[Buddha-l] Re: New trans. of petry of the Sixth DL

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Fri, 2005-06-24 at 16:43 -0400, curt wrote:

> Hmmm - I find that hard to fathom. I always suspect that people
> without opinions have nothing interesting to say - but then I always
> suspect that people who do have opinions are trying to convince me to
> agree with them.

When people are in the business of persuasion, what you say is true. But
scholarship is not persuasion. It is reporting. Most scholars are quitre
good at distinguishing between their own opinions and those of the
people whose work they are translating or discussing.

>  Either way - I want to know where they are coming from.

If where they are coming from is relevant, which it is when they are
trying to persuade you, they will tell you where they stand. If someone
is doing scholarship, however, his or her own opinions are entirely
beside the point. They simply have no influence at all on the work they
are doing.

> This goes double for Buddhist Buddhologists - whom I always suspect of
> trying to peddle their own favorite pet theories - but
> it also applies to Christian Buddhologists whom I always suspect of 
> trying to peddle Christianity.

A good Buddhist practice for you might be to strive to be less
suspicious.

> So when a Christian Buddhologist decides to produce yet
> another book about the sixth Dalai Lama's drunken womanizing I go "aha!".

What if a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, such as Donald Lopez, were
to publish such a book?

> And anyone who writes a whole book about Buddhism after practicing it 
> for 30 years and then abandoning it should be able to find some way of communicating 
> to the reader (other than assuming that the reader will go and read all of that 
> authors other books) the author's perspective on the subject matter of the book.

One of the reasons people write more than one book is because they
cannot possibly say everything they have to say in a single book.
Williams has written at length about his religious views. Go read what
he has to say, if this intrigues you. In his work on the sixth Dalai
Lama, he evidently felt his own convictions had no relevance. If he had
felt it was important to discuss his own religious views in a scholarly
work on an important figure in Buddhist history, he surely would have
done so.

> Williams had no trouble doing that when he was a Buddhist Buddhologist
> - why can't he do it as a Christian Buddhologist?

Williams has excellent judgement, and he no doubt judged that mentioning
Christianity was not very important in discussing the writings of a man
who had probably never even heard of Christianity, let alone of the type
of Christianity that Williams practices.

> Of course one can choose to use a term like "dropout" if one wishes -
> but it is a choice that reveals something about the mindset of the
> author. 

Right. What this choice of words reveals about Williams is that he is
trying to avoid pedantic language and is trying to speak in terms people
readily understand. You see, using an exotic word like "bhikkhu"
disguises the fact that the word means "beggar." When one is speaking
about a movement of people who took pride in abandoning the ways of
polite society and who deliberately chose to call themselves by words
that in their society had very negative connotations, a good way to
capture the dynamic equivalence of the terms they called themselves is
to use words that conjure up similar images in the minds of modern
readers. Steve Collins used to refer to Buddhist bhikkhus as tramps and
bums, arguing that these English terms come much closer than terms like
"monk" at capturing what the word "bhikkhu" meant to speakers of Indic
languages at the time of the Buddha.

-- 
Richard Hayes
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes