Campus

One of the standard complaints about urban university campuses is that you rarely see your colleagues. People commute in and hurry back home and you see them, at best, in thankless committee meetings. You find out about cool colleagues at conferences elsewhere, or from colleagues elsewhere who assume you know everyone at your own school. Give us more common space, we've been demanding, so some of those potential synergies will happen here!

The University Center is designed for such synergies, and they happen with satisfying regularity. Today I had a whole series of delightful reunions. Right now I'm sitting in the 2nd floor dining hall, and have greeted a student actor I've known for a few years, and a student taking the East Asian religion class I'm auditing. (After class today she and I had exchanged sympathies - in less than three weeks on Daoism, how did we get from the ethereal austerity of the Daodejing to a 12-day festival on the tenth anniversary of Hong King's return to China, with three priests garbed red as gods presenting offerings to hundreds of other gods, as long phalanxes of supporters in yellow robes sang droning anthems?) The personal pizza's yummy, too, if not pretty - here a Margarita balsamic + pesto.)

And before that... I attended a meeting at the India China Institute, helping finalize an application for an extension of the Luce-funded project ERSEH, together with an urban environmentalist from NSPE and a digital mapping specialist from Parsons. Emerging on the ground floor of the Parsons Building I noticed some student work inspired by Japanese Shinto shrines (yesterday was the third anniversary of the 3/11 earthquake/tsunami), and soon found myself in a conversation about it with W, the university Archivist, whom I know from New School history shenanigans. We talked about the exhibition my New School history comrade J and I are helping put together in the big Parsons Gallery this summer together with gallery curator R - and then R happened by and joined us. As we chatted I winked to a student I haven't seen since last year... This is how a campus works, right?

And then, crossing into the new building on my way to pizza happiness, I bumped into someone from the Provost's Office I worked with last semester, as we eavesdropped on a trumpeter from the Jazz Program filling the empty auditorium with Miles Davis. Sweet!

Resonances

The first half of "Buddhism and Modern Thought" winds up with an important recent book, David McMahan's 2008 The Making of Buddhist Modernism. We're spending three classes on its nine chapters - still perhaps a big optimistic given that it's midterm and students are worn out.

The name "Buddhism modernism" (coined by Heinz Bechert in 1966) has come into its own in recent years, in no small part because of this book. It takes the place of "Protestant Buddhism" (thought to be at once too polemical and too Christocentric) and "Modern Buddhism," and hopes also to displace or at least complicate what's sometimes called "Western Buddhism." While McMahan's concern is the 150-year period in which the West encountered Buddhism (you can put scarequotes around all those words), he argues that the new form of Buddhism which has emerged in this time is cosmopolitan and indeed global in scope, shaped by Asians as well as Europeans and Americans throughout the world. It is no more the same than "modernity" is in Köln, Kandy and Kyoto, but it needs to be understood as part of a globalized world - and as responding to and addressing the condition of this world.

McMahan's book is the first we've read that admits the newness of these forms without pathologizing them. He has questions about Buddhism's new faces, as anyone must, but his stance is that of one who not only would like to think that the Dharma might make it past hurdles of translation, orientalism, colonial ideology, consumer capitalism and therapeutic culture, but is convinced that it in fact has made it. I don't usually make a point of asking if a scholar is a practitioner or not, but here it seemed relevant. We arrive on the shores of his book having navigated the wild seas of staggeringly complicated and varied Buddhist formations in 20th century Asia, haunted by the world-shattering harm done by colonialisms. Scrupulous scholars aware of the contribution their predecessors made to this devastation have challenged shallow and self-serving Western Buddhophiles. How could "Buddhism in the West" be more than a cruel joke - whether on Buddhist Asia, western wannabe Buddhists or both?

The first time I read through The Making of Buddhist Modernism I thought McMahan was on the side of the scoffers. He shows compellingly how liberal Christian theology, scientific discourses and Romantic-Transcendentalism "expressivism" affected the Buddhisms that have taken shape in the North Atlantic world. In fact, however, he's biting the bullet. "Buddhism modernism" is formed decisively by Western modernities. But he refuses to conclude from this that it's an incomplete or even a false Buddhism. (It's critical of modernity, too, he points out.) If translation across cultures were a problem, Buddhism would have entered the realms of inauthenticity two thousand years ago as it traversed the linguistic Himalaya of Indic-Chinese languages.

We've been struggling with how to articulate the extent to which Buddhist traditions (or any traditions) are reframed as they move across cultures. Some in the class think it's generally successful. Others think it can never succeed. McMahan suggests that determining what a given culture (or individual) is able to receive goes beyond conscious "theoretical" to deep "tacit" structures. Weber's "elective affinities" are something like this but McMahan takes from Jay Garfield the concept of "resonances," which we decided we preferred. Resonances are dynamic and mutual; other terms, from "adaptation" to "receptivity" to "accommodation" are static and one-sided by comparison. It does remain a difficult thing to think through, though - the tacit needs to be activated somehow, perhaps through dialogue? (Gadamer smiles from the wings.)

I've been suggesting that we're up against one of the biggest questions of all: how is it possible for anyone to truly encounter something new?

Western Buddhists come late to a tradition which many of its long-term hosts believe long ago shot its wad. Throughout the Asian Buddhist world it's thought that we live in an age where the Dharma is in decline if not indeed already gone. Our best hope is that a bodhisattva will whisk us to a more propitious place (like Amida's Pure Land), or that we are reborn in human form the next time the Dharma is available, in the time of Maitreya. Can late arrival Western Buddhists be blamed for wishing otherwise, or even for thinking that the arrival of a new audience must have given the Dharma a second wind? Aren't we singing to the Buddha a new song?

Rereading McMahan with this group and after what we've read together, I find myself both more sympathetic and more suspicious of the "Buddhist modernism" he describes. Western constraints seem at once too strong (he speaks of Western "non-negotiables" like gender equality) and too weak (disestablishment and minority status make it feel politically weightless and inoffensive). But I guess he's there too: The many recommendations in contemporary popular western Buddhist literature to trust your deepest experiences, your inner nature, your internal vision have more to do with this legacy of Romanticism than with traditional Buddhism. One seldom hears such counsel from traditional Buddhist texts and teachers; for them, until one is an advanced practitioner, one's inner experiences are likely to be considered just another form of delusion. (84

I'm keen to see what we make of the book as a whole. 

My daily commute

 

Wonderful cover of the latest New Yorker Cover.

The kid at right is, of course, reading Notes from the Underground!

