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My methodological inclinations have definitely changed since September. My own research is primarily textual, so my hermeneutical stance has probably been affected the most. When I started this course I was somewhat divided internally. I had been (and remain) tremendously influenced by the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness. A large part of me was quite suspicious of any sort of objective, linguistic truth claims. My skeptical side felt that pretty much any statement could be called into question, no matter how basic. However, when approaching texts, I tended to ignore this side of myself. I subconsciously presupposed that there was a definitive meaning to be had when reading a given religious text. I assumed that the author's intention was, for the most part, accessible to me, so long as my language abilities were up to snuff or the translator had been careful. But Clark's summary provided a host of reasons to avoid this approach. Derrida's claim that there is no pure, originary text and Foucault's doubts concerning the identifiability of an "author" really resonate with me, and seem to have already affected the way I approach a text. I feel much more open and empowered as a reader. The anxiety of trying to get the meaning exactly right has lessened. Of course, I still appreciate the value of careful exegesis. I don't think that a scholar can simply beat a text into a shape that suits his or her own purposes. But Derrida's and Foucault's critiques have helped to illuminate ways in which my skeptical leanings can influence my own reading and research.
My stance on criticism has also changed. In my first entry I suggested that criticizing an author's work too harshly is something to be avoided. I stated that Masuzawa is sometimes too heavy on the rhetoric and is overly dismissive of past research. I would still maintain that being outright mean is not a terribly effective approach to academic writing. However, I haven't always embodied this sentiment. I was pretty hard on a few of the authors we looked at. I claimed, for example, that Asad was so dry that I had to sleep and eat more just to get through his article. I then claimed that reading an entire book by him would inevitably cause me to gain weight. A pretty mean thing to say, don't you think? I was also pretty critical of Smith, slamming his allusions to Berkeley and his use of alliteration. So, I ended up producing criticisms that were precisely the kind of criticisms I was initially criticizing. I think my ideal would naturally be to sit somewhere in the middle. Be critical, but not cruel. Over the course of the term it appears I've sat at both ends of the spectrum, so I hope that my future efforts will be a little more balanced.
Can I characterize my own voice as a scholar? I don't think I've written enough to be able to identify my own voice just yet. I certainly strive to write in a manner that is straightforward and clear. I don't like to clutter up my writing with uncommon English vocabulary for the sake of seeming intelligent or penetrating. My aim is to write in such a way that someone unfamiliar with the subject can follow along with relative ease. But that's not always easy to accomplish when dealing with ancient Indian and Tibetan doctrinal history. The terminology cannot always be easily translated. So, there's usually an awful lot to unpack, which can detract from the accessibility of my work. I also like the idea of including a solid dose of humour and wit. But is that something I can really consciously achieve? And what exactly will wit and humour accomplish? I want my writing to be engaging and entertaining, but what if the reader simply doesn't find my remarks funny? That's a pretty good way to turn off a reader, I would think.
Themes. Deconstruction! We have continuously deconstructed the terms we have been looking at. Problematizing is what we've aimed to do and I think we've done it well. Personally I feel pretty good about deconstructing things, so long as I don't lose sight of their usefulness. I wouldn't want to completely disregard the notion of authorship, for example, even though I agree with Foucault that an author's identity is largely constructed by the reader. I also wouldn't want to completely abandon terms like Buddhism or Islam. I think I've been pretty consistent in my insistence that we not see religions as entirely constructed by Western scholars. I maintain that religions are mutually constructed by those studying them and those practicing them. They've been invented all along, and continue to be reinvented from myriad angles. That said, I think it may be possible to distinguish between the ways in which Western scholars construct religions and the ways practitioners construct them. But here again deconstruction enters the picture and leaves us swimming in a complicated sea. Even if we were to pinpoint the apparent differences between a scholar's construction of a Hindu sect (e.g. Orientalist biases) and a particular Indian religious group's own constructive tendencies (e.g. caste, textual allegiances), this would only capture a tiny corner of an immense temporal and spherical picture (read: earth). So I'm not sure how far we can take such a project. For now I'm content to say that we're all world creators in slightly different ways.
Concerning the class itself, this is the second time I've taken a course that has utilized blogging. I really liked it the first time and I really liked it this time too. Informal writing lets me state what's on my mind and step outside of the formal thesis-centred approach. It's refreshing. I also find it interesting to look back at what I've written. The blogs are a useful resource for reminding myself of what I've read and how I responded.
In terms of pedagogy, the blog method is arguably better than simply asking students to "do the readings." I teach ESL, and in ESL circles, task-based learning is where it's at. Students are not taught loads of explicit grammar but are instead provided with exercises that get them to use English. Ideally an ESL teacher only speaks for a maximum of 1/3 of the class time. Students should be speaking for 2/3. The blog method reflects this approach in that we don't just read a text, but instead constantly interact with, and respond to, what we're reading. I think this helps with retainment and recall. This methodology is continued in the classroom in that Frances does not simply lecture for two hours but instead directs discussion. This again allows for more task-based learning rather than passive data reception.
Finally, interacting with my group members has resulted in a lot of "oh yeahhh" moments. I am often embarrassed to have missed a certain point or neglected to properly support or elaborate upon a position. This embarrassment is not a negative thing. It helps me fill in the blanks, so to speak. I am so Buddhist Studies focused that I tend to forget about other areas and how research taking place in those areas can seriously help me in my own efforts. The dialogues that have taken place in this class have encouraged me to start reading outside of my area. Indeed, the methodological and theoretical concerns we've looked at seem more or less equally relevant across the board. This is a compelling unity.
