of my background in a way. So, it's kind of natural to have this sense of history and text-historical development, and institutional history, and ideological history. So, I think it comes from there to an extent. And also, I think it's kind of natural. I mean, at least for me, it's been natural, you know, to observe what goes on around me and to, you know, see through certain dynamics in the light of, you know, this very Buddhist principle of dependent arising and conditionality and historical, you know, kind of the impact of historical conditions on ideas and individuals and communities. So I think it's not, again, it's not like an intentional going back and forth, but it's more like a type of, you know, kind of, I mean, a way of looking at things, and I couldn't escape from that way. (laughs) 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, that makes sense. And so, there's a lot of work that must go into every one of those moves intellectually and just geographically to kind of get your bearings and figure out what the context is that you're working with.

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Yeah, and then you have also, you know, like the language, you know, things to work out. Because, of course, you do need to read the primary sources, I mean, to the best of your ability. So I'm not like a trained, you know, Sinologist as such, or a trained, you know, Tibetologist—like if I'm doing heavy work in Tibetan, for example—but you do need to have direct access to the heavy-duty work. MILES OSGOOD: So for the Āgama Research Group, if you want to be able to access that side of early Buddhist texts, you need to have some access through your collaborators or through your own work to Chinese, I guess.

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Yeah. 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: I think in a way, you do have to, you know, surrender to the fact that you are not going to be, you know, like the perfect Indologist, or the perfect Sinologist, or the perfect Japanologist, to this service of having this broader picture, but also I think you have to be honest in recognizing your own limitations. So maybe you do own, or at least you try to build some sort of, you know, deeper knowledge and understanding, you know, within at least one main field, you know, with all the language and philology, et cetera. And then, I mean, there's collaboration for that. And also, I mean, I think if you do know the extent of your ignorance, it's easy in a way, you know, I suppose, to be a bit more careful. And so, if you're warned about your delimitations of your own tools, then, you know, it's epistemically acceptable, so to say, to do these excursions, you know, outside your field. If you just, I mean, you know, you end up being so conceited that you don't know the kind of, you know, limitations of your knowledge, of course, then it turns up very flat or, you know, just, I mean, wrong, really. So, I think it's also like negotiating this curiosity and wish to look at other things and knowing your limitations, really.

MILES OSGOOD: Right. So it does sound like there's a balance there. That on the one hand you use this language, this kind of humble language of limitations and ignorance and worry about that the opposite pole might be conceit. But I guess, I wonder if there's a different pole, as it were, of advantage of inciting collaboration because you need it, or seeking out some kind of comparativist move because that's the thing you come with, or if it's just a matter of having a slight unfamiliarity with a subject that allows you to see it in a way that those who are doing the kind of deep, expert, vertical study of something might not have. Has that ever been the case?

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: The way I'd put it, it's more like, I mean, you begin to recognize the impact of so many different conditions on textual transmission, textual formation, and reception. And, I mean, with the texts also the contents of the text. So it's, in a way, you know, if you really have to acknowledge the impact of these conditions—which is anyway also what traditional, you know, philologists have been doing way before, you know, this kind of arising of Buddhist philology as a subfield—I mean, to the extent that you recognize the impact of so many different, you know, aspects, you do have, you know, to have a methodological dialogue with, you know, other areas and fields, which are actually working with those conditions and studying those conditions. So, I think it's really, like, multidimensional, so we just try to look at the same phenomenon from multiple angles. Angles? Angles? I'm sorry, my pronunciation might be wrong.

So, from multiple angles. And so, again, I see it just as a reflection or as a demand of the materials we're working with, and this like human phenomenon we are working with.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, so there will always be this nice overlayering of the experience of the scholar who's trying to move maybe between languages and traditions, and just the experience of the scripture or of the material itself, having also been brought up that way, as it were. That's great. You mentioned something in passing earlier that I wanted to touch back on, which is the feeling of also maybe having glimpses of this history when you're there now—if I caught that right—that, like, by nature of having traveled to all these places, and as we will get to, also being a practitioner in this religion, I guess I wonder, have there been moments for you where you've been able to perceive elements of that context, elements of a particular tradition? Things that may be taken for granted on the ground that for you were really striking when you kind of arrive on the scene, where you say like, "Oh, I know this happened in this century, or this century. I can see it happening now here." 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Yeah, absolutely.