Public Seminar

I get to headline Public Seminar, the new website of the New School for Social Research! Public Seminar is modeled on the University in Exile's General Seminar, started eighty years ago this year. (You've heard me natter on about it.) I played up the NSSR connections, from the Horace Kallen cameo in its very first sentence to the words "social research" at at the very end of the very last (and coming after a little Durkheimian wink). You can read the whole piece - the start, I'm thinking, of a series on contemporary engagements with the Book of Job - here.

[ ... ]

How much can you take on in one class? Lots if all your engines are firing! This morning the "Buddhism and Modern Thought" students had an opportunity to share the arguments of their first papers. I took notes on the board in a half-intentional way: some themes are clustered, some just wound up on available empty spaces. (4NT is of course the Four Noble Truths, [...] is, well, [...].) We're goin' places!

Apple of the eye

When I had the opportunity to give a "Lay Stewardship Homily" at Holy Apostles four and a half years ago, I had a chance to reflect publicly on the pleasure of being a Lector. Not just pleasure. Here's what I said:

I had no idea how different [than being a professor] lectoring would be until I tried it. Not to be grandiose about it, but it filled me with fear and trembling (especially when I got to read the passage in Philippians where those words appear, "fear and trembling"!). In being a lector you have a totally different relationship to the text than you do as a teacher—even if you’re a teacher who sometimes takes people through passages from the Bible, or through Biblically formed texts like, say, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. As a lector you don’t get to choose the piece of scripture you’re reading. You don’t introduce or contextualize it, you don’t paraphrase, you don’t interpret it. Sure, in reading it aloud you are interpreting it. But I found as I prepared that I was trying to do something different: to let the text speak, to let it say more things than I knew were in it. (We all know that scripture says different things to different people, and even to the same person at different times.) As a lector I try to make the text significant, relevant, available; the purpose isn’t to commend my interpretation of it. (Often—I can say this here!—I don’t know what I’m reading. The more times I read it, and read it aloud, the less I understand. And I admit I’ve had a hard time with some of the texts I’ve been given, like the insistence that not one Egyptian survived the closing of the Red Sea over Pharoah’s army, not one.) But even then, I’m trying to be there for the reading, to give it voice, make it available. It’s a humbling, but also exciting experience.

I was Lector again today (first time for a while) and they gave me a dusey. Try it on for size!

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.’ Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God say, “You shall not eat from any tree in the garden”?’ The woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.”’ But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves. 

It's Genesis 2:15-17 and 3:1-7, somewhat awkwardly stitched together. Omitted for reasons of economy are not just the naming of the animals but the creation of Eve ('It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner,' 2:19), who, in this expurgated text, shows up out of nowhere.

It's interesting to have had to read this so-important story just as my Job talks have been focusing on the value of dramatizing the text - key passages, and transitions, etc. turn out to be capable of quite different stagings/voicings; the interpreter is forced to go with one of the them, often making a choice which she might not have made, or felt the need to make, had she just been reading a text silently.

In this hoary story the narrator has (or has the opportunity) to communicate a number of voices, reactions, deliberations, actions. The first few times I practiced reading it, theological and other interpretations were racing along above and below like news tickers on cable TV. Depending on the ticker God was informing "the man" about a poisonous tree he should take care to avoid or jealously threatening punishment of an otherwise desirable activity. The serpent was by turns crafty and wild and, more uncomfortably, an animal that the Lord God had made. His craftiness expressed itself in his words, or in the fact that they are addressed to "the woman." Adam is a cipher in this story, but what Eve was doing is open to exploration too. Why does she interpolate nor shall you touch it into what she's heard from "the man" - or was it Adam who added it to his recollection? She wasn't there for the public service announcement/prohibition, after all. (So even within this narrative two people had to voice what they heard God say.)

It's not a story I much like, knowing how foundational it's been for millennia of misogyny, and how its been mined and mobilized for misanthropic theodicies. (And Pierre Bayle's questions - didn't God make the serpent and the tree, didn't He know that the tempter would be successful? - rankle.) It's kind of a big deal. How to read it? As I tried to articulate in the homily, I don't see it as my business to endorse a particular interpretation, at least not deliberately. I wanted to let the text speak. Practicing different ways of reading, different stresses and pauses, would leave me limber enough to move as the spirit listeth.

As I practiced I found myself pausing in different places in the sentence beginning So when the woman saw... For a few iterations there was a pause between she took of its fruit and and ate but none in Adam's her husband, who was with her, and he ate but in the end I read the words about her as if they were a single movement and left a pause - a short one, but still a pause - before and he ate. It seemed to make sense as I was reading it but was a side being taken in the ancient debate?

Rewrites

Spent the day grading papers. Well, avoiding grading papers (laundry, email, an exhibit on science and art) and then grading papers. It's grueling not because the papers are bad but because they're good, or could be good, and one wants to give helpful feedback. What I decided to do (these are the first papers for "Buddhism and Modern Thought," addressing the rather impossible prompt In what ways is Buddhism a modern Buddhist invention?) was send each student a paragraph by email, praising what they'd done and proposing ways they might deepen or extend (or clarify or unify) their arguments. In Monday's class there'll be a chance for each student to talk a little bit about her/his paper; I'm hoping, also, that everyone will venture a rewrite.

On reflection, this is good pedagogy - a good way of teaching essay writing - but I'd be lying if I said I'd planned it that way. In retrospect it seems very well thought out - like my conscientiously updated syllabus!

Roundtable night

If I do say so myself we put on a very good show in Lang's Religious Studies world despite limitations of budget, personnel and institutional recognition. Tonight's roundtable was no exception! Four incisive presentations on questions of religion and politics from different parts of the world helped frame a wonderfully wide-ranging discussion. The first speaker introduced some of the American Evangelical organizations which have been supporting - if not indeed instigating - the push for anti-gay legislation in Uganda and other African countries. The second (a graduating senior) described the intriguing ways in which Islamist parties' victory in recent parliamentary elections may actually blunt their capacity to criticize the monarchy in Morocco. Next, we learned about how the so-called revival of Daoism in China is often driven by local politics and business people, while the communist government has created a new curriculum for Daoist priests that focuses on texts rather than ritual practices. Finally, a discussion of the role of gay-oriented religious organizations behind, beside and within the 1970s gay liberation movement offered a new and empowering view of the relationship of sexual minorities and the church. (The presenter is one of the contributors to our Queer Christianities book.)