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I found this week’s readings to be very relevant to my research. I have a lot of catching up to do, however. While Clark’s survey of the various attitudes and approaches toward texts serves as an excellent introduction to the topic, the long list of authors she discusses entails an even longer list of books that I really should be reading. None of the philosophy or religion courses I took in undergrad included Foucault, Gadamer or Derrida. This, I am realizing, is a problem, since it turns out that I am very interested in the hermeneutical issues they discuss, and familiarizing myself with their works would allow me to better articulate certain misgivings I’ve had about textual research for some time. For now, though, I’ll focus on Clark's summary. </div> I’d like to begin with issues surrounding the identity of a text. First, Derrida: Derrida argues that there is no pure originary text that has not been ‘touched’ by other texts. Text, he claims, is ‘no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content enclosed in a book or its margins, but a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces.’ (Clark 132)
Interpreting this position is at once compelling and overwhelming. Ancient texts, for example, have typically been copied and recopied numerous times before reaching our hands and have been modified in the process. It is typically impossible to discern what the "original" might have looked like. Further, a text isn’t created in a vacuum. The influences upon its inception are numerous and often inaccessible to the modern scholar. Things like the education of the author, his or her individual dialect, ideological influences, political pressures, community, and arguably even things like personal relationships influence the production of a given work. We can even take it a little deeper, and consider how, in a sense, the vocabulary utilized is related to every other instance of usage of the language. Indeed, one could argue that every single word is, in a sense, a quotation, given that the author is simply repeating a term that he or she has heard or seen others utilize. The interdependence of the text also extends beyond the point of its inception since its subsequent receptions are, in every case, somewhat different. The text is arguably reinvented and reinterpreted every time it is read. Naturally, such problems are also relevant to contemporary works. Despite attempts at thorough citation, the margins of an academic work are still blurred by its dependence upon complex origins. I’ve often thought about the somewhat arbitrary nature of citations. The factual content of a given paper is inevitably derived from other sources. So, if I wanted to be really thorough and give proper credit to all of my sources, I would effectively have to cite every single sentence, accurately pinpointing the origin of each piece of information. I could also extend my thoroughness and attempt to cite every word. Here using the dictionary as a source would almost always be a false step; in most cases I would probably need to cite the person that first uttered the word in my presence (after all, a great deal of our vocabulary is acquired during childhood). My parents would become rather notorious in the footnotes, it seems to me. Of course, such a project is absurd. But I think contemplating these matters is not without value, as it seems to illuminate the messiness of texts and even language itself. Texts are overwhelmingly complicated when you take a step back and consider them. They’re clearly not only what’s presented on the pages. Clark also mentions the problematic notion of an author. Above I have made reference to an "author" while discussing the fuzziness of texts. While writing I was quite aware of how problematic this notion is. Clark comments: Whereas in early antiquity, the anonymity of epics and other works did not stand against their celebration, in later times, when authors circulates in a ‘system of property,’ the ability to identify an author who ‘owned’ a text served to validate its worth. With this shift, the ‘author-function,’ as Foucault called it, changed. Now, readers sought to identify—or construct for themselves, in Foucault’s view—a rational being called an ‘author,’ to whom motives, creative powers, and designs could be attributed. (134)
This is a pretty challenging stance. First, one might contest that even in the case of an ancient work we can, in many cases, quite confidently assert the identity of the author. But my skeptical side says that we never really know who authored an ancient work, despite all the evidence we may have. We need to remain aware of our epistemological limitations in such cases, even if we do not constantly reflect this awareness while referring to the "author." In the case of a modern text, of course, we often have a pretty good idea of who the author is. We could call up Elizabeth Clark and ask "Did you actually write History, Theory, Text?" and she would probably reply "yes." But Foucault’s point is not defeated in this case. His argument is quite subtle, as what he seems to be drawing attention to is the function and indeterminability of authors. As Clark remarks, "Just as Foucault believed that ‘man’ was an elusive entity who had escaped his pursuers, so ‘the author’ appeared not so much as an identifiable human whose temporal and geographical placement, motives, and intentions were crucial to a work’s interpretation, but as a ‘function’ that granted authority to writing" (134). Foucault seems to be positing that an author’s identity is inescapably shaped by the presuppositions of the reader. Whether it be presuppositions gathered from the text itself or attempts to establish authoritativeness, the author is, in each instance, modified and in some sense invented. I personally find this compelling. Though I recognize that for practical purposes, sometimes we just have to say "Plato’s Euthyphro" rather than continually restating the Foucaldian difficulties surrounding such an attribution. One more point. I really loved the section on Nietzsche’s "undecidable" sentence. Like text and authorship, I would hold that the idea of "original" meaning is intensely problematic. To get inside an author’s head seems largely an impossibility. I would not maintain that we are completely cut off from the "intended" meaning of a text, but I don’t think that we have perfect access to it either. There are just too many possibilities. Here in particular I think about my reliance upon Tibetan-English dictionaries when translating a classical Tibetan text, and I am forced to confront the fact that there is a rather rickety bridge linking me to the author. Even the most comprehensive dictionaries would not solve this problem, for I am still bound to superimpose a great deal of my own preconceived notions about Tibetan language and Tibetan Buddhism onto the text I am translating. I am willing to live with that, so long as I don’t neglect the self-reflexivity required to prevent dogmatic assertions of meaning. If anything, this kind of deconstructive thinking helps me maintain some healthy humility while simultaneously enabling responsible creativity in matters of interpretation.
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To begin with, I must say that I probably liked these readings the least among all of the readings we’ve done so far. The topic of territory is very interesting, but the roundabout nature of these articles left me frustrated. They seem messy. All over the place. Pretty poor maps for understanding territory—even if territory is to be exploded.
Of course, it seems that Jonathan Z. Smith likes messiness, so maybe this style is natural for him. Sam Gill spends a lot of time discussing Smith in his article "Territory" and explains that "according to Smith, students of religion have no place to stand ‘apart from the messiness of the given world. . . . There is . . . only the plunge which he takes at some arbitrary point to avoid the unhappy alternatives of infinite regress or silence’" (309). I agree that thorough analysis is characteristically messy. Our class has encountered this in every topic we’ve dealt with. It’s easy to deconstruct conventional notions of territory, and, in fact, I think it’s helpful to do so. Especially when there’s such a strong tendency among people all over the world to draw rather crude boundaries between nations and religions.