I think this is—I mean, as a Buddhist practitioner and monastic, this academic background has been, you know, really like a protection in a way, and, you know, like a safe haven from the impact. For example, I mean, as a female monastic of, you know, terrible discrimination in the Theravāda world. I mean, by the way, I'm ordained in the Theravāda tradition, which is one of the contemporary-living Buddhist traditions. So, I think having this perspective, you now, for once you see this kind of long kind of tide of, you now, kind of historical kind of development. And so, your own sense of agency somehow, you know, is perceived in a totally different way—you know vis-à-vis like a person who simply—I mean, I'm not saying simply in a kind of diminishing way, but, you know, if you're fully identified with your religious persona in a way, so all your eggs are in that basket, so to say, and so you don't have this metacognition, you know, of your own kind of agency within that kind of context. So in a way, I think, I've been vaccinated by my academic understanding because things hurt less in a way on the personal level, or you also, you know, see through things in a different way, instead of having, you know, invested 100% into building a religious identity without this kind of meta-awareness or metacognition, so to say. So, I think that this has been really extremely helpful, I mean, on a very personal, like existential level. And this also ties in with the kind of talk we're going to have this evening. And also, in general, I really think that seeing, you know, like the long tide of history, it's so helpful. And it's just also so helpful to kind of also disengage from this, you know, monocausal kind of understanding of religious phenomena, because you really see the kind of multiple conditions. Again, you know, coming back to this conditionality topic, you know, you see the impact of different things, so it's not new. I mean, for example, you know, with this neuroscience, you know, thing, I mean, we had a little conversation before the recording, so I can just pull from, you know, pull it out, you know? Like Miles used this word, "Oh, what kind of..." I mean, I'm not quoting verbatim, but it was like, "What kind of pernicious things do you see in this, you know, misappropriation?" 

MILES OSGOOD: Trying to stir up drama on the podcast. 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Yeah, something like that. And, you know, this kind of click-bait thing. But, you know, actually, it's interesting, because I don't see it as pernicious, but you just see that this rewriting of new canons and, you know, redetermination of the tradition has already happened in history. So, you don't come from like a judgmental position. And I'm not now advocating for being non-judgmental, per se. But somehow you don't have this kind of moralistic or traditionalist kind of standpoint, and the idea that you have to defend tradition at all costs. But rather, you're also aware, you know, I mean, of your own conditioning actually there. So in a way, I mean, of course, I mean, as a Buddhist practitioner, I do feel, you know, there is something which is inconsistent there. But I do think, again, that—

MILES OSGOOD: Sorry, could you say more: inconsistent in what way?

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Oh yeah, like, you know, in certain kind of trends in this kind of contemporary, basically, deployment of, you know, meditation states for research in neuroscience, which is not fully informed by the paradigm emic to the Buddhist tradition. So, I mean, it's not a traditionalist position. It's just that you need to have a full dialogue with the other partner. So, you have to take the dialogue, the conversation part fully on board. So, of course, I mean as a Buddhist practitioner, I might react to that in a way. But actually, this academically informed understanding of my own sense of being, of self, does help with, you know, coming up with an interest, so: "let me understand what's going on here." Rather than this kind of black-and-white traditionalist, or, you know, outraged, textual scholar kind of thing. So I think that there is a lot of scope for actually having like a wider, you know, perceptive, perspective, wider perspective.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, and that's a great way of putting it. And I think what I was seizing on there was the opportunity to think, "Oh, here is a potential critique," you know, from kind of purely within the discipline to someone who's maybe outside of it, but rather to think about it in terms of a curiosity maybe: to think that like, oh, that allows you one more way of being broad-ranging in your research, to take an interest in what others are doing, and, you know, maybe to critique, maybe to correct, but so as to kind of understand what it is that they're working on, and then contribute to it. Does that sound right? 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, I mean, I also think, and here I am advocating for, you know, for Buddhist scholarship, or on behalf of Buddhist scholarship. I think it's also time to emerge from this orientalist or, you know, colonialist paradigm, so that if we are dealing with Buddhist constructs, we do need to have a text-historically informed understanding of these Buddhist constructs. So you can't have research in neuroscience, or mindfulness in general, or on a certain state because these states are actually controversial within tradition itself. So, so to say, if you are willing to have such a complex, and nuanced, methodological approach within your own field as a scientist—let's put aside now the ideology of science, vis-à-vis religious studies, and all of that—but anyway, if you're willing to be, you know, epistemically like solid in your own field, you do have to grant that kind of, you know, position and integrity also to the so-called object you are analyzing, otherwise you are just reifying it. And this object happens to be a living body, by the way.