Great stuff, and, as in every truly interdisciplinary or comparative discussion, all sorts of synergies. For instance, what might a less secularist understanding of gay issues in the US portend for other places - and what uses might such a narrative serve? Are there better and worse ways in which religious groups might participate in or even be institutionalized within the state? The whole discussion was framed by a brilliant spin on the famous story of the trial of Socrates. Recalling the way Plato's Socrates would banish poets from the ideal Republic, the moderator (my colleague M) opined that Socrates - often seen as a proto-secular martyr to religious persecution - was in fact being arraigned for the religious move of declaring some people beyond the pale. Echoing recent discussions of "political theology" he wondered if modern views aren't all guilty of naiveté and hypocrisy in supposing that "religion" and "politics" are neatly distinguishable in the first place.

Local and global, old and new, practice and theory, students and faculty, challenged pieties and new hope: The New School at its best!

No way!

Amusing sequence of revelations in the East Asian religions class today. The instructor N had laid out the structure of the Daoist celestial bureaucracy, including the discomfiting discovery that there were gods in your innards who would report infractions against the precepts of the  Orthodox and Unified Covenant with the Supernatural Powers 正益盟威 (zhengyi mengwei) to the appropriate authorities in the bureaucracy, who would in turn take the due number of years off your life.

As often happens at Lang, students accepted a loopy occult system at face value and then tried to game it.
S1: "What if you did something wrong but were sincerely sorry, what would you do?
N: "Well, I'm not a Daoist, but-" started N, but was interrupted.
S2: "You're not a Daoist?"
N: "Did I say I was?"
(Confusion)
S3: "We've all been thinking we were following this great sage."
N: "Did you think I was a Confucian when we were doing Confucianism?"
(Stunned silence)

I might add that N is a white guy like me, with a conspicuously Scottish surname. Then things got even better.
S2: "If you're not a Daoist, then what are you?"
N: "I think of myself as a Christian. The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount are the precepts I try to live by."
(Shocked silence)
S3: "You're a Christian?"
N: "I don't go to church, but yes."
(Pregnant pause)
S3: "I'm astonished."

And, the cherry on top, as N tries to get back to the discussion.
N: "Just to be clear: I'm not a Daoist. I study Daoism."
(Bemused silence)
N: "I'm an academic."
(Bafflement)

Why is religious studies so very hard for people to get? 

Embodied

Had some multimedia fun as I shepherded the Buddhism and Modern Thought class through our Kaempfer moment. This is a map of Asia I traced from online, which would soon be filled with tangled arrows marking the historical spread of Buddhism over two and a half millennia. Superimposed on it are Khmer Buddhist heads (from the Google), representing the disembodied and decontextualized Buddhism we know in the West: none of these will have been carved as a free-standing heads; most were knocked off of monuments like Angkor Wat.

In the end, of course, the local histories of modern Buddhist engagements and challenges throughout Asia overwhelmed us with too much information. I discussed four ways of responding:

1) one might write off the whole history as deviations and distractions, best put aside in favor of attention to the pure words of The Founder;

2) one could represent the spread of Buddhism as a family tree - though there turns out to be no impartial way of doing that; after all, the "trunk" of Indian Buddhism disappears! I brought back the banyan tree image from the last time I tried this exercise - branches become trunks, things grow down and up at the same time, a most Zennish tree!

3) one might dispense with the need for a linear story by instead stressing that, wherever if found itself, the Buddhadharma successfully accommodated itself to the preexisting culture, political structures and religious practices - though the histories we'd just finished reading forcibly raise the question of just how "successful" this really was: was not, instead, the dharma lost or smothered along the way?

4) finally one might own a Buddhist view, in which the dharma isn't just flotsam floating on the waves of human history but an agent in its own right; but then why confine oneself to a single point of revelation? Gautama isn't the only Buddha venerated in these traditions, bodhisattvas are busily at work. etc. Maybe, indeed, getting this history right is an irrelevance. The dharma we need will find its way to us, as it does to every era.

I didn't mention that, on this last view, one ought to expect similar upāya at work beyond "Buddhist" traditions entirely. That will have wait until the second half of the semester.

Ways to go

I've only just scratched the surface of the surface of the Chinese language, but I'm starting to sense the depths below. The surface is deceptively simple - little grammar, none of those pesky genders, articles, conjugations or, for that matter, tenses which entangle other languages. Its classic texts are often columns of just four characters per line which, in translation, spill out in nuance over many more words. And it's long been thus. I was disconcerted - excited and confused - to recognize every character in this text, for instance, which came up in the East Asian Religions course I'm auditing. The text is the early Daoist "Inward Training," possibly the oldest surviving mystical text in China (2500 years old, or more). This poem, VI, is translated as:

As for the Way:

It is what the mouth cannot speak of,

The eyes cannot see,

And the ears cannot hear.

It is that with which we cultivate the mind and align the body.

When people lose it they die;

When people gain it they flourish.

When endeavors lose it they fail;

When they gain it they succeed.

The Way never has a root or trunk,

It never has leaves or flowers.

the myriad things are generated by it;

The myriad things are completed by it.

We designate it "the Way."

Harold D. Roth, Original Tao: Inward Training (Nei-Yeh)

and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism (Columbia, 2004), 56-57

As when I was understanding some of the lines in the Hangzhou Yue opera performances last week, it's trippy to be recognizing anything, just two months in. How is that even possible?!

That there's more than meets the eye was confirmed by a story the instructor of the class told us. He'd gone to visit Maoshan, a famous Daoist mountain, important in the medieval history of Daoism, only to find it had been turned into a Daoist theme park: on a hillside facing it a huge gilded statue of Laozi (who never set foot anywhere near this place) looked out across the valley. Near the foot of the sacred mountain itself was a stone marker with these characters carved in red:

In modern Chinese this means something like special or cool path (feichang dao), but as N ascended the paved path which led uphill behind it he encountered stone plaques with the entire text of the 道德经 Daodejing [Tao Te Ching] along its sides. Eventually he remembered that 非常道 appears in the Daodejing, whose very first lines (again in characters all of which I recognize) are, with D. C. Lau's translation:

道可道

The way that can be spoken of

非常道

Is not the constant way;

名可名

The name that can be named

非常名

Is not the constant name.

Was the sign advertising a special walking trail, or the sacred text whose second line describes a way that is not the constant way? Why, yes?!