But there’s something about Smith’s style that seems pretentious to me. The way he kicks off his article "Map Is Not Territory" with the cliched reference to the "fabled" stone refutation of George Berkeley’s idealism followed by a quote from Archimedes. It just seems forced. Not to mention his use of alliteration here: "Bishop Berkeley" and "stubborn stone" (Smith 177). An attempt at literary playfulness gone terribly wrong.
Things get better, though. His interpretation of the story of Hainuwele is more convincing than Jensen’s. He brings the myth down to earth by identifying its connection with the conflicts that exist between European and aboriginal economic systems. He then concludes:
We have not been attendant to the ordinary, recognizable features of religion as negotiation and application but have rather perceived it to be an extraordinary, exotic category of experience which escapes everyday modes of thought. But human life—or, perhaps more pointedly, humane life—is not a series of burning bushes. The categories of holism, of congruity, suggest a static perfection to primitive life which I for one, find inhuman. (Smith 183)
I certainly can’t disagree with him here. Our modern tendency to simultaneously mystify and subjugate aboriginal cultures is still going strong. For example, keep an eye out for the LaKOTA Topical Pain Reliever commercials on TV (or even just visit http://www.lakota-usa.com/). The loon calls, the drumming, the "Indian," and then finally the mystical product that we can obtain at the local pharmacy to soothe our pains in an ancient manner. I think Smith does a good job of showing how these attitudes reach right up into the academy and profoundly influence the way that scholars approach the myths of the cultures they research. But, as Gill points out, Smith, who is so critical of Western mapping, is arguably a formidable cartographer in his own right. He "confines his work to texts, to maps" (Gill "No Place" 189). Smith does not compare his primary textual sources to any "text-independent human reality" (Gill "No Place" 189). That is, he apparently doesn’t do any fieldwork. I think Gill offers a pretty heavy blow here. However, we are left to wonder what a text-independent human reality is actually like. Is it a language-independent reality? Or are texts and language somehow separate? The phrasing implies that texts are in a sense inhuman, and to me that rings false. I do not find written language to be an artificial aspect of humanity. Though I suppose that an aboriginal group that does not have its own writing system may be easily misrepresented in a textual setting. Ultimately, these articles force us to consider the viability of Smith’s idealism. As Gill states, Smith holds that "religion . . . is the invention of scholars, a product of scholarly maps and mappings" (Gill "No Place" 191). Again we find ourselves heading back to Masuzawa. My metaphysical side certainly has no problem accepting this claim. But academically speaking, I fear that Smith may be too extreme. It could be argued that religions have been invented all along, and scholars today are simply developing upon pre-existing fabrications. Medieval Christians were arguably Christians by their own proclamation, as were ancient Buddhists, Jains and Jews. So the invention of religion may go back as far as history takes us. Is it possible that scholars describing a given religious tradition do no more conceptual harm than the self-defining practitioners themselves? It seems to me that labels are not necessarily just the product of modern scholarship, which gives us a certain freedom to indulge in these traditional misconceptions, for better or worse.
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For this week’s blog I decided to revisit a book written by my first Buddhism professor, Prof. Janet McLellan. Many Petals of the Lotus is an excellent study of five Asian Buddhist communities in Toronto. I will focus on McLellan’s account of the experiences of Japanese Canadians. As is well known, these citizens suffered tremendously after Pearl Harbor. Japanese Canadians living in British Columbia were forced to evacuate their homes, businesses, and religious centres and enter into internment camps. Evacuees were denied basic amenities such as heat and running water. Families were separated and religious practices were suppressed. McLellan tells us that elaborate Jodo Shinshu (a form of Pure Land Buddhism) shrines all over western Canada were taken down.
Despite this, Jodo Shinshu practice continued in the camps. Makeshift shrines were created using various objects donated by those interned. Many found the continuation of Buddhist practice to be extremely therapeutic, offering a certain amount of stability in an otherwise overwhelmingly unstable environment (45). However, the leaders of the Japanese Buddhist communities were not allowed to conduct any ceremonies in the camps. As McLellan states, "this ensured that Christian missionaries had little competition from Buddhist authority or leadership" (48). Thus tremendous pressure was put on the evacuees to abandon Buddhism.
Indeed, such pressure was felt before and after internment. McLellan explains that Japanese Buddhist groups had already made considerable accommodations to Canada’s Christian climate:
Japanese-Canadian Buddhist temples borrowed many of their practices, organizational forms, and cultural programs from Protestant Christianity. These include utilizing Christian terms and institutional formats, holding weekly religious services on Sunday, sermons from the pulpit, Sunday school classes, the use of pews, organs, and hymns and facilitating Christian-style weddings—complete with white bridal gown, bridesmaids and the pageantry of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. (46)
After the war, many Japanese Canadians moved to Toronto. This led to the creation of the Toronto Buddhist Church. This Buddhist centre, while essentially Jodo Shinshu, borrowed heavily from Christianity in its practices and aesthetic. McLellan explains that this was an attempt to fit in on the part of Japanese Canadians. These citizens faced explicit discrimination daily, and they sought to be accepted as Canadians while maintaining their Japanese religious heritage. The basic idea was that the more Christian they seemed, the less flak they would receive from their neighbours and government. Some Japanese Canadians, however, were adamant on proving that they were, above all, Canadian. This was especially common among the younger generations born in Canada. They shunned all things Japanese and converted to Christianity. Some Japanese Canadians described Jodo Shinshu practice as "stone-aged" and "un-Canadian" (47). Not surprisingly, considerable turmoil resulted from this attitude. Families became divided over religious affiliation. Matters became even more complicated in subsequent decades when more people from Japan started immigrating to Canada. Many were shocked by the Christian overtones of the Toronto Buddhist Church and rejected it as a corrupted form of Buddhism. The history of Japanese Buddhists in Canada offers an interesting modern example of the significance of authority and power in religion. The government’s persecution of Japanese Buddhists demonstrates how important religion was in the formation of Canadian governmental policies. The fact that our government was once intensely discriminatory against Buddhists and their practices is fascinating. I wonder if such discrimination persists in subtle ways. Was the treatment of Maher Arar strictly political or did it have something to do with him being a Muslim? Why does the government still fund Catholic schools but not other religious schools? Is it simply a carryover from the past or the result of a lingering partiality to Christianity? Equally interesting is the response of Japanese Buddhists to societal pressures. Japanese Canadians were rejected for their Buddhist practices and beliefs, and their attempts to Christianize their faith reflect their tendency to yield to the Christian majority. Amazingly, these societal powers dramatically transformed a centuries-old Buddhist tradition in a very short period of time. This seems to blur the lines between interiority and externality. The external pressures faced by Japanese Canadians were internalized and manifested themselves through modifications to religious life. However, we must wonder whether these modifications were only superficial. The founding members of the Toronto Buddhist Church certainly identified themselves as Buddhist, despite the Christian aesthetic. Could their internal religiosity have remained unaffected by such modifications to their tradition? I think not, but this is by no means a bad thing. It seems that the Toronto Buddhist Church served as a tremendous support for the Japanese community during a time of hardship, and the therapeutic value of their new brand of Buddhism was invaluable, regardless of whether it adhered to Japanese tradition or not. This institution seems to have offered its members a certain degree of power and self-respect at a time when Canadian authority was working against them.