MILES OSGOOD: Let me turn to something that you brought up, and that of course I think is a fascinating part of your biography to many listeners, which is the dual identity of being a scholar and a practitioner. And one way that you talked about it was to say, having the academic perspective means that when you go into various contexts, it gives you potentially a kind of distance or maybe an objectivity, or at least a kind of mode of assessing things that might otherwise be difficult,

or unpleasant, or just disorienting, perhaps. And I just kind of wanted us to go along that line and think about it a little bit. So what does that mean for your interactions, on the one hand, with other scholars, coming in as a nun? And, I guess, what seems more pertinent to that particular story is then talking to other nuns and monks or practitioners, coming in as the academic. 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Now, that's interesting. I don't think it gives me like an objective stance, but perhaps more an understanding of, you know, the fabrication of my own subjectivity there. So, I think just this sense of, you know, being aware of what you bring with you into the discussion. So, I mean, no, I used to feel, when I was younger, you know, that there was neither one thing nor the other. You know, I was like neither a scholar nor a practitioner. And now, you know, maybe getting old, (chuckles) it's kind of getting more integrated. So, actually now I feel, "Oh wow, you know what? I belong to both worlds." So it's actually a much more comfortable place. And also, of course, I mean, when you're younger or when you are, you know, maybe less mature—but I mean, I'm not claiming I'm mature now—but somehow I think the sense of identity becomes more divisive in a way and you cling more strongly, you know, to either side. So, you play, you know, the kind of scholar with practitioners—and then you kind of, you know—or you play the practitioner with scholars, in a way. But somehow, I think you can really have this kind of, you know, double identity together if you're not clinging so strongly, you know, to this kind of righteousness about one standpoint.

MILES OSGOOD: Right. Right. Where there could be that temptation on either end to say that there's a certain kind of purity of this field or that identity. So could we talk about the two directions then? So, for instance, being a practitioner amongst scholars, and maybe bringing that into your scholarship. What might that look like as a teacher or a writer? 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: I don't know. It feels so natural that I don't remember. 

MILES OSGOOD: Well, but it sounds like it wasn't always natural. Is that right? 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Yeah. Yeah, I don't have a meta-narrative with it now. But, yeah, I think, well, I mean, going personal, you know, it's like, for me, it's more like you can be yourself more. So maybe when you are like not fully confident maybe, or you're feeling threatened, or you're like, you know, you just lack the sense of personal integrity, you now, you end up having two different personas, you know, in two different fields. Or it's like a bit like, you know, when you have your own self with your parents, and then you have your own self with your friends. But like, slowly, I mean, like I really see it, you know, kind of with time, these two things kind of come together, so I feel a stronger sense of integrity in a way, and, you know, it's less about playing that or that, you know: this is what I am now. So I'm actually happy to have come to this kind of place of more integration compared to this kind of more conflicted, a sense of, you know, being—not quite knowing where you're placing yourself, in a way.

MILES OSGOOD: Sure, that makes sense. So, one thing we talked about when we met before this interview was a little bit about how this might manifest specifically in teaching. You've got a seminar right now at Berkeley on Buddhist texts, and then you mentioned you were kind of getting more into Dharma-teaching recently. So, I wonder about, you know—I'm somebody who cares a lot about teaching particular, and I imagine a number of our listeners might as well. Those seem like they have to be, by discipline, kind of fundamentally different ways of doing instruction, and for different ends and for different purposes. But now you're at this place, perhaps, where you feel like an integrated self, an integrated double-self in both of those contexts. So, does that change what, you know, a classroom or a gathering looks like in either of those contexts?