A fighting chance

"Buddhism and Modern Thought" has reached what I'm calling our Kaempfer moment. Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716) was a German physician who accompanied a Dutch East India ship to Japan (Dejima), by way of Siam. He wrote one of the first European accounts of Japan, but also included some description of what he'd seen in Thailand, and an account of what we now call Buddhism which our pal Donald Lopez cites in the selection we read from The Scientific Buddha. Check it out: the long inset passage below. What Lopez calls the "African hyopothesis" - that the nubby hair of Buddha statues testifies to an African, perhaps Egyptian origin - was the subject of our class discussion. But now we return to Kaempfer as the second of four representative figures in Lopez' tale of the emergence of the sanitized Buddha of western construction. The first and last, Athanasius Kircher (1602-80) and Eugène Burnouf (1801-52), never left Europe, assembling a picture of Buddhism from texts which had been sent back from Asia. The others, Kaempfer and a William Erskine (1773-1852), were in Asia - Erskine a minor court official in Bombay fascinated by the Buddhist sculptures in the caves of Elephanta Island. 

But 19th century India was as Buddhist-free as the libraries of Rome and Paris so Kaempfer is the only one who spends time with actual Buddhists. And, despite his valiant efforts to make sense of all he sees, he is royally confused by it. He observes "I am at a loss how to reconcile these various and opposite accounts" of the origins of the beliefs and practices he observes. He is convinced that Prah, Budhum, Siaka and Fotoge somehow belong together, but the best he can do to connect them is his variant of the African hypothesis.

 

We too, having left the academic clarity of the "scientific Buddha" presented by Walpola Rahula for places Buddhists actually live, are "at a loss how to reconcile" the widely divergent experiences of Sri Lanka, Japan, Thailand, Burma, Tibet and Nepal which we've learned about (with China and Taiwan, Cambodia and Korea yet to come). We've encountered not only complex histories but unfamiliar and difficult questions about Buddhism and politics and nationalism, the lingering consequences of colonialism, patriarchy, magic, etc. - as well as intra Buddhist controversies and often harmonious coexistence with other traditions. Some of these larger themes suggest ways of bringing all this information together, but they look nothing like the western scholar's or any actual Buddhist tradition's picture (like the Tibetan lineage below) of what's going on. We've come to the point where some scholars refuse to speak of Buddhism as a world religion at all, preferring to discuss Thai religion, South Chinese religion, Korean religion, etc.

It's a bit of a gamble, I concede, to set students up for such overwhelmment when many are encountering "Buddhism" for the first time. But it seems to me necessary if we are to avoid the mistakes of western Buddhists and Buddhologists who don't allow the practices of actual Buddhist societies to complicate the pictures emerging from streamlined translations of ancient texts and the slick "What I teach is the true Buddhism" of missionizing and convert teachers. Kaempfer names our perplexity not because it will lead to a clear, all-encompassing understanding of "Buddhism" and its travails, but because it's so hard not to seek a master narrative, origin or authoritative tradition to array these disparate phenomena around. We might be able to do better than the African hypothesis, but, if not ancient Egypt, we'd still have to anchor our story somewhere, and there's both too much and too little information in the Buddhist world to make that choice uncontroversial.

Discomfiting historiographical epiphanies await! And, perhaps, Buddhist ones, too. Isn't the reality of samsara a lot more like the convoluted picture we're getting than that of the "scientific Buddha" with his false promise to eject us from contingency with a simple 4-point plan?

(The sketch at top is by Kaempfer himself and lives, as you could perhaps make out, at the British Library. The map and Geluk thankga were used by students in their presentations.)

Breaking the chains

Went to Princeton today for a symposium on a book about religion and nation in contemporary China and India. The author claims that "colonial modernity" decisively affected the emergence of India's pluralist secularism as well as China's atheist secularism. To see what's going on one has to realize that the 19th century didn't just see the invention of religion, secularism and the nation, but what he calls the "syntagmatic chain of religion-magic-secularity-spirituality," terms which mutually define and condition each other. I'm sympathetic to this kind of argument (though I found I was missing "materialism" in the set, and "science"), but the "syntagmatic chain" was lambasted by an impetuous young scholar for being no more than a "bandaid," covering up where an argument should have been. What kind of claim was this, and what mechanism was being proposed (problems I'm aware my own approach has too)? Other problems arose too around issues of translation and evidence, but the most interesting intervention came from a sociologist of China who wondered if even a vague "syntagm" was inadequate to illuminate phenomena animated by a "sinic" understanding of categories, not oppositional or nondual merely but a yin yang-inspired form of both-and. I don't get what he was talking about yet, not really, but I sure want to find out!

Buddha eye

Enlightened trucker spotted on 19th Street in Manhattan this morning.

Lego my ego

I don't usually write negative reviews of things - the Web's overflowing with them - but allow me to recommend that you not see "The Lego Movie." (For everthing that movie should have been but wasn't, go see the sublime "Wreck-It Ralph"!) I should have known better than to go - I know I'm too close to it! - but an alumna told me that it was a brief for Christian socialism and my curiosity was piqued. And then I found myself exhausted late of a Friday afternoon and the deed was done.

The nature of the exhaustion may be pertinent. Fashion Praxis, the series of interdisciplinary conversations on fashion and politics of which I, too, was a part, turned out to be an all-day affair. It began with a prophecy that fashion did not just "exemplify" Hannah Arendt's understanding of the vita activa (The Human Condition was recommended reading for participants), but "completes" it. Specifically, it somehow complements Arendt's understanding of labor (the maintenance of our biological existence) with spectacle, work (the world of made things) with aesthetics, and action (the truly human world of persuasion and human multiplicity) with ethics.

This manifesto came not from one of the fashion theorists or designers but from an enthusiastic professor of international affairs, but it got me thinking. What I, as a relatively unsympathetic outsider, tend to see as a dystopia of waste, elitism and conformity is clearly understood by many within it as a utopia. (Witness the way that the "is fashion a religion?" question once again elicited wide-eyed talk of transcendence, etc.) I understand that Parsons is the design school most committed to bringing critical awareness of the dystopian realities of fashion (sweatshops, anorexia, cultishness) and to releasing its utopian promise (recognition of the value of craft, celebration of the ways that "everyone dresses," communities of use and reuse, etc..)

I wasn't thinking about Parsons while trying to remain interested in the action movie at the center of "The Lego Movie," but in retrospect there's a parallel. The film has been getting plaudits from pundits for successfully selling a 90-minuted infomercial whose point seems to be that big companies like Lego are not to be trusted. The film celebrates everyone's capacity to be a "master builder," to create Lego concoctions nobody has ever dreamt of before - which might, heck, save the world! And there I find myself caught. Even as I note that you can buy new Lego sets to build stuff from this film about not following instructions (hello?!), I am reminded my own utopian attachment to Lego's infinite combinatorial miracle, which - yes, still - I think has shaped (in good ways) how I understand the very stuff of the world.

