The Book of Job in community

An invitation to give a talk in Monmouth College, in western Illinois, has not just given an excuse for a Chicagoful Spring break, but a chance to break new ground on Job. My talk was entitled "The Book of Job in Community: Theater, Liturgy, Care" and every bit as ambitious and wide-ranging as that promises. The thesis: the Book of Job isn't just about individual experience, but does its work for and through communities. You've heard versions of this as it unfolds (and it unfolds still, I don't think I've got the argument "down" yet), but this was the first time I could bring it all together. I explored Job and community in four settings: on the page (Blake's Illustrations), on the stage (local productions of Archibald MacLeish's "J. B."), in a monastery (Matins of the Office of the Dead), and in response to disasters today (Outside the Wire's first Job reading in Moline).

I

The larger interpretive point, I suppose, was that new dimensions of Job are revealed when you think about staging it. Who's on stage at each point? Who's hearing what's being said? And for whom, then, is each speech intended? Blake's great for that, since he not only has Job's wife smilingly at his side throughout - showing up as a directorial decision her exclusion from traditional tellings - but makes clear that the friends were there throughout the divine speeches. Interestingly - something I only really appreciated when preparing my powerpoint for this talk - they seem sometimes to be addressed, others not so clearly.

Especially interesting is "The Vision of Christ," where they are hidden behind, or perhaps sheltered, by Job, who will soon be conducting a sacrifice for their rehabilitation. They look over their shoulders in wonder, terror, amazement? Like the image of the friends I chose for my book cover, each seems to be experiencing something a little different. In Blake's Illustrations, Job is never alone, and never alone with God. And where are we in these images?

II

This was a fun way of disrupting the image of Job as entirely alone, stripped to almost nothing, confronting the great All. I made the point in another way with this striking image of Job reduced almost to a geometrical abstraction. It happens to be the inside cover of the first edition of MacLeish's "J.B." - and so not really very appropriate as in MacLeish's play, hapless Job is never alone on the stage, though he thinks he is. I didn't have time to talk about the particularities of MacLeish's play, focusing instead on the fact that it has been and continues to be performed in many community, college and high school theaters (including Torrey Pines High School, where I met Job through this play). I pasted together images I found online from recent productions and invited the audience to consider what it would be like to watch or perform a version of Job in a community setting like this, where performers and audience may know each other intimately.

III

The next illustration - included in part because my friend and host H is using my book in her class, and they just finished chapter 3 - was the "community theater" of the ancient and medieval Matins of the Office of the Dead. Using a lovely website of medieval Books of Hours, I played out my understanding of the way the nine speeches from Job are woven into the liturgy, in a sort of dialogue with the community Response. (This wasn't the setting for discussing how the Psalms fit in, that this wasn't really Job's voice but everyman's, and Christ's, too.) I suggested that the Response of "I believe that my redeemer lives..." accompanies and assists the departed soul's Joban journey from grief and the wish not to have been to the discovery "I know that my redeemer lives." This would be a good story even without what happens next - for "I know that my redeemer lives" (19:25) comes in the eighth of nine readings, and in the ninth and final one Job is back in the hopelessness of chapter 10.

I invited the audience to join me in reading the English version of this painful final speech in a 1538 prayer book I'd found at the Morgan Library, but it was just me. (You know of the text, small enough to fit in the palm of one's hand; the photo is the one we got for the book.) What deep wisdom here - even the most virtuous person's faith and sense of self melt in the crucible of mortality. But how much more grounds for solidarity. "The real power of this liturgical setting becomes clear only on repetition," I said, "and repetition is what liturgy is all about." I invited them to consider this liturgy as a performance of mutual intercession of the living and the dead across time.

IV

Heavy stuff! Happily the final illustration was the video about "Outside the Wire" doing their first reading of the Book of Job in Joplin, Missouri, on the first anniversary of the tornado which destroyed most of the town and killed 161 people. Live streaming was a bit of an issue (the college president, who was in the audience, quipped "Job's friends waited seven years for him to speak, we can wait a few minutes") so I spoke about the Sandy-related readings I'd attended as it loaded rather than after, which worked out fine. We watched the first half, enough to get Paul Giamatti's searing reading of Job's despair. I knew it would speak to this audience as tornadoes have wreaked havoc in these parts recently, too, and the first question was from someone whose mother lived in one of the affected towns. He appreciated how spending time with Job allowed the communities visited by Outside the Wire to acknowledge losses and griefs which otherwise were pushed aside by a frenzy of rebuilding, a celebration of newly reforged community spirit and generosity which seemed almost not to want to confront the enormity and finality of loss. It was a good discussion with tough and important questions. (I should have taken notes!) 