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Yeah, this kind of seminar setting, I think, is quite interesting because I feel, well, for one, it's like a work in progress, so everyone is included. And I think maybe the kind of contribution that comes from Buddhist practice is that, you know, you are less, I mean, or comparatively less kind of anxious about delivering, you know, it's more like I'm enjoying very much the process, you know, with colleagues and students. I mean, if I screw it up, I screw it up, it's okay. You know, I mean, of course it's not always okay. I mean, you may feel embarrassed. But somehow, I feel that, you know, there is a place of self-confidence in the kind of, you know, your honest attempt at, you know, doing your academic work, and doing your—I mean, and living with some kind of coherence or consistency. So, there is a different sense of, I feel like, confidence that doesn't come from having to have the intellectual package or the professional package all completely sorted out. But, of course, I mean, I also know that I can say this because, honestly, I do put the work in, in textual work, so it's not just, you know, like fluff? (laughs) So I think that this is actually interesting for me. And I see that the students, they might not be practitioners or anything like that, but on the human level, I do feel, you know—maybe if anyone is going to listen to our interview and was in the seminar, maybe they have a different opinion—but I do feel that there is some kind of a human kind of connection there, and there is this sense of ease around that, and so it creates, actually, space, you know, for looking at things, again, with curiosity, and, I mean, really investigating things and not having to perform. So this, I think, this lessening of the kind of performance urge, if you embody it genuinely, I think it's also like an example for, you know, younger students and also—

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, who might be tempted to posture in some way. 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: Absolutely, that makes sense. So then conversely, when you're with members of the Sangha, are they curious about things that you're publishing academically? Do you bring in some of the things that are currently on your mind, in terms of your research, in those kinds of contexts? 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Yeah, I think more and more, actually, there is more opening to, you know, academic studies and cross-fertilization and all of that, in the Sangha over the last, you know, few years. And I mean in Taiwan, of course, I mean, in the Chinese world, this kind of literacy, Buddhist literacy in the Sangha is already established, so it's taken for granted there. It's a totally different kind of, you know, background, and kind of, you know, historical trajectory. As far as like so-called Western, or let's say modern, postmodern, contemporary, urbanized, elite, you know, whichever kind of category historically we want to kind of bring up, I think, there was a lot of like anti-scholastic, anti-doctrinal kind of preconceptions.

MILES OSGOOD: Why is that? 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: I think it's just a result of the transmission of the Dharma to the West, in particular, kind of strains of Buddhist ideology that have become dominant. And I think it's also part to do with this celebration of subjectivity and, you know, "my own truth," and this kind of epistemic kind of positioning. So, there was, I mean, a lot of that, and it's changing. I find it's changing. So, maybe it's like second, third, fourth wave. I don't know. But somehow, I think there is a lot more interest in understanding the texts and the teachings as they have been historically transmitted, and there is less kind of dogmatism in other ways, so less dogmatic stances. "This is what the Buddha said," you know, "period," and/or "this is what my kind of trustworthy, subjective experience says." So, I find a lot more balance and openness. So, it's actually a lot easier to have these conversations now than maybe like 20 years ago or 15 years ago. Yeah, it's changed a lot, actually. 

MILES OSGOOD: Do you have a sense of where it might go from here? Do you think that's a tendency that might continue to move in that direction of integration, or are there risks that it wouldn't? 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Yeah, this is a kind of complex question, in a way, I think, because with this whole jeopardizing of truth in this country and in the contemporary world in general, I think we are beyond, you know, this fact-checking already, and then we are beyond assertions of truth, which is foundational to Buddhist discourse. So I think, in a way, I mean the Buddhist traditions, the living Buddhist traditions, they are living entities, so they are definitely going to be influenced by what goes on culturally, you know, in general. So I do see that this sense of delegitimization of truth, this is beyond just, you know, non-factual truth. It's kind of a much deeper level of delegitimization of actually making truthful statements or reality. So, I think in a way, actually, the Buddhist traditions do have interesting tools to offer in this kind of conversation. But on the other hand, you know, the impact of these ideologies, I mean, is going to make itself, that is also—

MILES OSGOOD: ... it could be corrupting or poisonous in a way. Could you say more about the tools of where you feel Buddhism might have a role to play or be useful? 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Yeah, I mean, definitely, you know, the baseline practice of mindfulness shared by all Buddhist traditions is a great tool. It doesn't carry, you know, truth value in itself. It's not that it aligns with wisdom in itself, but it definitely enables the person, or groups, or communities in this attempt at, you know, like looking closely at your own, you know, biases. So it's not that mindfulness is not biased or it's kind of objective. 

MILES OSGOOD: ... or that it's dredging up propositions and facts. 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Absolutely, and I'm not subscribing to this in a kind of positivistic, you know, understanding of construct of mindfulness, but it definitely gives tools to pause and to self-reflect. So, probably, this is actually, I think, one of the strongest, most powerful tools that can be adopted from the Buddhist perspective.