Maybe I should approach the world of fashion in the same way? In the meantime, there's one moment in "The Lego Movie" which I loved. As the ragtag bunch of lovable rebels are storming the headquarters of nefarious Lord Business, who wants to destroy all creativity, they hear someone approaching. The little yellow people hide. But the improvised robot-pirate-spaceship does even better, recombining its pieces in a blinding flurry to a perfect disguise: a copy machine!

(If only it had actually been the same pieces. Sigh.)

缘分

I learned a new Chinese word today, 缘分 (yuanfen). It means something like "fateful coincidence, blessed by Heaven." This explanation is from Fan Lizhu, a Chinese sociologist of religion, who in a 2011 essay included 缘分 among the terms which a religious studies rooted in Chinese rather than Western tradition might build on. But Prof. Fan mentioned it in an e-mail to me today as a term "which is commonly used by Chinese people to describe things such as are happening between us."

缘

What she's referring to is a string of serendipities which started with my looking up an American Sinologist in San Diego last month. He directed me to her, and she connected me to the director of the Religious Studies Program at Fudan University in Shanghai, where she teaches. Then things started to snowball in a 缘分y way. Within a day, I had emails from several Fudan people eager to host me next year; indeed, everyone seemed to assume that it was a fait accompli. 缘分!

分

Then I asked her if she might be passing through New York in the next months, and learned that she'd be giving a talk a few states away next month. I sent out an email to people at New School who might be interested, and within hours had got enthusiastic expressions of interest from several. With the help of the India China Institute, we are now officially hosting Fan Lizhu and her husband Chen Na (also a sociologist of religion) for a lunchtime roundtable in four weeks. 缘分!

Mugging

I attended a roundtable discussion of the question "What is the Meaning of the University in Exile for the NSSR of the Future" today - and even got a souvenir mug! NSSR, "New School for Social Research," is a floaty signifier here: today it refers to what what was until recently known as the Graduate Faculty of Social and Political Science, which itself began as the University-in-Exile. The University-in-Exile, of course, was a 1933 offshoot and project of the original New School for Social Research, founded in 1919, which has been wandering increasingly wraithlike through our halls since losing its name - you know the story!

The current dean of NSSR framed the discussion with a more pointed question: is the University-in-Exile "useful as an organizing principle for the future" of the division. The answer I gathered from the ensuing discussion was: no. Faculty members talked of the paradox of "institutionalizing exile," of the way focus on exile generates nostalgia, sees time as loss and approaches the future in a modality of preservation. Graduate students lamented the institution's failures to live up to its ideals, one noting that The New School currently provides refuge to corporatizing trends in higher education, while sending into exile students crippled by debt and young faculty unable to find tenure-track positions. Difficult challenges!

J, my coconspirator in things New School history, spoke in our class last semester about the "trope of exile," tracing out several generations of protest movements within the school which helped themselves to the idea of exile even within an institution historically linked to refuge. Productive it may be in articulating alienation, but is it productive otherwise? I was struck by how a particular way of telling the 1933 story makes the division which started as the University-in-Exile permanently unassimilable to the school of which it's part. There are other ways of telling the story. What if we learned to see the University-in-Exile as a natural (if still epic) extension of the engagement with the international community of social scientists which produced the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences out of the office of The New School? If our greatest moment wasn't an exception but something more like business as usual in an exceptional place? Too easy? But probably also not "sticky" enough.

Roundtable

Just over a week away! Yours truly will moderate, channeling Rahula.

Helping professions

In last week's radio interview I was asked if it's really true that I learn something new from every conversation I have about Job, as I claim. It is. As fractal confirmation, here's a lovely email I got today from someone who heard the podcast. You might remember the policeman from Rockaway whose confession at "Job in Red Hook" that he was "ashamed" to feel like Job so stunned me (¶¶10-11 here). I answered the radio interviewer's question by recounting this again, stating that I still wasn't sure I understood - but had no doubt that there was a profound truth in what he said. I understand a little better now:

I just listened to your interview on RadioWest about the book of Job... very interesting. You were puzzled by the report of a Hurricane Sandy firefighter feeling ashamed to lose his home and identifying with Job. I have worked with healthcare providers dealing with a drug addicted population, and I think I understand this kind of thinking on the part of those in the helping professions. Like the addiction medicine doctor, the firefighter has undoubtedly seen many terrible things happen to many people, and such suffering is almost always "undeserved." I believe that the firefighter feels ashamed because he thinks it is self-indulgent for him to think that he has received a personal punishment from God because he has seen the suffering of so many others. He knows from experience that suffering is widespread, random, and generally undeserved, and he feels ashamed because he can't help but feel personally affronted by God when he himself is a victim. This type of thinking puts himself in a separate category (why me?) from others who have suffered and have every right to ask the same question.
Just a thought. Thanks for starting a rich and important dialogue.

Thanks for listening!

这是什么地方

Understood some more overheard Chinese tonight!
这是什么地方 
(What is this place?), an unpoetic line in the Hangzhou Yue Opera's adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler." An all-female traditional Chinese opera company and Ibsen? It works better than you might expect. In the talkback (after Hedda is all danced out and stabs herself with this sword) a company director told us that Shakespeare and Ibsen are the most beloved western playwrights in China. "Ibsenism" was brought in by early 20th century modernizers, who wanted spoken theater to take the place of traditional Chinese arts like opera. In 2006, however, the anniversary both of Ibsen's death and the founding of Hangzhou Yue, it seemed entirely natural to adapt "Hedda Gabler." I think it was effective. Good thing: I'm seeing their "The Lady from the Sea" tomorrow, too!

Idol speculation

In "Buddhism and Modern Thought" today we finished our section on the early Western encounter with Buddhism. We read the second chapter of Donald Lopez' The Scientific Buddha: His Short and Happy Life (a bridge between his Buddhism and Science and From Stone to Flesh), which illustrates the emergence of an image of the Buddha as a rational human being out of preconceptions about polytheism, idolatry, superstition and Eastern decadence. Lopez thinks this "scientific Buddha" has no precedent in Buddhist history and, as his subtitle suggests, hopes to help bury him with a richer and more complex picture of Buddhist histories. The "scientific Buddha" is in any case doomed to irrelevance, since he is constructed as proposing nothing which cannot and will not ultimately be confirmed by "science."

