I've not been attending that many AAR Virtual Annual Meeting sessions - I'm teaching, after all - but I have managed to have the familiar experience of discovering a few jewels but otherwise getting the sense I was missing most of what was going on. One session today, on the history of the AAR no less, helped explain why nobody could hope to avoid the sense of missing most of it! (See above.) It was interesting also to learn that our predecessor, NABI (the National Association of Biblical Instructors) peeled away from the Society of Biblical Literature in 1909 for the latter's connection to the Church, as well as their resistance to scientific research - but remained focused on the same material, now called "Bible and Religion." Only in the 1960s, when we were renamed American Academy of Religion, was even a desultory effort to move beyond Christian topics made. Now a thousand flowers bloom.
One such jewel was a panel of the recently formed "Indian and Chinese Religions Compared" Unit, where four scholars considered how a globalized humanities might learn from non-Western traditions not only in content but in form and approach. I attended in part because a Sinologist I met in Shanghai was sharing his work on how the work of Tang dynasty "scholar poets" became forms of meditation, incantation and apophasis, a lovely presentation. I was excited also by a paean to the Mahabharata, a polemic against Buddhist studies' implicit acceptance of an irrelevant western distinction between philosophy (the framework for most work on Indo-Tibetan materials) and literature (template for studies of most Sino-Japanese works), and a dialogue the 17th century Indian Muslim poet Bidel of Delhi describes with a Brahmin when they were both on the road to a spring sacred to many traditions. Especially in the time of "love jihad" legislation, it was nice to be reminded of the depth and beauty of Indian religious pluralism. This presenter also shared a translation of a ghazal of Bidel's "on composure and distraction."
Dust of distraction
everywhere
the opposite
of composure.
Bringing lips
to silence
is the aim
of the collected heart.
Be
spinebound
for a moment
held together
by attentive slow reflection.
Your compendium of inner meaning
has come apart
from all those proofs
and heartfelt demonstrations
of composure
In this ocean
waves grow
in search of pearls.
You skim the surface
fleeting and impatient
seeking
a collected heart.
Among its beautiful merits, she observed, was the poem's acknowledgment that in this life composure usually loses out to distraction, whatever faith journey one is on.