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No entry this week as I'm presenting on Wednesday.
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Paul Stoller outlines three modes of rationality: universalist, relativist, and phenomenological. For me, the universalist approach is the least convincing. Stoller explains this position by quoting Taylor: “Logical inconsistency may seem the core of our concept of irrationality, because we think of the person who acts irrationally as having the wherewithal to formulate maxims of his action and objectives which are in contradiction to each other” (244). Stoller describes this remark as “an extension of the intellectual hegemony of the Enlightenment project in which universally applied Reason is used to constitute authoritative knowledge” (244). I agree. This approach is overwhelmingly egocentric. I am very suspicious of logicians who expound “universal truths” about our world. While I do not doubt the usefulness of logic in many areas of learning, I question whether logic can account for something like causality. To say that A causes B, for example, would be too simplistic. Such an approach presupposes that a single cause and single effect really exist, and are isolatable from their existential frameworks. It also presupposes that a term can properly account for a changing entity. Such an entity develops a new identity from moment to moment. And if it’s no longer the same entity, then what exactly is the term referring to? The term itself hasn’t changed and therefore has failed to reflect the impermanence of the entity. This leads me to question how logical statements can accurately account for our experience of the world.
The relativist approach is more appealing. Stoller explains that in this view, “there can be many rationalities based upon diverse sets of rules, distinct Wittgensteinian language games, specific ‘ways of worldmaking,’ many of which prove to be inconsistent” (246-247). While I appreciate the flexibility of this position, I agree with Stoller’s criticisms. First of all, conceiving of the world as consisting of many exclusive rationalities ignores the tremendous commonalities that exist among peoples. It also gets an ethicist into trouble, since a particular instance of genocide can be excused as merely a product of a different worldview. Stoller presents the phenomenological approach as a balance between the universalist and relativist approaches. Following Edmund Husserl, this view emphasizes the importance of experience and urges us to see things as they are. Alfred Schutz, another phenomenologist, stresses the experience of “the immediacy of everyday life” (Stoller 250). However, his approach has been criticized since privileging the everyday seems too close to universalist attempts to establish a paramount reality. To remedy this problem, Stoller presents the idea of multiple realities: “Multiple realities, of course, exist within distinct and permeable universes of meaning. From a phenomenological perspective, the nature of one’s experience is the key to reducing distances between universes of meaning. As experience expands with time, the boundaries of the universe may begin to intersect, creating an arena of shared space and interpretation” (250). Here boundaries between individuals and cultures are rejected. Stoller explains that mind-body dualism is also done away with, and the individual is swallowed up by the sensual world. He or she is thus wide open to a range of available experiences. This he calls an “embodied rationality” (252). As with relativism, I appreciate the flexibility that the phenomenological approach offers. However, I am confused about how these so-called multiple realities relate to one another. They are said to be “distinct and permeable universes of meaning” but I wonder how these distinct universes are permeated. Stoller suggests that consciousness is responsible. It is our awareness that penetrates the distinct realities and brings them together over time. But does this mean that these things are truly distinct and only united by awareness? Or do they merely appear distinct to our consciousness, when in fact they are actually a unitary whole? If the former is true, then we basically have a relativist position modified only slightly, since one is able to penetrate the other spheres of reality instead of being cut off from them. If the latter is true, then we’re dealing with a form of metaphysical universalism that admits only apparent diversity. Overall, my concern has to do with the experience of such a system. Stoller does little to clarify how this brand of rationality actually functions. Perhaps this cannot be linguistically explained, and is only understood by those who have experienced enough in their lifetime. Unfortunately, this kind of ambiguity leaves me feeling disoriented and does little to clarify what practicing phenomenological rationality actually involves. Now on to Donald Lopez’s article. I’m always impressed by Lopez’s intelligence, and overall I found his article to be excellent. However, the following line jumped out at me: “By entering in a contract with belief, the Sinhalese were promised a certain salvation, the salvation of not losing the beliefs that they never knew they had” (33). I find this kind of rhetoric to be a little too extreme. Lopez is right that some European writers such as Olcott portrayed Buddhism in a skewed manner. They emphasized the philosophical and ethical elements of the textual tradition and largely ignored the lay practitioners. But Lopez talks about the Sinhalese as though they are one massive unit who all thought alike. He makes it seem as though no one in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) had read Pali texts and thus ever heard of doctrines like the Four Noble Truths. I find this very hard to believe. While many lay practitioners would not have been well-versed in Buddhist doctrine, I’m sure others, especially members of the Sangha, would have been quite familiar with it. Likewise, while Olcott’s interpretation of Buddhist texts was certainly his own, one could also expect a fair degree of individuality amongst the interpretations offered by the various monastic centres. Thus it seems to me that Lopez exaggerates the division between Olcott’s version of Buddhism and the forms of Buddhism actually practiced in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) during his time.