Lopez' pleasure in informing us what Buddhist traditions actually report (42) is matched only by his delight in quoting from the Great Discourse on the Lion's Roar something like a preemptive denunciation of the "scientific Buddha":

Should anyone say of me, 'The recluse Gotama does not have any superhuman states, any distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones. The recluse Gotama teaches a dhamma [merely] hammered out by reasoning, following his own line of inquiry as it occurs to him' - unless he abandons that assertion and that state of mind and relinquishes that view, then [as surely as if he has been] carried off and put there, he will wind up in hell. (45-46)

(Of course, the very fact that this view had to be condemned suggests that it was around long before the modern West went out in search of a non-religion/religion like 'Buddhism'!) Lopez rules the roost of revisionist Buddhologists (well, Buddhologologolists), and left us with a helpful sense of exhaustion. However interesting it is (one student called it "fascinatingly depressing") to see how Western needs, blindnesses and methods shaped our images of Buddhism, it's not nourishing. It's time to move beyond the image of a proto-modern "primitive" Buddhism 19th century Western scholars concocted out of ancient texts and mute statues, and attend to what actual practitioners of the modern era have done and said in Buddhist lands.

All that was accomplished, I think, but we also had an awesome discussion about - of all things - idolatry. It wasn't entirely accidental, as Lopez' story starts when Europeans could imagine only four religious constellations: Christianity, Judaism, Islam and "idolatry." This last category includes everything else, from ancient Egypt to Mesoamerica to Asia by way of the Norse gods. All are decayed forms of the original monotheism. Their differences are insignificant - there can be nothing positive in them, just the fascinatingly depressing tedium of human beings sliming the sublime with our all-too-human vileness over and over again in new climes. Last week we tittered at 18th century etymological arguments (described in Philip Almond's The British Discovery of Buddhism) that Buda was one and the same as Thoth - and Wodin, too!

But today we lingered over "idolatry." What is it anyway, I was inspired to ask, and what's wrong with it? So we talked about the second commandment, and the travesty of the divine committed by human efforts to represent the unrepresentable. This is the mechanism which, for premodern Christians, covered the world with a tapestry of polytheisms. But is that all there is to say? I told of the unironic use of the word "idols" I saw in Hindu temples in India, and soon we (well, mainly yours truly) were exploring the ways in which visual representa- 

tions might be aids, even perhaps indispens- able aids, to a life of devotion - especially if known to be just repre- sentations. (Photo from last summer)

So, I asked finally, if you're looking at a statue of the Buddha, is the Buddha there? Trick question, of course: it depends what kind of Buddhist you are. If you think Gautama has entered final nirvana, there's no Buddha to be around; the statue is just a memorial. On the other hand, there might be a relic inside it, making the Buddha posthumously present in powerful ways Buddhologists have only recently started grappling with. If you think the Buddha omnipresent, on the other hand, then of course the Buddha is there, though probably not in the sense intended by the question. And if you think everyone already has the Buddha nature but wrongly supposes it resides outside them, then the statue can work as a representation of your truly enlightened state, though it may take this externalization (or related visualizations) to make you realize it: yes, the Buddha is there, but not the Buddha-as-opposed-to-you. It's more like a mirror! So many Buddhisms, and all of them more interesting than the "Scientific Buddha" - who turns out to be an "idol" in the bad all-too-human sense1

On Wednesday we turn to student presentations on Buddhism in modern Asian societies, starting with Sri Lanka and Japan. We'll have to confront the inconvenient fact that we first learned about the "Scientific Buddha" not from a Western scholar but from Sri Lankan Walpola Rahula. Oh my!

Twitter!

Just discovered that my conversation with Doug Fabrizio at RadioWest was being tweeted as we spoke. Their tweeter does pretty well, I think!

Shanghai is the future

Saw a great movie today, Spike Jonze's "Her." You've probably heard about it - lonely guy falls in love with his artificially intelligent operating system, voluptuously voiced by Scarlett Johanson. It's about that, but about much more, brilliantly written, and sheds light on experiences and relationships we have with virtual technology, social media, and ever more human-like machines. It also does what great science fiction does - shows a possible future which makes such sense you feel it's already arrived. We may look back on it, as we do "Blade Runner" and "The Matrix," as not just prophetic but true.

Among its science fiction futures is a more developed Los Angeles which is full of skyscrapers - and even a functioning subway system. That some of these scenes - like the one above - are shot in China is given way not just by the shapes of the buildings but by the hazy white of the sky. In fact this is Shanghai, the city where, it happens, yours truly will be spending part of next year. Yes: I seem to have succeeded in making a connection in the Middle Kingdom, and it's with the Religious Studies Department at Fudan University in Shanghai. More soon!

Aiutavo il destino

Might look un- prepossessing, but this is the view an hour before the premiere of the fantastic production of Puccini's "La Bohème" by LoftOpera, the inspired project of one of our alums. We're in a converted warehouse in a desolate part of East Williams- burg. The musicians and singers are young, many still at the Mannes School of Music, and fabulously gifted. To really feel the world of the Rodolfos, Marcellos and Mimis of today, go see it yourself - there are two more performances, next weekend. Best $20 you'll ever spend.

The New School's own

Don't think all my time is taken up with Job, China and Buddhism these days! As a good citizen of a hybrid university, there are all sorts of opportunities to cameo in other programs. So tomorrow I'll bring some of J's and my understanding of New School history to a conference on the study of economics at The New School, and next week I'll be dialoguing with a design theorist about Hannah Arendt, politics and fashion! The week after that it'll be Religious Studies @ Lang's turn - details soon.

Arnhold Forum: A Library

The library in the new University Center is ever so much more than just a library. Read a book: it'll save the world!

我叫MARK，是美国学生。。。

My first essay in Chinese (with gentle corrections from my teacher)!

It is full of profundities like "This year I am a teacher and a student," "Kunming is south of Beijing," "I like to eat Chinese, Japanese and Indian food," and - more ambitiously - "I'd like to learn to cook Chinese food."

In confidence

In "Buddhism and Modern Thought" today we read three chapters of an old favorite of mine, Philip Almond's The British Discovery of Buddhism. Almond takes Edward Said's idea of "orientalism" and applies it to popular portrayals of the Buddha and his religion in Victorian England, and suggests that these portrayals have a lot more to do with Victorian England than they do with the Buddha. Was the Buddha like a Martin Luther, challenging the entrenched corruption and hypocrisy of a Catholic-like Hinduism? How convenient as Britain established its colonial rule over Hindus in India - and as a spasm of anti-Catholic protest roiled Britain. Or was the Buddha not a social reformer after all - a few years later the threat of socialism made a soteriologically oriented Buddha much more palatable. Almond lines up page after page of such convenient parallels, all in service of the claim that "Buddhism" was "created" in the West and for the West.