Afterwards the president, a chemist, told me he thought it was good the way the best scientists' talks are. Where humanists tended in his experience to write their talks out, attentive to the importance of finding exactly the right words for things, scientists were more likely to throw a graph or data set up on the overhead and try to make sense of it live with an audience. That sort of matches what I was trying to do. Still trying to make sense of all this, but excited at all the new data I'm finding and the new perspectives it's opening up!

In the pink

"Welcome home," starts the video introducing NASA's amazing panorama of a decade's worth of infrared images of the Milky Way taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope. A long sliver, only 3% of the night sky, captures more than half of our galaxy since it's flat and we're in it. You can zoom in, too - here's the brightest whorl at lower right from the scene above:

Good Samaritan

I was, I confess, a little distracted by the Eiffelesque struts of Chicago's Episcopal Cathedral of St. James this morning. Until, that is, la reverenda Liz Muñoz delivered a brilliantly compelling sermon on the Samaritan woman at the well, delivered without notes from before the altar, and filling the whole big barn with its energy. She framed it by telling us of efforts to develop a liturgy for quinceañera, the coming of age ritual for Mexican and Mexican-American girls. Someone told her she had been using the story of the Samaritan woman, which at first seemed entirely inappropriate - an outsider, a woman who "had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband (John 4:18)? But apparently the 15-year olds hear something else: the story of a marginal woman, a little "uppity," who keeps the faith despite being abandoned by men (only men could initiate a divorce in Jesus' time), and who becomes a leader because she recognized the Messiah, who "told me everything I have ever done" (4:29, 39). A whole new story, it felt like. Lived religion and contextual theology at their best!

Spring Break

Greetings from Chicago! I'm here for two days, then swinging down to Monmouth College where a friend has set up some speaking gigs. I spent much of today at the Art Institute of Chicago, one of my favorite places - and one which has considerably expanded in size since my last visit. As you can see, I sped through the museum's many collections, stopped in my track by individual works, among them these.

Detail from one of the Thorne Miniature Rooms,
Cape Cod Living Room 1750-1850 (c. 1940)

 Six female musicians, Tang Dynasty (8th C.)

Relief with Buddha Shakyamuni meditating in the Indrashala Cave
and Buddha Dipankara, Gandhara (2nd/3rd C.)

Detail (Dance) from Marc Chagall's America Windows (1977)

Adriaen van der Spelt and Frans van Mieris, 

Trompe L'Oeuil Still Life with a Flower Garland and a Curtain (1658)

Flowers and Fruit in a China Bowl, attr. Juan de Zurbaran (c. 1645)

El Greco, Saint Martin and the Beggar (1597/1600)

Perugino, Scenes from the Life of Christ (detail) (1500/1505)

Hale Woodruff, Twilight (c. 1926)

Christopher Wool (recent)

Bodhisattva, Gandhara (2nd/3rd C.)

Would you have guessed that it was the Zurbarán (fils) at which I nearly burst into tears? Not sure why that was, though I have a tender relationship with both still lives and with the work of Zurbaran (père).

Revival

I thought that researchers on religion in China might find their way to New School after I spent a year there making connections, but why wait? We're on Chinese time now!

Yesterday we hosted a symposium called "The Religious Revival in Contemporary China," with two ethnographically oriented sociologists from Fudan University in Shanghai. Both presentations were fascinating, providing on-the-ground descriptions of emerging formations in the spaces between an officially atheistic state and the limited list of "religions" it officially condones. Even if weren't already a lived religion fan, these amazing category-stymying thick descriptions would make clear the need for theories more supple than our understandings of religion - even world religion - for understanding what's going on.

Fan Lizhu described the wave of new and restored ancestry halls in southern China, nominally no more than public spaces and representations of family pride but in fact the continuation of ancient popular religious practices which predate all the official "religions." Na Chen described the emergence of a new religion that calls itself Confucianism 儒教 - a term scholars shun (preferring 儒学 and 儒家), in part because Confucianism is not one of the five recognized religions. This new "Confucian congregation" combines popular religious practices - healing, talismans, chanting and veneration of ancient worthies as well as its three still living founders. Its main texts and teachings are ancient Confucian but it also chants parts of the Daodejing and, cannily, Confucian-sounding government policies such as Hu Jintao's "Eight Honors and Eight Shames" and Xi Jinping's talk of "harmonious society."