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I’ll begin with Shigehisa Kuriyama’s The Expressiveness of the Body. This is not the kind of book that I would typically seek out, but I really enjoyed it. This makes me want to branch out in terms of my reading habits; I’ve been pretty particular for the past few years. First off, the following passage jumped out at me:
Historically, what marked Western discourse on the pulse was above all the fierce yearning for clarity. When Floyer and Menuret de Chambaud called the Chinese style imaginative and allegorical, they betrayed in part their wonder at a people apparently free of this longing—a culture curiously indifferent to, perhaps even ignorant of, the hunger for transparency. (Kuriyama 64) The Western demand for specification is ubiquitous. Scientists have sought to continually refine and develop our understanding of the material world. For every observed phenomenon a new term is created, which has resulted in an exponential development of scientific vocabulary. Western philosophy has also sought to continually “clarify” its subject-matter, as evidenced by the complexity of contemporary analytic works. This kind of philosophy has become so standard in North American universities that many students of philosophy are immediately repulsed by the so-called “ambiguity” of classical Chinese thought. Fellow students have told me that it’s just not rigorous enough for them. They need clear definitions, examples and positions. And these, they say, are not frequent enough in Chinese works. I have perhaps too much to say about this charge. But what is particularly important for the purposes of this blog is Kuriyama’s emphasis on desire. He offers some fresh insight by drawing our attention to the role yearning plays in shaping people’s perceptions. I think people often look to science because they crave clarity. But the irony is that most experienced scientists would admit that the further one researches something, the more challenging and complicated it becomes. This complexity can be overwhelming, and it is often not very conducive to feelings of certainty. So the desire for clarity can easily end in precisely the opposite. Failing to realize this can result in an unquestioning faith in the reliability of details, and a subsequent reverence for the scientific method that is not entirely justified. Kuriyama suggests that ancient Chinese writers were somewhat indifferent to the desire for clarity. I’m not sure about this, for the “imaginative” quality of their writings may have generated a clarity that is much more in sync with the fluidity of the phenomenal world than the rigidity and strict dualism that comes along with detailed scientific analysis. In other words, they may have actually achieved a very high degree of clarity, but one that is not easily recognizable to those operating within the Western paradigm. I also really enjoyed the section on pulse and music. On page 81, Kuriyama discusses how European doctors charted the varieties of human pulses using musical notation rather than words. I think this is particularly compelling because it moves pulse analysis beyond mere adjectives and numbers into a system that directly involves emotion. To distinguish heart rate from emotional states seems kind of bizarre to me, so any system of analysis that reflects the connection between the two could be quite valuable. Now for Robert Sharf’s article “Experience.” I found this to be stronger than his piece on ritual. Few things jumped out as problematic, though I was a bit puzzled by the following: “The ‘hermeneutic of experience’ was soon adopted by a host of scholars interested in religion, the most influential being William James, and today many have a difficult time imagining what else religion might be about” (Sharf in Critical 98). I’ve actually never met a professor who reduces all aspects of religious studies to experience. So I’m wondering why Sharf makes this claim. Any ideas? One of Sharf’s stronger points is his discussion of the contributions of scholars like D.T. Suzuki and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan to religious studies. He writes, “the polemics of Radhakrishnan, Suzuki, and their intellectual heirs has had a significant impact on the study of religion in the West. Few Western scholars were in a position to question the romanticized image of Asian mysticism proffered forth by these intelligent and articulate ‘representatives’ of living Asian faiths” (Sharf 103). This is an excellent point. In the early to mid 20th century, Buddhism and Hinduism were so foreign to the majority of Western scholars that authors could say almost anything about them. T. Lobsang Rampa’s The Third Eye, for example, was a ridiculous fabrication, yet it was widely accepted as an authentic window into Tibetan Buddhism. Suzuki and Radhakrishnan were not frauds like Rampa, but as Sharf explains, they had some definite agendas that went largely undetected. Their “experience” within the tradition gave them an authority that was difficult for anyone to challenge. It is not difficult to see the problems that this could create for scholars. Of course, the issue has not entirely disappeared, and the insider-outsider debate is still going strong!
Finally, since this entry is becoming quite long, I’ll just say something short about William LaFluer’s article on the body. He states, “Japanese Buddhist objections to transplantation typically focus on the tradition of maintaining that death is a natural and necessary part of life, not some kind of enemy to be resisted fought against at all cost and with all available technologies” (LaFluer in Critical 45). I’ve thought about this issue quite a lot. Having seen my mom suffer through chemotherapy twice, I am quite averse to such indiscriminate and pain-inducing forms of treatment. If I am diagnosed with stage four cancer and my doctor proposes chemotherapy, I may just refuse it. It’s hard to say. The pain of cancer is severe, but constant nausea for months is just as bad, if not worse. Remaining alive for an extra six months probably wouldn’t be worth the excessive suffering. What does everyone else think?
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David Kinsley’s “Women’s Studies in the History of Religions” is a good primer for someone like myself who hasn’t had nearly enough exposure to women’s studies and its role in the academic study of religion. It’s clearly written and concise. However, the following passages got me thinking:
“Once historians of religions began to study women’s religion with opened eyes they began to see, for example, that Hinduism for a male can be, and usually is, quite different from Hinduism for a woman” (Kinsley 4). “It is clear in many cases that it is simply not accurate to suppose that the meaning of a particular religious text, event, or symbol is the same for males and females” (Kinsley 7). Kinsley emphasizes the differences between how males and females regard a religion and its texts. While such gender-related differences appear historically evident, I find that Kinsley’s words elicit some difficult problems. Religious experience differs from individual to individual, so to talk about the “male” experience and the “female” experience seems too simplistic. This is also true of texts. Each person arguably reads a text differently, so what exactly are we pointing to when we say that women and men have separate ways of reading them? Did men throughout history get together and decide upon the “male” way to read a text while women got together and decided upon the decidedly “female” way to read a text? A pretty flimsy distinction, it seems to me. Furthermore, this kind of talk comes dangerously close to gender stereotyping. Kinsley gives the example of the nine Durgas. He explains that men interpret the Durgas in a rather philosophical manner, using them as symbols for the evolution of prakrti. Meanwhile, women regard the Durgas as symbols of the stages of a woman’s life. Unfortunately, Kinsley’s treatment seems to inadvertently reinforce the awful stereotype that men are rational philosophers while women are emotional beings defined by their bodies. While Kinsley attempts to address something that is apparently historically true about the practitioners in Varanasi, he ignores the possibility that the men and women there might be aware of both interpretations of the Durgas’ significance. I would be surprised if all of the men discussed the Durgas in philosophical terms and all of the women discussed them in relation to female development. Now on to Katherine K. Young’s “From the Phenomenology of Religion to Feminism and Women’s Studies”. She offers a compelling and lucid breakdown of phenomenology. Then she goes on to compare phenomenology with feminism. She writes: Phenomenologists, be they philosophers or scholars of religion, want to prevent the unconscious superimposition of values, categories, interpretations, and theories on things so that the nature of “things” might be revealed. Feminists want to prevent the unconscious superimposition of patriarchal values, categories, interpretations, and theories—termed “false consciousness”—so that the real facts about, and the experiences of, women might be revealed. (Young 26) A curious facet of this passage is that “things” and women are being directly compared. The unintentional colloquial implications of this choice of terms need not be emphasized. But more interestingly, this passage raises questions about the ontology of personhood. Phenomenologists apparently aim to experience the objects in our world directly so as to bypass the misleading elements of our conditioned awareness. Feminists, on the other hand, want to experience “real facts” about women and their experiences by avoiding patriarchy. Methodologically, I see the connection. But the idea that a woman and her experiences could be some kind of perceived “thing” that one could skilfully get a hold of seems kind of bizarre. It presupposes the existence of an essential self that is clear and distinct enough to be perceived by the well-trained phenomenologist. I’m skeptical that any such self exists. And I’m just as skeptical that something as fluid as a person’s experiences could be completely apprehended. Perhaps Young did not intend to draw such a close parallel between the subject matter of phenomenologists and feminists, but if that is the case, why make such a comparison in the first place? Lastly, thoughts on Monique Wittig’s “destruction of sex” as outlined in Daniel Boyarin’s “Gender”. Hmm. Well, my first thought is that it seems pretty extreme. The claim that all heterosexual sex is “forced sexual service” for a woman is something that makes me feel quite uneasy as a man. It’s not something that I know how to counter, and I don’t think I can really speak on behalf of women in this case. I’d like to hear what women in the class have to say about this. Boyarin also discusses the destruction of desire/pleasure. In Buddhist tantra, sex is sometimes used to overcome desire. The energy associated with sexual desire is thought to be transformable into enlightening energies. It is thought that hang-ups regarding sexual desire can be confronted and subsequently overcome via properly supervised tantric sexual practices. Ultimately, “male” and “female” are recognized as constructs and are, in the end, exploded. Here we have heterosexual sex being used as a soteriological tool. Unfortunately, I don’t think Wittig would be convinced of its effectiveness.
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| 2006-10-22 23:57 |
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Asad is dry. Real dry. So dry that I fell asleep twice while reading these two chapters. They also made me hungry. It took energy to stay focused, and that took food. If I were to read an entire book by Asad, I would 1) sleep more, and 2) eat more. I could gain considerable weight by confining my studies to Asad. Powerful stuff, it seems to me. That said, some interesting ideas were thrown our way. One such idea comes from Augustine: “Even Augustine held that although religious truth was eternal, the means for securing human access to it were not” (Asad 35). I like this passage. It brings to our attention the transitory status of both accepted rhetoric and approaches to gaining so-called religious knowledge. It can be taken temporally or geographically. While Asad is concerned with the differences between Augustine’s era and our own, similar differences also exist at any given moment between one culture and another. This diversity is enough to make one feel overwhelmed, because it undermines the possibility of pinning down a researchable entity. This reminds me of Masuzawa and the much-discussed problems associated with using the term “world religions”. And while Augustine tries to assure us that there is an eternal unchanging truth that underlies this theoretical mess, I doubt that everyone would be satisfied by this. What is the relationship between this eternal truth and the changing world? How does it shape what we commonly experience, if at all? Such enormous questions are entertaining, but I’m not sure how helpful they are in remedying these problematic aspects of our research. Thankfully, Asad addresses this issue. He writes: My argument, I must stress, is not just that religious symbols are intimately linked to social life (and so change with it), or that they usually support dominant political power (and occasionally oppose it). It is that different kinds of practice and discourse are intrinsic to the field in which religious representation (like any representation) acquire their identity and their truthfulness. From this it does not follow that the meanings of religious practices and utterances are to be sought in social phenomena, but only that their possibility and their authoritative status are to be explained as products of historically distinctive disciplines and forces. The anthropological student of particular religions should therefore begin from this point, in a sense unpacking the comprehensive concept which he or she translates as “religion” into heterogeneous elements according to its historical character. (Asad 53-54) Phew. A long quote. Sorry about that. But I think this section is worth looking at. While Asad acknowledges the undeniable complexity of studying a given religion, his solution is even more complex. He suggests that we “unpack” our area of research into heterogeneous elements. Bear in mind that the word “heterogeneous” denotes things that are dissimilar, miscellaneous, varied and even unrelated. It seems to me that