It is ultimately a little pat - not nearly as theoretically sophisticated as the comparable argument by William Pietz about the European invention of "fetishism," which I assign in Theorizing Religion - but it's an important argument for us to consider. "Religion" and "world religions" are categories emerging from a specific modern western matrix. To point this out isn't just to say the emperor has no clothes, though Almond comes close. "Buddhism" is a western concoction (I prefer that word, learned from Sam Gill, to discovery/invention/creation/construction, though these have their uses, too) but that doesn't mean there's no there there; rather is it an imperative to go beyond what the concoction claims, to seek out more, and more kinds, of sources of information, as well as more categories. The concoction can't be trusted to take us beyond our prejudices: that much is sure. That's why the next segment of our course takes us to the experiences of Buddhist modernisms in Sri Lanka, Japan, Southeast Asia, Tibet and China. The concocting didn't just happen with white guys in European capitals playing with the texts of long-dead Asians (Said's Orientalism), but affected and was affected by colonial encounters and responses in Asia, and the efforts and ideas of living Asians, some of whom - like Walpola Rahula - went to the colonial metropoles and talked back. They're moderns, too, but in a sense which doesn't make the European modern somehow more legitimate than the Ceylonese, or privilege an inaccessible "premodern" over efforts to keep living traditions alive.

This matters a lot to me. In a way this scrupulosity defines my generation of religious studies scholars - the ones who won't let you use words like "religion" or "belief" or "Buddhism" as if they had clear and objective meanings, as a matter as much of ethics as of methodology. So it was a little disconcerting to encounter this description of us:  

Is religion manufactured, invented, or constructed? And if it is constructed, is religion any different from other categories in social thought, such as society or economy? These are questions that engage the current generation of students of religion who have none of the epistemological confidence of previous generations. 

Peter van der Veer, The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual 

and the Secular in China and India (Princeton, 2014), 63

Lacking in confidence? In a way, I guess. Reluctant to claim universality or objectivity we are. Lacking in colonial bravado and missionary zeal, too, though we're fully capable of bluster and harangue. We abjure business-as-usual "objectivity." We're taking apart the master's house so that all may live. Van der Veer's sort of on our side, but he clearly finds our disciplinary navel-gazing tedious (his own discipline's debates matter to him more), and our scrupulosity about terms like "religion" and "Buddhism" evidently strikes him as exaggerated. I find the sloppiness of claims like these maddening:

The encounter of Western power with Asian religions in the modern period is one that has been preceded by precolonial missionary and political encounters, but also by a long history of the expansion and spread of religious formations within the Asian region. The presence of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in Asia long precedes European expansion. Moreover, there is a long history of expansion and spread of Asian religions, like Buddhism and Hinduism. In fact, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all originate in West-Asia and are Asian religions, but then we also have to ask from which period "Asia" is a meaningful category. (66)

Religious formations is still tolerable, but everything after it begs question after question, especially Asian religions, like Buddhism and Hinduism! Is the concoctedness of Asia the only problem here? Is it really unrelated to the concocting of Asian religions, like Buddhism and Hinduism? Van der Veer's whole book is about the fateful construct of the "spiritual East," so his flat-footedness here surprises me.

I know I'm being a little uncharitable. By "Buddhism" he surely doesn't really mean "Buddhism" but "phenomena which have been grouped under the name Buddhism by modern scholars in East and West," and it certainly would be unwieldy to have to spell that out at every turn! Almost every term in a book like his comes with invisible scare-quotes, dispensing with them in passages like the one just quoted so that he can make new arguments rather than always rehashing the old ones. His project is to take apart the syntagmatic chain of religion-magic-secularity-spirituality (9), not to mention "the nation" in general and "India" and "China" in particular. More power to him! Still, his language lets "religious formations" default to the world religions paradigm, which seems to me to risk undermining the critical force of all the rest! Lacking in epistemological confidence, did you say?

见面

Exciting, exciting - my first experience overhearing people speaking in Mandarin, and understanding it! OK, maybe it was a little overdetermined. It was in the Japanese gallery at the Met (I was on my way to the stupendous contemporary art show Ink Art in the Chinese galleries - more anon). A Chinese nun in brown was explaining a Kamakura Kannon 観音 sculpture to a lay companion, pointing toward the head. I heard 三面 (sanmian) and 十一面 (shiyimian) - three-face and eleven-face - and knew what she was saying: though this one has only one, representations of Guanyin 观音 sometimes have three faces and, as this one does, more above adding up to eleven faces. Yes, yes, I supplied about 90% of that out of non-Mandarin knowledge but still... It felt a very auspicious start to vicarious listening comprehension. (In fact, as 观世音 this particular bodhisattva is a specialist in hearing.)

The photo, however, isn't Kannon/Guanyin but from the exhibition of Silla Korea: a 1400-year-old Mireuk (Maitreya), Buddha of the future.

In the thick of it

In Chinese we're learning directions (starting, characteristically, with 东西南北 EWSN). I remember from my days learning Japanese and teaching English, as well as from studies I've read over the years, that directions - right, left, in front of, behind, etc. - are much more culturally specific, and much harder to explain. The expression of the guy in the middle of this picture - standing on a diagonal between two people pointing one way, looking the other and describing the directions relative to us viewing the picture rather than him - captures the adventure!

Parsifal experience

After a bit of a hiatus from the Gesamtkunstwerk, I heard a lot of opera this week, old and new. On Monday I attended the first performance of scenes from a New School colleague's opera based on Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" at Dixon Place. Last night I caught the last performance of the revelatory Glyndebourne Opera production of Britten's "Billy Budd" at BAM. And tonight I saw James Levine (yes!!) conduct an evening of comic opera with stars of the Metropolitan Opera's Lindemann Young Artist Development Program at Juilliard: Mozart, Stravinsky, Berlioz, Donizetti. Chinese soprana Ying Fang was the standout - expect to hear a lot from her in the future!

About "Billy Budd" I'm at a loss for words. I can say it was one of the most compelling performances I've ever attended - doing what only live performance, and opera most powerfully, can do: change the world. The production was seamless, powerfully sung (and acted). The brilliantly designed and lit set - a cutaway of an 18th century ship - gave an overpowering sense of the floating hell in which these sailors were caught: no escape. I went with two friends and before it started we compared our past experiences with the opera; depending on who was singing, we sometimes sided with the wicked Claggart, or just with the innocent purity of Budd. But tonight was Starry Vere's night, at least for me. A swooning review in the Times said Mark Padmore gave one of the most amazing performances in opera, but he was riding on a production which helped make it his story.