MILES OSGOOD: That's fascinating and worth thinking about. So, in terms of the specific work that you're doing, so much of your research recently, and your position with the Āgama Group in your various roles, has to do with specifically collecting, translating, interpreting, analyzing early Buddhist texts. Could you tell us a little bit about sort of after having had all of that breadth and having seen Buddhism from all these different temporal, and you know, geographical dimensions, how you gravitated toward that study and what it has brought to light for you? 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Yeah, actually that was my interest when I started, you know, my Buddhist practice. But, you know, back then I had no real understanding of what like Theravāda Buddhism was about, or so-called early Buddhism was about or, you know. It was all very vague, you know? And it was like the pre-internet era. And, you know, in Southern Italy, it was extremely exotic. I mean, the first kind of Sanskrit grammar book I had was in Latin, you know, from the local library, so it's a totally different world. I mean, it's like I feel extremely old in this conversation.

MILES OSGOOD: You're just taking whatever was available and doing the sorting later. 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Exactly, so really, I had no idea whatsoever of this. And so, you know, just again, your conditions and also just personal encounters with scholars and teachers who were actually doing—like Khotanese Buddhism for example, which was my PhD project. So I had a lot of respect and trust and admiration for my teacher. And so, this was also like an impactful factor for me, you know, going that direction. But this was like always my interest, you know, throughout. And then, finally, I was really, I mean, very lucky actually in having the right conditions in Taiwan for going back to this field. In Taiwan—I mean, Taiwanese kind of Buddhist scholarship has like a long tradition in this field. So I think it was very supportive. I mean, the environment was extremely supportive for that. I think maybe the outcome of all of this kind of circling around and about, is really this sense that even so-called early Buddhist, or, you know, early Buddhist texts or thoughts, this is absolutely also just like an artifact, you know? This is the result of philological practice. So, it's not that now I'm claiming that this is what the Buddha taught or thought—and then here you're left to work it out with my accent. You know what I mean? (laughing) So, teaching and thinking. So, we are not really in that position to make, you know, claims like that, and it's not a verbatim record of the Buddha's teachings. So, I think this understanding that these human phenomena, religious phenomena, they are like that. And so taking on board these uncertainties that we also have, you know? I think it's also very helpful, you know? I mean, I feel I'm far less dogmatic than I used to be as a result of all this trajectory of, you know, having to kind of really study all these different traditions and back and forth, et cetera. So, you really see the historicity of all of this. So, I think, I mean, for me, this is the main takeaway. So, like lessening this kind of dogmatic stance over the teachings as a practitioner.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, that's wonderful. So I'm thinking a little bit over the corpus of the writings of yours that I've gotten to know, where you've written about the nature of giving and sacrifice as basic principles, maybe the first instance of the chariot simile, and a rebuke of Māra. You've written about sex change within one life, as a kind of metamorphosis and rebirth across the sexes and ways in which those kinds of scriptures are then reinterpreted in later periods. Is there a particular project that comes to mind for you when you think about learning about that historicity, or having some kind of personal insight?

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Yeah, actually, I mean, this ties up with what I was saying earlier. So, this study I did on the chariot simile: so this is like a very famous, very well known simile in Buddhist literature. So, it's about so-called relative truth and so-called ultimate truth. So, it's like: are the components of the chariot, you know, the same thing as the chariot? So, there is this kind of just nominalist thing about calling an entity, you know, like the functional assemblage of something, a chariot. So, you know, what's the kind of the truth there or the relative? So, in Buddhist thought, there's been this very early, probably, arising of this construct of two truths. So the relative truth and ultimate truth spelled out in different ways in different texts. I mean, this is like hyper-, hyper-, hyper-, over-, over-, over-simplification. 

MILES OSGOOD: Sure, that's helpful. 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: But anyway, and so most Buddhists, well, all living Buddhist traditions, they basically operate taking this construct for granted. And this is also part of mainstream Buddhist discourse. Sometimes, you know, it's brought in—"Oh, this is just conventional truth"—as if, you know, there was like subscribing only to conventional reality, vis-à-vis the ultimate, et cetera. And, I mean, sometimes it's also been used, you know, to defend or support institutional violations, et cetera. Because, you know, it's like in the name of relative truths, things are known, et cetera. And so, what I'm interested in right now is actually finding out how this construct has arisen in Buddhist thought and in Buddhist texts, because we have basically the absence of any such a kind of dichotomic understanding of truth, or principles of truth in the early layer of the text. And then we have this fully fledged construct, which is found everywhere in Buddhist sūtra literature—so discourse literature—it's everywhere in scholastic literature, et cetera. So right now I'm trying to work on this topic, and I find this is quite, you know, relevant to this whole post-modern truth discourse. And it's very interesting for me, you know, to see how this very foundation, you know, the kind of epistemic foundation for in the Buddhist teachings has been also going through major ideological changes within Buddhist traditions themselves.