Fascinating stuff, which led to a wide-ranging discussion in our standing-room-only crowd. I was the moderator, and framed the discussion with Wilfred Cantwell Smith's famous claim that "The question, 'Is Confucianism a religion?' is one that the West has never been able to answer and China never able to ask" (The Meaning and End of Religion, 69). This may no longer be true, I suggested. In any case western attempts to understand Chinese practices and ideas involving heaven, human nature, fate, ancestors, morality and ritual long predate the modern discourse of religion, and provide a great starting point for a rethink of this discourse - especially as folks in China have been wrestling with it for over a century now. How exciting that I get to explore this, there and here!

Spring is near!

This pic was actually taken a week ago. Further unfolding is happening!

Monumental waste of time

There's one reason to see the film "The Monuments Men," and that is that our beloved Thomas Hart Benton murals appear in it. They are, as you know, one of my passions, and it's fascinating to me that on their way to the Met they came to be used in a scene of a New York bar in 1943. (The scene at right with Benton's Hallelujah Lassie doesn't even appear in the film.) There is, alas, no other reason to see the film: none.

Wise guy

It being the last class before Spring Break I let one of the students in "Buddhism and Modern Thought" take the class through an internet quiz. An article in the Times called "The Science of Older and Wiser" had caught her eye. We've been questioning stereotypes like "Eastern wisdom" and she was struck that its three examples of superlative, perhaps unattainable, wisdom were Buddha, Gandhi and the Dalai Lama. Various views on the nature of insight and satisfaction for those well advanced in years are described, including that of geriatric neuropsychologist Vivian Clayton, who argues that wisdom consists of "cognition, reflection and compassion," and of sociologist Monika Ardelt, who established a scale for Clayton's categories by means of 39 questions. My student was intrigued by the idea that wisdom could be defined and quantified in this way, and who doesn't like a quiz? It was a sluggish morn and almost everyone had a laptop along so I said let's try!

I did it, too, of course, and this is how I scored. We didn't compare everyone's scores, but so far as I could tell from the somewhat uncomfortable discussion everyone scored higher than I did (though nobody over 4). None of us really believes in quizzes and scales and we know all the problems with self-reporting but it was, I admit, awkward. "Well I'm certainly older," I thought to myself, and wondered if I was being penalized for more honest reactions to statements like "I am annoyed by unhappy people who just feel sorry for themselves," "There is only one right way to do anything," "It is better not to know too much about things that cannot be changed." But I've gone through it two more times now, trying to game it, and haven't done better than a 3.7. Perhaps I was misled by another definition mentioned in the article, Ursula Staudinger's five parts to "personal wisdom":

self-insight; the ability to demonstrate personal growth; self-awareness in terms of your historical era and your family history; understanding that priorities and values, including your own, are not absolute; and an awareness of life’s ambiguities. 

In any case, room for improvement! And keep learning from my students!

Feel the heat!

Saw a great science documentary at Film Forum today, Mark Levinson's "Particle Fever." Did it explain what the Higgs particle is or does for the layperson? Not really. But it gave a compelling sense of why it matters. Well, perhaps not how but definitely that it matters to theoretical physicists (whom we see, along with experimental physicists, in all manner of engaging contexts). Stanford physicist Savas Dimopoulos says that the Large Hadron Collider (which had just confirmed a theory he's been working on for thirty years) filled him with pride: I felt a sense of pride for humanity. We little people on a little planet with tiny brains can go so deep and understand what happens. As a feat of international cooperation it's staggering, too. So many resources poured into the quest for basic knowledge... a thing of beauty.

Critical engagement

We're making our way steadily through David McMahan's The Making of Buddhist Modernism. Much in it is at least a little familiar by now, so I'm encouraging students to assess it critically: honor it for what it does so well, but also note what it doesn't do but could do. I want the students to approach it as a model of research, so to frame their praise and critique in terms of in principle doable research and writing projects.

For instance, McMahan opens his discussion with five skilfully drawn vignettes of representative figures of Buddhist modernism:
• Sara, a "Western Buddhist sympathizer" (in the UK)
• Yanisa, a rural Thai laywoman
• Rachel, an "American Dharma teacher" of Jewish background
• Lobsang, a "traditional monk" (Tibetan exile in India)
• Ananda, an "Asian modernizer" active in the West (his nationality strategically unnamed)

The first three are women, the remainder men. Through careful characterization and perceptive contrasts McMahan is able to describe a dynamic and multipolar and yet interconnected Buddhist modern world. They're very well done, but one can also raise questions. It's appropriate and helpful to ask if five is enough, and if these are the right five. One can also ask about the use of such types in the first place. But it's not helpful to say there should have been twenty vignettes, or two hundred.