this approach is in many ways logical, but also endless and horrifying. Imagine how much one would have to write to feel confident that he or she had “unpacked” a given religious practice or ideology. It’s a staggering project when you really consider it. This approach is heavily influenced by our current scientific model: breaking things down further and further into progressively complicated components until you are left with the bare particulars. This is supposed to lead to expertise, but it seems to end in exactly the opposite. A subject can become so complicated that very little can be said without encountering exceptions and contradictions. So I wonder just how valuable Asad’s recommendation ultimately is. However, I liked Asad’s discussion of ritual and texts. The history is compelling. Asad explains, “it was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that the word ritual entered English as a substantive conveying the sense either of the prescribed order of performing religious services or the book containing such prescriptions” (Asad 58). I wrestle with the problem of explaining the relationship between textual sources and the performance of the rituals they describe. Initially it appears that we have something quite permanent on the one hand (the text) and something obviously dynamic on the other (the performance of the ritual). But on closer inspection it becomes evident that the meaning of a text can be as malleable as the performance. The era in which the text is read brings a host of presuppositions along with it, and these inevitably shape how the words are translated into action. Readings differ from era to era and even person to person, so it seems that a text is somehow not so permanent after all. Another related thought: a text is a text because we call it a text and use it like a text. It’s food for a bookworm. So if humans disappeared would texts just be food? Now on to Sharf’s “Ritual”. I liked this article overall, but I certainly didn’t like everything about it. The use of the word “play” sometimes gave me a funny feeling in my stomach. Hard to explain why. It just rubbed me the wrong way. But more specifically, I found Sharf to be a little misleading in his accounts of Buddhist doctrine. I’m being really picky here, but I think it’s worth discussing for anyone who hasn’t studied Buddhist philosophy very much. Sharf writes, “From a Chan perspective, the transformation of the abbot into a living buddha through the manipulation of metalinguistic framing rules is consonant with the appreciation of the intrinsic emptiness of all dependently arisen things” (Sharf 267). Overall this makes sense, but the jarring part is the mention of the “intrinsic emptiness” of things. Why is this problematic? The usual argument for emptiness states that because objects arise from causes and conditions, they lack svabhava, or “own-being”. This simply means that they do not have an independent essence or nature. If things lack such an essence, to call them “things” is ultimately misleading. The point is that emptiness entails that there is nothing “intrinsic” about anything anywhere. So to talk about the “intrinsic emptiness” of something is a little odd. Sharf also mentions that “all truth is relative” according Mahayana Buddhists. Not so. Certainly what is commonly called “conventional truth” (i.e. truth concerning the diverse world of appearances) can be described as relative, since the identity of any given thing is dependent upon its existential context. But Buddhists also refer to “ultimate truth” which is not reducible to subject-object distinctions. The interconnectedness that is right in front of us is thought to be impossible to label or even cognize with the conceptual mind. I’m not sure that we can call this kind of truth “relative” because such a label defines it as a “something” which is misleading.
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I have come to appreciate Masuzawa quite a bit more since my last entry. As I ploughed into the more detailed chapters of her book, the signs of condescension that initially bothered me seemed to fade into the background. I think her introduction is rather clumsy in comparison with the body of her work, and I would be tempted to recommend that someone read the introduction last rather than first.
I found chapter four, “Buddhism, a World Religion”, to be quite informative. Early in the chapter, Masuzawa draws attention to an important point: the initial methodological approach to Buddhist Studies utilized by European scholars was overwhelmingly text-focused. Masuzawa writes, “the discovery of Buddhism was therefore from the beginning, in a somewhat literal and nontrivial sense, a textual construction; it was a project that put a premium on the supposed thoughts and deeds of the reputed founder and on a certain body of writing that was perceived to authorize, and in turn was authorized by, the founder figure” (Masuzawa 126). This approach generated some significant problems. As Masuzawa explains, scholars like Monier Monier-Williams came to regard Buddhism as almost entirely philosophical. Both the practice of Buddhism and the magical and miraculous passages found in Buddhist works were consistently ignored or dismissed. Because these manuscripts couldn’t talk back, European scholars were able to extract what they wanted and present Buddhism to the West according to their own attitudes and priorities.
While serious efforts have been made in recent years to counterbalance this early bias, I still fear the problem remains significant. I use this text-focused methodology almost exclusively, and I do, at times, feel like I’m a little too prone to projecting my own understanding of Buddhism onto a given text. I don’t feel that the solution is to contextualize every text by seeing how it is used by some random Buddhist community. But I do feel that one must recognize the limitations of written language. Not only is the Western scholar confronted with the daunting problem of dealing with texts in difficult source languages, but he or she also encounters passages where dictionaries just don’t work. In Frances’ Readings in Tibetan Buddhism class, we recently came across a series of confusing lines. Possible medical problems with a woman’s womb were described using idiomatic expressions that seem almost impossible to crack. The text tells us that if a womb is like the mouth of a camel or the axle of a chariot, then a consciousness seeking rebirth will not enter that womb. In this case, I feel rather helpless, and I wonder whether even a native Tibetan would know what these references are actually describing. The text is extremely old, and the meanings of these idioms have probably faded from usage. In this case, a translator generally comes to an impasse, and is usually left to present the idiom literally, which unfortunately fails to communicate the original meaning.
Also, to touch on an issue Frances raised in this week’s handout, I think a text represents a very finite portion of the author’s thoughts and experiences. First of all, people’s opinions on a given issue can sometimes change over time. Thus we have to be careful not to assume that what an author states in one particular text was necessarily his or her opinion consistently. Likewise, it seems that a written work is, in some ways, an oversimplification of a person’s thoughts. I find that writing things down can sometimes make me feel confined and even dishonest, since comprehensiveness is all but impossible. At the same time, I’m not convinced that a text really has to reflect experience completely in order to be useful. At the very least it can point to a given idea or experience, allowing the reader’s own internal understanding to (ideally) fill in the blanks.
I wasn’t quite as sympathetic to Masuzawa’s treatment of the Buddha’s response to the beliefs and practices of his Vedic contemporaries. She argues that he wasn’t as reactionary as scholars have made him out to be. While this is probably true to some degree, I have encountered numerous passages in the Pali Suttas and later Buddhist texts that suggest that the Buddha and his followers really did self-consciously set themselves apart from the Vedic tradition. While the boundaries between Buddhism and Hinduism are always blurry, I don’t think that the Sramana movement was a fiction, and I don’t want to take the explosion of religious categories so far as to ignore historical religious sectarianism.