The best I can manage is say that I had a Parsifal experience - which isn't very well put as I have issues with Parsifal. I felt that between the dark first half and what happened in the second, something changed in the very chemistry of the world. More my experience with "Tristan und Isolde" than "Parsifal," to tell the truth, since the latter working for me more through attrition and exhaustion than magic, but I'll say Parsifal experience anyway as it was an experience of redemption, of redemption coming to a dark and fallen world. And of course the trigger is a pure young simpleton. I think it started to happen during the amazing series of weird chords, loud and soft and employing all of the orchestra's registers, after Billy in condemned, and before we see his form slowly emerge from the dark in just the place on the stage where we initially meet Vere - and will see him again at the end. And where both sing of having seen a sail in the distance, a promise of release from this dark world which spares noone, especially the good, and intone the transcendent words: "I am content."

I fell headlong for the Christ story: Vere was saved, or Billy would have died in vain! And if he's an ancient mariner figure at the opera's start, during the three hours we witnessed something changed, inexplicable in rational terms but  My friend B rejected it out of hand: "he'll say anything," she said, by tomorrow he'll be wandering again. Vere was a weak man, and condemned - rightly - to eternal regret for not having saved Billy, which he certainly could have done. Vere reminded her (she used to work as a lawyer) of judges who, Pilate-like, took the law's side against innocent young people caught in its maw.

When we met tonight at Juilliard, I was about to tell her I'd been second guessing my too quick assumption that the enforcer of an unjust law could still be a good person (have I become too comfortable with the power structure, unquestioning of authority?) when she told me she'd decided, in the subway home, that I was right. The opera only makes sense if he is, despite his own judgment and understanding, redeemed. We ruminated together over the achievement of a production which allowed such different understandings, the mystical nature of Billy's and Vere's contentment, and the capacity of a not-quite-believing composer to convey it.

雪白

I was the first person out the door of 265 this morning, and was greeted by this scene of fluffy snow - a good 5-6 inches! Before the snowplows came through, with just a few people on the roads, it was lovely! This was the nicest part of the blizzard. Even the lions in front the China Institute seemed happy about it. Then came rain and vast slush puddles... More snow is forecast for this evening, with totals of 12-18 inches possible!

Memory lane

Time flows in curious ways. I just got an e-mail telling me that I had a jury duty summons from the Mercer County Superior Courthouse. It's been almost 13 years since I left New Jersey, but they've evidently not updated their rolls! The summons was sent to the little cottage where I spent my last several years in Princeton, 162 South Stanworth Drive. Judging from these recent (but not seaonal!) photos sent by its kind current inhabitant, not a thing has changed! But I learned also that everything's about to. Come summer, the whole complex (originally built by MetLife, I recall) will be razed to make way for more housing, though they'll try to keep the trees.

静夜思

We've entered the sixth week of our intensive Chinese class! And while we're still drilling on pronunciation and learning simple conversation about who's in your family and what you'd like to drink and when you start class (giving directions is next), our teacher marked the occasion by giving us a first poem!

床前明月光

疑是地上霜

举头望明月

低头思故乡

It's by 李白 Li Bai (Li Po) and apparently appears in every class (like this one). Still, it's exciting to recognize more than half of the characters, and to be able to sort of imagine how they might say

In front of my bed, bright moonlight,

Can it be frost on the ground?

Lifting my head, I gaze upon the bright moon,

Lowering my head, I think of my hometown. 

Five of one, half a dozen of the other

Most of today's class was about Schopenhauer, but we started with one last point about Buddhism and Walpola Rahula. The revised edition of What the Buddha Taught (1974) includes many of the suttas from which he quotes in the main text. Included is the "Advice to Sigala" (No. 31 of the Digha-nikaya), the main prooftext for showing "with what great respect the layman's life, his family and social relations are regarded by the Buddha" (78). Here the young son off a householder is told that worshipping the six directions is meaningless, unless he understand the directions as his parents; teachers; wife and children; friends, relatives, neighbors; servants, workers, emplotees; and finally religious men.

The Buddha then explains to Sigala what the right form of each of these relations consists in, always listing five things the junior party should do for the senior, and five things done by the senior for the junior. It's a beautiful image of a society sustained by clearly defined reciprocal relationships of love. Until, that is, we come to the sixth "direction."

Six ways! The steady state get a wobble here - a wobble meant (I think, though it's the opposite of Walpola Rahula's point) to destabilize the whole social world. It's not just that care of religious men turns out to be the best investment of the layperson's time as it pays back more than it costs. The stand-out sixth - given further resonance by the fact that this network of paired fives describes not five but six directions - is "reveal[ing] to them the way to heaven" (124). (As it happens, "friends" - not among the six relationships - can apparently show the way to heaven, too, 122.)

What to make of this? Where our Monday discussion read What the Buddha Taught against the grain at the author's own direction, this time we were reading against his grain. (He really plays down the separation between monastic sangha and society.) It is true that Buddhist societies are more pro-family and pro-civil society than a world-renouncing image of monastics (like the one British administrators brought to the colony of Ceylon) would suggest. And it seems that most people in contemporary Theravada societies, whether lay or "religious," are working toward propitious rebirth rather an end to rebirth in this life. Yet this isn't because of what the Buddha taught, but because it's been such a very long time since he taught it. In this age of the Decline of the Law the Dhamma is all but inaudible even to the most dedicated, so the best thing is to work toward rebirth in human form when Maitreya, the Buddha of the future, comes and teaches it again.

As a Buddhist modern, Walpola Rahula doesn't tell us about the Decline of the Law. What the Buddha taught, being verifiable, scientific truth (not religion, remember!), is accessible to any human being who commits himself to it. Getting out of here isn't really the goal, is it? That's for Pessimists like Schopenhauer, not Buddhists!

Our song of the day (I've been gathering pop-cultural references to things Buddhist - our second class was called "Getting to know you") was George and Ira Gershwin's "Isn't it a Pity," sung by Ella Fitzgerald. I chose it to gesture at the joy with which Europe's "Oriental Renaissance" rediscovered its apparently Indic roots - and because our philosopher is named in it! But it takes you to a this-worldly steady-state Buddhism like the one Walpola Rahula recommends, too.

My nights were sour

Spent with Schopenhauer

Let's forget the past

Let's both agree

That I'm for you

And you're for me

Isn't it a pity

We never never met before...

My journey's ended
Everything is splendid
Meeting you today
Has given me a wonderful idea 
Here I stay!