I've also introduced two critical views from (Euro-American) Buddhists which should force us to size up McMahan's larger project from various angles. One is from a review of the book by Zen Buddhist David Loy:

McMahan is careful not to make normative judgments about what is or is not genuinely Buddhist; he takes the tradition as a whole, with all its multiplicities and inconsistencies, and is content to observe “the circumstances in which Buddhists must develop adaptations and strategies of legitimation.” Yet there is more at stake than the legitimation of Buddhism in the modern world, because what we really need to do today is to distinguish the aspects of Buddhist traditions that are most helpful from those—patriarchy, for example—that are not. The broader context for the development of Buddhist modernism—still in its early stages—is a globalizing civilization in ecological, economic, and social crisis. What can Buddhism contribute to help us address these crises? Ultimately, the fundamental issue is not Buddhist interaction with scientific reductionism or Romanticism but how the Buddhism that is emerging might best address the individual and collective dukkha [suffering] of our time.  

The other is from an essay by Theravada monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu to which a key part of McMahan's book is a not always convincing response:

Just as the Chinese had Taoism as their dharma gate—the homegrown tradition providing concepts that helped them understand the dharma—we in the West have Romanticism as ours. The Chinese experience with dharma gates, though, contains an important lesson that is often overlooked. After three centuries of interest in Buddhist teachings, they began to realize that Buddhism and Taoism were asking different questions. As they rooted out these differences, they started using Buddhist ideas to question their Taoist presuppositions. This was how Buddhism, instead of turning into a drop in the Taoist sea, was able to inject something genuinely new into Chinese culture. The question here in the West is whether we will learn from the Chinese example and start using Buddhist ideas to question our own dharma gate, to see exactly how far the similarities between the gate and the actual dharma go. If we don’t, we run the danger of mistaking the gate for the dharma itself, and of never going through it to the other side. 

Interesting discussions ahead - as we head from the half of the course on modern and Western takes on Buddhism to the half exploring Buddhist takes on the modern and West.

Facebooked

One of my colleagues tagged me when posting a recent essay on the smugness of atheists on his Facebook page. Predictably it produced a volley of responses, one more smug than the other, which looks to have no end. Are atheists fools for believing in reason? Are theists fools for claiming everyone lives one faith or another? Are agnostics fools for thinking they've seen through the other two and so can get by without a compromising reliance on reason or faith? Facebook's algorithm recommended some links to stir the pot, including this one:

Touché.

A hunch

Reading about "Buddhism Modernism" at the same time as I'm learning more about "religion" in China in the last century is giving me some interesting ideas. David McMahan, whose Making of Buddhist Modernism is our current text in "Buddhism and Modern Thought," makes clear that the bookstore is an important locus.

What could be more commonplace than a Buddhist - or perhaps someone simply "into" Buddhism - going to a good bookstore, browsing a bit, purchasing a translation of a classic primary text, then going home and reading it? Besides meditation, most western Buddhists would consider reading Buddhist books one of their primary activities as Buddhists, and many have come to Buddhism through books. ([Oxford University Press, 2008] 16-17)

I've regaled you with Carl Bielefeld's hilarious account of what role texts actually play in traditional Buddhist societies of the past - reading them, especially as a lay person, is so rare as to be nonexistent. And we all know about how Buddhism is "invented" as a textual construct by western Orientalist scholars in the 19th century, and how this textual Buddhism, privileging a pure primitive teaching over later elaborations and practice, affected Buddhist modernizers in Asia. But the way these texts now reside in bookstores all over the place, where anyone can leaf through them (along with Rumi, The I Ching, The Gnostic Gospels and of course The Varieties of Religious Experience) and perhaps take them home to read, is worth thinking about on its own. The Orientalists were seeking a sure foundation in the oldest texts, but the denizen of the Religion-Philosophy-Spirituality-New Age section of her local bookstore has other interests. McMahan stresses the importance of "perennialism," the idea that all traditions articulate the same unchanging Truth, in making Buddhist ideas accessible to the West (71f). But nowadays people may be looking for something specifically "Eastern."