Above all, I think I most enjoyed Masuzawa’s discussion of philology and the European classifications of languages. The claim that inflected languages are superior to uninflected languages has actually been presented to me more than once here at UofT. Having studied Sanskrit for a while now, I have come to see just how complex its grammar really is. For the beginner, it is truly horrifying. A shadow in the shape of devanagari characters can silently overtake one for weeks at a time. Interestingly, people are prone to equate complexity with sophistication, and therefore superiority. I’m by no means convinced that a language like English is incapable of conveying certain ideas due to an absence of inflection. But I think it’s important to realize that traces of the attitude Masuzawa is illuminating can still be found in the academy today. Can grammatical complexity actually be linked with intellectual rigour? Personally, I don’t think so, but I’m interested in hearing what others have to say about this issue.
While I have other comments to make, I’d better jump ahead, as this entry is getting quite long and it’s very late. In chapter nine, Masuzawa touches on contemporary pluralistic attitudes toward religions. She comments “we . . . would be hard pressed to find a religion writer who would set out to contradict the notion of the fundamental commonality or unity of religions” (Masuzawa 317). Here Masuzawa makes the bold claim that today nearly all religion scholars believe that the world’s religions share a fundamental unity. I don’t think this is true. Scholars use the same term “religion” to refer to an enormous diversity of practices and doctrines, but this does not entail that they see all religions as unified in some grand metaphysical or New Age way. I’ve never had a professor blindly propound that “they’re all the same.”
Overall, Masuzawa has done a good job of emphasizing the need to be critical of the terms we use when studying religion. I am not ready to abandon the term “World Religions” altogether, but I’m certainly becoming more sensitive to its shortcomings.
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I’d like to begin my first entry by reflecting on our first class rather than the readings we’ve been assigned. After the introductions and Prof. Garrett's explanation of the general layout of the course, we were presented with a pile of textbooks on world religions (I must say I now feel a bit self-conscious about using the term "world religions", but I’m not sure that I should feel this way—more on that later). When we split into groups and began analyzing the books we had been given, there was an immediate tendency, at least in my group, to mercilessly criticize the works in front of us. In fact, it wasn’t just criticism, it also included some all-out mockery. I think I was perhaps the most excited by these attacks. I even thought it would be funny to read to the class Lewis M. Hopfe’s explanation of what “Basic Religions” apparently encapsulates.
I later thought about why I was so quick to attack these works. One possible reason is that I was slightly on edge given that it was our first class together, and somehow felt more at ease once a common critical aim was designated and pursued. There's definitely a certain camaraderie that comes from joint criticism, and in situations where two or more people who don’t know each other very well are talking, the conversation will often turn to either complaints about situations in life (e.g. “Oh don’t you hate it when ________________”), or just criticisms of anything exterior to the group, such as politicians, the TTC, the weather, or anything else that seems to suck at that moment.
Another possible reason is that I was feeling uncertain about what I would be expected to do in a Method and Theory course. I consequently took cues from Prof. Garrett's very brief introduction to Masuzawa’s The Invention of World Religions and quickly came to assume that I should examine the works in front of me through similar eyes.
Which brings me to my first response to Masuzawa. Her introduction contains some condescension that is clearly akin to the attitude I myself assumed in class. For example, she writes, “Broadly speaking, the more ‘traditional’ the society, the greater the role religion plays within it—or so we presume, regardless of how much or how little we happen to know about the society in question or about its supposed tradition. To be sure, these are mostly precritical, unreflected assumptions on the order of street-corner opinions, but when it comes to the subject of religion, it appears that the scholarly world is situated hardly above street level” (Masuzawa 1). Here Masuzawa ridicules religion scholars and their work. In doing so, she asserts her own apparent superiority. This kind of egotism is frankly a bit of a turn off. I completely agree that we should remain ever-critical of what is being presented to us in the academy, but I generally don’t like it when someone denegrades an entire field of research and implicitly presents their work as superior.
Another example: “a typical world religions textbook opens to an actual map of the world showing an oddly irregular, often illegible, and frankly uninterpretable picture of the distribution of these religions, sometimes accompanied by a list of figures indicating the respective size of the ‘adherents’ or ‘believers’ that each religion supposedly claims” (Masuzawa 5). While there is undoubtedly some truth to these remarks, I find that Masuzawa’s rhetoric is a bit hard to take. Are these maps really so incoherent? Yes, there are obvious problems with drawing clear boundaries between “different” parts of the world, especially when it comes to religion. But these maps do serve the conventionally useful purpose of indicating the general distribution of religions. And we shouldn’t forget that the followers of religions like Buddhism, Christianity and Islam have been consciously setting themselves apart from other religious groups for hundreds of years, and are in fact more concentrated in certain parts of the world.
Ultimately what I’m questioning here is the ethics of criticism. If the authors of the textbooks I was mocking last class were actually in class with me, I probably would have been a lot less harsh and condescending. I find there is an overwhelming tendency to dehumanize books. Many people feel it’s just fine to mock what someone else has worked incredibly hard on. I’m not so sure that this is the best approach to criticism, because, as is the case with Masuzawa’s introduction, it comes across as rather self-absorbed. Such an attitude does not generally encourage positive dialogue.
And getting back to my self-consciousness about using the term “world religions”, I don’t know that I should feel self-conscious about it—at least not yet. Religious divisions are not simply the invention of modern Europe. Different religious groups really have historically distinguished themselves from one another. But the subtlety of Masuzawa’s point is not yet clear to me, as I have not finished her book. I am only working with the impressions I have so far, and these are probably too simplistic. Perhaps in two weeks I’ll feel much differently about her ideas. But for now, I am trying to remain critical of Masuzawa’s thesis, while avoiding the negativity she sometimes exemplifies.
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