MILES OSGOOD: Is there anything you can tell us that might be useful to us on our own era about a historical moment where the concept of relative truth suddenly becomes apparent? And then when it becomes, as it were, ossified as of the new dogma... or...?

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: I wish I knew. I'm still working on it. (laughs) 

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: I'm working on it. But definitely, this move towards, you know, more scholastic, boxed kind of descriptions and models: so this has had an impact. So within this kind of classificatory thrust that the Buddhist tradition started to take, you know, you do need to allocate things to this or that box. 

MILES OSGOOD: ... category. 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Category. And so this is, I mean, I think this is like part of like a larger movement towards scholasticism, and towards classification, and description, rather than mere normativity. So it's all part of a like a bigger movement which led to the arising, for example, of the Abhidharma traditions or other constructs. MILES OSGOOD: Well, could I ask you just by way of closing, perhaps, to say a couple words about what listeners and viewers might see at the lecture tonight? Would you like to say just a little bit? 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Oh, yeah. So, maybe you know the title better than I do. (laughs) But anyway, the idea is that I'll be sharing some, I don't know, like findings or reflections on this whole theme of the revival of the Bhikkhunī Sanghas, or the fully ordained, female, monastic community in the Theravāda tradition, which is the monastic tradition I was ordained in. And I'm particularly looking, again, at institutional history: so, at legal ideologies involved in this revival, which is sometimes not part of the discourse, because I mean you do need to have, you know, a certain sensitivity for these kind of topics. It's also not part of, you know, the explicit discourse that you find in modern Buddhist circles.

MILES OSGOOD: It sounds like, in any case, there's some things there that'll be topical for things that we've been talking about: between the scholastic and the subjective, between, you know, the two identities that you've been pulling together, and a kind of historical view and a contemporary view of how Buddhism has manifested itself today. Well, wonderful. I'm looking forward to that. I'm sure others are looking forward to that. Well, thank you very much, Venerable Dhammadinnā. It's been wonderful to talk to you and learn a little bit about your life, your practice, and your scholarship. So thanks so much for being here. 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Thank you, Miles, also for really like doing the homework, the Buddhist homework, before our conversation. 

MILES OSGOOD: I was very happy to. 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Yeah, it's really impressive, and I really appreciate it very much. 

MILES OSGOOD: It was fascinating reading. 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Thank you.

MILES OSGOOD: And I encourage others to go and read it as well. 

VEN. DHAMMADINNĀ: Thank you. Okay. 

MILES OSGOOD: All right. Well, thank you.

[Epilogue]

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

To watch a video recording of the conversation you just heard, head to our YouTube Channel, @thehocenterforbuddhiststudies, or visit our website: buddhiststudies.stanford.edu.

Online, you can also find future guests and events hosted by our center. 

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

Thanks again to Venerable Dhammadinnā for coming on the show. You can read more of her work at her academia.edu page, by searching for “Bhikkunī Dhammadinnā.” 

I mentioned a few of these essays at the beginning of the episode, but if I can give a plug for a personal favorite, it would be an article from 2018 in Religions of South Asia, titled, “When Womanhood Matters: Sex essentialization and pedagogical dissonance in Buddhist discourse.” In forty pages or so, you really get a sense of the range that Venerable Dhammadinnā is able to cover–from early Buddhist texts and the first bhikkhunīs to contemporary Western Buddhism and the “sacred feminine.”

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]

The music for this episode is a recording from Ani Choying Drolma’s “Buddhist Chants and Songs,” performed at Stanford’s Memorial Church in 2017 on the occasion of the Buddhist Studies Center’s 20th anniversary. We’ll leave you with her voice, accompanied by the audience, singing the mantra “Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐,” or “praise to the jewel in the lotus.” 

Until next time, this has been “The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford” podcast.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]