Like other large-scale religions ... Buddhism has become detraditionalized among many adherents, including the rapidly emerging affluent and educated middle-class populations of various Asian countries, as well as in the West among converts. Among western converts, detraditionalization occurs in part because most of them learn about Buddhism from books that portray it as part of an amorphous "Eastern mysticism" that is considered largely independent of institutional structures. Popular literature in the West often presents the "essence" of Buddhism as primarily about inner experience rather than its institutional and social realities. This approach has created a new kind of quasi-lay community of Buddhist sympathizers [a term from Thomas Tweed] who read popular Buddhist books and do some meditation and an occasional retreat but do not necessarily identify themselves exclusively as Buddhist. These sympathizers ... may not be committed to Buddhism in any institutional form, may reject or simply be unaware of doctrines unpalatable to late modern sensibilities, and may also be "Hindu sympathizers," "Daoist sympathizers," and "neo-pagan sympathizers." It is not just their eclecticism, though, that makes them particularly modern - the religious lives of many, if not most, traditional East Asians throughout history has been constituted by an amalgam of beliefs and practices from a variety of traditions. What marks such contemporary spiritually eclectic Buddhist sympathizers as embodying detraditionalized Buddhism is the fact that they quite consciously feel free as individuals to adopt or reject whatever bits and pieces they choose from Buddhism, as well as mixing and matching them with fragments from other traditions, thus creating their own personal religious bricolage. Autonomous reason, freedom of choice, and intuitive insight are implicitly considered superior to external authority, even though part of that freedom may include placing oneself under the guidance of a spiritual teacher. (43-44)

A few months ago I would have dwelt on how this conforms with the picture "lived religion" gives us of contemporary life, which of course it does (along with questions about its historical and cultural specificity). Now what strikes me here is a possible parallel with the unfolding religious world in China, and especially what I understand are called "cultural Christians" (wenhua jidutu 文化基督徒). Largely based at universities - professors and students - these are apparently people who have developed a keen interest in Christianity and embrace some of its teachings but don't choose to be baptized or join an actual church community. They learn about Christianity as part of "western culture" from books, and integrate elements of what they find into their lives without feeling the need to connect to the legacies of interpretation and practice of actual churches and denominations. Yang Fenggang, in the first book I read on the subject, stressed that this "religion as culture" sector - independent both of the state and religious authority - plays a distinctive and significant part in the story of religion in China.

It sounds like - for a few of the same and many different reasons - Christian traditions could be as textualized, dismembered, reassembled and hybridized in China as "Buddhist" ones are in the modern West. Especially in the context of a society which doesn't expect people to (at least claim to) belong to one or another faith tradition or community, there's no reason necessarily to expect that cultural Christians will wind up in what we would recognize as church traditions. It'll be fascinating to learn more about this in situ, to see how far the analogy goes...

Offense and Dissent

 

Have I mentioned that one of the fruits of our New School history class will be an exhibition about moments when displayed art rubbed up against political and community questions at The New School? Yes indeedy - going up at the end of the semester in the main university gallery, and remaining up through Orientation, under the (working) title "Offense and Dissent: Image, Conflict and Belonging at The New School."

New research is being done on three resonant episodes (all of which we discussed in our course last semester - though I guess I haven't shared images from the third with you: see below): the curtaining of the part of the Orozco murals depicting Lenin and Stalin in the early 1950s in what was then the school cafeteria; Parsons students' replacing their scheduled senior showings with an anti-war exhibit in May of 1970; and the furor over a racist image included in an exhibition of Japanese graphic design in 1989 in the university's central gallery. Exploring and analyzing these will be a large part of the exhibit; we're supplementing display of artifacts, archival materials, news reports, etc. with timelines commissioned from illustrators working in interestingly different styles tailored to the moments and genres at play.

But that's only part of it. The other part will be generated by The New School of 2104. We've sent out a lot of invitations, and received enthusiastic signmeups in almost all cases! Here's the invite:

In addition to the three incidents, we would like to have a fourth exploration that is a present-day investigation by faculty, staff and students at The New School in dialogue with an image/installation or an element of design that they regularly encounter at the university.

We ask that you

1.     Select either ­an artwork or an aspect of design that you regularly encounter at the university to which you have a strong reaction, positive or negative, that you may not necessarily share with others.  The work should be either an image or installation from The New School Art Collection that is in the hallways, offices, courtyards and hallways of the university OR it should be an element of design—graphic, interior or architecture—on campus. 

2.     Describe briefly why you are provoked or disturbed by the image/design: How do you encounter this work?  Why does it disturb or delight you? How do others feel? Does it exclude some people in its address?  Are you left out, drawn in, disgusted, bored, taken aback?  If you could effect a change with regard to the display, design or reception of this piece of work, how might you begin? 

3.     Suggest three questions that you would use to initiate a conversation with your colleagues to make such a change possible.

We are interested in all three aspects of your response – selection, disagreement and dialogue – and will include these texts with questions and the corresponding artwork/designs, as appropriate, as part of the exhibition.

The range of excited responses suggests that we've hit a nerve.

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.

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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.